Of the nine planets most people are familiar with (NASA World Book lists Pluto as a planet) There are eight planets in our solar system. In increasing distance from the Sun, they are ☿ Mercury, ♀ Venus, ⊕ Earth, ♂ Mars, ♃ Jupiter, ♄ Saturn, ♅ Uranus. ♆ Neptune, Pluto.

But wait, is that all there is?  When I went to school we knew of 9 planets…. now, unlimited. Here is an interesting thought for the day.  As you watch this video you will learn that the earth quite small compared to some planets.  In fact, if you could pick up the earth and set it onto one of the biggest planets it could be like setting a grain of sand onto a beach.  Think about that, our planet would be like a grain of sand on another planet. I wonder if any of the grains of sand on our earth have any planets on them. (anyone up for Horton Hears A Who!)

Click play above for the video, click the photos below to enlarge.

There are of course more planets than these photos.  There are some much smaller and there are certainly many that are MUCH larger!

Take for example the planet named HAT-P-1 which is located over 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lacerta.

Located about 1,400 light years away from Earth is a planet called TrES-4 which is one of the strangest and largest planets.  It’s density is only about 0.2 grams per cubic centimeter which is the same as density of balsa wood which means this planet is very light, in fact, it would float very high on the water in a bathtub (if you had a large enough tub that is) and theoretically should not even exist, scientists say.

There are larger planets…. go find them.

So, we have been looking at largest planets…. but what is the largest “thing” in the universe?

Check this out, scientists in Mauna Kea, Hawaii have discovered a ginormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.

(Many people think a light year is speed, in fact, it is a measure of distance.  One light-year equals the distance traveled by light in a year, about six trillion miles or 9.5 trillion kilometers. )

The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the universe exploded into existence after the theoretical Big Bang. The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea.

Some of the gas bubbles are up to 400,000 light years across, nearly twice the diameter of our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy. Scientists think they formed when massive stars born early in the history of the universe exploded as supernovas and blew out their surrounding gases. Another theory is that the bubbles are giant gas cocoons that will one day give birth to new galaxies.

This finding gives researchers new insight into what the structure of cosmos looks like at the largest scale.

"Something this large and this dense would have been rare in the early universe," said study team member Ryosuke Yamauchi from Tohoku University.

"The structure we discovered and others like are probably the precursors of the largest structures we see today which contain multiple clusters of galaxies," Yamauchi said.

Now, if you want to read some strange, fantastic and interesting ideas about the moon being hollow, made of metal and created to be a satellite by intelligent aliens, CLICK HERE