- The vastness of space is mind blowing.
When we gazed up at the night sky,
we cannot truly comprehend its size,
or the secrets that it may contain.
Even astronomers are baffled by some of the things
that they see up there in the cosmos.
Some of these mysteries are localized to specific regions,
regions that you might not know exist in space,
but nonetheless contain incredible mysteries.
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Here are 10 mysterious areas of space that are unexplored.
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Number 10 is The Center.
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Even those with a passing knowledge
of the universe know that it started
with a massive explosion called the Big Bang.
This explosion created everything in the universe,
all the matter and energy we see around us.
The explosion continued to expand
and this is where we live within that expansion.
It seems logical then to ask,
where's the center of the universe?
So where did the Big Bang start?
Well, there are two answers to this.
One is that we don't know where the Big Bang originated,
and the other is even more confusing
that there is no center.
Astronomers and physicists liken the universe
to an expanding balloon,
and so we are on the surface of that balloon as it expands.
We can travel across the surface,
but there is no real central point that we can travel to.
We cannot get inside the balloon
and therefore we can never know where it came from.
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Number nine is Hoag's Object.
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In 2001, the Hubble Space Telescope took one
of the most incredible images ever seen in astronomy.
It was of an object in space called Hoag's Object.
This area of space has a bright object at its center,
and then a large ring of stars around it.
Between the ring in the center there's a huge void,
thousands of light years across.
No one knows how this place formed,
nor whether it should be even classified
as a galaxy as some argue.
Since this initial discovery,
other places have been discovered
with their own Hoag Objects.
This shows that whatever force has created
this strange pattern, exists in more than one place.
It's easy then to speculate that something has pushed
the stars out into this ring formation,
and that whatever has done so may not be visible
to the naked eye,
or even to our most advanced scientific instruments.
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Number eight is the Unicorn constellation.
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When huge gas Nebula are seen from Earth,
they cause wonder in the observer,
they're only made observable because the gases are lit up
by a backdrop of stars.
When this happens, these vast regions
of space take on strange and unusual forms.
However, there is one region in the constellation
of the Unicorn where a nebula has taken on a shape,
which for many defies explanation.
Known as the Red Rectangle Nebula,
illuminated by two stars at its center,
the Nebula shines with a bizarre square shape.
This is not seen usually outside of man-made constructions.
One theory is that the stars
are creating two separate shapes,
which combine to make a square.
The nebula also glows red for some reason,
and there are still some researchers
who believe that the red rectangle remains inexplicable
to this day and may forever.
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Number seven is the Great Attractor.
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The Great Attractor is an unexplained gravitational anomaly.
It sits in what's called the Zone of Avoidance.
This is an area of space which is obscured
by the middle of our galaxy
and so we cannot directly observe it.
The Great Attractor is pulling galaxies towards it.
To put this into context,
it's believed that the great attractor has a combined mass,
which is many times larger than our entire Milky Way galaxy.
What's in this region of space remains completely unknown.
Some believe that there's a super cluster of galaxies
in this region of space,
which would account for its gravitational pull.
Others still believe
that there's something else about this region,
which needs to be explained.
The debate over what the Great Attractor is
and why it's pulling us towards it remains unsolved.
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Number six is the Cold Spot.
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One unsettling aspect of our universe
is that mysterious regions continue
to be discovered each and every year.
These places challenge our ideas
about how reality works.
In 2017 for example,
a mysterious Cold Spot in space was theorized
to explain the true bizarre nature of our universe.
The current standard model of physics suggests
that this region,
which is colder than surrounding areas should be the result
of structures in the universe known as voids.
However, measurements of the radiation in this region seem
to defy this explanation.
More than that physicists believe
that something truly unique has occurred
at this point in the universe.
One theory to explain this Cold Spot
is if other parallel universes exist outside of our own.
There's no way to know for sure, but the Cold Spot could be
where two universes actually crashed into each other.
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Number five are the Filaments.
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The center of our galaxy has always been mysterious.
It's obscured by large amounts of gas and dust,
and so observing it directly can be difficult.
There is good evidence to believe
that there are many stars there,
and even at least one supermassive black hole,
but in 2017, astronomers found something entirely new.
Referring to them as filaments,
there are structures
which seem to be swirling like a snake,
out from the center of the galaxy.
They're comprised of gas
and what appears to be connected partially to a black hole.
There's no full explanation yet for what this is
and how it formed, and so this just adds more mystery
to what the center of our galaxy is hiding from us.
Who knows what else will find is our technology
to observe the unseen heart of our galaxy improves.
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Number four is other dimensions of space.
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It has to be said that one of the strangest theories
to come out of physics is the proposed existence
of other dimensions.
What's even more shocking is that this theory
could be correct.
It could be that what we see around us
as the immensity of space is only the tip of the iceberg.
We live in three dimensions and a fourth
if you include moving through time.
But there may be regions of space here with us now,
inside and out of us.
These regions are other dimensions, alien to our own.
What's in those dimensions is anybody's guess.
It could be that there are other structures like planets
and galaxies, but which operate in very different ways.
Furthermore, there could be a form of life
in these regions of space.
In this way, aliens could be closer to us than we think.
They could, in fact be in dimensions of space,
right next to us, which we simply cannot yet observe.
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Number three is the Great Nothing.
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The Great Nothing is one region of space,
which continues to confuse astronomers.
It's an enormous spherical region with a diameter
of nearly 330 million light years.
What's strange about this region
is that it's almost completely empty
when compared to the rest of the universe.
To put this into perspective,
if the earth was at the center of the Great Nothing
and you looked up at the night sky,
you would see no stars with the naked eye,
because everything would be too far away.
Current theory suggests that for this region of space,
there should be over 2000 galaxies,
and yet only 60 galaxies have been found
in the entire area.
One speculative theory is that
the entire region is populated by an alien race,
which has built structures called Dyson spheres
around the stars, absorbing their energy
and blocking their light in the process.
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Number two is the Space Between.
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We tend to think about the universe is countless stars
surrounded by planets, and that each star has its own family
of objects on top of that, including asteroids,
dwarf planets and moons.
You might call it a stellar neighborhood.
However, what we fail to comprehend is that most of space is
what is between these neighborhoods.
Recently, scientists have discovered
that these empty spaces may be more mysterious
than we once thought.
The reason, they're not exactly empty.
There may be countless dark objects,
moving through these regions waiting to collide
into our own solar system.
These could be rogue planets, but more worrying,
they could be the remnants of a dead star or a black hole.
We cannot know for sure what lies in the space
between our solar system and another,
but it could contain things
which will truly defy the limits of our imagination.
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And number one is beyond.
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An important question is if our universe is expanding,
what is it expanding into?
This is a common question
and physicists and philosophers have been trying
to answer it in a satisfactory way for decades.
However, the perfect explanation remains elusive.
There are candidate theories though
for example what we consider as our universe may just be
what we can see,
it may in fact be far larger than that,
and so the expanding galaxies
of which we are a part are simply expanding
into this part of space.
However, if this is true,
there's a terrifying potential consequence.
Some theorize that out there other Big Bangs have occurred
and are hurtling towards us.
We simply just can't see them yet
because the light hasn't reached us.
When we do finally see them our universe
as we know it could be destroyed by galaxies
and black holes from other Big Bangs,
ripping through our own.
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