"Do there exist many worlds, or is there but a single world? This is one of the most noble and exalted questions in the study of nature."
- St. Albertus Magnus (ca. 1193-1280)

Explore your curiosity about astronomy and the cosmos. Click on links below and learn about amazing, interesting and 'strange' facts about universe:

Universe Slide Show - Middle School

Universe Slide Show - High School

Some additional facts about the solar system and the universe

• The Earth is rotating on its axis at a rate of 460 metes per second at the equator, and is orbiting the sun at a rate of about 30 kilometers per second. The sun is orbiting the center of the Milky Way at a rate of about 220 kilometers per second. The Milky Way is moving at a speed of about 1000 kilometers per second towards a region of space 150 million light years away called the Great Attractor.

• Unlike other planets in the solar system, Venus spins not from west to east, but from east to west.

• More than 75 million meteors enter the earth's atmosphere every day, but they disintegrate before hitting the ground.

• The star Betelgeuse, a bright star in the constellation of Orion, is estimated to have a diameter of around 700 million miles. If it were placed at the center of our solar system, it would extend beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

• As late as 1820, the universe was thought by European scientists to be 6,000 years old. It is now thought to be about 13,700,000,000 years old.

• The most distant object ever observed is estimated to be around 13.2 billion light-years away. Discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in January 2011, the tiny, dim object is a compact galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the big bang. More than 100 such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way. The new research offers surprising evidence that the rate of star birth in the early universe grew dramatically, increasing by about a factor of 10 from 480 million years to 650 million years after the Big Bang.

• The term "Big Bang" started as a putdown. In the 1940's, there were many competing theories about the nature of the universe. British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang" as a snide putdown of his competitors, only to have the term find its way into the general consciousness as the description of the correct theory.

• For black holes, distant observers will see only the outside of the event horizon, while individual observers falling into the black hole will experience quite another "reality." General relativity predicts that for distant observers outside the horizon, they will experience the three space-like coordinates and one time-like coordinate, as they always have. For someone falling into a black hole and crossing the horizon, this crossing is mathematically predicted to involve the transformation of your single time-like coordinate into a space-like coordinate, and your three space-like coordinates into three time-like coordinates. Along any of these three former space-like coordinates, they now all terminate on the singularity; you're experiencing them as time-like now. All choices always terminate on the singularity—at least in the case of a non-rotating black hole. The coordinate which used to measure external time now has a space-like character which affords you some wiggle room, but dynamically, in terms of these new reversed space and time coordinates, you find that no stable orbits about the singularity are possible no matter what you try to do. Without any stable orbits, and the inexorable free fall into the singularity, relativists often refer to this as the collapse of space-time geometry.

• Most of the chemical elements found in the human body originated in stars; we are literally made of stardust.

• Our bodies are made of neutrons, protons and electrons. Practically all of the protons and electrons originated 13.7 billion years ago during the Big Bang. At some point in time some of them come together and form our bodies that carry life and informational environment called 'soul.' During a brief moment of life they stay together, and then they disperse in space - forever. Most of them will exist trillions of years - as long as the universe itself...