Top 10 Strangest Things In Space
Let’s be honest: space is an absolutely crazy place. Most science fiction writers throw in a planet with two stars that looks vaguely like Southern California, and call it a day. But the cosmos is a lot stranger than we give it credit for:
10 Hypervelocity Stars
Everyone knows that shooting stars are just meteors entering the atmosphere, right? If you didn’t, congratulations—you just failed the fourth grade. What some people don’t know, however, is that real shooting stars exist as well; they’re called
hypervelocity stars. These are big, fiery balls of gas rocketing through space at millions of miles per hour.
When a binary star system is gobbled down by the supermassive black hole (that’s the scientific term, by the way) at the center of a galaxy, one of the two partners is consumed, while the other is
ejected at high speed. Just try to imagine a huge ball of gas, four times the size of our sun, hurtling out from our galaxy at millions of miles per hour.
9 The Planet From Hell
Gliese 581 c wants to kill you. Seriously. Scientists have determined that this hell of a planet is the most likely candidate for future colonization, despite the fact the entire planet’s out to get you.
This planet orbits a red dwarf star, many times smaller than our Sun, with a luminosity of only 1.3% of our sun. This means that the planet is far closer to its star than we are to ours. Because of this, it is stuck in a state of tidal locking, meaning that one side of the planet is always facing the star, and one side is always facing away—just like our moon’s relationship with Earth.
The tidal locking of the planet alone results in some pretty odd features. Stepping out onto the star-side of the planet would immediately
melt your face off, whereas standing on the opposite side of the planet, where there is no sun, would freeze you instantly. However, in between these two extremes is a small belt where life could theoretically exist.
Living on Gliese 581 c would have its challenges, though. The star it orbits is a Red Dwarf, which means that it is at the lower frequency end of our visible spectrum, bathing the entire sky of Gliese 581 c in a hellish red color. Another side effect of this is the fact that photosynthesizing plants would have to adapt to the constant bombardment of infrared radiation, rendering them a deep black color. That Greek salad wouldn’t seem so appetizing any more…
8 The Castor System
As if one or two giant, fiery balls of gas weren’t enough, here we have the
Castor System. As one of the two bright stars from the Gemini constellation in our night sky, it has some serious luminosity. This is because the Castor System isn’t one, or two, but six stars, all orbiting around a common central mass.
Three binary star systems orbit each other here, with two hot and bright A-Type stars being stuck in the system, as well as four M-type red dwarves. All together, though, these six stars put out roughly
52.4 times more luminosity than that of our sun.
7 Space Raspberries and Rum
For the last few years, scientists have been studying a dust cloud near the center of our Milky Way galaxy. If there’s a God out there, it seems that he decided to get creative—this dust cloud, named Sagittarius B2,
smells of rum and tastes like raspberries.
The gas cloud in question consists largely of ethyl formate, which is known to give raspberries their taste, and rum its distinctive smell. This large cloud is said to contain a
billion, billion, billion liters of the stuff—which would be great, if it wasn’t rendered undrinkable by pesky particles like propyl cyanide.
The creation and distribution of these more complex molecules is still a mystery to scientists, however, so we won’t be opening up an intergalactic pub anytime soon.
6 A Planet of Burning Ice
Do you remember Gliese? That hell-hole of a star that we visited earlier? We’re heading back to the same solar system for this one. As if one murderous planet wasn’t enough, Gliese supports a planet made almost entirely out of ice—at
439 degrees Celsius.
Gliese 436 b is, quite simply, a
burning ice cube. Imagine Hoth from Star Wars—except that it’s on fire. The only reason this ice stays solid is because of the huge amount of water present on the planet; the gravity pulls it all in towards the core, keeping the water molecules so densely packed that they cannot evaporate.
5 The Diamond Planet
Finally: a planet fit for Oprah, or perhaps even Bill Gates. 55 Cancri e—made
entirely out of crystallized diamond—would be priced at 26.9 nonillion dollars. That’s the kind of stuff that even the Sultan of Brunei dreams about at night.
The huge diamond planet was once a star in a binary system, until its partner began to cannibalize it. However, the star was not able to pull its carbon core away, and carbon is just a ton of heat and pressure away from being a diamond—so at a surface temperature of 1648 degrees Celsius, the conditions are almost perfect.
One third of the mass of the planet is said to be
pure diamond, and whereas Earth is covered in water and abundant in oxygen, this planet is made mainly of graphite, diamond, and a few other silicates.
The huge gemstone is two times the size of Earth, and has eight times the mass, making it a “Super-Earth.”
4 The Himiko Cloud
If there has ever been any object that has shown us the origins of a primordial galaxy, this is it. The
Himiko Cloud is the most massive object ever found in the early universe, and it dates to only 800 million years after the Big Bang. The Himiko Cloud astounds scientists with its sheer size, roughly half that of our Milky Way Galaxy.
Himiko belongs to what is known as the “reionization epoch,” or the period from around 200 million to one billion years after the Big Bang—and it’s the first glimpse scientists have managed to get of
the early formation of galaxies. To make it even cooler, it has been introduced as the “Giant Mystery Blob Discovered Near the Dawn of Time” by Space.com.
3 The Universe’s Largest Water Reservoir
Twelve billion light years away, the
universe’s largest water reservoir resides in the heart of a quasar. Containing 140 trillion times the amount of water in Earth’s oceans, and found near the colossal black hole at the center of the quasar, the water unfortunately manifests itself in the form of a massive cloud of gas, several hundred light years in diameter—our dreams of the universe’s most kick-ass water slide have been destroyed!
But the kicker is that this black hole, twenty billion times the size of our sun, is constantly spewing out huge amounts of energy—equivalent to what would be produced by
1000 trillion suns.
2 The Universe’s Largest Electrical Current
Only a few years ago, scientists stumbled upon an electrical current of cosmic proportions: 10^18 amps, or roughly
one trillion lightning bolts. With that kind of power, you could even use that pesky seven-blade electric razor you have lying around!
The lightning is thought to originate from an enormous black hole in the center of the galaxy, which has a core that is supposedly a “huge cosmic jet.” Apparently, the black hole’s huge magnetic field allows it to fire up this lightning bolt through gas and dust to a distance of over
one hundred and fifty thousand light years away. And we thought that our galaxy was big—this single lightning bolt is one and a half times the size of it.
1 The LQG
So yeah, the Himiko Cloud is pretty big—like, half the size of our galaxy. Big whoop, right? Well, what about a structure in space so enormous that it breaks the conventional laws for modern astronomy? This structure, my friends, is the LQG—the
Large Quasar Group.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is only one hundred thousand light years across. Think about that for a moment; if something happens on the far side of the galaxy, it would take a hundred thousand years for the light to reach the opposite end. That means that when we watch an event take place at the other end of our galaxy, it actually occurred when the human species was just beginning to form.
Now, take that length of time, and multiply it by forty thousand. That’s right—the Large Quasar Group is four billion light years across. The cluster of seventy-four quasars actually
breaks the rules of standard astrophysics, since the maximum size of any cosmic structure should be only 1.2 billion light years across.
Scientists have absolutely no idea how this huge structure formed, since they had previously only been aware of other clusters of perhaps several hundred million light years across. The gargantuan structure absolutely spits on a certain physical law, which states that when viewed from a distance, the universe would look relatively uniform. This is exactly the type of condescending cosmic structure that looks over at our galaxy and, with a smirk, says “cute.”
Top 10 Cool Facts about Space
Jamie Frater November 13, 2007
There is still so little known about outer space by modern science, but of that little we do know, there are some extraordinarily amazing things. This is a list of the top 10 cool facts about Space.
10. Lightweight
Fact: If you put Saturn in water it would float
The density of Saturn is so low that if you were to put it in a giant glass of water it would float. The actual density of Saturn is 0.687 g/cm
3 while the density of water is 0.998 g/cm
3. At the equator Saturn has a radius of 60,268 ± 4 km – which means you would need an extremely large glass of water to test this out.
9. Constantly Moving
Fact: We are moving through space at the rate of 530km a second
Our Galaxy – the Milky Way is spinning at a rate of 225 kilometers per second. In addition, the galaxy is travelling through space at the rate of 305 kilometers per second. This means that we are traveling at a total speed of 530 kilometers (330 miles) per second. That means that in one minute you are about 19 thousand kilometers away from where you were. Scientists do not all agree on the speed with which the Milky Way is travelling – estimates range from 130 – 1,000 km/s. It should be said that Einstein’s theory of relativity, the velocity of any object through space is not meaningful.
8. Farewell old friend!
Fact: The moon is drifting away from Earth
Every year the moon moves about 3.8cm further away from the Earth. This is caused by tidal effects. Consequently, the earth is slowing in rotation by about 0.002 seconds per day per century. Scientists do not know how the moon was created, but the generally accepted theory suggests that a large Mars sized object hit the earth causing the Moon to splinter off.
7. Ancient Light
Fact: The light hitting the earth right now is 30 thousand years old
The energy in the sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago – it spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun! The temperature at the core of the sun is 13,600,000 kelvins. All of the energy produced by fusion in the core must travel through many successive layers to the solar photosphere before it escapes into space as sunlight or kinetic energy of particles.
6. Solar Diet
Fact: The Sun loses up to a billion kilograms a second due to solar winds
Solar winds are charged particles that are ejected from the upper surface of the sun due to the high temperature of the corona and the high kinetic energy particles gain through a process that is not well understood at this time. Also, did you know that 1 pinhead of the sun’s energy is enough to kill a person at a distance of 160 kilometers? [Sourced from Planet Science]
5. The Big Dipper is not a constellation
Fact: The Big Dipper is not a constellation, it is an
asterism
Many people consider the big dipper to be a constellation but, in fact, it is an asterism. An asterism is a pattern of stars in the sky which is not one of the official 88 constellations; they are also composed of stars which are not physically related to each other and can be vast distances apart. An asterism can be composed of stars from one or more constellations – in the case of the Big Dipper, it is composed entirely of the seven brightest stars in the Ursa Major (Great Bear) constellation.
4. George’s Star
Fact: Uranus was originally called George’s Star
When Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, he was given the honor of naming it. He chose to name it Georgium Sidus (George’s Star) after his new patron, King George III (Mad King George). This is what he said:
In the fabulous ages of ancient times the appellations of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were given to the Planets, as being the names of their principal heroes and divinities. In the present more philosophical era it would hardly be allowable to have recourse to the same method and call it Juno, Pallas, Apollo or Minerva, for a name to our new heavenly body. The first consideration of any particular event, or remarkable incident, seems to be its chronology: if in any future age it should be asked, when this last-found Planet was discovered? It would be a very satisfactory answer to say, ‘In the reign of King George the Third.’
Uranus was also the first planet to be discovered with the use of a telescope.
3. Extra Moons
Fact: Earth has at least 4 moons
Okay – that is not actually true – but it is very close. In 1986, Duncan Waldron discovered a asteroid (5km across) that is in an elliptic orbit around the sun with a period of revolution virtually identical to that of Earth. For this reason the planetoid and earth appear to be following each other. The periodic planetoid is named
Cruithne (pronounced krin-y?) after an ancient group of Scottish people (also known as the Picts). Because of its unusual relationship with Earth, it is sometimes referred to as Earth’s second moon. Cruithne, is fainter than Pluto and would require at least a 12.5 inch reflecting telescope to attempt to be seen. Since its discovery, at least three other similar asteroids have been discovered. These types of objects are also found in similar relationships to other planets in our Solar System. In the image above (courtesy of
Paul Wiegert), the earth is the blue circle with a cross in it, and Cruithne’s orbit is shown in yellow.
2. Sunspot Music
Fact: Sunspot activity may be the primary reason for the beautiful sound of Stradivarius violins
Antonio Stradivari is considered to be the greatest violin maker ever. He lived in Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Scientists have been unable to work out what it is about his violins that makes them so incredible, but they do know that the timber used to make them is a very important contributing factor. From the 1500s to 1800s, the earth underwent a
little ice age mostly due to increased volcanic activity and decreased solar activity (this is called the
Maunder Minimum). As a result of this cooling, the types of trees that Stradivari used for his violins were particularly hard (due to slow growth). Hard timber is especially good when making violins. It is very probable that had Stradivari lived in a different age, his violins would not be prized as they are today. This picture above is made of three overlapping photos. It shows the rings in the spruce tree used to make the most famous Stradivarius violin, the “Messiah.” The first row of numbers gives the width of each ring in millimeters (one mm is about the thickness of a fingernail). The bottom row gives the years in which each ring grew.
1. Cold Welding
Fact: If two pieces of metal touch in space, they become permanently stuck together
This may sound unbelievable, but it is true. Two pieces of metal without any coating on them will form in to one piece in the vacuum of space. This doesn’t happen on earth because the atmosphere puts a layer of oxidized material between the surfaces. This might seem like it would be a big problem on the space station but as most tools used there have come from earth, they are already coated with material. In fact, the only evidence of this seen so far has been in experiments designed to provoke the reaction. This process is called cold welding. For those who still don’t believe it, here is the
Wikipedia article on Cold Welding.
More amazing Facts:
- 1. Saturn's moon Titan has plenty of evidence of organic (life) chemicals in its atmosphere.
- 2. Life is known to exist only on Earth, but in 1986 NASA found what they thought might be fossils of microscopic living things in a rock from Mars.
- 3. Most scientists say life's basic chemicals formed on the Earth. The astronomer Fred Hoyle said they came from space.
- 4. Oxygen is circulated around the helmet in space suits in order to prevent the visor from misting.
- 5. The middle layers of space suits are blown up like a balloon to press against the astronaut's body. Without this pressure, the astronaut's body would boil!
- 6. The gloves included in the space suit have silicon rubber fingertips which allow the astronaut some sense of touch.
- 7. The full cost of a spacesuit is about $11 million although 70% of this is for the backpack and the control module.
- 8. Ever wondered how the pull of gravity is calculated between heavenly bodies? It's simple. Just multiply their masses together, and then divide the total by the square of the distance between them.
- 9. Glowing nebulae are named so because they give off a dim, red light, as the hydrogen gas in them is heated by radiation from the nearby stars.
- 10. The Drake Equation was proposed by astronomer Frank Drake to work out how many civilizations there could be in our galaxy - and the figure is in millions.
- the rest of the list:
- 125 Amazing Space Facts You Should Know About Space, Universe, Planets, Solar System, Galaxy, Astronomy and Stars
What are the Coolest, Amazing, Extreme and or Strangest Things In Space?
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