For 4.6 billion years, our Sun has been carrying us around the Milky Way at more than 800,000 km an hour. One lap takes about 220 million years, and so far it has gone around about 20 times. This one makes me feel so small. Everything that has ever happened, every moment in history, every great person who ever lived, even the dinosaurs, all of it happened on that one tiny speck. And it makes me wonder: where is heaven in all of this? 🤔

You can't fold an ordinary sheet of paper in half more than about 7 or 8 times, however hard you try. Every fold doubles its thickness and halves its size, so after a few folds you're trying to bend a tiny block that's thicker than it is wide. But what if you could keep going? If you could fold that same sheet 42 times, how thick do you think it would be? Make your guess, then watch to the end.

I put 640 metronomes on one platform, each playing its own note, and started them all at once in total chaos. Watch what happens when they all sync in this physics simulation. 🔊

This is the path Mars draws in our sky over 32 years. Every couple of years it slows down, loops backwards and carries on, and all those loops add up to this.

Bamboo can spend years building roots underground with nothing to show above the soil, and then one day it breaks through and grows almost a metre in a day. If you've been working hard and seeing nothing yet, your roots might be growing too.

If you draw a line between Earth and Mars every 6 days, starting from Mars's closest approach in 2003, fifteen years of their real orbits weave this seven-petal rose.

The Taj Mahal doesn't have a light show, so I made one, on a full moon night with fountains dancing in the long pool in front of it. Shah Jahan built it as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, and almost four hundred years later it might still be the most beautiful building in the world. 🇮🇳

Each of these glowing lines is the path of a real asteroid. The gold ones are the Hildas, more than 7,000 asteroids out past Mars, and every one of them goes around the Sun exactly three times for every two orbits of Jupiter. Because of that rhythm they all end up tracing the same giant triangle, with the Sun in the middle and Jupiter at the top, and they’ve been moving like this for millions of years. They slow down at the corners, where the lines turn deep orange, and speed up along the sides. The blue and pink clouds are the Trojans, two groups of asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit, one ahead of it and one behind. The orbits are all real, from NASA’s asteroid data. #space #astronomy #jupiter #asteroids #physics

If you draw a line between Earth and Venus every few days as they circle the Sun, then keep going for eight years, they draw a five-petalled flower, and when you join up the five places where Venus passes closest to us, they make a perfect five-pointed star. 🔊

A jet sends out sound in rings that spread at about 343 metres per second. As it speeds up, the rings in front get squeezed closer together, and at the speed of sound they pile up into a single wall right at its nose. Once it flies faster than that, the rings fall behind it in a cone, and anyone on the ground hears nothing until that cone sweeps over them, which is the sonic boom. Sound on 🔊