Mrs. Kubelik

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Louis Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night   

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Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan    

Show up for yourself. Sit in the front row. Be the first to clap. Demand an encore.

Show up for yourself. Speak words of encouragement. Congratulate your efforts. Gass yourself up fam.

Show up for yourself. Embrace your vulnerabilities. Be patient with your growth. Blossom at your own pace.

Show up for yourself. Silence your demons. Respect your intuition. Reconnect with the source.

Show up for yourself. Stay hydrated. Alkaline > Acid. Run. Jog. Walk. Forward.

Show up for yourself.

We’ve compiled a list of the 20 most incredible facts about the universe you will ever come across. The infinite expanse of stars and galaxies are riddled with mysteries which leading scientists and experts are yet to explore. In their quest to unearth the hidden secret of the universe, startling facts and information have emerged - 20 of which we’ve featured below.

1. When you look into the night sky, you are looking back in time.

Originally posted by apparently-artless

 When we gaze at stars in the night sky, we are actually looking into the past. This happens because light emitted from a star has to travels many light years ahead to actually become visible to our eyes. For  example, Orion is 640 light-years away, so the light left the star around 1370 is what we are seeing now.

2. The Hubble telescope allows us to look back billions of years into the past

Originally posted by dreamofthedragon

NASA releases some incredible images of space, from time to time, and it’s made possible with The Hubble Telescope. Here’s an image which is a collection of 10,000 images captured by The Hubble. 

3. You can watch the Big Bang on your television

Cosmic background radiation is an after effect of the Big Bang, the event that allegedly gave birth to the universe. This can actually be seen on television where the old fuzzy noise we saw contains 1% of the same radiation. 

4. There’s a giant cloud of alcohol in Sagittarius B

Sagittarius B, is a huge cloud of vinyl alcohol whizzing in space near the Milky Way. It’s important as it leaves crucial information for scientists about how early life forms originated in space.

5. There’s a planet-sized diamond in Centaurus named after a Beatles song

Originally posted by iclalove

A planet , made completely of diamond, which has been called Lucy by scientists after the Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,”  can be found 50 light years away in Centaurus and weighs in a mind boggling 10 billion-trillion-trillion carats. 

6. It takes 225 million years for our Sun to travel around the galaxy

Originally posted by toomanythoughtanddreams

While our planets in the solar system circumnavigate the Sun, the star itself it on a orbit around the Milky Way. And if we’re counting in humans years, it takes 225 million years to complete the journey. 

7. Our solar system’s biggest mountain is on Mars

The tallest mountain in our solar system is Olympus Mons, located on Mars. It’s calculated  to be three times taller than Everest, spanning 600 kilometers across and 26 kilometers in height. 

8. Uranus spins on its side, with some rather strange results

Originally posted by spaceplasma

Uranus is not just unique because of its strange spinning, but the consequences of that effect results in 42 consecutive years of summer sunlight followed by another 42 consecutive winter darkness.

9. A year on Venus is shorter than its day

Originally posted by spaceplasma

Venus is the slowest rotating planet in our solar system - it takes longer to finish a rotation on its axis than orbit the entire Sun!

10. Neutron stars are the fastest spinning objects known in the universe

The fastest spinning known pulsar, a neutron star which emits a radiation beam as light, cycles on a whopping 70,000 km per hour speed.

11. A spoonful of a neutron star weighs about a billion ton

Neutron stars are unimaginably dense, in fact one spoonful of one such star would weigh around a billion tons!

12. The Voyager 1 spacecraft is the most distant human-made object from Earth

In 1977, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were released into space as an ambitious project and are still cruising the outskirts of our galaxy and maybe beyond to help us explore space even further.

13. Voyager 1 captured the most distant photograph of Earth

The same spacecraft, Voyager 1, took the most distant photograph of Earth: Voyager 1 took a shot of the Earth from the far reaches of space in 1990, and the small speck at the end of the image that is the world we’re living on right now became known as the Pale Blue Dot. Astronomer Carl Sagan noted,“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

14. Scientists are looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life on Earth

Originally posted by ajshostak

One of the most exciting mysteries of the universe is a quest to find aliens, or as termed by scientists a project called The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), where they are pulling n all data about extraterrestrial life on other planets through evidence they have at their hands.

15. It is estimated there are 400 billion stars in our galaxy

Originally posted by thelucidnation

Our own Sun is one of 400 billion others, some astoundingly larger, some smaller, in the Milky Way alone. 

16. There could be 500 million planets capable of supporting life in our galaxy

“Goldilocks Planets” are  habitable planets which fall into a specific zone around the star to make life sustainable on it. Many factors come into play to get this perfect distance such as temperature, atmospheric content, water, chemical compounds on the surface etc. 

17. There are probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe

Based on extensive calculations, using data from the Hubble Telescope and as far as it can see into space, there’s a probable 170 billion galaxies besides our own Milky Way.

18. There could be an infinite number of universes

Originally posted by sci-universe

Speculative theories in advanced branches of science such as mathematics, quantum mechanics and astrophysics have summed up that we could be living in a “multiverse”- a convergence of an infinite number of universes. 

19. The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe

Originally posted by teapotsandroses

Our brain is a blueprint for the most complex network in the universe, with over a hundred billion neurons and quadrillion connections- this system isn’t even the tip of the iceberg which we know about what our brains have the potential to achieve.

20. We are all made of stardust

Originally posted by drugsruleeverythingaroundme

VIDEO: Living Under Israel’s Missiles

Four boys of the Bakr family were killed by a missile strike during last year’s incursion. Their surviving family members are still scarred from the attack.

More than anyone, children bear the brunt of regular Israeli military assaults on the Gaza Strip. During the 51-day war in the summer of 2014, 551 children were killed and 3,436 were injured. But these gruesome figures say little about the psychological state of the nearly 800,000 children who have survived the periodic bombing campaigns. After the final cease-fire that ended Israel’s Operation Protective Edge on August 26 of last year, UNICEF estimated that at least 425,000 Palestinian children in the besieged Gaza Strip require “immediate psychosocial and child protection support.”