Space. Hasn’t the night sky fascinated us all at some point in our lives?
Here some ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING and simple facts about space that have been put together that will blow your mind away!
- LIGHT YEAR – Now, I’m sure you all would know that light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach Earth. That means that it travels at a speed of 186,000 miles PER SECOND! Wow! Just imagine using light as a measure for distance. In space, light years are used to describe the distance between stars, galaxies and other celestial objects from one another as the distances are too vast for normal standards of measurements to be used and nothing is faster than the speed of light. Therefore, 1 light year is the distance travelled by light in one year.
(Picture courtesy: www.gopixpic.com)
- NEBULA: This is basically an interstellar cloud of dust, gas and other star forming gases like helium, hydrogen and other ionized gases. These clouds are so massive that they can cover an area of HUNDREDS of light years across!!! But they are so light, that a cloud the size of the Earth would weigh only a few kilograms on our planet!
Horsehead nebula, Named after the obvious features of the horse head rising from the stellar cloud can be found in the ORION constellation. The ORION constellation is very distinct in the night sky because of the three bright stars in one line.
- DARK MATTER: Just as we know that the known Universe and the objects we see in it are made up of matter, similarly there is also dark matter present which is not visible to the naked eye. This dark matter is estimated to constitute 84.5% of the total matter in the universe!!!! It is hypothesized to be simply matter that is not reactant to light and the existence and properties of dark matter are inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter, radiation etc.
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