The goal of this blog is to create a list of super facts. Important facts that are true with very high certainty and yet surprising, misunderstood, or disputed by many. This blog aims to be challenging, educational, and fun, without it being clickbait. I determine veracity using evidence, data from reputable sources and longstanding scientific consensus. Prepare to be challenged (I am). Intentionally seek the truth not confirmation of your belief.
Category: Super fact
This post is about a super-fact. The goal of this blog is to create a list of facts or insights that are important and not trivia, known to be true, and yet highly surprising, shocking, amazing, or widely disputed amongst the public but not disputed among the scientists or experts in the relevant fields. However, not all of my posts are super-facts. This category distinguishes posts that are super-facts.
Superfact 20: Domesticated Turkeys and Wild Turkeys are the same species, but Wild Turkeys can fly.So yes, there are flying turkeys.
I think this is a super-fact, because the Turkey is a very important bird to Americans and at the same time a lot of people, including Americans, do not know that Turkeys are not flightless birds.
Domesticated turkeys are flightless but wild turkeys are not flightless. Wild turkeys can fly distances of more than a mile, sometimes at speeds of 55 miles per hour. I’ve seen it with my own eyes on turkey hunts. I’ve seen turkeys fly and glide across the sky at the height of 30-50 feet. I’ve seen them flap their wings and then take off.
The turkey my oldest son shot when he was 11 years old.My son holding the turkey he shot.
The photo above is a Tom, a male turkey, that my oldest son shot when he was 11 years old. Male turkeys are called Toms and females hens. We took it to a taxidermist for preservation and mounting. I should add that we typically ate the meat of everything we shot. Taking a wild turkey to the taxidermist makes eating the animal more complicated but you can typically ask for the breast meat of the turkey.
Personally, I think that legal hunting is a lot more humane than eating meat from animals from factory farms.
Eastern Wild Turkey Meleagris gallopavo flying over the snow in Ottawa, Canada Stock Photo ID: 1358163995 by Jim Cumming.
I should add that legal hunting is often encouraged for conservation and population management. For example, moose are hunted in Sweden (my native country) to manage their large population (400,000 moose), which can cause damage to forests and agriculture, as well as starvation among moose, if not managed. Illegal hunting, on the other hand, is something nefarious. Below is a video showing wild turkeys flying (video is about one minute long).
Superfact 19: An account impersonating you on Facebook does not mean you have been hacked. When someone using your name and photo starts sending friend requests to your friends on Facebook, they are most likely just copying your information. You have not been hacked.
I am considering this a super-fact because almost every time I see this the person being impersonated states “….I have been hacked”. Most likely they have not been hacked. They don’t need to change their password or take special precautions related to their account or password. It is not the problem.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network with over 3 billion users and few people understand this common Facebook problem, which is why I am calling it super-fact. All that happened is that someone downloaded their photo, copied some information, and started sending out friend requests to their friends. It is so easy to do that. Any 10-year-old can do it and there’s no hacking required. If you think about it for a minute, I am sure you all could do it.
However, it is not appropriate behavior and Facebook can delete your account and ban you if you resort to this behavior.
WP AI generated image
So, what can you do to reduce the chance of being impersonated? You can go to Settings & Privacy > Privacy Settings and set your profile to private by setting “Who can see your posts?” to friends only, but if you want visibility and don’t want to go that far you can set the “Who can see your friends list?” to “only me”. You can also set “Who can see posts you’re tagged in?” to “Friends” or “Only me”. You can “Limit Who can see your profile picture and cover photo?” to “Friends.”
Additional things you can do are regularly search your name on Facebook to check for fake profiles and avoid oversharing.
The actions above will greatly reduce the chance that someone will impersonate you but if it happens anyway, you can report the offender by going to the fake profile and click on the three dots (…) on their cover photo, select “Find support” or “report profile” and choose “Pretending to Be Someone” and follow the instructions to report the account. Encourage your friends to do the same.
Superfact 18: Accents are very difficult to lose. People may speak and understand a second language perfectly and still have a strong accent in that language assuming they did not learn the second language in childhood. This is a fact that is well known to the 20.6% of people in the US who are bilingual and to the 43% of people in the world who are bilingual. Yet many monolingual people are unaware of and surprised by this basic and important language fact.
I can’t lose my accent
On one occasion when I took my oldest son to the playground a guy doing the same started talking to me. Hearing my accent, he asked me where I was from (Sweden) and how long I had been here (10 years). Then the guy said, “I am surprised that after all these years you still have an accent”.
This is a sentiment I’ve come across many times here in the US, but not as often in Europe. Monolingual people are surprised to hear bilingual people’s accent. When I tell people about the reality of accents and that it is difficult to lose one without major speech therapy, they act very surprised. It is a basic and important language fact that is surprising to those who don’t know it. That’s why I think this counts as a super fact.
I have difficulty hearing my own accent, which is to be expected according to this article . However, my accent becomes obvious to me when I hear myself speaking on a recording such as when I was interviewed by NBC about the tornado that ravaged our neighborhood five years ago. At first, I was thinking “oh shoot my accent is so obvious and now the whole world knows”, then I was thinking it is no big deal. If you want to hear my accent, click on this link. It is NBC news and my interview is located at : 1 minute and 11 seconds.
Accents are very difficult to lose
What monolingual people typically do not know but practically all bilingual people do know, is that it’s difficult to lose an accent as an adult learning a new language. Children can do it but not adults, not without major speech therapy. This article states that the cut off age is around 12 years old.
According to a test I took, my vocabulary and understanding of English grammar at the time of the incident above was above the average for native English speakers, and it was just as easy for me to understand, speak, read and write English, as Swedish. Yet my accent was obvious.
It should not really come as a surprise to monolingual people, but it does. After all, if you think about it, famous foreign actors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Werner Herzog, Marion Cotillard, Stellan Skarsgård. etc., speak with an accent even after living in the US and/or working for Hollywood, several decades, and they are not faking it. I have several friends and relatives who speak with a strong foreign accent after living in the United States for 30, 40, 50, and 60 years. If they came as adults, they still have their accent.
Arnold Schwarzenegger a bilingual man Stock Photo ID: 2501506607 by Ralf Liebhold
As this article states, “accents are extremely difficult to lose because our infant brains codify a lifetime’s worth of sounds before we’ve spoken our first word”. As this article explains as we age our brains become more specialized in our native language sounds, making it harder to accurately perceive and produce new sounds from another language, a phenomenon often referred to as the “critical period hypothesis” in language acquisition; essentially, the window for easily acquiring perfect pronunciation closes during childhood.
Past childhood it is much harder to accurately perceive and produce new sounds from another language Stock Photo ID: 1818291203 by pathdoc
A few second language facts
The most popular second language in the world with respect to the number of non-native speakers (data taken from this site).
(1) English – 1,140 million non-native speakers
(2) Hindi – 264 million non-native speakers
(3) Chinese (Mandarin) – 199 million non-native speakers
(4) Urdu – 162 million non-native speakers
(5) French – 132 million non-native speakers
(6) Arabic – 109 million non-native speakers
(7) Russian – 107 million non-native speakers
(8) Spanish – 74 million non-native speakers
(9) Bengali – 43 million non-native speakers
(10) Portuguese – 28 million non-native speakers
The most popular second language in the world with respect to number of countries.
3D illustration of giant Black hole in deep space. High quality digital space art in 5K – realistic visualization. Stock Illustration ID: 2476711459 by Vadim Sadovski.
Superfact 15: A black hole is a region of spacetime wherein gravity is so strong that nothing can escape it, not light, not anything. There are different kinds of black holes. We don’t fully understand black holes, which makes them very interesting to science. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. Black holes are invisible. They are truly black. However, we can see what they do to their environment as they consume surrounding matter. Below are some bizarre facts about black holes.
Time runs much slower closer to a black hole.
An object falling towards a black hole will become redder, faint, then infrared, then invisible and all its movements and clocks will freeze.
From the perspective of an outside observer, time appears to stop for someone reaching the event horizon of a black hole. Time will continue for someone falling in.
At the center of a black hole may lie a gravitational singularity, a region where the spacetime curvature becomes infinite. However, since we cannot peer into a black hole we cannot know.
The largest known black hole (TON 618) is more than 287 million times more massive than the most massive known star (R136a1).
If our planet earth collapsed into a black hole, it’s diameter would be 1.75 centimeters or 0.69 inches in diameter. The diameter of the largest known black hole (TON 618) is 242 billion miles, which is more than one million times larger than the distance from the earth to moon.
There are supermassive black holes located at the center of most large galaxies, including our Milky Way. The Milky Way’s black hole is about 4 million times the mass of the Sun.
Astronomers estimate that there are around 100 million black holes in our Milky Way.
When an object (maybe a spaceship, or a person) approaches or falls into a black hole the difference between the gravity on the parts closer to the black hole and those further away will be so large that the object is stretched and ripped apart. This is called spaghettification.
Stretching from the event horizon and out another half radius of the black hole is a region called the photon sphere. In the photon sphere light will travel in a non-stable circular orbit around the black hole. Light will go around and around for a while. If you are in the photon sphere you might be able to see the back of your head.
Above is just a small sample of weird black hole facts.
The understanding of black holes requires the General Theory of Relativity, and it is still a lot we don’t understand about them. Stock Photo ID: 2024419973 by Elena11
The Bizarre Reality of Black Holes
I chose the Bizarre Reality of Black Holes as a super-fact and included the ten facts above because these facts are shocking and yet not well known. Below is a photograph of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 taken by the event horizon telescope in 2017. To create the picture below image processing was needed. It is the first photograph of a black hole. This supermassive black hole is an estimated 6.5 billion times as massive as our sun, and 28 million times as massive as the largest known star.
The photo of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 taken by the event horizon telescope in 2017. Uploader cropped and converted TIF to JPG – This file has been extracted from another file, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77925953.
The fact that from the perspective of an outside observer, time appears to stop for someone reaching the event horizon of a black hole seems to prevent anything from falling into a black hole from an outside perspective. How does anything ever get inside the black hole if it freezes up at the event horizon? Black holes grow, they collide and merge, so clearly things can get inside, right? But how? As I tried to find the answer to this question, I found that I was far from the only one asking this question.
Realistic spaceship approaching a black hole. This content was generated by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system. Stock AI-generated image ID: 2448481683 AI-generated image Contributor Shutterstock AI Generator.
I searched physics forums trying to find the answer to this question. There were a lot of discussions but no clear answers. Some said, nothing falls into a black hole. Everything accumulates on the event horizon from the outside perspective and that’s how the event horizon and the black hole grows. The observer crossing the horizon essentially jumps infinitely far into the future, or into a different universe, that’s how he can pass through the event horizon.
Others said that the black hole is not static, it grows, and it shrinks from Hawking radiation, and this complicates the equations so that objects can enter the black hole even from an outside perspective. I have a few physics books on black holes that I have not finished reading. If I learn something better, I will update this post.
AI-generated image Description : Space Black Hole Blue Illustration Gravity Geometry Vast Line. Stock AI-generated image ID: 2457551367 by AI-generated image Contributor Shutterstock.AI
In the image above the grid demonstrates how a black hole is distorting space-time. Other strange facts about black holes are that they are slowly evaporating through what is called Hawking radiation.
They come in different sizes. The smallest known black hole (XTE J1650-500) has a diameter of approximately 15 miles. Perhaps scariest of all, black holes are nearly undetectable unless they are feeding on star dust or tugging on nearby stars. That means one hungry black hole could be zipping right through our solar system without us knowing. Considering there are an estimated 100 million black holes in our Milky Way space travel might be scary.
Addressing a Good Question
After posting this post I received a question via email regarding this fact “If our planet earth collapsed into a black hole, its diameter would be 1.75 centimeters or 0.69 inches in diameter. The diameter of the largest known black hole (TON 618) is 242 billion miles, which is more than one million times larger than the distance from the earth to moon.” The person who asked thought that 1.75 centimeters was pretty tiny and was wondering how a black hole could be that small.
To create a black hole, you need extremely strong gravity and one way to increase the force of gravity at the surface of a planet is to compress all its mass into a smaller volume.
If you compressed all of earth’s gravity so its diameter was only half of what it is, it would be more compact, and the gravity would be four times stronger at earth’s surface. If you compressed it further so that the earth’s diameter would only be a fourth of its original diameter the gravity at the surface would now be 16 times stronger. If you keep compressing the earth until its diameter is only 1.75 centimeters the force of gravity at the surface would be 132,000 trillion times greater than it currently is according to Newtonian physics, and you would get a black hole.
I should say that it comes out differently with General Relativity and that number is different for different sized black holes. However, this calculation is for demonstrative purposes. For relatively small masses like a planet, you would have to compress so much that it becomes tiny before gravity becomes large enough to make a black hole.
Superfact 14:The vastness of space and the beginning of infinity
The Universe is unimaginably large. Our solar system is enormous. It consists of our star, the sun, the planets including earth, dwarf planets, asteroids, comets, rocks, the Kuiper belt, the Oort cloud, and much else. It is 100,000 times wider than the distance between the sun and our earth. Yet it is just one star system among between 100 and 400 billion in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
But that is not all. According to the Nobel Prize winner in physics, Roger Penrose, our universe is just one in an eternal (infinite) series of universes, an eternal chain of Big Bangs that has always existed. See his conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) model (and the book cycles of time).
According to Stephen Hawking, M-theory, an extension or collection of string theories, states that there are 10^500 or 10000000000000…(followed by five hundred zeros) possible multi-verses that are all equally possible. Hugh Everett’s multiverse or multi-world theory states that there are infinitely many universes.
Now try to imagine the size of it all. You can’t do that, can you?
When the astrophysicist Brian Cox was asked the question “what is the one fact about the Universe that blows your mind the most?”, he answered, “One. Just the size and scale of it…”.
At first, I thought his answer was a bit boring. I mean, what about neutron stars, which essentially are giant atomic nuclei? What about the amazing mysteries surrounding black holes, and what about supermassive black holes, quasars, magnetars, the great attractor, what about the big bang, quantum physics, massless particles, the amazing general theory of relativity, dark energy, etc.
Then I tried to imagine the size and scale of the universe and I realized that he knew what he was talking about. The more you think about it, the more it blows your mind.
An illustration of the Andromeda galaxy with a supernova explosion near its center. “Elements of this image furnished by NASA” Stock Photo ID: 2495486227 by muratart.
The vastness of space and the beginning of infinity
Below is a 55 second video in which astrophysicist Brian Cox ruminates on what it means to live a finite fragile life in an infinite eternal Universe.
Our sun is a star. The sun’s diameter is 109 times larger than earth’s diameter, which means that you could fit more than one million earths inside the sun. The distance between the sun and the earth is called an astronomical unit or 1 AU. 1 AU is approximately 11.7 million times larger than earth’s diameter and 107,340 times larger than the sun’s diameter.
The solar system including all the planets, dwarf planets, asteroids, the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud is 100,000 AU across with the sun just being a dust speck in the middle.
I mentioned that M-theory implies that there are at least 10^500 multiverses. To get an idea of how bif that number is; It is a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion a quintillion times a quintillion times a quintillion times. By the way a quintillion is a million trillion.
Below are two more videos. The first one is trying to give a perspective on the size of our solar system, our galaxy, and the Universe. It is 11 minutes and 9 seconds long. The second one is very long, half an hour, and it is a bit advanced, so I recommend it only to star nerds.
However, at 22 minutes and a bit more than 30 seconds it states the observable universe is less than a 15 millionth of the universe (which might be even bigger) which contains at least 30 quintillion galaxies.
Super Facts 