Space is full of planets, stars, and other celestial bodies that baffle scientists and
make them doubt the laws of physics and astronomy.
So what space objects defy common sense and contradict all our current understanding of
the cosmos?
Prepare to learn about how a star can blow smoke rings, how black holes can eject unwanted
space bodies, what happens when stars feed off each other, and how stars continue to
live on after exploding.
[INTRO]
At the beginning of 2022, the MeerKAT radio telescope detected a strange and unique signal
in the Vela-X 1 region of the sky.
There, 1,300 light-years from Earth, dead neutron stars have found their last resting
place.
Previously, no pulses from stars or other activity has ever been seen there.
So what strange and mysterious object was sending radio signals from a dead part of
space?
Scientists figured out that it was the neutron star labeled PSR J0901-4046.
Now, neutron stars are usually spinning really fast.
Their rotation periods range between 1.4 milliseconds and 30 seconds.
But as they age, their spin slows down, and because of that, they also stop emitting radio
bursts.
But this star takes as much as 76 seconds to complete one revolution and still produces
pulses.
In fact, it has seven different types of them!
Scientists say they’ve never seen anything like that before.
The weakened PSR J0901-4046 has almost run out of power.
Its signals last about 300 milliseconds, which is only 0.5% of the rotation period of the
star.
So astronomers were lucky that, just for a moment, a radio beam crossed the Earth and
they were able to detect it.
One idea is that PSR J0901-4046 belongs to a rare class of ultra-long-period magnetars
or stars with very strong magnetic fields.
If so, the star marks the beginning of a new class of neutron stars, and there could be
a whole lot of them out there.
But that’s not the only star that caught scientists’ attention.
The blue star S5-HVS1, located only 29,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation
of Grus, is a hypervelocity star traveling through the Milky Way at a blistering 6,000,000
kilometers per hour [3,700,000 miles per hour].
This is roughly ten times the speed of most stars in our galaxy.
So what happened to this star that caused it to be shot across the galaxy at such an
incredibly insane speed?
By tracing the star S5-HSV1 back in time, researchers have found out the star was ejected
from the center of the Milky Way, where the Sagittarius A* black hole sits.
This led scientists to a paradoxical thought.
Black holes are known to pull celestial bodies inside by their insane gravity once an object
is close enough.
But, as it turns out such black hole monsters are also capable of slingshotting celestial
bodies through space at incredible speeds.
It’s possible that something like this could have happened to S5-HSV1.
In the past, the star orbited a companion as part of a binary system, but they came
too close to Sagittarius A*.
The monster black hole captured the companion star with its gravity, and S5-HSV1 was ejected
at thousands of kilometers per second.
Scientists suggest that the event occurred about five million years ago.
But there are other stars out there that have insane behavior and defy logic.
KIC 8462852, or Tabby’s star from the constellation Cygnus, stands out for its brightness.
The star orbits at a distance of about 1,470 light-years from Earth.
It’s slightly more massive, hotter, and brighter than the Sun.
One of the most resonant cosmic stories in recent years has been about Tabby’s star.
The star became famous in 2015 when the Kepler Space Telescope recorded a decrease in its
luminosity over the span of several days.
The star's brightness dropped by about 20%, and then gradually began to increase.
In addition, Tabby’s star has consistently had much fainter, but long-lasting dimming.
Such phenomena have never been observed in other stars slightly larger than the Sun.
Believers of extraterrestrial civilizations immediately started talking about the megastructure
of a distant, highly evolved civilization.
According to their version, alien intelligent life periodically takes energy from the star
for their own needs and, by doing so, dims its light.
But recent research by NASA's Spitzer and Swift missions has refuted this idea.
Astronomers recorded a smaller dimming of Tabby’s star in the infrared spectrum.
And aliens certainly had nothing to do with it!
Scientists have put forward their hypothesis of the anomalous behavior of the star.
The cause of long and weak periods of low light may lie in uneven movement of the dust
cloud around the star.
Any object larger than the tiniest dust particle would darken the star when passing in front
of it.
Researchers say the dust around Tabby’s star may not be small enough to evaporate
into space.
But it’s also not large enough to evenly block the entire spectrum of light waves.
Particles with a diameter of no more than one ten-thousandth of an inch, or about a
few micrometers, fit these parameters.
The period of rotation of the cloud, according to the researchers' calculations, is about
700 days.
So far, they haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact source of the dust.
It could be dust from a swarm of passing comets, remnants of planetary collisions, or particles
of matter from interstellar space.
The story isn’t over for the legendary Tabby’s star, and scientists will continue studying
it.
Who knows what surprises it may reveal in the future.
But stars don’t only travel fast or shine bright….there’s more!
This is the star named HD 140283, located in the constellation Libra 190 light-years
away from Earth.
Also known as the [https://youtu.be/oUTYG6f2gAQ] Methuselah star, it was studied in 2000 in
an attempt to determine its age.
The result was a staggering 16 billion years old.
But how is that even possible given the Universe is only 13.8 billion years old?
If you’d like to hear the full story about this star, let us know in the comments.
Something strange is also happening to another star [HD 5314] in the Milky Way.
Using the ALMA telescope, scientists have discovered a debris disk surrounding the star.
Generally, it’s not uncommon for stars to have debris left from the formation of their
systems orbiting them.
But no other star has a debris disc with such a complicated structure.
HD 53143 is a yellow dwarf star with a mass of about 80% and a luminosity of 70% that
of the Sun.
It’s located 60 light-years away from Earth in the Carina constellation.
The star is young, just about one billion years old.
So it’s not surprising HD 53143 is still surrounded by a disk of rock debris.
As these rocks move, they are constantly colliding with each other, crashing on impact and turning
into dust.
Usually such disks are ring-shaped and resemble the Kuiper Belt.
But this one has a completely unusual "crown" or ellipse shape.
And this is not the star’s only strange and unique feature.
During further observations, astronomers noticed that it has another inner disk, offset or
tilted relative to the outer disk.
The unusual thing is that the larger disk should gradually attract, destroy and absorb
the smaller one.
Scientists have come to the conclusion that there’s one possible scenario.
If there is an object hiding in the system, its gravity might allow the disks to maintain
distance.
But this object would have to be at least a large exoplanet.
To test their theory, astronomers will have to thoroughly search the entire vicinity of
HD 53143, and look for an unknown space body, if there is one.
To see the unusual behavior of another star, let’s travel to the constellation Hydra.
The star V Hydrae located 1,300 light-years from Earth is nearing the end of its life.
And recently researchers noticed the dying star put on an incredible show ejecting six
rotating smoke rings and streams of plasma fireworks out into space.
It sounds beautiful, but scientists weren’t sure why the star was doing these things.
It was once comparable in size to the Sun, but with age, it had become a red giant.
More than 90% of solar-mass stars follow this path in their evolution.
But V Hydrae is the only one that emits gas rings similar to smoke rings in its final
stages.
And every few hundred years, a new ring appears around this carbon-rich star.
Over time, it continues to slowly expand.
All six smoke rings, which are about 2,100 years old, have long been hidden by a thick
veil of dust around the star.
They were very hard to find, but in 2022, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter
Array telescope detected the rings from very short radio waves of just 1 millimeter in
length.
And then the telescope detected something even more intriguing.
These are stunning hourglass-shaped gas bubbles located in two opposite directions from the
star.
They were formed by the jets of gas that V Hydrae ejected at enormous speeds.
The plasma streams were picked up by the cosmic wind, which blew in two opposite directions
at insane speeds of up to 800,000 kilometers [500,000 miles] per hour.
This hurricane eventually turned the jets of gas into an hourglass shape.
Large plasma outbursts occur about every eight years.
Such fountains of plasma have particularly stunned scientists.
By all rules, there shouldn't be any.
It takes remarkable energy to release such jets.
So where does the dying star get that energy?
One theory is that a sort of ‘space vampire’ may be involved in the story disguised as
the star's good neighbor.
There may be an invisible companion star orbiting close to V Hydrae that affects this ejection
mechanism.
Part of the gas is sucked into space and forms an amazing hourglass-shaped structure.
But the show of the dying V Hydrae pales in comparison to what the star from the Eta Carinae
binary system did.
About 170 years ago, it exploded with enormous force.
And for a time, it became the second brightest star in the night sky.
And then a miracle happened.
The star emerged from the fire in one piece!
Astronomers discovered the light echo of this event in 2003, using telescopes at the Cerro
Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
As the investigation into the cosmic catastrophe progressed, the situation gradually became
clearer.
But scientists now have a theory and suggested that before the explosion, there were not
two, but three stars in the system.
In the center of the system was a huge star - let's call it star A. Next to it was a smaller
star - B. And finally, on the outskirts, there was a very small star - C. When star A got
old, it started to lose its shell.
And star B began to hastily peel away layer upon layer of its neighbor, consuming its
gas and matter.
As a result, star A was turned into a helium core.
After that, the gravitational balance of forces in the system changed.
Star B, swollen at the expense of the neighbor’s shell, pushed A farther from the center, closer
to star C.
Eventually, C crashed into B, and there was an explosion.
It was very strong, but not enough to destroy the huge star B. Instead, the small C star
was blown to pieces.
And so the system became binary, with stars A and B remaining.
Scientists will continue to search for arguments in favor of this hypothesis using computer
simulations and the new James Webb Space Telescope.
Speaking of the James Webb Space Telescope, what new phenomena do you think it’s going
to find?
Let us know in the comments.
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Thanks for watching!