The Royal Observatory of Greenwich, England, has crafted three simple animations to explain three very complex things: What’s inside a black hole, how do we know the age of the sun—did you know the Sun weighs 4,000 trillion trillion hippopotamuses?—and how big is the Universe.
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If you’re still a little confused about why everyone is talking about The Big Bang and gravitational waves and cosmic inflation and space and twists of light and so forth, it’s okay. Much smarter people are taking care of answering those questions for humanity. But it’s a big effing deal so us less wrinkled brain humans should try and understand it too. How? Simple. With a towel, an apple and a ping pong ball.
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According to very real and totally verifiable scientific research, we might live in a multiverse. No, really. The same research that revealed the first-ever direct evidence of Big Bang inflation
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This simulation of a flight through the known universe shows "the real positions and images of the galaxies that have been mapped so far" according to the Galaxy and Mass Assembly catalogue.
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I used to joke around about how I have learned so much more from YouTube than I ever did in school. I’m not joking anymore. Here’s a nice animation from Kurzgesagt that simplifies all you need to know about the Big Bang. It’s this type of education that plants a seed in my brain for future Wikipedia rabbit holes and YouTube note taking. All hail YouTube Class of 2014.
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When the Universe came into being, it was a kind of hot soup of elementary particles—and now scientists believe it could have been rumbling with thunder caused by Higgs boson bubbles.
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Nothing lives forever, not even our universe. Eventually it’ll go kaput and be destroyed… but how? Smart people have wrapped their heads around the universe’s destruction and have come upwith three different theories. The Big Rip, Heat Death (or the Big Freeze) and the Big Crunch and Big Bounce. They all sound like they’re going to hurt.
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Stardust sounds magical enough as it is, but now scientists have for the first time observed that it contains water—which, in turn, could suggest that life is universal.
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In almost every sci-fi movie worth re-watching, it seems that us humans are always less technologically advanced, dumber and only serve as a mere speed bump into an alien race eliminating humans to take over our planet and suck Earth dry of its resources. We’re always the weaker ones in alien wars. Well, what if we’re not? Tom Scott imagined a scenario where everyone else in the universe was afraid of humans. It’s fantastic.
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The Universe is so big that it can be difficult to accurately measure the huge distances between things in it. But no longer, because now a team of researchers working on the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey can measure distances between galaxies with 1 percent accuracy.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
