Nothing makes a person feel more thirsty for knowledge than staring into the vastness of the space and realising just how little of it we know. If we are to talk about facts, we just know 4% of the stuff the universe in made of. We have no clue about the rest 96%.

Understanding our neighbourhood has always been a prime priority for us humans. Initially it was little villages. Overtime, the neighbourhood grew larger and larger. And now, we are at a point where we are looking towards planetary neighbours in terms of understanding our place in it.

I think it is a natural step in the evolution of any intelligent civilisation to become a space faring one. That happens after reaching a threshold in terms of technology and knowledge of the universe. That is the reason why each new discovery gets us really excited as it brings us one more step closer to that threshold.

In this article, I am going to be talking about 5 such recent discoveries that I think are worth reading about.

1. The Universe Has 10 Times More Galaxies Than Scientists Thought

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Just recently it was discovered that the universe has much more galaxies than we ever thought. The number is now in the trillions. The discovery came after an international team of astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to create a 3D map of the universe.

This means that over 90% of the galaxies in the universe are yet to be studied. If there are trillions of galaxies out there, just think how many stars are there in total and how many planets. The number gets so big that even our imagination fails to perceive it justifiably. 

If we didn’t feel small before, this discovery will do the trick. This discovery shows just how unfathomable the universe really is. Who knows even if this is a tiny fraction of what it really is!

2. Kepler-10c: The Planet That Shouldn't Exist

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About two years ago, the Kepler space telescope made a remarkable find. It discovered a rocky planet that weighs 17 times as much as the Earth and is over twice the size.

This planet was named Kepler-10C and it baffled astronomers. Planets such massive were thought to be possible only if they were gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. But here was a rocky planet of such huge mass, which challenged astronomers to rethink how planets are formed.

As it turns out, according to current theories, such a planet shouldn’t exist. But the team which made the discovery is confident that there are no errors in their findings. This shows that we have much to learn about planet formations.

3. Gravitational Waves

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This is perhaps one of the most important discoveries of 2015. For the first time ever, scientists were able to confirm the existence of gravitational waves. Up until then it was only a theory proposed by non other than Albert Einstein himself, about a century ago in 1916.

The waves were caused as the result of the collision of two black holes which were picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Apart from confirming a major theory and giving us the ability to observe the universe in a totally new way, we also have, for the first time ever, physical evidence of two black holes merging.

4. Asteroid With Rings

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Rings are something that we associate only with larger gas planets like Saturn. But recently, astronomers have discovered an asteroid name Chariklo, that harboured two rings encircling it. 

The asteroid lies between Saturn and Uranus and has a diameter of 155 mile only. The formation of ring system on an asteroid has stunned atmosphere because it has challenged our current understanding and it is always surprising when that happens.

5. Biggest Object in the Universe So Far Found

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Just a few months ago a team of researchers from the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics have found a region of superclusters that represents the largest structure ever found in space. They are calling it the BOSS Great Wall (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey)

According to the astronomers involved in the finding, this megastructure is composed of 830 different galaxies and has a mass that is 10,000 times greater than our own galaxy. Also, the supercluster spans roughly 1 billion light-years across, which is a mind boggling distance!