5 incredible facts you didn't know about the universe

Despite decades of exploration, much of the universe still remains unexplored. But even the tiny fraction of what we do know about the universe can sound like fiction.

Take, for instance, the Moon. It appears to be perfectly round from here on Earth, right? But it is actually shaped like a lemon. It has flat poles and bulges on both the near and far sides around its equator. A study led by Ian Garrick-Bethell, who's a professor at UC Santa Cruz, says that Earth's gravitational pull and the Moon's own spin gave it this shape when it was mostly liquid beneath a thin outer crust of rock.

Sound is a wave of energy that requires a solid, liquid, or gas to move. Now, space is a vacuum, which means there are almost no atoms or molecules to carry sound waves. Yet, space is not actually silent. Specialized instruments can translate electromagnetic vibrations, like plasma waves or magnetic field interactions, into sound. In fact, back in February, NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory even released sonifications of data from Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus.

It's true that the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Humans have even set foot on the lunar surface. But it's farther away from us than some might think, floating at an average distance of 238,855 miles away from Earth. That's about the same as the width of 30 Earths, according to NASA.

Contrary to what Hollywood might have you believe, you wouldn't freeze or explode instantly if your spacesuit started leaking in space. Of course, the situation would be terribly unpleasant, but it would last longer than you might think. According to Stefan de Mey, Strategy Team Leader for Human and Robotic Exploration at ESA, it would take about 10-15 seconds for you to lose consciousness because of a lack of oxygen. However, it would take about one to two minutes for the lack of oxygen to turn fatal. In the meantime, since there's no atmospheric pressure in space, your blood would begin to boil, along with other bodily fluids. Your body would also expand, but you would not explode since the elasticity of your skin would be able to keep up with the pressure change. The low humidity of space may also cause your eyes to freeze over.

Overall, a terrible way to go.

Back in 2009, astronomers were trying to find traces of amino acids among the thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2—a dust cloud at the center of the Milky Way. And while they did not find any amino acids, the astronomers did find ethyl formate—the chemical that gives raspberries their flavor and also smells like rum.

This, however, doesn't mean that Sagittarius B2 is teeming with raspberries. "It [ethyl formate] does happen to give raspberries their flavor, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries," Arnaud Belloche, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, told the Guardian.