12 AMAZING FACTS ABOUT THE UNIVERSE

1. Look at the rings in the image below. See them? The ones around the stars?

Those rings are formed because the mass of those distant stars and galaxies is warping spacetime so that the light that should be blocked by their bulk bends around them and is focused towards us. We are looking at the curvature of space and time predicted by Einstein. This is called gravitational lensing.
(Source: What is Gravitational Lensing?)

2. Look at the rectangly shape I've outlined in the picture below:

Seems empty and boring right? Well, Astronomers thought so too. So they pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at that shape and waited for ten days. This is what they saw:

just in that little rectangle.
(Source: Hell Yeah, Hubble!, Hubble Deep Field)

3. You probably learned that the atom looks like the picture below, with electrons orbiting a central nucleus:

But it's actually more like one of these:

Those funny shapes describe the probability of detecting an electron in a given position around the atomic nucleus. This is because electrons, like all subatomic particles, arewaves and their position is inherently random and non-local.
(Source: Orbitron gallery of atomic orbitals poster > Periodic table posters > Main shop menu > WebElements Ltd)

4. This is a plot of the wavelengths of the light left over from the beginning of the universe, as a function of where you look in the sky:

What's more? If you have an analog TV and you move to a channel with no reception, some of the static you hear is the microwave radiation pictured above. You are literally listening to the birth of the universe.

5. Holy crap we are technologically advanced to move individual atoms. Just watch this video.

Pale Blue Dot

I quote from Carl Sagan's book "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space":

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

6. Whenever we look into space we see darkness. This does not mean that universe is a dark place. We all know that universe is expanding. A few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, when the first light was able to leap out into space, everything, in every direction was as bright as the surface of a star. So, in all directions, we should still be seeing the brightness of a star.. and yet we don’t. As the Universe expanded, the wavelengths of that initial visible light were stretched out and out and dragged to the wide end of the electromagnetic spectrum until they became microwaves. If you look in every direction, you’re seeing a spot as bright as a star, it’s just that the expansion of the Universe stretched out the wavelengths so that the light is invisible to our eyes. But if you could see the Universe with microwave detecting eyes, you’d see this: brightness in every direction. That's why we see Universe black.

                                  Universe visible to naked eye

                                   Cosmic Microwave background

7. About 21.77 micrograms  of a matter are needed to form a Black Hole.

8. If we look into the space, we observe that group of galaxies orbit each other at a common centre. But wait. Our universe is expanding too. So the space between them, should expand too. As space will expand, they should recede from each other and should not orbit each other. But this does not happen. Something holds them together. Something in the space that stops them from scattering. Some mass holds them together. That mass is called Dark Matter. Dark matter is poorly understood and can be detected only through their gravitational effect. They are hypothised to be made of weakly interactive massive particles(WIMPS).

9. Objects in space such as galaxy, group of galaxy, stars, black hole etc are so massive that through their gravitational effect they can bend light rays. This effect is calledgravitational lensing.

10. The farther the galaxy, faster they will recede from each other. Their relative velocity of receding and expansion of universe can cause the light emitted from one source to never reach other part of the universe. That means we will never observe some part of universe.

11. Mutual gravitational force between the objects in universe should stop the acceleration of universe and contract to have Big Crunch. But this may not happen. Universe is accelerating more than in the past. So what is there in the universe that is increasing its expansion? That energy which is helping in the expansion of universe is called Dark Energy.

12. We all are made from stardust. Every element on earth is made from stardust. This may seem bizarre but this is true.