Original photo by neilkendall/ iStock
A spoonful of sugar may make the medicine go down, but a spoonful of water contains an almost unfathomable number of atoms. There are more atoms in just a teaspoon of water than there are spoonfuls of water in the entire ocean — almost twice as many, in fact, according to math involving numbers so high most of us have never heard of them. All in all, there are about 501,900,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a teaspoon of water compared to just 270,850,560,000,000,000,000,000 teaspoons of water in all of the oceans combined.
Though there’s really only one global ocean, which covers 70% of the planet and contains 97% of the Earth’s water (pick up some slack, lakes and rivers!), it’s geographically divided into five oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern, also known as the Antarctic. Atoms, meanwhile, are in everything — they’re the fundamental building blocks of all matter, from air and water to people and planets and everything in between.
Numbers Don't Lie
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“Atom” comes from a Greek word meaning “______.”
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“Atom” comes from a Greek word meaning “indivisible.”
There are more stars in the observable universe than grains of sand on earth.
If you live in an area with heavy light pollution, you’d be forgiven for underestimating just how many stars there are. The number is unfathomably large, even when compared to every grain of sand on every beach on the planet — and it isn’t even close.
When attempting to calculate just how many grains of sand there are on Earth, researchers at the University of Hawaii came up with a very rough estimate of 7.5 x 1018 — which is to say, 7 quintillion, 500 quadrillion. As for stars, the estimated number is even more unfathomably enormous: 70 thousand million million million. Molecules remain undefeated on that front, however; you’d find just as many of them in a mere 10 drops of water as there are stars in the universe.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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