FREAKY FACTS... So much space

By VIRGINIA WINDER
THE universe is unimaginably huge and filled with unknown stars, planets – and who knows, even life.
Just so you get an inkling of how huge the great beyond is, think about this.
Scientists estimate there are 10 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and about 10 billion galaxies in the universe.
It’s so big in fact, that the span of space is mainly measured in light years, or how far light can travel in a vacuum in one year.
That confounding figure is 9,460,730,472,580.8km or in more readable terms, nearly 10 trillion kilometres.
Here are some more staggering statistics:

1) If you were travelling at the speed of light you could fly around Earth’s equator seven-and-a-half times in just one second.
2) More than one million Earths could fit in our closest star – the Sun.
3) About 40,000 tonnes of cosmic dust falls to Earth each year.
4) Jupiter is as heavy as 317 Earths.
5) Wind speeds on Neptune, where the atmosphere is mainly made up of hydrogen, reach 2000km/h – 10 times as fast as the strongest tropical storms on earth.