Thursday, March 23, 2017

It is a Strange Universe.

This universe we live in is a strange place.  It is a place where clocks run at different speeds, places where gravity is so strong that light can't escape, unimaginable collapsed stars that are very, very, very huge diamonds, a planet where its day is longer than its year, the moon is moving away us, the sun's rays that warms you are really old, and the stuff that makes up the universe.

Clocks run at different speeds - yep, but not enough to really interfere with most of us, but if you are a jet pilot, his watch would lag behind yours.  As the speeds increase, they lag even more, so satellites and space flights have to take that lag into account.

Large dying stars collapse into black holes.  Black holes are the strangest things in the universe.  Some of these dying stars are so very huge that they collapse into a very huge diamond.  Just don't tell your girlfriend about them.
The above picture represents a collapsed star that measures  2485 miles (4000 km) across and that has a core made up of 10 billion trillion carats or more.

The planet Venus will complete an entire orbit around the sun before it rotates once on its axis.  That really helps heating that place up.


The moon moves almost one and a half inches away from the Earth every year.  Someday it will break loose from the Earth's gravity and take off on its own.  That will mess up the tides and moonlight walks.


It only takes light eight minutes to travel the 93 million miles from the sun to earth, but it took that same light 30,000 years to get from the core of the sun to its surface.

What stuff do you think makes up our universe?  Well, it is mostly empty space, but there are ten billion trillion (10 followed by 21 zeros) stars.  So, there are more stars than grains of sand on Earth!!  Ain't this universe wonderfully strange?  Now, enjoy living here and have a great day, you hear?

7 comments:

  1. It is so mind boggling that I can't even begin to understand it. And how can scientists be sure of the numbers of stars? Can they actually count them, or do they just take a smaller space to count and then extrapolate. I'm not sure I believe anything I read, but I know it's a vast universe out there.

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    1. Yes, I would imagine that it was an educated guess.

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  2. Such wonders out there that it boggles the mind to even think about it!

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    1. There sure is Jim. My big old telescope can see only a fraction of the stuff out there.

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  3. Since the Universe is infinite, I'm betting there are an infinite number if stars out there also. It just boggles my mind when I think of it. Have a great weekend.

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  4. Wonderfully strange for sure! Love the variety of stuff on your blog!!

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