This GIF Captures How Truly Beautiful Space Is
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The universe is huge. It's a vertigo-inducing, always-expanding kind of huge. And it's lonely (think: Gravity). Sometimes, because our own planet already seems so big, the size and scale of space is completely unfathomable. Well, this amazing, Reddit front-page-worthy GIF does a pretty good job of expressing how terrifying and beautiful open space is. Reddit user eyevoree put it best:
"This is the most accurate, non-verbal description of how terrifying space is. It's . . . the emptiness of space that scares me. Or the true unknown. I mean, at the bottom of the ocean is fish and monster-like crap, but we've seen a lot of it. There are other species, life forms and civilizations in the universe. It's mind boggling. I think almost anyone who ran into an alien would sh*t their pants."
The zoom GIF was pulled from the video below, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. It zeroes in on the Horsehead Nebula, a dark cloud of gas and dust formed when a star or planetary body collapses. The leftover dust clumps together, due to gravitational attraction between the particles. I think we can all agree that the results are pretty beautiful.