Amazing facts #04
Facts That Will Both Terrify & Amaze You
The speed of light: Everybody loves to imagine them flying through the galaxy at the speed of light that is roughly 299,792,458 m/s. However reality might be less fun and a lot more fatal, when coming into contact with an object moving at speed of light, hydrogen atoms transforms into intensely radioactive particles that easily wipe out the crew of the starship and destroy electronics in seconds. Just a few wisps of hydrogen gas floating through cosmos could have a radioactive output equivalent to a proton beam created by the Large Hadron Collider.
The Moon: Our Moon every year gets about 4 cm farther away from the earth and while this might not seem like much at first it could have devastating effects on our planet in the future. Although the earth’s gravitational field should be enough to keep the moon away from spiraling into the space for good. The increasing distance between moon and earth will eventually slow our planet rotation down to the point where a single day will take longer than a month and our oceans tides are locked in place.
Black Holes: Typically formed out of the death of massive stars. Black holes are super dense regions of space with so much gravitational pull that they trap light and warp time. Just a small black hole in our solar system would throw planets out of orbits and tear our sun to pieces. If that wasn’t scary enough on its own black holes can hurtle across the galaxy at several million miles per seconds leaving trails of destructions in their wake.
Gamma Rays: The most powerful type of explosion in the universe. Gamma ray bursts are intense high frequency bursts of electromagnetic radiation that carry as much energy in milliseconds as our sun will give off in its entire lifespan. If one of these rays were to hit Earth it could strip the atmosphere of ozone in seconds and some scientists even attribute a mass extinction 440 million years ago to gamma ray bursts hitting earth.
Zero Gravity: Scientifically referred to as microgravity this condition occurs when an object is in state of free fall and appears weightless. Although it may look like fun to float around like astronauts prolonged time in zero gravity conditions can have long term mental and physical effects on humans.
Cold Welding: Here on earth gases in atmosphere reacts with metal to create a thin layer of oxidation. The vacuum of space however has no atmosphere and therefore causes no oxidation to form on metals leading to an interesting reaction. This reaction is called Cold Welding and it occur when two metals of same molecular makeup are pressed together and fuse together permanently as if they were one piece while it may sound neat it caused quite some problems on the first satellites and can make in space repairs very tricky.
Alien life: The Universe is massive and unbelievably old so the chances of other planets similar to Earth evolving are not unlikely at all. According to Fermi’s paradox the high probability of extraterrestrial life is contradictory to the lack of apparent evidence supporting it. At this point we aren’t sure which is scarier the fact that we might not be alone in the universe or the possibility that we are.
Rogue Planets: Launched into space after the formation of their planetary system rogue planets are planetary bodies that are free to roam in cosmos and crash into things as they go because they do not orbit around sun. Rogue planets often have freezing surface temperatures however due to their molten cores and icy insulations some scientist theorize that these free roaming planets could contain massive subterranean oceans that supports life.
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