The most mind-blowing facts about the Universe

The most mind-blowing facts about the Universe All about Universe

The Sun is producing only a third of the neutrinos expectedHold up your thumb. 100 billion neutrinos are passing through...
04/01/2023

The Sun is producing only a third of the neutrinos expected

Hold up your thumb. 100 billion neutrinos are passing through your thumbnail every second. 8.5 minutes ago they were in the heart of the Sun.

Solar neutrinos are a by-product of sunlight-generating nuclear reactions. When Ray Davis set out to detect them with 100,000 gallons of cleaning fluid down a mine in South Dakota, he expected to confirm the standard picture of the Sun.

Instead, he found only a third of the expected neutrinos, something that was not only confirmed by later experiments but led to his Nobel Prize.

Neutrinos are ghostly subatomic particles existing in a weird quantum superposition – akin to an animal that is simultaneously a cow, a pig and a chicken.

As they travel from the Sun, they flip between being an electron neutrino, a muon neutrino and a tau neutrino, which is why experiments sensitive to only one type pick up a third of the expected number.

Most of the stuff in the Universe has repulsive gravityThe Universe is expanding, its constituent galaxies flying apart ...
04/01/2023

Most of the stuff in the Universe has repulsive gravity

The Universe is expanding, its constituent galaxies flying apart like pieces of cosmic shrapnel in the aftermath of the Big Bang. The only force operating should be gravity, which acts like a web of elastic between the galaxies, slowing them down.

But in 1998, contrary to all expectations, astronomers found that the expansion of the Universe is actually speeding up.

To explain it, they postulated the existence of invisible stuff, which they’ve termed dark energy, that fills space and has repulsive gravity. It is the repulsive gravity of this dark energy that is accelerating cosmic expansion.

Dark energy accounts for almost two thirds of the mass-energy of the Universe. School science is therefore behind the times in saying that gravity sucks. In most of the Universe it blows!

The Universe was bornThe Universe has not existed forever. It was born. 13.82 billion years ago all matter, energy, spac...
03/29/2023

The Universe was born

The Universe has not existed forever. It was born. 13.82 billion years ago all matter, energy, space – and even time – erupted into being in a titanic fireball called the Big Bang.

The fireball began expanding and, out of the cooling debris, there eventually congealed the galaxies – great islands of stars of which our Milky Way is one among an estimated two trillion. This, in a nutshell, is the Big Bang theory.

Whatever way you look at it, the idea that the Universe popped into existence out of a nothing – that there was a day without a yesterday – is utterly bonkers. But that is what the evidence tells us.

An immediate question arises: what happened before the Big Bang?

The reluctance to face this awkward question is why most scientists had to be dragged kicking and screaming to accept the idea of the Big Bang.

95% of the Universe is invisibleThere is a discovery so amazing that it has yet to trickle into the consciousness of mos...
03/19/2023

95% of the Universe is invisible

There is a discovery so amazing that it has yet to trickle into the consciousness of most working scientists: everything science has been studying these past 350 years is but a minor contaminant of the Universe.

Only about 4.9% of the mass-energy of the Universe is atoms: the kind of stuff you, me, the stars and galaxies are made of (and, of that, only half has been spotted with telescopes).

About 26.8% of cosmic mass-energy is invisible dark matter, revealed because it tugs with its gravity on the visible stuff.

Candidates for what makes up dark matter include hitherto unknown subatomic particles and black holes made in the Big Bang.

But, in addition to dark matter there is dark energy, accounting for 68.3% of the mass-energy of the Universe.

It’s invisible, fills all of space and is accelerating cosmic expansion. And our best theory – quantum theory – overestimates its energy density by a factor of one followed by 120 zeroes!

The Universe has the same temperature everywhereThe heat of the Big Bang fireball was bottled up in the Universe. It had...
03/18/2023

The Universe has the same temperature everywhere

The heat of the Big Bang fireball was bottled up in the Universe. It had nowhere to go, so it is still around us today.

The weird thing is that its temperature – 2.725°C above absolute zero (–270°C), the lowest temperature possible – is essentially the same everywhere.

Yet, if we imagine cosmic expansion running backwards, like a movie in reverse, we find that parts of the Universe that are on opposite sides of the sky today were not in contact when the fireball of radiation broke free of matter.

In other words, there has been insufficient time for heat to travel between them and the temperature to equalise since the Universe’s birth.

Astronomers fix this by maintaining that early on, the Universe was much smaller than expected, so heat got around easily.

To get from this smaller size to its present size, the Universe had to go through an initial burst of superfast expansion, known as inflation.

There is a supermassive black hole at the heart of every galaxyActive galaxies often pump out 100 times more light than ...
03/15/2023

There is a supermassive black hole at the heart of every galaxy

Active galaxies often pump out 100 times more light than a normal galaxy. With the discovery in 1963 of quasars, it was clear that the light comes not from stars but from a central region smaller than the Solar System.

The only conceivable energy source is matter heated to incandescence as its swirls down onto a giant black hole up to 50 billion times the mass of the Sun.

In the 1990s, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that, although active galaxies account for only about 1% of galaxies, supermassive black holes are no anomaly.

Almost every galaxy, including our Milky Way, contains one, but starved of a food supply, most have switched off.

What are supermassive black holes doing in the hearts of galaxies? Were they the seeds around which galaxies congealed? Or did new-born galaxies spawn them? These remain some of the biggest unsolved questions in astrophysics.

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