• From weird shapes found on Mars, to a mysterious extra planet in our own solar system,
we count 10 weird and wonderful objects found in outer space.
10 – Planet Made Entirely of Diamonds, • If you’re a fan of shiny things, you’ll
love 55 Cancri e, a planet that falls under the super-Earth category, as it is made almost
entirely of compressed carbon, also known as Diamonds.
• That’s right there’s a planet out there made of diamonds, but that’s not all
the universe has in the way of diamonds, Jupiter and Saturn both rain diamonds, in multiple
directions, which sounds lovely until you realise just how painful it would be.
9 – Star Trek Symbols on Mars, • Nasa loves taking photos of Mars about
as much as your average person loves taking selfies and with the litany of photos being
taken you’re bound to get a few weird anomalies, such as these conspicuous Star Trek symbols
found on Mars’s surface.
• Of course these symbols aren’t exactly a sign that the enterprise is a reality, they’re
just some interestingly shaped dunes that coincidentally took the form of the Star Trek
symbol.
8 – Earth’s Orbital Buddy, • Space is super big and mostly empty, but
that doesn’t mean weird coincidences can’t happen, the asteroid 3753 Cruithne is a good
example of one, as it has an orbit around the sun that’s almost exactly the same as
our own.
• The first thought that you might have is that Cruithne might crash into us, which
is a fair worry, but a misguided one as it just doesn’t follow a critical orbit, also
like I said, space is super big and mostly empty.
7 – Face on Mars, • One of the most famous images of Mars
includes the Cydonian face, it seemed like this face was either a huge, unlikely coincidence,
or it was sign of intelligent Martian life.
• Well it was actually neither of those, as it was just a quirk of the lighting and
photography, in almost any other lighting it just looks like a rock jutting out of the
sand with barely any face-like features to be seen.
6 – Galaxy X, • We don’t know for sure, but there are
some strong theories that suggest that there’s a dim Galaxy orbiting us at quite a short
distance, however, it’s so dim that it’s pretty much impossible to see with telescopes.
• Most people who believe it exists postulate that it’s mostly made out of the mysterious
dark matter, which in of itself is a weird object we’ve found in space.
• Dark matter is flowing through you right now, it’s just such a non-reactive substance
that you can only detect its gravitational pull and since gravity is such a weak force
you can’t feel it going through you.
5 – Planet 9, • How many planets are there?
Well if you’re like me you were taught that there were nine planets, as Pluto was considered
the last one in our solar system.
It may be that we were taught the right number purely by mistake as there’s some strong
evidence of a planet 9 in our solar system.
• This isn’t any measely rock of ice like pluto either, it’s a full blown gas giant.
How do we know this without looking at it?
Well by its gravitational pull.
• It does seem weird that we can see planets in far off solar systems, but can’t see
all of the planets in our own, but that’s just because we see alien planets by noticing
them as they pass between us and their own sun and we can’t really do that for any
of our own planets further away from the sun than us.
4 – Hyper Novae, • You’ve probably heard of super novae,
but did you know there are explosions much more spectacular than them?
These explosions are called hyper novae and they’re awesome in every sense of the word.
• We’re not certain how they happen, some suggest they’re the type of super novae
that create a black hole and others suggest they’re multiple super novae happening at
once.
• No matter what theory you subscribe to, the amount of gamma radiation they shoot into
the universe could destroy all life on Earth before you ask me why I’m not calling them
super novas. 3 – Dyson Sphere,
• Dyson spheres are theoretical objects that collect most, if not all of the outgoing
energy of a star and we think we might have found one out in the reaches of space.
• What we’ve found is a star that is incredibly dim and has a flickering that is incredibly
unlikely to be caused by a natural phenomenon.
• Astronomers are still far from certain whether or not this is actually a Dyson sphere,
but it’s currently our best theory.
2 – Giant Ocean, • Astronomers found a gigantic cloud of
water orbiting an even bigger black hole.
• It’s hard to convey just how big this cloud of gas is, but I’ll give it a shot,
if we took some water from this cloud and used it to replace all of the water on Earth,
we wouldn’t have taken even 0.01% of the water from this cloud.
• This is essentially the biggest and oldest ocean that we know of, it’s entirely possible
that it is the ultimate ocean in size and age in the entire observable universe.
1 – Giant Black Hole • When you find giant black holes you tend
to find them at the centre of a galaxy, or inside a dense cluster of galaxies, but the
romantically named NGC 1600 doesn’t follow either of those conventions.
• This black hole is 17 billion times the size of our own sun, it’s bigger than our
entire solar system.
• This black hole is so anomalous that it’s forced astronomers and cosmologists to rethink
how super-massive black holes work.