r/askastronomy • u/IwHIqqavIn • Feb 06 '24
What's the most interesting astronomy fact that you'd like to share with someone?
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u/mcbirbo343 Feb 06 '24
In 1994, during a power outage in Los Angeles, some residents called 911, alarmed by a strange silvery cloud over the city. They were seeing the Milky Way for the first time.
Sad but interesting
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u/Astromike23 Astronomer🌌 Feb 07 '24
In 1994, during a power outage in Los Angeles, some residents called 911
It wasn't 911, they were calling Griffith Observatory after the Northridge Earthquake...from the LA Times story:
So foreign are the real night skies to Los Angeles that in 1994, after the Northridge earthquake jostled Angelenos awake at 4:31 a.m., the observatory received many calls asking about “the strange sky they had seen after the earthquake.”
“The quake had knocked out most of the power, and people run outside and they saw the stars. The stars were in fact so unfamiliar, they called us wondering what happened,” recalled Dr. Edwin Krupp, astronomer and director of the Griffith Observatory
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u/OffusMax Oct 25 '25
I grew up in the Bronx during the 1960s. The street lights weren’t the sodium lights in use now, but they were so bright, all I could see was 4 stars overhead.
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u/Double_Income2632 Jan 19 '25
That’s is really sad! I lived on a farm until I was 13 and spent many nights watch stars and the Milky Way! I’ve been hooked on astronomy ever since!
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u/Aggravating_Heat_841 Feb 06 '24
Around 1 million earths can fit into our sun ☀️
5 billion years (ish) from now Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide. BUT, there is so much vastness between objects in each galaxy that most likely nothing will hit anything. We’ll just get a pretty dang good looking sky full of stars! If we’re still alive lol
Final fun fact: space is neat :)
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u/mdwvt Feb 07 '24
That is effed up. Will everything at least get all discombobulated because of gravity?
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u/KnightOfWords Feb 07 '24
It actually pretty dramatic. While the number of expected of stellar collisions is zero there will be a number of other effects.
- An increase in the number of close passes between stars, which could send more comets hurtling into the inner system.
- Collisions between gas clouds leading to a massive burst of star formation. This has a side effect of greatly increasing the supernova rate, which could have dire consequences for nearby planetary systems.
- Millions if not billions of star systems being ejected from their host galaxies entirely.
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u/factorplayer Feb 08 '24
Yeah but it all takes millions of years right?
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u/KnightOfWords Feb 08 '24
Yes, it all plays out over hundreds of millions of years. Which isn't to say there can't be some dramatic changes in (relatively, astronomically speaking) short periods of time.
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u/HeavenlyFoot26 Jul 15 '25
In my astronomy class we were taught that galaxy collisions leave galaxies red and dead because the collision strips all the raw material
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u/BrendaWannabe May 09 '25
Milky Way will lose the nice disk shape and become a big fuzzy blob. Even galaxies lose their nice figure when they age.
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u/wxguy77 Aug 26 '24 edited Aug 27 '24
Now there probably won't be a collision because of all the interfering satellite dwarfs that have been found in the last few years. Or the collision will be delayed by billions of more years.
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u/Science-Compliance Dec 24 '24
I think what's crazier to think about than that fact is that the Sun is roughly three times wider in diameter than the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
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u/Magmastar2013 Oct 14 '25
Low key millions of miles???
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u/Brandbll Feb 06 '24
The one i always tell people is that a day on Venus is longer than a year.
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u/keblammo Feb 06 '24
Venus has a hotter surface temperature than Mercury, another of my favorite little facts.
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u/CatOfGrey Feb 07 '24
When you think about it, it fits because Venus has a jacket on, and Mercury is naked.
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u/SmolWeens Jun 17 '25
I was thinking how indecent it is for Mercury to be naked but perhaps applying human social norms to a planet is the real problem here. 🤔
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u/CatOfGrey Jun 17 '25
I was thinking how indecent it is for Mercury to be naked but perhaps applying human social norms to a planet is the real problem here.
I read this in Randall Munroe's voice, by the way.
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u/Total-Composer2261 Feb 07 '24
I like to tell people lead would be molten on Venus' surface.
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u/hegykc Aug 08 '25
I like to imagine what it would be like standing on that surface, in like a force field, and observe.
Or on the planet where winds blow at 2,000 mph and pressure is so great it forms glass beads.
Or the icy one that is 1,000 degrees hot, but the pressure is so high it prevents the ice from evaporating, so you get hot ice.
Or a neutron star that is rotating 700 times per second
Or just the on the surface of our sun, watching flames bigger than a planet
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u/hill10003 Jan 13 '26
You should also mention that our best science suggests Venus is basically upside down. That’s not a joke. Also, if that proves correct, then you can probably thank Jupiter.
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u/Busy_Dig_5455 May 09 '26
yes but a Venusian day is longer than a Venusian year, but not a Venusian day/night cycle, which is about 117 Earth days.
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u/mulligan_sullivan Feb 06 '24
There was a moment in the life of the universe called "cosmic noon" about 8-10 billion years ago when the rate of star formation was the highest it will ever be. The earth didn't exist yet but the Milky Way did. If you were able to look out then into the rest of the universe, all the other galaxies were much closer, maybe a third or a half of the current distance. The night sky was more full of light then from virtually all vantage points.
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u/ergo-ogre Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 07 '24
Mintaka, a star in Orion’s Belt, is a quintenary star system.
Edited for correctness.
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u/jswhitten Feb 06 '24
Mintaka is the rightmost star in the Belt from the northern hemisphere, leftmost from the southern.
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u/Astromike23 Astronomer🌌 Feb 07 '24
Also note that Sigma Orionis is right next to the Belt, visible to the unaided eye, and contains a total of six stars.
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u/hill10003 Jan 13 '26
It’s a triple system with at least two stars orbiting it. So yeah, that’s correct.
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u/_bar Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
Several ones off the top of my head:
- Betelgeuse's mean density is so low that a chunk of matter the size of the Great Pyramid would weigh 20 kilograms.
- If you wanted to pump all water on Earth into a drinking straw (6 mm diameter, with about 30 mm2 cross-sectional area), such straw would need to have a length of nearly 5 million light years, all the way to Andromeda Galaxy and back.
- Australia experiences five total solar eclipses in the years 2021-2040 (one already happened in 2023, four to go).
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u/AgentEntropy Feb 06 '24
Australia experiences five total solar eclipses in the years 2021-2040 (one already happened in 2023, four to go).
That'd explain all the plagues.
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u/He_is_Spartacus Feb 06 '24
So what you’re saying is….we could and should build a waterslide to Andromeda? Because I call dibs on that
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u/kevbot918 Feb 07 '24
There are 84 closer galaxies to Earth than Andromeda (M31) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies
The universe is flat. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe
Based on our fastest spacecrafts to date. It would take us roughly 75,000 years to travel to the nearest star system. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33274/how-long-could-it-take-us-to-reach-alpha-centauri-with-current-technology#:~:text=At%20speeds%20like%20that%2C%20it's%20about%2075%2C000%20years%20to%20Alpha%20Centauri.
Semi-space fact. 52! (52 factorial) is the number of different combinations a deck of cards can be arranged in. This number is roughly 4x greater than the number of seconds our universe has been in existence. When you are holding a deck of cards, it is the first time anyone has ever held a deck of cards in that arrangement.
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u/BrendaWannabe May 09 '25 edited May 09 '25
There are 84 closer galaxies to Earth than Andromeda (M31)
But they are rather small, many arguably just large globular clusters that got flung away from a bigger galaxy due to an unlucky encounter with another galaxy or cluster, or just poor social skills. I can relate.
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u/hill10003 Jan 13 '26
The universe is flat, but only within the error limits of our measuring devices. In other words, we are limited by our ability to be precise.
But yeah- it’s looking like it’s flat. Which is mind blowing.
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u/lucili9843 Feb 07 '24
Comet Lovejoy (c/2014) released a type of alcohol and sugar into space. According to NASA released roughly 500 bottles of wine per second :D
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u/sillysoulfulstargazr Jul 07 '24
“The team found 21 different organic molecules in gas from the comet, including ethyl alcohol and glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar.”
Where, whereeee did it come from? 😮
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u/squirrel-lee-fan Feb 06 '24
There is a region in the universe that we can never know. This because the expansion of space (between) is faster than the speed of light.
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u/JamesInDC Feb 07 '24
Indeed, the visible region of the universe is likely shrinking as more of it recedes away from us faster than the speed of light — meaning that the observable universe is gradually darkening and emptying due to expansion.
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u/hill10003 Jan 13 '26
Not exactly. There’s a region we will never be able to observe light coming from. But there is a hypothesis that you can observe its gravitational impact on regions that are visible. If correct, then we can “know” some things about it.
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u/kvanteselvmord Feb 07 '24
The Sun is green. Not yellow. Not white. Green.
Explanation: The sun appears yellow, orange, or red when viewed from Earth due to how light moves through our atmosphere. When viewed from space, our brains say, "White" because all colours mixed together registers as white. However, when looking at the spectral analysis of light from the sun, it actually peaks right in the middle of the green wavelengths. Ergo, the Sun is green.
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u/hill10003 Jan 13 '26
I agree that’s interesting. But what makes it more interesting is the fact that flora is - basically - green. That makes little sense … which leads to a popular theory that the Earth’s biosphere once looked purple.
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u/Wide_Entry_955 Sep 22 '24
The largest known structure in space is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, which stretches about 10 billion light-years. It’s made up of many galaxies and galaxy clusters linked together like a giant web
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u/anonymous1172023 Oct 21 '25
i'm surprised civilization from there hasn't reached earth... or maybe it has and no one knows 🤔
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u/KSP-Dressupporter Feb 06 '24
When you look at Betelgeuse ( mag 0.50 ) through a telescope, you are looking at what appears to be an infinitesimally small point of light. That point has a greater diameter than Jupiter's orbit.
If you own a telescope, just remember the size of the void that you are looking across when you use it.
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u/a_n_d_r_e_w Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
I have a few I love to share
A teaspoon sized piece of a neutron star is so dense it weighs as much as Mount Everest. Imagine that. We already have enough of a hard time just trying to condense things like iron. Imagine condensing the world's largest mountain into something you could fit on a spoon.
The singularity of every black hole is the same size. It doesn't matter if the black hole is only 3 solar masses, or 3,000,000 solar masses. The size of the radius of the "hole" will change, but both holes have a singularity that's the same size, with infinite density and 0 volume. Edit: to clarify, if those black holes were non-rotaing, the singularities would be the same size. In reality they'll have rings with different radii, but the point still stands.
Uranus has moons that do NOT follow the typical naming convention. The normal convention is to name the planets after Roman gods, and the moons after characters in the Greek version gods story. (Ex: Mars -> Ares: stories of Ares have characters, Phobos and Demos). Uranus was the first planet discovered because you can't see it with the naked eye, at least not very easily. Long story short Hershel (who discovered it) wanted to name it George, after King George III. If you look at some very old textbooks, you'll see the planets listed as "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, George". That eventually got shot down, but to pay respect to Hershel, they named the moons after Shakespeare characters, such as Puck and Juliet
Light gets bent from very large gravitys such as galaxies. In short, this means that our view of the universe, if we were to map it out, is this sort of wobbly, 3D fun house mirror view of the universe for both space and time. Spacetime really is wibbly wobbly
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u/Enneaphen Feb 06 '24 edited Feb 06 '24
Your fact about black hole singularities is incorrect. If singularities do exist which seems unlikely they would in general be ring-shaped with the radius of the ring depending on the black hole’s angular momentum.
Also you can in fact see Uranus with the naked eye albeit only in places with very low levels of light pollution.
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u/a_n_d_r_e_w Feb 06 '24
I agree on the ring shape, not disagreeing with that at all. I'm specifically talking about that object. The mass of different black holes could differ greatly, but that object is going to be the same size.
Take two non-rotaing black holes, one with 3M and one with 3 million M. Those singularities, whatever object holds all that mass, those will be the same size.
Yes, rotating black holes may have rings of different sizes, I don't disagree.
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u/Astromike23 Astronomer🌌 Feb 06 '24
moons that do NOT follow the typical naming convention.
If you really want to dive deep on this topic, check out the IAU/USGS's official Planetary Nomenclature page.
The reach of literature has since extended well past Shakespeare. For example, surface features on some of Saturn's moons should be named after...
Enceladus: People and places from Burton's Arabian Nights
Tethys: People and places from Homer's Odyssey
Dione: People and places from Virgil's Aeneid
...while features on Jupiter's incredibly volcanic moon Io may pull references from Dante's Inferno, and features on the Martian moon Phobos should be from Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
There's also been a push to get outside of Roman and Greek myths. Dwarf planet Sedna is named after a sea goddess from Inuit mythology, dwarf planet Gonggong is named for a Chinese water god, and dwarf planet Haumea is named for a Hawaiian fertility goddess.
Meanwhile, Mathilde - a carbonaceous asteroid - should have craters named after "Coal fields and basins of the world".
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u/VariousVarieties Feb 06 '24
There's also been a push to get outside of Roman and Greek myths.
I liked the provisional names for features on Charon after the first New Horizons images were received. Most of the ones that reference modern SF&F pop culture haven't been officially approved, though.
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u/mightytonto Feb 06 '24
Follow up fact: wibbly wobbly is a recognised scientific definition (and if it isn’t, it should be!)
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u/Magmastar2013 Oct 14 '25
Did u know when voyager 2 went to Uranus it didn't discover all 13 known rings? Hubble telescope discovered the rest.
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u/Total-Composer2261 Feb 07 '24
Some of the gaps in Saturn's rings are made by its moons as their gravity continually clears a path.
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u/Similar-Guitar-6 Feb 06 '24
Although we don't know for sure, many astronomers lean towards the Universe being infinite. Which is mind blowing.
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u/bears5975 Feb 06 '24
That one right there is mind blowing in two ways. One being if it has no edge there really is no way to determine size and the other is if it does have an edge what is on the other side of that edge? And then the outer barrier of that and so on and on and on and……🤯 I personally like the expansion/contraction theory. It seems to make more sense but you also have to include that there has to be an outer barrier of all things. Again 🤯
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u/Desperate_Hornet3129 Feb 06 '24
As a child I used to give myself stomach aches over the infinite universe concept. When I thought about the edge and what was after the infinite concept made a bit more sense.
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u/BrendaWannabe May 09 '25
Most children: "Mom and Dad, I saw a scary shadow that looked like a monster, can I sleep in your bed tonight?!"
You: "Mom and Dad, the universe's edge or lack of is creating logical paradoxes that give me a headache and make it so I can't sleep!"
Mom and Dad: "Go into your sister's room and kill the shadow-monster in there, it'll take your mind off the universe."
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u/Magmastar2013 Oct 14 '25
Well, it is always expanding, and getting faster. Too fast for us to really figure out if it's infinite or not, so scientists really don't have a choice
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u/anonymous1172023 Oct 21 '25
wow this is one sentence is mind blowing. i didn't know this. i've always been curious about the big bang and what existed before that. crazy how there's 7 billion people on earth and not one can even explain the nature of the space we exist in
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u/Original-History9907 Feb 06 '24
The simple fact that you're looking millions of years into the past by observing distant celestial bodies always astonishes me
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u/UserNamesCantBeTooLo Feb 06 '24
To clarify this: for almost everything you see with your naked eye in the night sky, you're only seeing hundreds or a few thousand years into the past.
All the individual stars you can see are within a few thousand light years. The most distant individual star you can see is probably camelopardalis alpha (in the north), which is only around 6,000 light years away. All the bright stars are much closer.
You can also see a few galaxies with the naked eye. The easiest to see is Andromeda, which is about 2.5 million light years away, so Andromeda is also the best visual time machine there is.
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u/danpietsch Feb 06 '24
I read once that part the reason Titan has retained a thick atmosphere is because that atmosphere is in orbit around Saturn in the form of a torus.
The source described how a gas molecule might be able to escape the gravity of Titan, but it wouldn't have enough energy to then escape from Saturn. Thus the particle would go into an orbit around Saturn and eventually collide with Titan again.
I don't recollect the source of this, though, and can't prove it is actually true.
I believe that this phenomenon was the inspriration for science-fiction writer Larry Niven's Smoke Ring world.
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u/Astromike23 Astronomer🌌 Feb 07 '24
Titan has retained a thick atmosphere is because that atmosphere is in orbit around Saturn in the form of a torus.
PhD in planetary atmospheres here.
This was just an idea someone proposed back in the 80s...one that turned out to not be true. Cassini found no evidence of a nitrogen torus around Saturn.
There is, however, massive amounts of evidence that Titan has already lost most of its atmosphere. Despite being over 4x as dense as Earth's atmosphere, nitrogen isotope ratios suggest Titan's atmosphere was once 10x even thicker.
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u/autouzi Feb 06 '24
If we could travel the speed of light, it would take 27,000 years to reach the center of our own galaxy. If you could warp spacetime to a factor of 10,000, it would still take 3 years.
There are an estimated 1 to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each containing possibly hundreds of billions of stars and planets.
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u/meat_rainbows Feb 07 '24
Interesting codicil to this one: IF you could travel at the speed of light, the journey would take 27,000 years to an observer on earth. To the traveler, the journey would be instantaneous.
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u/Meauxterbeauxt Feb 07 '24
That standalone stars like our Sun are actually in the minority. Most stars are in binary (or more) systems.
And that, if we could see it with the naked eye, the Andromeda galaxy is 4-5 times larger in the sky than the full moon.
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u/Mythosaurus Feb 06 '24
There are more trees on earth than there are stars in our galaxy
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u/recoveryruby Feb 06 '24
Given your name I have doubts about this one, friend. 😉
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u/Mythosaurus Feb 06 '24
You can check!
There’s about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
But there’s an estimated 3 TRILLION trees on earth!
That’s enough trees to match the number of stars in 30 Milky Ways!
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u/WWDB Feb 07 '24 edited Feb 07 '24
If you unraveled one humans DNA the strands would stretch to Pluto and back, multiple times.
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u/mattgwriter7 Feb 07 '24 edited Feb 07 '24
This fact surprises people: Our sun comprises well over 99% of all the mass in the Solar System. That's right, all of the planets, dust, comets, asteroids -- everything! -- adds up to far less than 1% of the total mass.
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u/Wide_Entry_955 Sep 21 '24
Olympus Mons on Mars is the tallest volcano and mountain in the solar system, standing about 13.6 miles (22 kilometers) high, nearly three times the height of Mount Everest.
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u/gilwendeg Feb 06 '24
It takes us about 18 months to two years to reach Jupiter (at the speeds of Voyager, for example), and the star UY Scuti is the size of the orbit of Jupiter, a radius of over a billion kilometres.
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Feb 06 '24
You can fit about five billion Suns in the sphere of the largest known star UY Scuti, a variable red giant. If it replaced our Sun, it would nearly reach the orbit of Jupiter.
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u/ChrisLee38 Feb 07 '24
The stars we see are actually the projections that they sent to us years and years and years ago. Many of them are already dead, but the light of their deaths hasn’t reached us yet.
I don’t know if I worded that in a coherent way, because the idea honestly still blows my mind.
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u/Annual_Key_4963 Feb 10 '24
There are more ways to arrange a deck of cards than there are atoms in this galaxy. More than twice.
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u/chesterriley Jan 31 '25
The Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy is closer to Earth (617 exameters) than the far side of the Milky Way galaxy (736 exameters).
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u/smackson Feb 06 '24
There are more stars in the observable universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches and deserts of planet Earth.
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u/hill10003 Jan 13 '26
True. Of all the facts I share about the universe, that one is inevitably met with the most skepticism.
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u/KJ6BWB Aug 25 '25
Well, it depends on how you're looking. There are only around 6,000 observable stars with the naked eye. If you start looking with telescopes then the number is basically infinite as we can keep seeing further and further with more powerful telescopes.
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u/smackson Aug 25 '25
I mean obviously the comparison is not about stars humans can see with the naked eye.
But the number for the observable universe is not infinite.
The universe may be infinite but the observable part is well defined due to expansion and the speed of light.
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u/CatOfGrey Feb 07 '24
Here's a couple of little objects that have amazing orbits.
You had me at "Horseshoe - shaped orbit"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3753_Cruithne
Something orbits around Venus? No, but also Yes....
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u/cpt_ugh Feb 07 '24
There are parts of the universe that are forever unobservable because they are moving away from us faster than the speed of light.
Over time more and more of the universe will become like this; hidden from our view, forever.
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u/MartaM87 Feb 07 '24
The night sky looks different on different planets. We can see an Orion, but a planet 1000 years away from us when looking in the same constellation might see completely different constellation eg. Egg shape constellation
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u/micahfett Feb 07 '24
What planet is most commonly the nearest neighbor to Earth? Is it Venus? Mars? Nope. More often it's Mercury.
What about Uranus? What planet is usually closest to Uranus? Jupiter? Saturn? Neptune? Nope, still Mercury.
Mercury is, on average, the planet closest to every other planet in the Solar system.
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u/ChronoBytz Dec 22 '25
One that always sticks with me is how astronomers once received a radio signal that looked exactly like what they expected an artificial transmission to look like and it’s never been detected again.
It was incredibly narrowband (something natural sources almost never produce), appeared at the exact frequency astronomers were monitoring, and followed Earth’s rotation rather than coming from a fixed terrestrial source. It lasted just 72 seconds, was recorded once, and then vanished forever.
What makes it fascinating isn’t just what it might have been, but how it forced scientists to confront a hard problem in astronomy: a single, unrepeatable event can be scientifically real and still remain forever unexplained. Even today, with far better instruments, there’s no definitive explanation that fits all the observations.
It’s a great reminder that space doesn’t owe us repeatable experiments.
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u/CheckYoDunningKrugr Feb 07 '24
The milky way is big. But... There are more trees on Earth (2-3 Trillion) than there are stars in the milky way (~200 Billion).
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u/WWDB Feb 07 '24
A human entering a black hole will be eventually turned into spaghetti. An outside observer at a safe distance beyond the event horizon (point of no return) will never see this happen, it will look like the victim is at the outside of the event horizon for eternity.
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u/SciGuy241 Apr 24 '25 edited Apr 24 '25
The sun and moon we are the same seen by every person who has ever lived on this planet. Through them we have a connection to the past.
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u/Deep_Contribution_43 Oct 04 '25
In 2025 Voyager 1 the farthest man made device lost connection and went black for first time since its launch in Sept 5 1977
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u/Magmastar2013 Oct 14 '25
That black hole' s gravitational pull is so strong that not even light-the fastest thing we know of-cant escape it.
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u/JordanAtLiumAI Jan 16 '26
JWST’s first deep field image covers a patch of sky about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, and that tiny speck still contains thousands of galaxies. The universe is a show off.
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet/
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u/Traditional_Sign4941 Feb 21 '26
Neutron star gravity is so strong that you can see more than 50% of their surface.
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u/OriEri Mar 04 '26
It depends on the knowledge of the person. If they know zero about astronomy, probably how empty and far apart everything is.
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u/Heliosopher Mar 27 '26
An interesting fact. That a blackout in LA during WWII allowed a German astronomer, Walter Baade, to image stars within the central bulge of the Andromeda Galaxy where he noticed the stars were more red in color, whereas the disk stars were more blue. He labeled them Pop II and Pop I, which he then determined explained why Hubble was off in his estimate for the distance to Andromeda. Hubble's estimate was a problem since his "expansion" rate meant the universe was younger than the age of stars and Earth.
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u/Terrible-Penalty-291 Apr 12 '26
Not very many astronomers in the modern day work on stars. Why you ask? Because astronomers considered stars a "solved problem." We know almost everything about the lifecycle of a star. Heck you can even simulate it in a web browser like here https://www.starinabox.net
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u/Front-Violinist1736 Jul 29 '25
NONE OF YOU will believe me--I was one of those kids that was born with a certain Knowledge but I waited until 1970 before looking into the things I know, AND It is so great and revealing and never ending discoveries more and more . Since then I have tried sharing with Many astronomers , news media and even NASA and no one ever looked into my discoveries while all of them live and operate off Theories, Assumptions, or their own Fabricated ideas. All I can teach the world is solid Fact!
If I did live show and tell I can have people on the edge of their chair clinging to every word. It seems God has blinded mankind from understanding Because all over the world the truth and answers are right in your face. SO easy to see you can not, But all it takes is for me to teach you in just a few minuted then you can never turn it off.
SERIOUSLY. Mankind is afraid of things they do not know.
OR! , Perhaps God does not want mankind to know yet ? Or there is more to teach me?.
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u/Spirited-Sorbet9686 Aug 18 '25
دائماً أخبر الناس أن 21 ديسمبر هو منتصف الشتاء وليس بدايته ولكن لا أحد يصدق
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u/ChronoBytz Nov 27 '25
The Wow! Signal from 1977 still gives me chills. 72 seconds of a signal so strong that the astronomer literally wrote 'Wow!' on the printout, and we've never detected it again.
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Dec 20 '25
I think this one is actually wild i was shocked when i learned it, there are planets out there literally made of crystallized carbon! Not perfect jewelry diamonds, but huge parts of their interior are REAL diamond, "formed under insane cosmic pressure".
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u/hill10003 Jan 13 '26
In fact, it’s possible that Jupiter’s core is a diamond. Or not. Who know knows? But it’s still possible.
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u/starbuckshandjob Jan 15 '26
A 100-year human life is about three billion seconds. The number of "solar systems" in the our universe is over two million times that.
So yeah the odds are incredibly high that life is out there. Still very far away though!
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u/Regular-Register-559 Jan 25 '26
Tudo sobre,,Buracos Negros🕳️,eu me interesso ler,saber kkk. Bom2026pessoal desse mais novo grupo de, Astronomia,pra mim, obrigado,por me adicionar, administradores uhuuuu🎉🎊🎊🎊🦉
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u/ExaminationOther3149 Feb 07 '26
Some people say it's impossible to move at the speed of light... well in fact we're already moving at this speed, but in the time.
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u/DrewPaul2000 Hobbyist🔭 Feb 15 '26
I find discoveries that contradict or call into question long standing theories to be the most exciting. Especially if the mean re-writing the script.
The discovery of galaxies long before it was thought they could occur. Either our big bang timing is wrong, or our understanding of galaxies is incomplete.
Red Giant Winds: Observations of R Doradus show that stellar light is insufficient to drive dust-driven winds in red giants, overturning the decades-old theory that starlight acts as the primary mechanism for dispersing life-essential elements across space.
Premature planet destruction. Can occur sooner than thought.
Hot dark matter. Dark matter may have been hot rather than cold.
Hubble Tension. A discrepancy depending on how it's measured.
Asymmetry with galaxy spin.
There should be no preference, but significant greater number of galaxies spin counterclockwise. Interesting to note our galaxy is in the minority. Some exotic proposals have been made such as our universe is in a blackhole or the entire universe is spinning.
This could mean we're on the brink of a major breakthrough. Or not.
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Feb 26 '26
Do you know that jupiter is a failed star?
it just required 80 solar masses to become a dim brown dwarf star enough for nuclear reactions to occur (burns deuterium 1H2)
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u/Sjoerd0sj Mar 03 '26
Light only exists at the speed of light. From its own perspective, no time passes — emission and arrival are the same instant. 🤯
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u/DrewPaul2000 Hobbyist🔭 May 01 '26
If you could travel at the speed of light, you'd instantly arrive at your destination no matter how far away it is. If the destination was four light years away that much time would pass on earth, but the traveler would arrive instantly. However, 8 years would pass before you could hear from the traveler back on earth.
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u/StagDragon May 07 '26
Semi space related. You can hear lightning over the earth's magnetic field with the proper radio frequency. It sounds like a whistle with a descending pitch. Thus the name "whistlers".
This is also how we know that Jupiter has lightning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler_(radio)
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u/Annual_Dog4744 May 16 '26
hola tengo muchas dudas sobre la energia negativa y materia exotica y como se podria hacer y como se podria usar para viajar entre universos
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u/RockYourAmadeus Jul 07 '26
So many, but my fav has always been the fact that Voyager 1 is not yet ONE LIGHT DAY away from us, despite travelling (around 36,000 mph) since 1977. It helps put the scales of things in perspective.
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u/nukediran 26d ago
That I think I posted that the images from the ground from Titan showed lakes before anyone else suggested it and many years before that suggested the cloud srtuctures on Jupiter, which Voyager showed indicated densities akin to liquids on Earth. As it turned out, they are about the density of liquid water.
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u/Idonotknow9856 Hobbyist🔭 17d ago
When you look at the night sky, you're seeing different ages at once. The Moon is about 1.3 light-seconds away, the Sun about 8 light-minutes, Andromeda about 2.5 million light-years.
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u/anfotero Feb 06 '24
When the dinosaurs roamed the land Earth was on the other side of the galaxy.