There are 30 times more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way. It’s estimated that there are 100 billion stars and 3 trillion trees.
100 Mind-Blowing Milky Facts
The age of the Universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years. The oldest stars in the Milky Way, found in globular clusters, are 13.6 billion years old.
The name Milky Way derives from the Greek “galaxías kýklos” or “milky circle” due to its appearance as a dim milky band in the sky.
All the world’s bacteria stacked on top of each other would stretch for 10 billion light-years. Together, Earth’s 0.001mm-long microbes could wrap around the Milky Way over 20,000 times.
You travel 2.5 million km a day around the Sun without realising. The Earth’s orbit travels around 2.5 million kilometres around the Sun’s centre and around 19 million km around the centre of the Milky Way.
Earth is 4.54 billion years old. Using radiometric dating, scientists have discovered that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old (give or take 50 million years). This makes our planet half the age of the Milky Way Galaxy (11-13 billion years old) and around a third of the age of the Universe (10-15 billion years old).
There are fewer stars than there are trees on Earth. According to statistics, there are around 3 trillion trees on the planet and only about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way.
If all of the world’s entire bacteria were stacked together, it would stretch for 10 billion light-years. Here’s another weird science fact about it: it could wrap around the Milky Way over 20,000 times.
The Milky Way smells of rum, raspberries and booze. In 2009, astronomers exploring a giant cloud of gas and dust at the centre of the Milky Way made a surprise discovery – the cloud was packed full of a chemical known as ethyl formate, which has a couple of intriguing properties: it is responsible for giving raspberries their flavour, and has the smell of rum. Another nearby region is also notable as it’s full of ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, the type we use to make alcoholic beverages. It contains enough alcohol to supply every person on the planet with 300,000 pints of beer per day for the next billion years! If bottled at the source, the proof for this beer would be very low, with an alcohol content of less than 1%, but as the cloud also contains plenty of other nasty chemicals, among them carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, it would still leave you with quite a headache the next morning.
Most Sun-like stars in our galaxy are in multiple star systems. Our Sun may be a single star, but it is in the minority. Over half of the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way are part of multiple star systems, binaries or triplets, with stars orbiting around a common centre of mass. Most lower-mass stars like red dwarfs, however, live alone without a companion.
There are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way.