Our universe is a strange place. It is so strange that often times it is really hard to believe certain things that scientists say! So today, instead of writing on any specific topic, we decided to write on random universe facts for kids.
Trust us, it will be fun! Every fact you read here will potentially leave your jaws dropped. You will possibly end up scratching your head in disbelief or you may just stand up and declare – ‘I disagree!’
But the question is, who are we to question this creation? No one basically! We are born and some day, we will die but this creation will continue. So, all that we should do is relax, read and enjoy the crazy universe facts for kids!
Universe Facts for Kids
1. If you untangle your DNA, it would make a 34-billion-mile rope and that could travel from Earth to Pluto and back to Earth 13 times!
2. Did you know that 99.99% of ordinary matter is made up of nothing but empty space? If you remove this empty space, that entire human race (the population of the world) would fit in a volume of a tiny sugar cube.
3. The atoms that our body is made up of (like calcium, iron, etc.) were brewed in the center of exploding stars some billions of years ago.
4. In fact, the hydrogen atoms that are present in our body were actually formed in the Big Bang which took place around 13.7 billion years ago.
5. One of the craziest universe facts for kids is that only 5% of the total universe is visible and the rest i.e. 95% is dark matter and dark energy. The visible universe is something that is obviously visible like stars, galaxies, etc. and of the 95% of the universe, dark energy makes up 68% and dark matter makes up 27%. This means that we know only 5% of our entire universe, that too, partially!
6. Do you know what a neutron star is? When a huge star (a star with at least 8 solar masses) explodes, the core forms another star called the neutron star. Do you know how dense these neutron stars are? A teaspoon of their matter or material can outweigh Mount Everest!
7. Not just that due to the explosion, the neutron stars are supposed to have mind-boggling speeds which may run up to 600 rotations per second.
8. Wondering how many stars are there in our universe? There are three sextillion stars in our entire universe i.e., 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. For the lazy ones out there (like me) there are 23 zeroes after 3!
9. The total number of stars in our universe is more than the total number of sand grains present on Earth.
10. Sun is huge, but how huge? It makes up approximately 99.9% or to be precise 99.86% of the mass of the solar system.
11. Did you know that in 1.3 million Earths inside the Sun without any problem?
Universe Facts for Kids
12. One day of Venus is longer than one year of Venus! Yes, you read that right. One year of Venus is 224 Earth days and one day of Venus is 243 Earth days. This means that Venus takes more time for one rotation than it takes for one revolution.
13. Venus is the only planet of our solar system to rotate or spin backward!
14. If you just touch two pieces of the same kind of metal together in vacuum or space, they will fuse and unite until you break them apart.
15. We believe you know that sound needs a medium to travel and it can’t travel in a vacuum. Why are we bringing this up? Space is a vacuum, and hence the outer space is extremely silent.
16. Some stars are so far from us that it takes years for us to see their light which means that we are looking into the past in our present! Hubble Telescope of NASA can look some 100 million years into the past.
17. We experience some static when we tune our TV between stations. A little percentage of that static we witness is the afterglow of the Big Bang.
18. Did you know that our universe is expanding? Edwin Hubble made this astonishing discovery in the 1920s.
19. In 1998, Hubble Space Telescope made a further astonishing discovery. It studied extremely distant supernovas and found out that the universe expanded slower earlier than today. It is suggested that dark energy is the force that is making the universe expand.
20. It was also proved in the same year that the universe is not only expanding, but also accelerating. It is again suggested that the dark energy is pulling the cosmos apart. According to two groups of researchers, the farther the galaxies are from Earth the faster they are receding from Earth.
21. One of the amazing universe facts for kids is that the shape of the universe is dependent on its density. The shape of the universe is influenced by gravity pull and rate of expansion. If the density of the universe is more than a critical value, the universe is considered to be closed just like a sphere.
22. What does the above point mean? It means that the universe will eventually stop expanding and start imploding. This event is known as the Big Crunch.
23. If the density of the universe is less than the critical value, then the universe is termed as open. The universe is infinite and can expand forever.
24. If the density of the universe is exactly equal to the critical density, then the shape of the universe is considered to be flat. Even here the universe keeps on expanding at a slower rate as time passes and eventually stops expanding after an infinite time period.
25. If recent studies or measurements are to be believed, the shape of the universe is flat with a margin of 2% error.
Universe Facts for Kids
26. Did you know that some scientists have developed something called a multiverse theory? According to them, when Big Bang happened, space and time expanded differently in different places. This produced something called bubble universes which could function independently of each other and each universe has a different set of laws of physics.
27. The multiverse theory is controversial and there are no proofs of this theory yet.
28. Black holes are produced when very massive stars collapse on themselves. Such a collapse of a star also leads to a supernova explosion. The gravitational force of black holes is so strong that nothing, literally nothing can escape from black holes. Not even light.
29. The nearest black hole to Earth is around 10,000 lightyears away from Earth.
30. The spacesuits that astronauts wear are first to be warmed, then cooled, then pressurized and finally supplied with fresh air.
31. The Moon is one of the major reasons why we have tides and waves on our planet.
32. Similar to Venus, a day on Mercury is longer than a year on Mercury. A year on Mercury takes 88 Earth days to end and a day on Mercury takes 176 Earth days to end!
33. From 1930 to 2006, Pluto was considered as a planet but from 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet. Now people again want it to be classified as a planet.
34. The universe was super hot when it was young. It is now proved that as the universe is expanding, it is cooling down and it may eventually lead to something called Big Freeze. This Big Freeze is also called the Heat Death.
35. Measurements made by WMAP i.e., Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe on the present density and geometry of the universe favors Big Freeze.
Universe Facts for Kids
36. The diameter of our universe is a staggering 150 billion lightyears. Didn’t we say that the article on universe facts will blow your mind?
37. As the universe is expanding, there is no center of our universe. Many, once thought, that the Earth was the center of the universe. But no, it has no center.
38. Did you know that Moon is moving away from Earth? Moon is moving away by approximately 3.8 centimeters from Earth each year.
39. We have given you the total number of stars present in the universe. But it may be surprising that 275 million stars are formed every day!
40. It takes 170,000 years for a photon to travel from the Sun’s core to the Sun’s surface.
41. Voyager 1 Spacecraft is the most distant man-made object from the Earth.
42. Our galaxy’s center tastes like raspberries and smells like rum. How did we know – of course by studying the dust from the center of our galaxy?
43. Mars has the biggest mountain on the whole solar system. For you just to get an idea, Mount Everest is 8,844 meters high and Mount Olympus Mons (highest mountain of Mars) is 22,500 meters high.
44. Earth is 93 million miles away from the Sun. It will take 177 years for Earth to reach the Sun if it has a constant speed of 60 kilometers per hour.
45. Humans have placed mirrors on Moon that help us to calculate the accurate distance of the Moon from Earth.
46. Our galaxy, the Milky Way rotates at a speed of 250 kilometers per second and the time it takes to complete one revolution is 200 million years.
47. Did you know that the constellation of Aquilla holds a gas cloud that holds huge quantities of alcohol? We can make 400 trillion pints of beer with the alcohol present in that gas cloud.
48. If the stars within any given galaxy were shrunk to a tennis ball size, then they would be 4,800 kilometers apart (on average).
49. Astronomers and scientists estimate that there are around 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.
Universe Facts for Kids
50. Most of the galaxies have black holes at the center, and the mass of such black holes is 1/1000th mass of the mother galaxy.
51. The first black hole to be photographed is 310 million trillion miles away from Earth. This photograph was taken in April 2019. It is also estimated that it is 3 million times bigger than Earth.
52. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is shrinking. Earlier it could squeeze in three Earths, but now it can accommodate only one.
51. Did you know that Pluto is smaller than the United States? The diameter of the equator of Pluto is equal to the distance from London to Denver.
52. Astronomers have found a giant water vapor cloud in the universe. It is 10 billion lightyears away from Earth. The cloud holds 140 trillion times the mass of water present in the oceans of Earth.
53. Here is one of the fun universe facts for kids – a spacesuit of NASA costs $12,000,000. The backpack and control module makes up 70% of the total cost.
54. Astronomers discovered the largest diamond in our galaxy. The diamond is called BPM 37093. It is a variable white dwarf star. It is also known as Lucy as it is named after the famous song of the Beatles – “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” There is also a diamond planet out there.
55. BPM 37093 has a diameter of around 25,000 miles which makes it larger than our Earth. It weighs 10 billion trillion trillion carats.
56. It takes around 225 million years for the Sun to revolve around the Milky Way galaxy.
57. Uranus spins on its sides. This means one pole gets around 42 Earth years of sunlight and other pole experiences 42 years of darkness.
58. Neutron stars are the universe’s fastest spinning objects.
59. Voyager 1 captured the most distant photo of our Earth. The photo is called The Pale Blue Dot. Voyager 1 is around 6 billion kilometers away from Earth.
60. Our galaxy alone has 500 million planets that have the potential or capability to support life! These planets are called Goldilocks planets. These are the planets that are present in the habitable zone of a star.
61. The human brain is the most complex object present in the visible universe.
62. When the universe was just 10-43 seconds old, it was smaller than an atom. It was just a million billion billionths the size of an atom.
We will finish this article here and allow you to digest some of these incredible facts. If you want us to write yet another article on universe fun facts, all you need to do is ask! So, don’t be shy!
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