The origin of the universe was not by a singularity, since in a singularity, the laws of nature are not valid or do not exist,
1. Gravitational waves are real. More than 100 years after Einstein first predicted them, researchers finally detected the elusive ripples in space time this year. We’ve now seen three gravitational wave events in total.
2. Sloths almost die every time they poop, and it looks agonising.
3. It’s possible to live for more than a year without a heart in your body.
4. It’s also possible to live a normal life without 90 percent of your brain.
5. There are strange, metallic sounds coming from the Mariana trench, the deepest point on Earth’s surface. Scientists currently think the noise is a new kind of baleen whale call.
6. A revolutionary new type of nuclear fusion machine being trialled in Germany really works, and could be the key to clean, unlimited energy.
7. There’s an Earth-like planet just 4.2 light-years away in the Alpha Centauri star system - and scientists are already planning a mission to visit it.
8. Earth has a second mini-moon orbiting it, known as a ‘quasi-satellite’. It’s called 2016 HO3.
9. There might be a ninth planet in our Solar System (no, Pluto doesn’t count).
10. The first written record demonstrating the laws of friction has been hiding inside Leonardo da Vinci’s “irrelevant scribbles” for the past 500 years.
11. Zika virus can be spread sexually, and it really does cause microcephaly in babies.
12. Crows have big ears, and they’re kinda terrifying.
13. The largest known prime number is 274,207,281– 1, which is a ridiculous 22 million digits in length. It’s 5 million digits longer than the second largest prime.
14. The North Pole is slowly moving towards London, due to the planet’s shifting water content.
15. Earth lost enough sea ice this year to cover the entire land mass of India.
16. Artificial intelligence can beat humans at Go.
17. Tardigrades are so indestructible because they have an in-built toolkit to protect their DNA from damage. These tiny creatures can survive being frozen for decades, can bounce back from total desiccation, and can even handle the harsh radiation of space.
18. There are two liquid states of water.
19. Pear-shaped atomic nuclei exist, and they make time travel seem pretty damn impossible.
20. Dinosaurs had glorious tail feathers, and they were floppy.
21. One third of the planet can no longer see the Milky Way from where they live.
22. There’s a giant, 1.5-billion-cubic-metre (54-billion-cubic-foot) field of precious helium gas in Tanzania.
23. The ‘impossible’ EM Drive is the propulsion system that just won’t quit. NASA says it really does seem to produce thrust - but they still have no idea how. We’ll save that mystery for 2017.
Planet 55 Cancri e is basically a giant diamond. like the planet is a diamond. and it would be worth $26.9 nonillion
Planet Gliese 436 b is an ice planet that is constantly on fire do to its close proximity to its parent star. the ice doesn’t melt bc the planet’s gravity is so strong it physically prevents the ice from melting
Planet HD 189733b rains sideways glass…. constantly
Planet J1407-B has planetary rings that are 200x the size of saturn. if saturn’s ring were as big as J1407-B’s we’d be able to see them with our naked eye from earth AND they would dominate our sky and look larger than a full moon
Planet Wasp-12b rotates so close to its parent star that its slowly being consumed by the it
Planet Gliese 581c is one of the candidates for a planet that can support life however it orbits a tiny dwarf star and is tidally locked so one side is constantly subject to immense sunlight while the other is constantly in darkness. there’s a small area of the planet however, that is just the right temp to support life. u just can’t step out of said area. the skies are red and the plants would have be a black color instead of a green bc they would use infrared light for photosynthesis. (a message was actually sent to the planet in 2008 in hopes that there’s life on the planet but the message wont reach the planet until 2029).
Planet GJ 1214b is a water planet nicknamed “water world” is has no land at all and the water is so deep it goes down miles all the way to the planet’s core.
Planet Wasp-17b is the largest planet discovered thus far. its so large its existence contradicts our understanding of how planets are formed. and it has a retrograde orbit, so it orbits in the opposite direction of its parent star.
Planet HD 188753 has 3 suns you should have triple shadows and there would be almost daily eclipses. and no matter which direction u face on the planet u would always see a sunset
Planet HD106906b is the loneliest planet discovered thus far. its known as “super jupiter” bc its 11x bigger than jupiter. it orbits its parent star at a distance of 60 billion miles (which is v strange) hence why its the loneliest planet.
Planet Tres 2b is the darkest planet known. it reflects less than 1% of light (it reflects less light than coal and black acrylic paint). the tiny part of the planet that does reflect light is red making the planet glow a dim red.
some of my favourite absolutely SICK facts about the trappist-1 exoplanets: - theyre all very close to one another and to their star, so the length of a year on them varies from 1 to 20 DAYS - since they’re so close, the star appears a lot bigger than our sun from earth, and from one planet you could easily see the rest, some would even appear bigger than the moon from earth. you could literally see the surface of another planet with the naked eye!!! - they’re probably tidally locked to their star like our moon is locked to earth, meaning only one side of a planet ever faces the star, and on the other side it’s always night. the sun never sets or rises on any of the planets - the star is red, so the sunlight is red/orange, meaning if, for example, plants were to grow there, they could be black and that’s just what we know now, imagine how much cool stuff we have yet to discover about the trappist-1 system
DIY organization Autonomous Space Agency Network just sent a Trump protest 90,000 feet in the air. And it didn’t even cost that much to do it.
Stardate: 2258.42...or, uh, 4... Whatever. Life is weird, at least we've got science.
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