These are notes I've compiled about the Universe from various sources.
If you have anything to add, please e-mail patcoston@gmail.com.
This is a work in progress.  Any numbers I don't know are represented by X
as in ... "It would take X light years to reach the edge of the universe"

one light-year equals about 6 trillion miles
The universe may be accelerating in it's expansion.
5 billion years left to the life of our sun
Big Bang - 12 million years ago.
Big Bang started smaller than an atom
expanded 100 trillion times to size of grape fruit in 1 millionth of a second
Anti-matter and matter collided destroying both and creating heat and radiation
In the end, some matter was left
Hidden in the interference in the static on your TV set is the
energy signal left from the big bang
The echo left from the 1st second of the big bang
Moon is .25 million miles from earth
Sun is 93 million miles.
Saturn is a billion miles from Sun
Alpha Centaurie and Proxi Centari are our closest galaxies 25 million million miles away
The Milky Way Galaxy is made up of 100 billion stars
Traveling at the speed of light it would take 100,000 years to travel from one end to the other.
At the center of our Galaxy is a super massive black hole
that is 3 million times the size of our sun and smaller than a spec of dust and
its gravity is growing more powerful as its mass increases because its always consuming
the surrounding gas and dust.
There may be millions of black holes roaming out Galaxy.
Our solar system is in a quiet suburb near the edge of one of the spiral arms
It takes our solar system 300 million years to orbit the center.
The nearest galaxy is 10 million million million miles away
At the speed of light, it would take 2 million years to reach
Our galaxy is part of a local group of 25 galaxies
This local group is being pulled toward another group of galaxies called the Virgo Super Cluster.
Andromeda is the nearest galaxy to us and we are on a collision course with it.
It is approaching us at 300,000 mph.
When we collide, we will combine to create a much larger galaxy.
The two galaxies will pass thru each other and the centers will orbit
each other and eventually combine.
We are both flat spiral ring galaxies but after the collision we will be chaotic ball.
This new galaxy will collide with other galaxies before reaching the Virgo Super Cluster.
The universe contains 50-100 billion galaxies each containing
50-100 billion stars
Gravity is the weakest force in the universe
Electricity and Magnetism are some of the strongest forces in the universe
Without those two forces, we could pass thru each other
Every atom in the universe attracts every other atom in the universe
Edge of Universe is 50 million trillion miles from Earth
The further you look out in the space, the further back in time you see
It would take X light years to reach the edge of the universe
Our sun will expand to a Red Giant and swallow Mercury, Venus and Earth.

There are 250 billion stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way, for you non-astronomers (like me),
is the galaxy we live in. Experts who know about these things have told me that if I were to ship off
from one edge of it traveling 700 million miles an hour (the speed of light), it would take me 144,000 years
to get to the other side! That's a lot of years. But even more astounding than the enormity of the Milky Way
itself is the fact that it represents only a tiny fraction of the universe a droplet in an ocean of Milky Ways.
There are an estimated 100 billion galaxies out there beyond our tiny planet. If you were to count the number
of stars in the cosmos first you would be long dead before you could count even a fraction of them
but if you could, you would come up with a number that has twenty zeros behind it.
And there's more... 

Even if every one of the stars above us were crammed together cheek by jowl;
if there wasn't room to slip even a teensy silicon chip between all of the heavenly bodies in all of the galaxies,
the immensity of space would still be staggering. However... they are not crammed together. They are spread far,
far apart. The emptiness between these bodies would shame even the emptiest heads of some studio executives I know.
It is so empty in fact that if I were to place you in the transporter room of the Enterprise and set the controls
to beam you to some random location in the galaxy, the chances of you arriving anywhere at all close to a planet
or a star or any kind of solid body, would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.   
  
Space is spacious. 
More proof. The swiftest object we humans have created is a spacecraft called Pioneer 10,
launched from earth way back in 1972. About twelve years ago it departed the solar system,
zipping along at twenty-five miles a second, a pretty stout speed. (I'm lucky if I can go
twenty-five miles an hour on the freeways of Los Angeles). Having left our relatively crowded
solar system behind, Pioneer 10 now finds itself sailing through a vast vacancy, as solitary as a clam.
Even traveling at 90,000 miles an hour, it is moving 7,500 times slower than the speed of light!
The nearest star to Earth, other than our own sun, is Proxima Centauri, combusting 4.3 light-years away.
It will take Pioneer 10 32,000 years to get there. And this is the closest star! It will take 15 billion years
for it to reach the next galaxy. To place that number in perspective,
keep this in mind: 15 billion years is the current estimated age of the universe.
Everything that has ever happened, from the big bang to your last meal, from the extinction of the dinosaurs
to the rise of alien civilizations in star systems we don't even know about 
everything has happened in those 15 billion years. And remember there are a hundred billion galaxies roughly
the size of our own out there, circling, colliding, transmogrifying. 
 
Star Trek and the Universe
So warp drive, or something like it, was an absolute necessity.
At top speed, the Starship Enterprise could travel exactly 199,516 times 186,300 miles per second. Damned fast.
But again, just to refresh your memory about the incomprehensible dimensions of the universe,
even at this speedy speed (1,380,000,000,000,000 miles per hour),
it would take us eighteen days to cross the celestial territory of the United Federation of Planets
(10,000 light-years across), and it would still require ten years to reach the next galaxy.
It says so right in the Star Trek Encyclopedia. This is traveling at maximum warp to the next nearest galaxy,
never mind the remaining 99,999,999,999 other ones. (I told you this was big.)
Of course it would take no time at all to get to Proxima Centauri.
In fact if you left right now, you'd arrive just inside of thirteen minutes

Here are some facts on our Solar System and Planets that I'm still looking into
The planet Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and can hold 100 Earths
The Moon X around the planet X is larger than Earth
The planet X has X moons
There is a 10 planet in our solar system
All planets orbit in roughly the same plane except for X
Sometimes the planet X is closer than the planet Y because of its elliptical orbit
When do planets align?

Jupiter-sized blobs of hot gas embedded in streams of material ejected from
hyperactive galaxies known as blazars travel at 99.99999999999999999999% the speed of light.
To accelerate a bowling ball to the speed newly measured in these blazars would require all
the energy produced in the world for an entire week.