( Note that these might not be accurate, but I like looking at such things for entertainment and sometimes improve my general knowledge, although I make it a point to take these information with a pinch of salt)
1 – The speed of light is generally rounded down to 186,000 miles per second. In exact terms it is 299,792,458 m/s (equal to 186,287.49 miles per second).
2 – It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the Earth.
3 – 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
4 – The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.
5 – Every year, over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.
6 – When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers away in Australia.
7 – Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.
8 – Every year lightning kills 1000 people.
9 – In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .
10 – If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.
11 – Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.
12 – The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.
13 – The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.
14 – Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.
15 – When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.
16 – If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.
17 – Astronauts cannot belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.
18 – The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.
19 – One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a …pea.
20 – DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.
21 – The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.
22 – The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.
23 – The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.
24 – Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.
25 – Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.
26 – The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus – In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.
27 – Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 – the patient lived for 18 days.
28 – An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.
29 – ‘Wireless’ communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals.
30 – The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.
31 – In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.
32 – Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in spurts – not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.
33 – There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
34 – An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.
35 – On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.
36 – The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.
37 – A quarter of the world’s plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.
38 – Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.
39 – At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.
40 – The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.
41 – Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.
42 – More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.
43 – The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.
44 – It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.
45 – Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence.
46 – The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.
47 – Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.
48 – Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.
49 – Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.
50 – A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.
After reading this, I was quite interested in fact 31, "In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.", I was curious about the fact that the sun, which we all now take for granted, would die out in the end, and thought about what would happen to organisms on Earth after the sun had died out. And I went to do a little research...
The Sun is about 4.5 billion years old. it has used up about half of its nuclear fuel (hydrogen). In about 5 billion years from now, the sun will begin to die.
As the Sun grows old, it will expand. As the core runs out of hydrogen and then helium, the core will contact and the outer layers will expand, cool, and become less bright. It will become a red giant star.
After this phase, the outer layers of the Sun will continue to expand. As this happens, the core will contract; the helium atoms in the core will fuse together, forming carbon atoms and releasing energy. The core will then be stable since the carbon atoms are not further compressible.
Then the outer layers of the Sun drift off into space, forming a planetary nebula (a planetary nebula has nothing to do with planets), exposing the core.
Most of its mass will go to the nebula. The remaining Sun will cool and shrink; it will eventually be only a few thousand miles in diameter! The star is now a white dwarf, a stable star with no nuclear fuel. It radiates its left-over heat for billions of years. When its heat is all dispersed, it will be a cold, dark black dwarf - essentially a dead star (perhaps replete with diamonds, highly compressed carbon).
Below is an interesting article I got from
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/feb/26/earth-is-doomed-in-5-billion-years
"Life will have fried, oceans will have boiled away, but no one has ever been sure what will happen to Earth itself when the Sun finally swells into a red giant. Now, astrophysicists from Mexico and the UK are forecasting a dismal fate for our rocky planet: it will get caught up in the Sun’s outer layers, spiral inwards and vaporize.
Like all dwarf stars, the Sun converts hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei by fusion to produce immense amounts of radiation and outward pressure. But in five billion years or so the core will run out of hydrogen fuel, lose pressure and collapse under its own gravity. As this inward crush boosts the temperature of the core, the remaining shell of hydrogen around it will heat up and trigger a new period of fusion, which in turn will cause the Sun’s outer envelope to expand to around 250 times its current radius and cool from white to red.
Once the Sun is in this red-giant phase, Mercury will certainly be engulfed, and going on the increase of the Sun’s radius alone it would appear that Venus, Earth and Mars will suffer the same fate too. During expansion, however, the Sun is also expected to shed mass in a powerful solar wind. The resultant drop in gravity will let the orbits of the planets drift outwards, and some models suggest that Earth — and possibly Venus — might escape the fiery death. Indeed, astrophysicists have even spotted a distant solar system in which a planet with Earth’s orbital radius has survived its star’s red giant phase.
Klaus-Peter Schroeder of Guanajuanto University and Robert Smith of Sussex University are not so optimistic. They have performed calculations of Earth’s fate that include not only the favourable effects of solar mass loss, but also the speed of the Sun’s rotation, which will diminish as the Sun gets bigger. Currently completing one rotation in about a month, at red-giant size the Sun will rotate once every few thousand years, allowing the Earth’s gravity to draw out a large tidal bulge on the solar surface. Such a bulge will haul the Earth back into the Sun’s outer layers, while the drag will steadily reduce the rocky planet’s orbital angular momentum. Earth will spiral inwards until it eventually vaporizes (Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. to be published; preprint available at arXiv:0801.4031).
We would say this is the definitive answer to the fate of the EarthRobert Smith, Sussex University
A history of fates
This is not the first time that tidal bulges have been taken into account when predicting Earth’s fate. In 1996, Mario Livio at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute and colleagues also found that the effect would be strong enough to swallow up Earth. Then, in 2001, Kacper Rybicki of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Carlo Denis of the European Centre for Geodynamics and Seismology in Luxembourg suggested that the Earth would survive in spite of tidal bulges.
But Rybicki and Denis’s analyses were mostly qualitative, while the calculations performed by Livio’s group were based on an old formula for the Sun’s mass loss. Schroeder and Smith, on the other hand, have performed their calculations using a recent mass-loss equation devised by Schroeder along with Manfred Cuntz from the University of Texas at Arlington, which was calibrated using precise observations. “We’re confident that our mass-loss equation is the best that’s currently available,” Smith told physicsworld.com. Furthermore, Schroeder and Smith have consulted with Jean-Paul Zahn of the Paris Observatory, who is regarded as the authority on tidal physics, to make sure they have considered the effect of tidal bulges properly.
Still, predictions for the fate of the Earth have bandied about for decades, so is this the final say in the matter? “We would say this is the definitive answer to the fate of the Earth,” says Smith. “But I dare say someone will come up in a few years and say that we’re wrong.”
Smith points out, however, that any further developments will likely come to the same conclusion because he and Schroeder have “probably underestimated” the total drag. The solar wind, which the pair did not include in their calculations, should also hinder the motion of the Earth in its orbit and encourage it to spiral inwards."
I enjoyed researching on his topic as it made me think about how mankind have taken the energy from the sun for granted, however, the shocking truth is that this powerful energy would be gone one day, although know one would be able to find out why, however, if there is still life on Earth 5 billion years later, I do wonder how would they survive.
I also found this article online, which I found fascinating and this gave me something to think about as well,
"After supernova universe was expanding up to one point and after that strange matter continued this expansion. Scientists called this matter the Dark Energy. Dark energy has so much of dark matter that is associated with it and we still don't know much about it. Though, man has made such large strides in astronomy and has been able to find out so much, at the same time, there is so much more that remains and that is the dark matter. There is the mysterious and unknown form of energy in the universe that man has not been able to fathom much about.
This energy is in the form of one that is made by heavenly bodies like neutron stars, the sun, Galileo Galilei and the various black holes that abound.
Almost as much as 23% of the universe is not visible to the naked human eye. This means that there is so much of dark energy being formed in the universe and we are not aware of it. There are multitude amounts of different ways in which these gases and energy can get together in the most unknown of ways and probably go on to form stars and galaxies that way. This is the place where most of the mass in the universe accumulates. The dark energy is more concentrated towards the center and gets less as it goes outwards."
This energy is in the form of one that is made by heavenly bodies like neutron stars, the sun, Galileo Galilei and the various black holes that abound.
Almost as much as 23% of the universe is not visible to the naked human eye. This means that there is so much of dark energy being formed in the universe and we are not aware of it. There are multitude amounts of different ways in which these gases and energy can get together in the most unknown of ways and probably go on to form stars and galaxies that way. This is the place where most of the mass in the universe accumulates. The dark energy is more concentrated towards the center and gets less as it goes outwards."
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