Space is often referred to as “the final frontier”.
As planet Earth grows crowded, with few blank places left on the map to explore, mankind
has turned its attention to the stars, seeking to uncover the secrets of the Universe.
With so much space to cover, exciting new discoveries are made almost daily, and as
technology progresses we’re seeing farther than ever before.
Let’s take a look at 9 Fantastic Things in Space that will blow your brain into the
cosmos.
Floating among the other space rocks in our solar system’s asteroid belt, the asteroid
designated P/2013 P5 doesn’t quite fit in with the rest.
Most asteroids are simply pinpoints of light against the black of space through our telescopes,
but this one in particular drew the attention of NASA scientists due to the six milky white
tails that seem to sprout from it.
It’s not every day you find a “lawn sprinkler” in space, so naturally, astronomers wanted
to figure out what caused it.
The tails seemed to change every few days—quite perplexing until they realized that the asteroid
was actually spinning quite fast.
Then, things started to click into place.
The prevailing theory regarding the breakdown of small asteroids into space dust considers
interstellar collisions to be the most likely culprit.
But since P/2013 P5 lacks a large burst of stellar dust seemingly cast off all at once,
the implication is that it’s unique tails weren’t caused by a collision.
Instead, observations offer up another potential cause—rotational stresses that break up
asteroids bit by bit.
The core of the asteroid is 1,400 feet wide—a good deal larger than the amount of dust spun
off to form the tails.
As it continued to shed its outer layers, adding to the several hundred tonnes of dust
already streaming behind it, scientists will study it to gather more data on the final
phase of an asteroid’s life cycle.
And hopefully, P/2013 P5 will continue to water celestial lawns for many years to come.
In February of 2006, astronomers searching for the telltale flash of supernovae via the
Hubble Telescope spotted a bright burst of light from the constellation Bootes.
Mysteriously, nothing was visible at the location before it flared, and nothing has been visible
since.
After bestowing the phenomena with the name SCP 06F6, scientists set to work trying to
reason out what exactly they had witnessed.
They dubbed it “an unusual optical transient” and “one of a new class”—which can be
roughly translated as “we have no idea what that was”.
It’s not likely to have been a supernova—or at least, not one as we know them—for a
number of reasons.
First, a star going supernova brightens dramatically over a short period of time, before fading
more slowly than it appeared.
It takes around twenty days on average for the event to reach its peak intensity.
But then we have SCP 06F6, which took one hundred days to reach full luminosity before
fading away at an equally slow rate.
Slow to arrive and slow to leave—kind of like in-laws.
Second, the supernova explanation takes another blow when scientists consider the spectral
lines given off by the event.
The light emitted could indicate a carbon-based star going supernova, which would generate
an explosion of a relatively low temperature between 5,000 and 6,000 degrees Kelvin—of
course, this is only low, relative to other exploding stars.
However, in August of 2006 the European X-ray satellite discovered an X-ray glow around
SCP 06F6’s location—not a feature shared with other low temperature supernovae.
Third, the event generated unusual patterns in the visible light spectrum, showing “broad
line features” in the blue light region while maintaining “continuous emission”
in the red light region.
There is currently no known object that shares those variations.
Perhaps there was a containment breach at some deep-space research facility—that’s
as likely of a theory as any other, for now.
Until we find another “optical transient” like SCP 06F6 to study, we’ll have to be
comfortable with the knowledge that we understand far less about the universe than we think.
Another example of how little we actually know about the furthest reaches of space comes
in the form of The Great Attractor—proof that the universe might not be as uniform
as scientists have theorized.
It’s the great galactic bathtub drain, pulling in everything around it, and the interesting
part is that there isn’t nearly enough visible mass to account for the massive gravitational
pull.
The Great Attractor manifests itself as a “dipole pattern on the sky”, first discovered
in the 1970s during a study on the homogeneity of the Universe.
From our perspective in the Milky Way, the Attractor is located through the “zone of
avoidance”—a region of space filled with so many stars, galaxies, and other interstellar
debris that we aren’t able to make out much using the visible light spectrum.
However, its location can be inferred based on the “great river of galaxies” sixty
megaparsecs wide—including our own Local Group, the Virgo Cluster, the Hydra-Centaurus
Supercluster, and more—all flowing toward the Attractor at a rate of six hundred kilometers
per second.
Using infrared and radio based methods of seeing through the “zone of avoidance”,
scientists found the Norma Cluster, which is estimated to contain at least one quadrillion
solar masses.
That’s astronomically huge, and a good contender for the source of the Great Attractor—except
that the mass in the Norma Cluster still can’t sufficiently explain the full range of motion
astronomers see on a galactic scale.
Located beyond the Norma Cluster is the Shapely Supercluster, which dwarfs the former at nearly
ten quadrillion solar masses.
Prevailing theories today suggest that nearby galactic clusters and even the Great Attractor
itself are all ultimately moving toward the staggeringly massive Shapely Supercluster.
Just when scientists think they’ve found the biggest thing in the universe, something
else comes along and flips everything we thought we knew upside down.
Stars have a reputation for being burning globes of elemental gasses that sparkle at
night and warm our world during the day.
But some stars aren’t quite as fiery as the image you’re led to believe.
The Y-class “dwarf” stars completely shattered the stereotype, prompting astronomers to create
a new star classification after their discovery—not just because of their size, but because they
were so shockingly cold!
The first Y dwarf stars were introduced to the scientific community by NASA in late 2011,
thanks to the efforts of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer program.
They drew a great deal of attention due to one of their number having an estimated surface
temperature of 25 degrees Celsius—or perhaps even less!
It’s not often you find stars colder than the human body out in the cosmos, so this
naturally encouraged the search for additional Y class stars to see if there were more that
defied expectations.
In 2014 the search proved fruitful, as another dwarf star discovered by NASA was found to
boast sub-zero temperatures of between minus 48 and minus 13 degrees Celsius.
If there are any planets orbiting it, they’d better have some good space heaters.
Because these sorts of stars are so abnormal, it is difficult for scientists to determine
whether they are in fact remarkably cool stars or “free-floating planets” drifting through
the universe.
But at the very least, they offer some very exciting possibilities.
Swap out our sun for a Y-class dwarf, and global warming would be nothing but a distant
memory.
Sometimes, it isn’t what astronomers find in space that piques their interest, but what
they don’t.
Current models of the universe allow for a certain amount of variation, but when there’s
a statistically significant anomaly that breaks the mold, there are plenty of questions to
be asked.
The discovery of the Eridanus Supervoid begs one question in particular: why is there a
massive hole in the Universe?
Scientists study the early years and subsequent expansion of the universe by mapping the Cosmic
Background Radiation that’s visible in all directions.
By measuring the variations in energy given off by radioactive sources, they can identify
pockets of matter like galaxies and superclusters, as well as the empty spaces in between.
On a large scale the universe is expected to be relatively uniform when it comes to
the distribution of background radiation.
But near the constellation Eridanus, there’s a peculiar pocket of—nothing.
The Eridanus Supervoid is somewhere between six and ten billion light years away, and
NASA estimates it to be 500 million light years across.
It’s the largest structure astronomers have discovered to date in the Universe—and they
don’t have any solid theories yet on why exactly it’s so empty.
It’s so extraordinary that even quantum entanglement with another universe has been
considered.
But until the Doctor drops by in his TARDIS to let us know that we’re on the right track—or
at least until we gather more data—the Supervoid will remain a mystery.
You’re likely already familiar with the concept of black holes: ominous dark maws
in space, consuming anything that gets caught in their gravitational pull—chewing up matter
and even light itself as though they were little more than an appetizer before the main
course.
There’s a lot we don’t know about black holes—like what happens after something
is sucked beyond the event horizon—but if there’s one thing we know for certain, it’s
that black holes are equal parts fascinating and terrifying.
But even more unnerving is that some of them are known to “wander” aimlessly around
space chewing up everything in their path.
Such entities are known as “Wandering Black Holes”.
A huge, wandering black hole was discovered in 2012 by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory,
thanks to the efforts of a research team led by Harvard-Smithsonian scientist Francesca
Civano.
They found it in the vicinity of a galaxy known as CID-42—of no relation to this channel,
of course—situated four billion light years away from Earth.
It attracted the team’s attention due to their observation that it was moving rather
quickly for an object containing many millions of solar masses—clipping along at a speed
of no less than 4,820,000 kilometers per hour.
Any planets in its way are going to end up the galactic equivalent of a fly on a windshield—perhaps
we’re lucky it’s so far away.
But there is in fact a “rogue” black hole in the Milky Way galaxy, measured on two separate
occasions in 1996 and 2001 by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Thanks to a star accompanying it along its trajectory and the movement of the surrounding
stars, scientists were able to track it and determine that it was moving four times faster
than anything nearby.
Speculation about its origin has led to multiple theories, one being that it was shot out of
a supernova by the tremendous explosion of a dying star, and the other concerning two
smaller galaxies which collided, ultimately merging the black holes at their hearts, together.
Regardless of how it came to be, there is little that can stop it now.
Just remember to look both ways when crossing the interstellar highway.
While we’re on the topic of black holes, at the center of our galaxy is a theorized
black hole so big that Muse wrote a song about it.
And it is indeed “supermassive”.
The distance from our humble home in a spiral arm of the galaxy to the Milky Way’s galactic
core is just over eight kiloparsecs.
For perspective, that’s more than two hundred and forty-six quadrillion kilometers - though
the exact distance is difficult to measure accurately due to the same “zone of avoidance”
that confounds scientists studying the Great Attractor.
From our perspective here on Earth, the Galactic Core is a densely packed nest of “globular
clusters”, each one a group of many thousands of stars.
Imagine a ball of popcorn and you’re pretty close to what it would look like.
In the early 20th century, the very same Harlow Shapely for whom the Shapely Supercluster
was named after, began trying to discover the distances of different globular clusters
from our solar system.
He soon found a notable collection of them in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius,
and theorized that such a massive assembly of them might be gathered at the galaxy’s
heart.
His work led scientists to determine decades later that he had in fact found the Galactic
Core.
And just like the classic Joseph Conrad novel, we also discovered that our galaxy has its
very own dark heart nestled deep within.
The Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole can’t be detected directly via visible or
infrared light, so instead we infer its existence due to the radio waves it gives off.
They provide scientists with sufficient data to calculate its mass—and it’s a big one,
more than four million times bigger than our sun.
At least it knows to stay put, instead of careening across the universe like it’s
a free matter and light buffet.
In a universe that seems to be expanding in all directions, it’s surprising to find
something out there that’s travelling straight for us.
The Andromeda Galaxy, the closest large galaxy to our own, is currently approaching us at
a rate of around 400,000 kilometers per hour.
But don’t worry just yet—it still has another 2.5 million light years to travel,
which puts it on track to reach the Milky Way in around four billion years.
Astronomers with NASA speculate that the collision will result in a merging of the galaxies—which
could seriously shake up the neighborhood, pushing our sun into a new section of the
galaxy.
They speculate that Earth and the other planets in our solar system will continue orbiting
our sun after the mix-up, but of course, such an event is unprecedented.
There’s not a lot of data to work with.
On the initial approach, the galaxies will most likely skirt each other without full
contact, narrowly missing before they spin back around and slam into one another.
Another theory suggests that after the merger, our solar system might become a part of the
Andromeda galaxy afterward, looking back on the spiral arms of our old galaxy in the night
sky.
Quality fodder for science-fiction fans today—the science-fact of tomorrow.
This will all be happening in slow-motion; very, very slow-motion.
It’s expected that two billion years will elapse between the near miss and the final
collision, so there’s plenty of time for the futuristic Earthlings to admire the Andromeda
Galaxy taking up nearly all of the night sky on the first go-around.
There’s even a slight chance that a satellite galaxy of Andromeda’s could reach us first—but
hey, the more the merrier!
In a universe filled with rogue black holes and colliding galaxies, it’s nice to find
something that’s pretty to look at without posing a risk to our well-being.
In the Serpens constellation, around 5,000 light years from Earth, astronomers were baffled
to discover a nebula with a very distinctive shape.
Thanks to the human mind’s tendency to find familiar images in random patterns—known
as Pareidolia—many nebulas have been named for their uncanny similarity to objects we
know, like the Horse Head nebula and Cat’s Eye Nebula.
But there’s no room for creative interpretation here; the Red Square nebula of the Serpens
constellation is—well, a giant red square among the stars.
The Red Square nebula is certainly eye-catching—appearing to be an almost perfect square at first glance.
It’s actually formed by two cone-shaped nebulae, which meet at the tips, and the mind
simply fills in the blanks to complete the square.
But the sharp angles and lines that define it grant it the honor of being “the most
symmetrical object of comparable complexity” found among the stars to date.