More and bigger everytime we look

This is what we always suspected. What all the space operas took for granted even before there was any proof. After all the small, single steps it's now coming in bulk. Extrasolar planets. The Kepler telescope mission results finally started flowing and it's glorious. It already gave us 1235 possible planets (they have to be confirmed but most of them surly will be). This project was made to specifically to discover new planets and it's doing great job. It not only gave us more gas giants but also rocky planets both smaller and bigger then Earth. But most importantly 54 of those planets are in their stars Goldilocks zone. Everyone was excited when Zarmina was discovered (well except those who don't believe it exists) but it was just one example. This time we got multitude of planets to chose from rocky ones to gas giant that although not able to support life as we know it themselves may have moons that can. Alien life became suddenly much more probable. And that's just a small, tiny number of stars in our Galaxy that have been looked at.

That the visible Universe is just a small part of what was created in Big Bang is almost certain. Universe is about 14 billion years old and due to space expansion it's about 90 billion light years in diameter (this is the funny effect of road getting longer while you travel). But that's what we can see. There are parts that we can see - the ones that expanded so fast at the beginning that the distance between us and them grows faster then the speed of light and there is no way for the information about it to reach us. But there might be a way to learn how big the whole Universe (visible and invisible parts together) is. There are different estimates like if the universe expanded at the speed of light during inflation, then it ought to be 10^23 times bigger than the visible universe. Other depend on the shape of the Universe and whether it is closed, like a sphere, flat or open. In the latter two cases, the Universe must be infinite. But if it's a sphere one can measure it's curvature and estimate the size. Right now they think at least 250x times the size of visible one.

Neutrons stars are weird in their own right even under normal conditions but they can get even weirder. It's been postulated that the reason for one of them rapidly cooling of is that the neutrons inside tuned into superliquid - a strange state of matter that flows with 0 friction. On Earth we are only able to do that to atoms and then the superfluids can climb walls or stay still when the container is moving. Here the superfluid is made of neutrons and they loos energy by emitting high energy neutrinos. Probably.

And some optical illusion for the weekend.