Scientific facts about the universe that you should know. A Brief History of the Concept of the Universe

The universe is so huge that, even knowing approximate numbers, it is impossible to imagine its size. That is why the Universe never ceases to amaze us with its beauty and new mysteries. Scientists are constantly doing new research so that we can learn more about the universe, and here are 10 of the most amazing and incredible facts.

10. Our bodies are made of stars.
Your body and every other body in the universe is made up of stars, or rather, dead stars. In the beginning, there were only simple elements such as hydrogen and helium. Then these elements combined and formed the first stars, which in turn formed new elements such as iron and gold. After some time, the first stars died, and their explosions formed new elements. Our bodies are made up of just about every element in the universe – of course, the majority are elements like hydrogen and oxygen, but we also contain small portions of elements like gold!

9. When you look at the sky, you look into the past.
The stars that you see are not stars at all, but the light that they radiated many years ago. Because light takes a certain amount of time to reach us, we see it as it was some time ago. One light year is the distance that light travels in a year. So if you look at a star that is 1,000 light years away, you see it as it looked 1,000 years ago.

8 Scientists Are Looking For Extraterrestrial Life
Scientists are so interested in alien life that they have come up with dozens of different interesting techniques aimed at finding it. For example, the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, in order to speed up the detection of aliens, uses its methods to search for space debris, nearby stars, artificial objects, radio waves and radiation.

7. There are at least 10 billion trillion stars in the universe
Although scientists cannot agree on this issue, the most reliable figure we have is 10 billion trillion. Each star is different in size and can be hundreds of times smaller or larger than our Sun. In addition, each star is surrounded by stellar bodies, like planets, which can be from 4 to 12.

6 Scientists Think We May Be Aliens Ourselves
Some scientists believe that simple microorganisms like bacteria formed on Mars and, as a result of a meteorite impact, ended up on Earth at an early stage of its formation. From that moment we began to develop into more complex organisms and many years later evolved into human beings who we are today. It sounds crazy, but at that time the atmosphere on Mars could have been much more habitable. So there is a chance that we and many other species known to us are aliens who have colonized the Earth.

5. There could be more universes
Yes, our universe may be just one of many others that are different from ours. The slightest change in the principles of science can turn other universes into something that we have not even dreamed of. It all depends on the fact that the big bang that started our universe could happen elsewhere. If so, then the existence of countless other worlds is indeed possible.

4 Black Holes Are Dying Too
Black holes are bodies of various sizes that we cannot see. They have an incredible gravity that even light cannot overcome, and they feed on the trapped light in order to survive. However, Stephen Hawking argues that if black holes "starve" for too long, they can die after a while.

3. The universe is growing
Until the 1920s, people thought the universe was standing still, but astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that it was expanding. For many years people have been wrong in assuming that gravity slows down the universe, but this fact would only be true if gravity were stronger. Moreover, in 1998, the Hubble telescope recorded that supernovae in the past expanded more slowly than they do now, which only confirms Hubble's theory.

2. The universe is full of invisible things
There is an opinion that we see and know only 4% of the Universe, since 96% may consist of dark matter and dark energy, which we still cannot detect. These unknown entities are supposedly pushing visible matter apart, leading to the expansion of the universe and other possible effects that are not yet known to us.

1. Our ancestors knew more about the universe than we know now
Our ancestors were much smarter than many think. Although they did not build skyscrapers or build computers, they knew a lot about plants and herbs, geography and astronomy. Let's not forget Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Giza, the Nazca Lines, and hundreds of other famous sites that our ancestors supposedly used to watch the sky. They believed that changes in the sky played a big role in their lives, so they made accurate cosmological calculations. The information they gained helped them determine when it was best to grow food, travel to dangerous lands, form alliances, and make important decisions.

Have you met anyone who would be completely sure that humanity has conquered space? If so, then know that this person is a rare optimist. The cosmos has not revealed all its secrets to us. And even what we already know is sometimes more frightening than encouraging.

What is the assumption about the existence of planets unknown to us, which can suddenly crash into the Earth, leading to a new end of the world? NASA is seriously considering this possibility. But in addition to the frightening and absolute darkness and suspense, the cosmos is fraught with real miracles ... however, will we be able to observe them with our own eyes?

We present you with 11 interesting facts about our Universe that may surprise, amaze and even scare you.

Black holes

This phrase sounds quite intimidating, and for good reason. Black holes, as you know, are formed as a result of the destruction of stars, forming a real "whirlpool" that sucks everything that gets in its way. And the word “way” is extremely appropriate here. Black holes do move through the universe, and their trajectory is impossible to predict. Sometimes they crash into massive objects that they cannot absorb, causing the black holes to change direction. All this is accompanied by the lowest sound that has been recorded so far. For incredulous musicians, let's explain: this sound is B flat, which is 57 octaves below the note to the first octave.

Planet with diamond icebergs floating in an ocean of carbon

No, this is not a line from a poem by some space-obsessed poet. This is how scientists imagine the surface of Neptune and Uranus. Due to special conditions, it can even rain diamonds there.

Dark matter and dark energy

More than 90% of the entire Universe consists of this combination, and we can neither see nor explore it. Both energy and matter are absolutely invisible to humans and cannot be measured in any way. And at the same time, our entire world (including ourselves) is almost entirely composed of dark energy and matter. It's not that we're saying there are some other-dimensional creatures that we can't see either... ...we're just not sure they don't exist.

hot planet

Another incredible planet could well surprise us with a rain of molten glass, because due to its close position in relation to its “sun”, the temperature on its surface reaches more than 4000 ° C. Yes, if we end up there, we will die immediately. Apparently, everything beautiful that is in space is deadly for humans.

Sometimes satellites of planets are much more interesting than the planets themselves.

So, for example, on Titan, the moon of Saturn, gravity is so low that we could fly there like birds, tying our wings to ourselves. And we'd hover over an amazingly beautiful green-and-yellow surface... ...until the gasoline rain killed us. Sad, isn't it?

The Phantom Menace

In addition to giant asteroids, unknown planets and rogue black holes, our planet is also threatened by a huge cloud of gas. It weighs like one million stars and slowly moves towards us. True, until it reaches our planet, millions of years will pass. But when this happens, it will definitely be the end of the world and the beginning of a new life cycle.

The stars have their quirks

The stars are one of the few cosmic wonders that we can regularly observe with the naked eye. Everyone knows about their beauty, but how many have heard about their sound. Yes, the stars can sing. True, unfortunately, we cannot hear their singing, because the height of this singing is about a trillion hertz. (18) However, these heavenly fireflies are not as cute as they seem at first glance. Among them there are real vampires and zombies. So, technically a dead star can pull matter from its “live” neighbors. Usually such stars are called supernovae, and they are a subspecies of white dwarfs. As a result, these cuties suck out all the energy of their neighbors, and what is left of these neighbors subsequently floats around the universe in the form of space debris.

Earthly not from Earth

Have you ever thought that many of the things we are used to actually have an unearthly origin. For example, gold. All the gold on our planet came here as a result of numerous collisions with asteroids. What else? Yes, even life! Yes, you heard right: there is an assumption, the essence of which is that life in the form of microorganisms came to our planet from Mars. Why isn't she there now? Who knows ... You never know what terrible secret the death of all living things hides the "red planet".

People as a Phenomenon

That's right - we are one of the wonders of our universe. And not only our existence itself (which, of course, is amazing), but also our behavior. This is what is really amazing: we do not get tired of polluting our planet and are ready to kill each other for a ghostly idea. We have some amazing craving for self-destruction by all possible ways. I don’t know how other intelligent representatives of this Universe are there (if they exist, of course), but I would not want to make contact with us. Is that to observe: so, for the sake of laughter.

Contacts with extraterrestrial intelligence... ...or not?

History has recorded at least two cases describing possible contact with extraterrestrial life forms. So, in August 1977, the Big ear radio telescope (translated as “Big Ear”), located in the observatory state university Ohio, picked up a radio signal that later became known as "WOW!". The fact is that the telescope showed exactly the frequency and periodicity of the waves, which, as expected, would be characteristic of extraterrestrial sources. The scientist who recorded this signed the printed data - “Wow!” - hence the name.

Space is the most discussed and, at the same time, the most mysterious topic on the entire planet Earth. On the one hand, humanity has learned a lot about it, on the other hand, we know a tiny percentage of what is actually happening in the Universe.
Today we will look at some of the most interesting facts about space.
1. It turns out that our satellite - the Moon - is moving away from us every year by about 4 cm. This depends on the decrease in the period of rotation of the planet by 2 miles of a second per day.
2. Forty new stars are born every year in our Galaxy alone. It is difficult to even imagine how many of them appear in the entire universe.
3. The universe has no boundaries. It seems that everyone is familiar with this statement. In fact, no one knows if the cosmos is infinite or just gigantic.

4. Our solar system is terribly boring. If you think about our neighbors, they are all unremarkable gas balls and pieces of stone. Multiple voids of light separate us from the nearest star. In the meantime, other systems are full of amazing stuff.

a) In the vastness of the Universe there is a very amazing thing - a giant gas bubble. Its length is about 200 million light years, and it is located 12 billion of these years from us! This interesting thing formed just two billion years after the Big Bang.

b) The Sun is about 110 times larger than the Earth. It is even larger than the giant of our system - Jupiter. However, if you compare it with other stars in the universe, our luminary will take a place in the manger kindergarten, that's how small it is.
Now let's imagine a star that is 1500 times larger than our Sun. Even if we take the entire solar system, it will not take up more than a pixel of this star. This giant have VY big dog, whose diameter is about 3 billion km. How and why this star was blown to such dimensions, no one knows.

c) Fiction authors fantasized about five different types planets. It turns out that there are hundreds of times more of these species. Scientists have already discovered about 700 types of planets. One of them is a diamond planet, and in every sense of the word. As you know, carbon needs very little to turn into a diamond in this case, the conditions coincided so that one of the planets solidified and turned into a gem of a universal scale.

5. A black hole is the brightest object in the entire universe.
Inside a black hole, the force of gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape from it. Logically, the hole should not be visible in the sky at all. However, during the rotation of the hole, in addition to cosmic bodies, they also absorb gas clouds, which begin to glow, twisting in a spiral. Also, meteors, falling into black holes, light up from an incredibly sharp and fast movement.

6. The light of our Sun, which we see every day, is about 30 thousand years old. The energy we receive from this celestial body was formed in the core of the Sun about 30 thousand years ago. That's how much time and no less is necessary for photons to break through from the center to the surface. But after the "liberation" they need only 8 minutes to get to the surface of the Earth.

7. We fly through space at a speed of about 530 km per second. Inside the Galaxy, the planet moves at a speed of about 230 km per second, itself Milky Way flies in space at a speed of 300 km per second.
8. About 10 tons of cosmic dust “falls” on our heads every day.

9. There are over 100 billion galaxies in the entire universe. There is a chance we are not alone.
10. Interesting fact: about 200 thousand meteorites fall on our planet every day!
11. The average density of Saturn's substances is two times less than the density of water. This means that if you lower this planet into a glass of water, it will float on the surface. You can check this, only, of course, if you find the appropriate glass.
12. The sun is losing weight by a billion kilograms per second. This is due to the solar wind - a stream of particles that move from the surface of this star in different directions.
13. If you wanted to get by car to the nearest star after the Sun - Proxima Centauri, then we, at a speed of 96 km / h, would need about 50 million years.

14. Even on the Moon, earthquakes occur, which are referred to as moonquakes. But, nevertheless, in comparison with the earthly ones, they are insignificantly weak. There are more than 3,000 such moonquakes every year, but this total energy would only be enough for a small salute.

15. The neutron star is considered the strongest magnet in the entire universe. Its magnetic field is millions of billions of times greater than the field of our planet.

16. It turns out that in our solar system there is a body resembling our planet. It is called Titan, and it is a satellite of the planet Saturn. It also has rivers, seas, volcanoes, a dense atmosphere, just like our planet. Surprisingly, even the distance between Titan and Saturn is equal to the distance between us and the Sun, and even the ratio of the weight of these heavenly bodies is equal to the ratio of the weight of the Earth and the Sun.
Yet intelligent life on Titan is not even worth looking for, because its reservoirs failed: they consist mainly of propane and methane. But still, if the latest discovery is confirmed, then it will be possible to argue that primitive life forms exist on Titan. Under the surface of Titan there is an ocean, which consists of 90% water, the remaining 10% can be complex hydrocarbons. There is an assumption that it is these 10% that can give rise to the simplest bacteria.

17. If the Earth revolved around the Sun in the opposite direction, then the year would be two days shorter.
18. The duration of the full lunar eclipse is 104 minutes, at a time when the duration of a full sun is only no more than 7.5 minutes.

19. Isaac Newton first set out the physical laws that artificial satellites obey. They were first published in the work "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" in the summer of 1687.

20. Most funny fact! Americans have spent more than one million dollars to invent a pen that would write in space. The Russians, on the other hand, used a pencil in zero gravity without making any changes to it.

The cosmos is the greatest mystery that humanity will always want to unravel. He pulls with his extraordinary properties and mysteries. Today we have revealed nothing at all, but I hope that the Universe has become more accessible and interesting for you.

Let's discuss what we don't know about the universe. And when I say "we" I mean, of course, us, stuffed with scientific articles and discoveries.

When we try to imagine incredible short life against the backdrop of billions of years of the life of the Universe before and after us, we feel like grains of sand on the tablecloth of space-time. Or if we try to imagine billions, trillions of other worlds, of which there seems to be an infinite number in the real and parallel universes, our existence seems to be zilch.

But shock, excitement or the prospect of what we do not know still causes children's delight.

We don't know why the universe exists

This is completely unfair, especially given that the cosmos knows exactly what it is doing. From a physics point of view, there are some very attractive, promising theories that start the answer to the question above, but we don't and probably won't know which one is right.

Perhaps the universe was born from an inherently unstable "nothing". You should know that emptiness is not actually empty, matter and energy are spontaneously born and die in it, at least in the form of quantum fluctuations.

Perhaps our universe is not the only one of its kind, but one of an almost infinite number of multiverses. Perhaps all this is just a projection, a game, a virtuality.

Much of our ignorance comes down to the fact that we are still waiting for the next generation of cosmic measurements that will confirm or disprove the latest theories, and we also need more flexible and comprehensive theories, and not just mathematical elegance. In general, we do not know why all this exists and even happens.

Usually "why" always exists.

We don't know what dark matter and dark energy are.

Big problems talk about yet big problems. The ordinary matter that we, planets, stars and sausage sandwiches are made of is about 4,9 % of all matter that fills the Universe.

26,8 % of matter is "dark", and we know this because, on large scales, cosmic material moves faster than it should, and galaxies behave as if they are controlled by a huge mass of particles invisible to us. And we have no idea what these particles are.

This is bad, but the situation is even worse with dark energy. Something is causing the universe to expand faster and faster.

It shouldn't be like that. In the period up to 5 or 6 Billions of years ago, after the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe was stable, but something interfered, some invisible component, perhaps some kind of dense vacuum energy that fills space as it grows.

What's this? We do not know. We have a lot of assumptions, which in principle is not bad - to assume something about 68,3 % of the universe.

We don't know if there is life anywhere else

This question is incredibly interesting already because events can be assumed and located regardless of the answer. Here we are, beings on a planet full of flourishing life, carefully adjusting to the physical and chemical conditions last life 5 billion years. We also know that there are an awful lot of planets in the universe, and many of them could also host life.

However, we do not know for sure if we are alone. And no hints. This is problem.

It's a good problem, as I said, regardless of the answer, but few people move around trying to find the answer to this question. Although too much may depend on its resolution.

We probably don't quite understand the quantum world

Indeed, our current quantum physics in theory (and in practice) works wonders, describing atoms and molecules along with the bizarre nature of entanglement and qubits. But that doesn't mean we're quantummech gurus.

People keep coming up with formulations of how quantum mechanics defines us, or doesn't define us. The problem is exacerbated when quantum physics plunges into the realm of soft, warm, and wet biology.

Not to mention black holes and quantum firewalls.

We don't understand our own biology

It's not an exaggeration to say that we don't understand how every detail of ours works. If we understood (and we are moving in this direction), we would cope with disease, death, begin to grow limbs and restore memory.

We could master genetic engineering at the level of demigods and understand how to make the brain work hundreds of times faster. If you need good example of our ignorance, let there be microflora.

There is a joke that if aliens find us, they will not understand with whom to start a conversation: with the bacteria that inhabit us, or with us? Ten trillion human cells are supplemented, used, saturated with hundreds of trillions of microbes - we carry a kilogram of bacteria and archaea with us and cannot live without them. They're in our guts, lungs, noses, everywhere.

We're just cruise ships for germs.

We don't know how the earth works

Let's dive deeper. Neither man nor robot, no one went deeper into the Earth than a few kilometers, probes and physical analyzes which are far from the essence of the matter.

It took us ridiculously too long to figure out that our planet's skin is constantly moving: plate tectonics wasn't generally accepted until about halfway through. 20 century. We are still not sure how the internal dynamo works, how the rolls of convecting magma generate our planet's magnetic field.

At the same time, for 4,5 So many things have happened in geophysics for a billion years that some of our best information about the origin of the planet comes with meteorites and hides in the craters of other worlds. We don't even know for sure where the moon came from.

Maybe there was a giant collision, maybe not. For supposedly smart creatures on a small rocky planet, this is a complete failure.

We cannot prove or solve many of our own mathematical hypotheses and problems

If mathematicians think they can avoid this festival of ignorance, let's just remind ourselves that we have a long list of unproven, unsolved problems and unverified hypotheses. With all this, it has not yet been decided exactly how accurately mathematics describes the world and whether mathematics is at the very foundation of the universe.

We do not know how to make artificial intelligence

We mention this because it is an eternal problem. Also because we often write about the development of artificial intelligence (or about its pathetic attempts to get back on its feet). Finally, an attempt to create artificial intelligence It is an attempt to understand ourselves.

Because in order to create something artificial, you need to know how the original works. While our machines have come a long way, it's still not clear whether services like the YouTube search engine or some other big name can work the same way that ideas pop into our heads.

Whether a machine can think at all is the question. Conclusions?

There are a lot of things that we do not know (much more than the examples in this article). But you should not fall into despondency, and ignorance is not strength.

In the end, the thirst to discover and the desire to think launched the flywheel of science, and the Universe is the most difficult riddle in the history of mankind. Perhaps hundreds of years will pass, and we will not know anything.

The universe is amazing, no one knows where its boundaries end and begin. It is so great that one can only guess what secrets it hides in itself. Cosmology provides some answers to questions that may be of interest to the average person.

Surely you are wondering how the universe appeared? Where did it all start? Here, scientists will not be able to give a detailed answer, many adhere to the Big Bang theory. But no one can say for sure what exactly happened during the explosion. We only know that at birth the universe was very hot, it was heated to unimaginable temperatures, and now it is gradually cooling down. And the universe is expanding quite rapidly, the distance between galaxies is increasing.

Cosmologists use the light year to measure. As you understand, the space is very large and it is very inconvenient to use the usual measures of length. The fastest speed in the world is the speed of light in a vacuum. The distance that light travels in a whole year is called a light year. This is a very large value, one light day alone equals 26 billion kilometers. In order for you to understand the scale of such a measurement, the light from the Moon to the Earth reaches in just 1.3 seconds. But scientists went further, they tried to measure our vast universe. Of course, such calculations are only approximate. First, we are talking about a very large-scale measurement. Second, the universe is constantly expanding. More than 150 billion light years is the approximate diameter of the universe.

We talked about sizes, now it's worth mentioning a few words about age. Naturally, no one can say the exact age, there are only assumptions. Observations were made on old stars, many measurements were made, and some radioactive nuclei were also studied. With their help, it was possible to calculate these figures: 13.7 billion years.

Surely you will be interested in the fact that the universe has a flat shape. In research, cosmologists are assisted by cosmic microwave background radiation. She gives answers to many questions. And it also has galaxies, clusters and voids. The universe is not full superclusters, there are a lot of voids in it. And if we take into account the fact that it is constantly expanding, then the size of such voids only increases. But at the same time, she cools down. Over time, it will cool down so much that the Big Freeze will begin.

The Universe has no center because it is in constant motion. But it is moving, that is, not only the Universe is expanding, but also the galaxies that are inside it. Inside the galaxies there are planets and stars, they also move away from each other, losing heat in the process.