• What kind of planet is bigger than Jupiter, and has a year shorter than one day on Earth?
Can an asteroid have rings?
Here are 15 of the most unusual and unexplainable object we’ve found in space.
15 – The Eridanus Supervoid • Easily one of the strangest things in
the universe is… nothing.
Literally nothing.
The Eridanus Supervoid is a massive expanse of space approximately 1.8 BILLION light years
across.
• And there’s basically nothing in it.
It’s just a huge expanse of nothing but empty space, and nobody really knows why.
14 – Asteroid with Rings • Until 2014, the only things ever observed
to have a ring system in space were planets.
• But Chariklo, an asteroid that is 155 miles in diameter, was observed to have its
own ring system, making it the first non-planetary object found with rings.
• Even stranger, the existence of rings on the asteroid suggests that it may also
have a MOON keeping those rings stable.
13 – ‘The Distant Monster’ • The planet dubbed NGTS-1b is about the
same size as Jupiter, but has less mass, and orbits its sun at about 3 percent of the distance
that Earth is to its Sun.
• It completes an orbit around the Sun about every 2.6 days.
• But its sun is a red M-dwarf – a type of planet that, in theory, SHOULDN’T have
a planet of this size.
The discovery of this planet is causing astronomers to completely rethink some assumptions of
how planets are formed.
12 – Neutron Star Pairs • The collision of two neutron stars is
one of the most violent events in the known universe.
• Of course, it’s also one of the rarest, and we understand very little about what happens
there.
• So NASA created an animation of a pair of neutron stars meeting, tearing each other
apart, and forming a black hole.
So at least we know what it looks like.
11 – The Great Attractor • The Milky Way Galaxy is moving through
space at an incredible rate.
And in fact, that rate is much, much faster than astronomers initially thought.
• One of the most common explanations is that something is pulling on the Galaxy.
A “great attractor” is most likely pulling on the galaxy with an incredible gravity…
but nobody has any idea what that attractor might be.
10 – Mysterious Object in Cygnus A • The Cygnus A galaxy was discovered in
1939, but it wasn’t until 2017 that astronomers discovered something in it that shouldn’t
be there.
• A bright spot in the galaxy showed up, over a thousand light-years away from the
supermassive black hole that makes up the center of the galaxy.
• It could be a star cluster, or a giant supernova, or even another supermassive black
hole.
If it is another black hole, it would be the first instance of two that close together,
and they may merge sometime in the future.
9 – Black Holes • And speaking of black holes, there is
a ton about black holes we don’t know.
• Obviously nobody has been IN one, and they appear to destroy any matter in the vicinity.
But we don’t really know exactly what happens to that matter.
• We pretty much just know how they’re formed, and that we should stay far away from
them.
8 – Tabby’s Star • A star approximately 1,500 light-years
from Earth does something nobody can figure out.
• It seems to be on a cycle where it dims as much as 22 percent for days at a time.
• Explanations run from comet swarms to alien superstructures.
Nobody knows quite why it dims the way it does.
7 – Dark Energy • Based on our previous understandings of
the universe, it was assumed that the rate of the universe’s expansion was slowing
over time.
• But observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have shown the opposite.
The universe’s rate of expansion is increasing, which means some invisible form of energy
is driving it.
• That energy has come to be known as “dark” energy.
We don’t know what it is or where it comes from.
It just… is.
6 – Six Tailed Asteroid • A comet with a tail is an expected thing
to find in space.
But an asteroid with six tails?
• Astronomers found just that in 2013 – an asteroid with six tails spinning off it in
all directions, like spokes on a wheel.
• Astronomers were completely stumped by it, and continue to observe it to see why
it looks that way.
5 – Gamma Ray Bursts • Gamma ray bursts happen seemingly at random,
as high-intensity bursts of light.
• They were first observed in the 1960s, feeding all sorts of conspiracy theories.
• They might be related to the conjoining of black holes in deep space, but there is
no concrete explanation as to where they come from.
4 – Hot Jupiters • At one point, the idea of a gas giant
being found close to its sun was absurd.
• But then, astronomers found one.
And another.
And some more.
• These “hot Jupiter” planets, like the previously-mentioned NGTS-1b, are huge,
and fast.
• Many of them orbit their suns in less than a single Earth day.
And the reason they form is still largely a mystery.
3 – Triple Star System Planet • For a while, astronomers thought that
planets shouldn’t be possible in trinary star systems.
• The assumption was that the varying gravitational force from three different stars would yank
any planet from its orbit.
• But eight planets have been discovered in multiple star systems, including one in
a triple-star system in 2015.
• And somehow, its orbit indeed appears to be stable.
2 – A/2017 U1 • An asteroid or comet passing by close
to Earth is not exactly an unusual event.
• But in 2017, for the first time, an asteroid was observed approaching Earth from interstellar
space.
• It’s the first time astronomers have detected an object passing by Earth that is
not native to our Solar System.
1 - Niku • Niku is a mysterious object that orbits
our Sun in the deepest part of our solar system.
And there’s a lot about it that’s weird.
• First of all, it doesn’t orbit the Sun on the same flat orbit as the rest of the
planets and objects in our Solar System.
It has a tilted orbit that moves almost vertically to what everything else does.
• Also, it appears to orbit clockwise – the opposite direction of Earth and every other
planet.
• Finally, it isn’t alone.
Niku is just one of what appears to be several different objects orbiting the Sun deep beyond
Neptune.
But we still don’t know what it actually is – so theories are flying all over the
place.