20 incredible facts about space that will blow your mind (21 photos)

Space is perhaps the most mysterious and interesting thing in the world, so it is not surprising that the Internet is full of interesting information about it. Reddit users shared the most mind-blowing facts that simply boggle the mind.





1. “My favorite fact is about cold welding. Due to the lack of oxygen—and the resulting lack of corrosion—if you join two pieces of metal in the vacuum of space, they will fuse forever, almost instantly forming a single piece of metal.”



2. “Imagine that our entire solar system is the size of a beach ball. This ball was placed on a beach on the east coast of the United States. The closest “ball” in the galaxy to us is on a beach in Portugal. We sent a probe decades ago, and as far as we know, it only recently reached the edge of our own beach ball."





3. “The fabric of space. Imagine that you somehow managed to build a spaceship that could withstand any gravity and other critical conditions, and then for a split second fly into a black hole just beyond the event horizon and return back. After returning, our galaxy will most likely no longer exist. From your point of view, it existed only a few seconds ago, and no one knows how many billions of years you spent there from the point of view of the Earth. Or you would just die along with the universe and the black hole as soon as you were beyond the event horizon, who knows.”



4. “There is enough space between the Earth and our Moon to contain all the other planets.”



5. “I have always been amazed by the size of space. The observable universe alone has a diameter of 93 billion light-years, and the real universe is thought to be about 250 times larger.”



6. “The fact that space is not just a backdrop against which everything happens. In fact, it bends under the influence of gravity. When you see photographs from James Webb, for example, with gravitational lensing, the light goes "straight", that is, it does what light normally does and takes the shortest path from A to B. However, space is curved, so the shortest path is curved. It's crazy that it's distorted around us."



7. “Everything in the universe actually moves through space and time at the same speed: S, you, me, a rock and a photon all move at the same speed.”



8. “The fact that it, the cosmos, is growing. That is, nothing is literally getting bigger as we speak. I just can’t wrap my head around it.”



9. “The fact that “normal” matter makes up only about 5% of the Universe as we know it... All the steel—dark energy and matter—is largely unknown.”



10. “Almost everything we see no longer exists.”



11. “Void of Bootes. Its radius is 165 million light-years, but it contains only 60 galaxies, although there should be about 2000 in a space this size.”



12. “The fact that we sent a robot 35 MILLION miles away from us. And this robot took a selfie and sent it back.”



13. “The largest black hole is the size of Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun.”



14. “The fact that we actually fucking walked on the moon. Just imagine saying that to someone 500 years ago.”



15. “I wouldn't call it a fact because it's impossible to know for sure, but it is believed that the universe is expanding in three dimensions faster than the speed of light. Furthermore, if you were somehow able to get to the edge, what would happen if you kept going? What is beyond the expanding universe?



16. “The largest star could hold 10 billion suns.”



17. “Light cannot bend, but objects with mass can bend the space around them, and if light passes through that space, it appears to bend. But since light travels at a constant speed, if it travels through this curved space, it means the light takes longer to reach its destination. This is impossible because light cannot slow down and technically does not bend, so in this curved space time SLOW DOWN. It blows my mind every time I think about it."



18. “That we will never be able to explore it, space, completely.”



19. “I read somewhere that the Universe has no definite center, because it expands infinitely in all directions. Thus, any point in the universe is a center, which makes you the center of the universe."



20. “A photon released by a supernova in some distant galaxy could take billions of years to travel across the universe only to end up landing on the ass of someone lying on the beach.”