weedbrain

15/06/2025

Look at that tiny circle in the galaxy that’s where every star you’ve ever seen in the night sky lives. Seriously. All the constellations, shooting stars, and planets visible to the naked eye exist in just this one thin slice of the Milky Way.

Our galaxy is estimated to hold over 100 billion stars, but the ones we can spot from Earth without a telescope make up only a tiny fraction. We’re tucked into one spiral arm of this massive structure, orbiting around a core we can’t even see directly.

It’s wild to think about how small our visible universe really is. Next time you look up at the stars, remember you’re seeing just a few grains of light in a cosmic ocean 🌌🔭

29/05/2025

This is TON 618, the largest black hole ever discovered. With a mass around 66 billion times that of our Sun, this supermassive blackhole is a true cosmic monster. Its event horizon stretches across 390 billion kilometers in diameter (1,300 astronomical units). This implies that TON 618 is so vast that it could swallow our entire Solar System more than 30 times at a glance. For scale, Neptune orbits the Sun at just 60 AU. TON 618 dwarfs this effortlessly. But the jaw-dropping scale doesn’t stop there. The black hole's accretion disk, where matter spirals in at near-light speeds, extends roughly 320,000 light-years. That’s over three times the diameter of our entire Milky Way galaxy. When compared to TON 618, our Solar System is just a speck of dust floating beside a cosmic mountain. It’s not just bigger than most celestial bodies, it’s monstrously larger than almost anything else we’ve ever seen in the universe. What do you think about this cosmic monster?

11/05/2025

It’s easy to forget just how small we are. Earth is just 1 of an estimated 3.2 trillion planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Our Sun? Just 1 of roughly 200 billion stars in that same galaxy. And the Milky Way is only 1 of about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

Let that sink in: our planet, everything we know and love, is a tiny speck in a cosmic ocean that stretches across 93 billion light-years. And even that is just what we can observe. Beyond it? Possibly infinite galaxies, stars, planets—and maybe even life.

This perspective doesn’t diminish our importance. Instead, it reminds us how rare and precious Earth is. Out of trillions of planets, this one sustains life. This one is home.

So the next time things feel overwhelming, remember—we are part of something so much bigger than ourselves. Something vast, mysterious, and still mostly unexplored.

10/05/2025

Astronomers have discovered the largest structure in the universe the BOSS Great Wall. Spanning over 1 billion light-years and made up of 830 galaxies across four superclusters, it’s 10,000 times the mass of the Milky Way. This massive web of galaxies reveals new clues about how matter spread after the Big Bang.

09/05/2025

09/05/2025

How big is the Milky Way Galaxy?

To answer this question, we are going a space trip with a spaceship moving at 100 percent of light speed across the Milky Way Galaxy to find out its actual size. The Milky Way Galaxy is huge, stretching 100,000 light-years across.

Hence, it will take us 100,000 years to travel from one edge of the Milky Way Galaxy to another. Our home galaxy is packed with 100-400 billion twinkling stars, and probably just as many planets spinning around them, ranging from 800 billion up to 3.2 trillion.

At the center, a giant supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* sits, as heavy as 4 million suns, swallowing anything nearby. Smaller black holes hide in the galaxy’s twisty arms. Even though it’s so wide, the Milky Way is super thin, only 1,000 light-years thick—like a cosmic pancake! So if we should travel through it's thickness, it will take us only 1,000 light years to escape our home galaxy.

Now that we have learned about the actual size of the Milky Way, it will also be interesting to learn about our place in the Universe. Our Milky Way is just one spiral galaxy, out of over 2 trillion galaxies that make up the observable Universe.

And even if we decide to get fly across it with our spaceship, we will never get to the end of Universe as our cosmos is expanding faster than the speed of light. I hope you enjoyed our space trip across the Milky Way? If yes, tell me the next galactic world you think we should explore next.

Image Credit: NASA

08/05/2025

A breathtaking view of thousands of distant galaxies captured in a patch of sky known as the Lockman Hole, photographed by the Herschel Space Observatory.

This deep-sky image reveals the incredible richness of the universe far beyond our own galaxy.

Image credit: ESA / SPIRE / HerMES

08/05/2025

Exactly how big is the universe? It takes our Sun 250 million years to orbit the Milky Way.
Ultimately, the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across and 1,000 light-years thick. Our solar system is located about 26,000 light-years away from the center of the galaxy.
If that's not impressive enough, our star is just 1 of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way. As such, scientists estimate that there could be as many as 3.2 trillion planets in our galaxy.
And keep in mind, these are just the numbers for our own tiny galaxy. According to NASA, there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

05/05/2025

You are looking at the most accurate map of the Milky Way to date, created using two billion observations of over three trillion objects in 11 years!

PC - NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration