Everything you can see is just 5% of the universe

Anecdota
Everything you can see is just 5% of the universe
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🌌Space

Everything you can see is just 5% of the universe

Stars, planets, gas, dust, you: all “ordinary” matter makes up only about 5% of the universe's content. The rest is dark matter (around 27%), which emits no light but betrays itself through gravity, and dark energy (around 68%), which is speeding up cosmic expansion. So far, nobody really knows what either of them is.

ESA (Planck mission)
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🌌Space

The water in your glass is older than the Sun

A large share of Earth's water molecules formed in the interstellar cloud that existed before the Sun was even born, more than 4.6 billion years ago. You are literally drinking a cosmic fossil.

Cleeves et al., Science (2014)
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🌌Space

On Mars, sunsets are blue

By day, the Martian sky looks butterscotch because of fine dust hanging in the air. But at dusk, those same grains scatter blue light forward, creating a bluish glow around the Sun. Rovers have photographed these blue sunsets: the exact reverse of what we see on Earth.

NASA