Fruity Fact Friday

Warning:

 This Fridays' Fruity Facts might make your head spin with scientific-ical space facts :}

I've always considered myself a nerd, if you will.  I like history, English, books and I like science.

{not to mention Star Wars!}

I've always been infatuated with the night sky and it's many wondrous stars and galaxies.  

I remember when I was in 6th grade, talking about the universe with my dad, he told me that there are more stars and planets than there are grains of sand upon the earth. 

Since then I've been hooked. 

So for all of you science nerds...

This is for YOU!

• A pulsar is a small star made up of neutrons to densely packed together that if one the size of a silver dollar landed on Earth, it would weigh approximately 100 million tons.

• As late as 1820, the universe was thought by European scientists to be 6,000 years old. It is now thought to be about 13,700,000,000 years old.

• A "light year" is a measure of distance, not time. It is defined as the distance light travels in one year. Light moves at a velocity of about 300,000 kilometres each second, so in one year, it travels about 9,500,000,000,000 kilometres.

• The matter in the universe is so thinly dispersed that the universe can be compared with a building twenty miles long, twenty miles wide, and twenty miles high, containing only a single grain of sand.

• The Milky Way has a radius of about 50,000 light years.

• Physicists believe that our universe does not have three dimensions or four dimensions, but eleven dimensions (ten of space and one of time). We do not observe the extra spatial dimensions because they are curled tightly around each other.

• If space is infinite, there is nothing on the other side. If space is finite because it has been bent around upon itself because of gravity, then again there is nothing on the other side of it because there is no seam. It looks like the surface of a smooth ball which represents a piece of flat paper bent upon itself.

• There are an estimated 50 thousand million galaxies in the universe, with the typical galaxy containing 50 thousand million to 100 thousand million stars. It is estimated that there are 10²² stars in total in the universe. 

• Most of the elements found in the human body originated in stars; we are literally made of stardust