10 Common Myths and Misconceptions About Our Universe

10 Common Myths and Misconceptions About Our Universe

Almost everyone was amazed at the night sky's vastness and wondered about the secrets of the final frontier. Nevertheless, certain erroneous beliefs about the world around us have been spread by films, television shows, and literature. Therefore, let's use science to dispel ten of the most widespread fallacies and false beliefs about our universe.

By Paul Misfud

10 Many of the Stars We See at Night Are Dead and No Longer Exist

On Earth, it takes a long time for the light from a far-off or dying sun to reach us. Therefore, a large portion of the 6,000 stars we can see at night must be extinct, burned up, and dark. Right? Actually not at all. All 6,000 visible stars are probably still shining brightly and are in excellent condition. Less than 1,000 light years separate all of the stars that can be seen from Earth, which is rather close for stars. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that any star we see has passed away in the time it takes for its light to reach us (186,000 miles per second; 300,000 kilometers per second).

🚨CLICK HERE FOR HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS 🚨

9The Universe Is Infinite

There is no question that the universe is vast, but it is also limited. It does have a conclusion. The Milky Way alone contains more than 200 billion stars. Additionally, the cosmos is thought to contain two trillion galaxies. Yet it is still quantifiable. The radius of the cosmos is about 47 billion light years in all directions from Earth. What lies beyond those planets and stars on the outer frontier of the cosmos is an even more mind-boggling thought. The distance across (the diameter) from end to end is 94 billion light years.

🚨CLICK HERE FOR HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS 🚨

8 Black Holes Are Like Giant Vacuums—Sucking Up Everything

Black holes are not terrifying cosmic tornadoes that devour everything in their path like we've seen in movies. Black holes don't seek for planets to eat either in order to live, prosper, and expand. Instead, they form when enormous stars run out of fuel and start to die and collapse. During that collapse, the star gets denser and denser, increasing its gravity as a result. This increased gravity then starts to draw on adjacent objects, including light. Yes, that gravity might draw planets, moons, and other stars toward the event horizon, the black hole's furthest boundary. But that black hole's gravity is merely ordinary gravity with more of it. For instance, the gravity from a black hole generated by the death, collapse, and formation of a star 10 times as massive as our sun would be equal to that star's mass.

🚨CLICK HERE FOR HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS 🚨

7 Dark Matter Is Evil and Destructive

The Expanse, Star Trek, Futurama, X-Files, and even Scooby Doo, to mention a few, have all featured dark matter as a story element. But is it truly nasty, devious, and sinister? Of course not. Dark matter accounts for 27% of the universe's mass while being completely unseen and undetectable. In essence, it is the matter found in the spaces between suns and galaxies. The majority of scientists think that this intangible substance is composed of WIMPS, or weakly interacting massive particles, which have masses significantly denser than protons. However, because of how weakly they react with other substances, they are hard to find (i.e., "dark").

🚨CLICK HERE FOR HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS 🚨

6 Earth-Like Planets Are Rare

At only four light-years away, Proxima Centauri b is the nearest planet to us that resembles Earth and may even be habitable. And it would still take more than 60,000 years to get there with our current technology. But let's not conflate the closeness of another habitable planet with the potential existence of additional worlds that resemble Earth. According to astronomers, the Milky Way galaxy alone has 300 million to 6 billion potential Earths. There may be 76,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars similar to our sun and orbiting habitable planets in the universe's 10 trillion galaxies.

🚨CLICK HERE FOR HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS 🚨

5 Once We Perfect Speed-of-Light Travel, We Can Zip Around the Galaxies

Hyperdrives, warp drives, and other futuristic technology are frequently used in fiction to travel quickly between galaxies and planets. Light-speed travel, or even travel close to it, is not possible in the real world because, as Albert Einstein explained in his Theory of Relativity, objects become heavier as their speed increases. As a result, any object that accelerates to a speed even near that of light would begin to have infinite mass or energy. And that simply cannot occur. Nothing with a mass can ever travel faster than light; although a photon, which has neither mass nor weight, has been accelerated in a lab to 99% the speed of light, the energy needed to accelerate even one gramme of anything would be limitless.

🚨CLICK HERE FOR HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS 🚨

4 The Big Bang Was an Explosion

There was a tremendous explosion that created the cosmos and everything in it. The name of the theory, The BIG BANG Theory, says it all. Cosmologists, however, are always working to shed more light on this. According to the widely accepted hypothesis, the universe was created 13.8 billion years ago when a little, dense ball of substance suddenly went bang. But did anything actually explode or blow up? The general view is that a quick expansion rather than a bomb detonating caused everything to begin. And it was space, not the things in our universe, that experienced a rapid expansion (faster than the speed of light). Despite the fact that everything is still in the same location as it was 13.8 billion years ago, the distance between the items is expanding. This explains why there isn't a void at the center of our universe, which would be there if everything were to be blasted away from a single place in the universe with an explosion (a bang).

🚨CLICK HERE FOR HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS 🚨

3 Aliens Could Come to Earth

Especially in light of the numerous UFO encounters that occur in North America every year, that seems feasible. But let's run those enormous numbers again. With 76,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe having habitable planets orbiting them, there is without a doubt other life out there—some developing, some intelligent, and perhaps some technologically advanced. And if only a fraction of those encounters were genuine, one could reasonably assume that alien visitors to Earth are a possibility. Could such technologically advanced species reach Earth? The Milky Way, the only galaxy in our vicinity, is 100,000 light-years across, and even extraterrestrials must deal with the practical issues of space travel—food, fuel, radiation, etc. The Voyager spacecraft is currently the fastest man-made object in space, moving at a blazing 11 miles per second. Voyager would take 73,000 years to get at the nearest star even at that speed. How could any being possibly survive a journey that could take millions of years, given all the dangers along the way? There is life out there, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson famously remarked, "Scientifically, we have a rule: you want to be alive at the conclusion of your experiment, not dead." But it's not coming this way.

🚨CLICK HERE FOR HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS 🚨

2 In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

No one can hear you scream in space, as the adage goes. However, NASA researchers now claim it depends on where you are in space. Since space is a vacuum with no material for sound waves to travel through, that assertion makes sense—a scream shouldn't even be able to escape your lips. Researchers heard a variety of unsettling sounds while listening in on a massive (gas-rich) black hole close to the Perseus cluster, a galaxy 250 million light years away. So go ahead and scream if you want to in a region of space that is filled with dense gasses, plasma, and other particles—you won't be wasting your breath.No one can hear you scream in space, as the adage goes. However, NASA researchers now claim it depends on where you are in space. Since space is a vacuum with no material for sound waves to travel through, that assertion makes sense—a scream shouldn't even be able to escape your lips. Researchers heard a variety of unsettling sounds while listening in on a massive (gas-rich) black hole close to the Perseus cluster, a galaxy 250 million light years away. So go ahead and scream if you want to in a region of space that is filled with dense gasses, plasma, and other particles—you won't be wasting your breath.

🚨CLICK HERE FOR HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS 🚨

1 Our Sun Is a Giant Fireball

Actually, it's more like a never-ending string of hydrogen bomb explosions, as hydrogen atoms in the sun's core collide with helium atoms and combine. Large amounts of energy are released by that fusion, or nuclear reaction, just like in a nuclear power plant. And the sun has been powered by those reactions for four billion years. Fortunately for Earth, the sun's gravity and density are so strong that it holds everything in place and prevents itself from exploding.

🚨CLICK HERE FOR HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS 🚨