14 scientific facts that will make you look at the world differently

The universe is a crazy place. There are exploding stars and immortal jellyfish, and all this has been around for about 14 billion years. Here are 14 incredible facts about the universe in which we live. They will turn your ideas about what surrounds you.

If you expand all the DNA molecules in your body, their length will be about 54.7 billion kilometers. This is almost 10 times the distance from Earth to Pluto (5.7 billion kilometers).

Ordinary matter is almost completely (99.9999999%) empty space. If we remove all the empty space from our atoms, the whole of humanity (more than 7 billion people) would fit into the volume of one sugar cube.

Many of the atoms that make up you, from calcium in your bones to iron in your blood, were created in the heart of an exploding star billions of years ago.

It turns out that your body contains cosmic relics from the time of the creation of the universe. Almost all the hydrogen atoms in your body were formed at the time of the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago.

And when you set up TV channels, a small percentage of static visible on the screen is the remnants of radiation from the Big Bang.

The light of some stars flies to the Earth for an eternity, and admiring the star-studded sky, we are actually looking into the distant past. The Hubble Telescope can look back 13 billion years.

Forty-seven years ago, humanity took its first steps on the lunar surface. The footprints of astronauts will remain, perhaps, for another million years. The moon has no atmosphere, so there is no wind and water that could wash away the traces.

There is silence in outer space. Absolute silence. This is because sound waves need a certain medium to propagate. And there is a vacuum in space. A dark and quiet vacuum.

If you touch one piece of metal to another piece of the same metal in the vacuum of space, they will merge and be together indefinitely (well, or until they are broken).

One year on Venus lasts 224 Earth days. And one day on Venus is 243 Earth days. It turns out that a day on Venus lasts longer than a year. And Venus is the only planet in the Solar system that rotates in the opposite direction.

The Sun accounts for 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. It is so big that 1.3 million planets identical to Earth can be squeezed into it.

There are about three sextillion stars in the universe. That's three with 23 zeros — 300 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. This is more than grains of sand on Earth.

When a massive star explodes, its core turns into a so-called neutron star. Neutron stars are so dense that only a teaspoon of the substance they consist of will weigh more than Mount Everest. The explosion is capable of spinning a neutron star to a mind-boggling speed - up to 600 revolutions per second.

Ordinary, visible matter (such as stars and planets) makes up less than 5% of the universe. The remaining 95% of the universe is invisible dark energy (68%) and dark matter (27%). This means that we don't know anything about 95% of the universe.