(explosion)
(coughing)
- Sorry.
Interstellar business.
So space is something that has
always filled the human race with wonder.
We are a fundamentally curious species,
and one of the most fundamental questions that
we can ask as humans is "What else is out there?"
Well, once in a while, we actually get an answer to
that question through the discoveries that we make.
And those discoveries are often awe-inspiring.
So this week, I gathered just that,
some of the most incredible discoveries ever made
beyond the stars.
So here they are, the 10 Most Fascinating Things
Ever Found in Space.
Number one is Gravitational Lensing.
In space, gravity has some additional effects,
unlike on Earth.
One of those being that it has the ability to
bend light around objects, an effect that
scientists call gravitational lensing.
This picture is of a luminous red galaxy,
gravitationally distorting the light from
a much more distant blue galaxy,
causing the blue light to appear as an almost perfect ring.
This is a significant discovery, because it means that
astronomers may now have the ability to
study things like galaxies that are behind gravity sources
such as black holes.
What's also quite interesting is that this effect
can create multiple copies of objects,
as seen in this picture where one galaxy appears as three,
and one quasar appears as five.
That must be quite confusing to astronomers at first,
because really, how would you know
which is the copy and which is the real?
- Oh, that really does sound confusing.
I'd hate to be in that position.
- [Matthew] Number two is Pareidolia.
Pareidolia is the effect of perceiving an image or
pattern where it doesn't actually exist.
And there is a lot of it in space.
There are countless examples of images taken from
space of things that look a little too familiar.
This photo, taken by NASA on July 25th, 1976 appears to
show a face on Mars.
This image taken by a European southern observatory of
three galaxies appears to be a cosmic hummingbird.
This image, taken by the Chandra Observatory,
is of a pulsar and has been dubbed The Hand of God.
This is a thermal image taken by NASA of Mimas,
one of Saturn's moons, showing what looks like a Pac-Man.
And of course, here's a nebula that appears to
be flipping you the bird.
Those are just some of the hundreds of
images available online, so feel free to Google them,
just don't be surprised if some of them are phallic.
I mean, it is the internet.
Number three is Mira, The Red Giant.
If you've ever been lucky enough to see a shooting star,
you know how cool it looks.
But of course, a shooting star is not a star at all.
It's a meteorite, as a star is billions of times bigger.
Well as it so happens, there is an actual shooting star that
was discovered called Mira.
It's a red giant planet at the end of its life,
but instead of simply burning out like most stars,
it decided to go out in a blaze of glory,
rocketing through the universe at a speed of
468,000 kilometers an hour.
The most fascinating thing about Mira is
that the 13 light year long tail that it's
leaving behind it will actually spawn more stars and
planets in the future.
So essentially, it's impregnating every area of
the universe that it can before it dies.
Which means that all those stars
will grow up without a father.
Planets these days man, no morals.
Number four are Hypervelocity Stars.
If you thought Mira was impressive,
let me introduce you to its track running cousin on
meth, the hypervelocity stars.
These stars are big fiery balls of gas that
blast through space at a speed of up to
three point two million kilometers an hour.
When a star system is consumed by
a super massive black hole, it ejects a massive ball of
burning gas up to four times the size of our sun
at an almost incomprehensible speed.
In fact, just last year, six hypervelocity stars were
ejected from the black hole at the heart of our Milky Way.
Hmm, it must have eaten some Space Taco Bell.
We all know that feel.
Number five is The Bipolar Planet.
Discovered in 2007, Gliese 581c is
an extremely bizarre planet.
It orbits a red dwarf star with proximity far closer than
that of the Earth to the Sun.
This means that it's stuck in a state of
something called tidal locking,
which means that one side of the planet is
always facing the star, while one side is facing away from
it, just like the moon's relationship with Earth.
The star side would instantly melt you,
while the other side would instantly freeze you.
However, in between those two extremes,
there's a small belt that scientists believe
could support life.
In fact, this planet was determined to be one of
the leading candidates for future colonization of space.
I really don't think many people would sign up to
live there if it became an option though.
Mostly because the sky is a constant blood red color,
and plants would be pitch black due to
constant bombardment of radiation.
It would be like living in hell.
Yeah, no thanks.
Number six is The Castor System.
The Castor System represents one of
the two bright stars from the Gemini constellation,
and is one of the brightest stars in the night sky.
What's impressive about the Castor System is that
it only appears to be a single star,
but it's actually six individual stars that
emit 52.4 times more luminosity than that of our sun.
To put that into perspective, the sun is incredibly bright
and is only 0.00015 light years away from Earth.
The Castor System is 49.8 light years away from Earth.
So good it wasn't any closer,
or else everything would look like this:
whoof, better get your shades.
Number seven is The Diamond Planet.
Discovered in 2004, 55 Cancri e is
a planet made almost entirely out of crystallized diamond.
This planet, dubbed the Diamond Planet,
was actually once part of a binary system
until its partner planet began to cannibalize it.
The result was enough heat and pressure to
create a planet with a core made of pure diamond,
representing one third of the planet's entire mass.
The rest of the planet is made up of
crystallized diamond, graphite, and a few other silicates.
Oh, and if you're wondering just how big this planet is,
it's two times the size of Earth,
with eight times its mass.
- Damn boy, that's a lot of bling.
All right, whatever, I give up.
I'm going to watch Netflix.
- [Matthew] Number eight is The Himiko Cloud.
The Himiko Cloud is a primordial blob of
gas discovered in 2009, and is the largest object
ever discovered from the early universe.
Believed to date back only 800 million years after
the original big bang, it's located
12.9 billion light years away,
and researchers believe it may hold the secrets to
the origins of our galaxy.
This cloud belongs to the Epoch of Reionization,
a time when galaxies were just beginning to
form in the universe.
It was named Himiko after the ancient and
mysterious Japanese queen, which is cool,
but I prefer to call it the giant mystery blob
discovered near the dawn of time.
Way more badass.
Number nine is The Large Quasar Group.
The large quasar group, or LQG,
was deemed the largest and most massive known structure
in the observable universe upon its discovery in 2012.
The LQG is approximately four billion light years in
diameter, and again, to put that into perspective,
our galaxy, the Milky Way, is only about 100,000
light years in diameter, and even that is a huge number.
In fact, it's so enormous that
it literally breaks the laws of modern astronomy,
as the maximum size of any cosmic structure
should only be 1.2 billion light years across.
Scientists are completely baffled by
how this structure is formed, but I'm okay with that,
seeing as how a quasar is a super massive black hole
that feeds on matter, and this structure is comprised of
73 of them, so, you know, it's probably in
our best interests not to poke at it too much.
And number ten, Rogue Planets.
Our solar system has eight planets in it,
nine if you count Pluto,
but that's only counting the planets that play by
the rules of our solar system.
There also exist things called rogue planets which
are planets that don't orbit anything,
and simply move through the galaxy until
something stops it.
Now that's as interesting as it is terrifying,
because the average size of these planets is
comparable to Jupiter, and there are 200 billion of
them rushing around the universe,
just ready to smash into us.
So essentially, 200 billion gigantic planets are
speeding randomly around us like
a universal game of pinball.
Hmm, so that's what God does with his spare time.
And that's it for this video, guys.
Keep in mind that there of course were many, many other
incredible things that have been discovered in space,
these were just the ten that I personally found
most fascinating.
As always, if you enjoyed this video,
please share it on Facebook and Twitter,
and give the Like button a click,
and I will see you all back here next Saturday with
a brand new video.
Peace.
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