Thursday, November 14, 2013

Ten of the Most Interesting Structures in the Universe

The universe is so big that its size is incomprehensible...even to the most knowledgeable and open-minded individuals.

With a diameter that extends more than 93 billion light-years across, it"s not too surprising that many extremely large objects are lurking out in space just waiting to be found. In this list, we’ve gathered up the most massive and bizarre structures found in the universe. Many of them are actually a collection of objects that are held together by the immense force of gravity. And since space is so big, none of our Earthly means of measuring distances will suffice. So for the sake of this article, we’re going to use light-years, the rate at which light travels through space in one year, as a unit of measurement.

To give you a basic idea of what this means:
Light travels at 186,000 miles [300,000 kilometers] per second, which equals about 5,878,000,000,000 miles [9,461,000,000,000 km] each year.

Therefore, at this rate, it would take light more than 4 years of traveling at top speed to reach the Alpha Centauri triple-star system (the closest celestial neighbors of the sun). Our galaxy (the Milky Way) is so long that it would take light over 100,000 years of traveling before it would make its way across the galaxy.

Now then, click here to take a brief trip with us to the great beyond:
http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/ten-of-the-most-interesting-structures-of-the-universe/#more-4038

Image Source (Before Edits): http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/22200000/Planets-the-universe-22238647-1920-1200.jpg

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