The physical world

Interesting facts
1. When you look into the night sky, you are looking back in time
The stars we see in the night sky are very far away from us, so far the star light we see
has taken a long time to travel across space to reach our eyes. This means whenever we look out
into the night and gaze at stars we are actually experiencing how they looked in the past. For
example, the bright star Vega is relatively close to us at 25 light-years away, so the light we see
left the star 25 years ago; while Betelgeuse (pictured) in the constellation of Orion is 640 light-
years away, so the light left the star around 1370, during the time of the Hundred Years’ War
between England and France. Other stars we see are further away still, so we are seeing them
much deeper in their past.
2. It takes 225 million years for our Sun to travel round the galaxy
Whilst the Earth and the other planets within our solar system orbit around the Sun, the
Sun itself is orbiting around the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It takes the Sun 225 million
years to perform a complete circuit of the galaxy. The last time the Sun was in its current position
in the galaxy the super-continent Pangaea was just about starting to break apart and early
dinosaurs were making an appearance.
3. Our solar system’s biggest mountain is on Mars
Olympus Mons on Mars is the tallest mountain on any of the planets of the Solar System.
The mountain is a gigantic shield volcano (similar to volcanoes found in the Haiiwain Islands)
standing at 26 kilometres tall and sprawling 600 kilometres across. To put this into scale, this
makes the mountain almost three times the height of Mount Everest.
4. Uranus spins on its side, with some rather strange results
Most of the planets in the Solar System spin on an axis similar to the Sun’s; slight tilts in a
planet’s axis causes seasons as different parts become slightly closer or further from the sun
during their orbit. Uranus is an exceptional planet in many ways, not least because it spins almost
completely on its side in relation to the Sun. This results in very long seasons – each pole gets
around 42 Earth years of continuous summer sunlight, followed by a wintry 42-year period of
darkness. Uranus’s northern hemisphere enjoyed its last summer solstice in 1944 and will see in
the next winter solstice in 2028.
5. A year on Venus is shorter than its day
Venus is the slowest rotating planet in our Solar System, so slow it takes longer to fully
rotate than it does to complete its orbit. This means Venus has days that last longer than its years.
It’s also home to one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable, with constant electronic
storms, high CO2 readings, and it’s shrouded by clouds of sulfuric acid.
6. Neutron stars are the fastest spinning objects known in the universe
Neutron stars are thought to be the fastest spinning objects in the universe. Pulsars are a
particular type of neutron star that emits a beam of radiation which can be observed as a pulse of
light as the star spins. The rate of this pulse allows astronomers to measure the rotation.
The fastest spinning known pulsar is the catchily-titled PSR J1748-2446ad, which has an
equator spinning at 24% the speed of light, which translates to over 70,000 kilometres per second.
An artist’s impression of what this must look like is pictured above.
7. A spoonful of a neutron star weighs about a billion ton
Neutron stars spin incredibly quickly and are also incredibly dense. It is estimated, if you
could collect a tablespoon of matter from the centre of a neutron star, it would weigh about one
billion tons.
8. There are probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe
Different calculations provide different numbers for how many galaxies there are in
the observable universe – that is the part of the universe we can see from Earth with our current
technology, there maybe many more but they are simply to far away for our telescopes to detect.
Using data from the Hubble Telescope astronomers have calculated there are likely to be around
170 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
9. The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe
Our brains are remarkably complex objects with a hundred billion neurons, a quadrillion
connections, and we still know very little about how this organic super computer operates. But we
do know the human brain is the most complicated thing we have yet discovered. It gives us the
power to form language and culture, consciousness, the idea of self, the ability to learn, and
understand the universe and reflect on our place within it. We even have an inbuilt “model of
gravity“, which is pretty useful.
10. Dark energy. More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there
is because we know how it affects the universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete
mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy.
Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with
all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe. Come to think of
it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the
universe.