10 Facts About Space That'll Make You Feel Uncomfortably Vulnerable

It would take Usain Bolt – running at his highest recorded speed – a little over 262 days to trek the distance of Saturn's rings. To put this into perspective, if he ran his top speed around the Earth, it would only take him around 37 days.

Any time you look up at the sky, you are seeing the universe as it was in the past. If we look at an object 50 million light-years away, we are seeing what the object looked like 50 million years ago because that's how long it took the light to travel from the object to our eyes.

There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the Earth. In case you were wondering, scientists estimate there are seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains of sand. In case you wanted to see that in number form, there are more than 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the sky. That's a lot of zeroes.

Scientists have found a void in space one billion miles wide that could be a parallel universe. This void has no matter (empty or dark) in it and is 40 times larger than the biggest void previously on record. Although this theory is controversial, Some scientists hypothesize that this may be where a parallel universe has crashed into ours, leading to speculations of a multiverse.

A black hole the size of one atom has the mass of a large mountain. There is a black hole at the center of our galaxy called Sagittarius A, with a mass equal to four billion of our Suns. Don't worry, though. It's so far away from Earth that we don't have to worry about getting sucked in. It's really only worth having one or two nightmares about.

There are over 500,000 pieces of "space junk" floating above the Earth, and they're moving at speeds up to 17,500 MPH. There is a dedicated team of researchers who work on tracking debris and assessing the debris' risk of collision with Earth.

To match the energy the Sun produces, you would need to light 100 billion tons of dynamite every second. 100 billion tons of dynamite is equal to roughly 400 trillion sticks of dynamite. I don't think Wile E. Coyote even has that much dynamite.

If you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you would weigh 1/100 of one pound on a comet, meaning you could just jump and you'd start floating off into space.That means, if an average male hippopotamus (3,750 pounds) was on a comet, he would only weigh 3/8 pound. However, we never suggest you or your hippopotamus try jumping off of comets.

The picture below covers a distance of 50 light-years. Each of those dots in the picture above is a star, like our Sun. The distance across our Sun is 864,000 miles, which is 109 times wider than Earth. Think of all that...space.

All of the stars, galaxies, and planets only make up 4% of the universe. The other 96% of the galaxy, scientists can't explain yet. It's made out of things that are invisible or incomprehensible, like dark matter and dark energy.