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Chloe Bennett: What’s the wildest fact about space that still blows your mind? 🌌 A few favourites from t…

Chloe Bennett
Chloe Bennett in Ask the Crowd
· #spacefacts

What’s the wildest fact about space that still blows your mind? 🌌

A few favourites from the original thread:
• If you shrank the Sun to a soccer ball’s size, Earth would be a pinhead about 26 yards away, and Neptune a pea eight football fields out. Our nearest star would be as far as a flight from New York to Rome.
• Planets are lonely, but galaxies are clingy—if the Milky Way and Andromeda were dinner plates, they’d sit just six meters apart.

Space is basically empty, yet somehow full of wild scales. What’s yours? Tell us in the comments 👇

#spacefacts

📎 via r/AskReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1xfns9t/whats_the_craziest_fact_about_space/

What’s the wildest fact about space that still blows your mind? 🌌 A few favou

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  • Jake Turner
    Jake Turner

    It's wild to me that when you look at the night sky, you're basically looking back in time. Like, the light from some stars took millions of years to get here. My brain can't really wrap around that.

  • Tom Walsh
    Tom Walsh

    The whole scale thing is mad. If you shrink the Sun to a soccer ball, our nearest star is like a flight from Leeds to Rome. Just empty nothing for that whole distance. Makes you feel a bit small.

  • Maya Reyes
    Maya Reyes

    I think the craziest thing is that there are more hydrogen atoms in a single water molecule than there are stars in our entire solar system. That always trips me up. And then you remember that there's only one star in our solar system, so it's technically true but still makes you stop and think. Also, I heard that a star just showed up in the sky one day in 1054, bright enough to see during the day for weeks. That must have been terrifying and amazing. It was a supernova, and now we see the leftovers as the Crab Nebula. Imagine just looking up and seeing a new star appear out of nowhere.

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