what's the biggest diamond you can think of are there really gigantic
clouds of booze floating woozily through the cosmos and what's up
with that spoon they found on mars yes despite its inky inscrutable blackness
deep space is actually teeming with oddities quirks and bamboozling miscellaneous so join us
today on an interstellar voyage of discovery as we encounter the 10 strangest things found in space
1. this martian spoon scientists hunting for evidence of life on mars have resorted to all
manner of arcane methodologies like reading the flow patterns on long-dried riverbeds and
blasting rocks with lasers to identify their chemical makeup but really the answer was
hiding in plain sight curiosity rover snapped this shot of what's clearly a discarded spoon
does it point to the existence of a long-perished soup-loving civilization we can't know for sure
but either way it's a stirring image 2. bling world one especially flashy exoplanet
kangaroo e is believed to be made up entirely of crystallized diamond if you were to buy one as
the ultimate interplanetary accessory it would set you back an estimated 27 million dollars
more money than has ever existed in the history of the world apparently formed when one of two stars
in a binary system began to cannibalize each other putting its carbon core under intense heat and
pressure the resulting planet is twice the size of our world with eight times the mass and a trillion
times the flex value three saturn's hexagon since the voyager mission first sashayed past saturn
back in 1981 astronomers have been perplexed by an unexpected regular hexagon shape that sits on
the ringed planet's north pole its sides are reach about fourteen and a half thousand kilometers long
longer than the diameter of the earth and the 2006 cassini mission revealed the hexagon even
changes color from subtle blue to burning gold nobody's entirely sure what's going on
a team from oxford university suggests such geometric shapes can form when two different
rotating fluid bodies move at dissimilar speeds a team from harvard reckon the answer comes from
deep within the planet itself in the form of deep zonal jets thousands of kilometers down
where pressure is tens of thousands of times greater and the planet's rotation and topography
creates freaky shapes fact is it's a bit of a mystery four the planet from hell in 2007
stargazers got all worked up by the discovery of an earth-like exoplanet called gliese 581 located
pretty much in our backyard a little over 20 light years away in the constellation libra
gliese 581 orbits a friendly red dwarf star and could in all likelihood harbor liquid water alas
glieser on closer inspection seems to be tidally locked meaning one side always faces the sun while
the other constantly points to the inky blackness of space this means one half of the previously
promising world is infernally hot and the other devastatingly chilly life could hypothetically
live in the narrow strip around the edge where it's neither too hot nor cold but this is purely
speculative the property values on that bit would be insane anyway five fast radio bursts since 2007
researchers have observed intensely strong bright repeating radio signals
emanating from an unknown source billions of light years away beyond the edge of the milky way
these fast radio bursts or frbs last for mere milliseconds and have befuddled scientists
who variously attribute them to colliding black holes or signs from distant technologically
advanced civilizations well to be seen at such range they need to be releasing as much energy
in a tiny fraction of a second as our sun does in nearly a century one particular burst frb121102
repeated itself some 93 times on one day in august 2017 possibly indicating
a rapidly rotating neutron star or some manner of extraterrestrial morse code definitely aliens then
6. the cocktail nebula 58 quadrillion miles away in the neighborhood of the constellation of aquila
a vast cloud 1000 times the diameter of the solar system contains enough ethyl alcohol to fill 400
trillion trillion pints of beer this is exciting not just because it sounds like a sweet party
but because alcohol is an organic compound and this offers a tantalizing hint to the possibility
of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos best of all the cloud appears to comprise of ethyl formate
a compound that helps give raspberries their taste it will be great to visit one day 7. gigantic
space reservoir 12 billion light years away there lies a quasar inside this quasar is a black hole
20 billion times as massive as our sun as a byproduct of its diet gobbling unimaginable
quantities of dust and gas the black hole belches out as much energy as a thousand trillion suns one
manifestation of all that chemistry is a colossal reservoir of actual water vapor holding somewhere
north of 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the earth's oceans eight tabi's star
when astronomer tabitha boyajian of louisiana state university first clapped eyes on this
object roughly one and a half thousand light years away in the constellation cygnus she
knew something was amiss the star known then by its romantic official name kic846285 was dimming
by up to a quarter of its brightness at unusual irregular intervals what's so weird about that
distant stars dim all the time for instance when orbiting bodies like planets pass between it
and us but normal dimmings are regular and predictable tabby's star dips at irregular
seemingly random intervals some have excitedly claimed this points to extraterrestrial activity
perhaps some manner of advanced alien civilization constructing a giant dyson sphere around all or
part of their star to harness its energy however tabby tabitha herself is more conservative
arguing the star is probably being partially eclipsed by more humdrum objects like the remnants
of a destroyed moon inspired by tabby astronomers have since identified a number of similar dipper
stars whose light dims at mysterious intervals edward schmidt emma writers professor of
astronomy at the university of nebraska-lincoln has identified no fewer than 21 excitedly noting
they all seem to be roughly the same age and masses the sun lending credence to the theory
that it's really little green men extraterrestrial intelligence is a low probability explanation
but it's a possibility he said and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence seti people ought to
be looking at these stars 9. the rogue glow world a highly unusual planet known catchily as simp
zero nine j01365663-093 three four seven three has been observed drifting about 200 light years away
untethered from its parent star nearly 13 times the mass of jupiter is not only a
big land but its magnetic field is some four million times the intensity of that on earth
which means this rogue world is attracting a lot of attention as it meanders on its lonely journey
around the milky way 10. schubylski's star perhaps the weirdest star aka hd101065 has been studied
since the 1960s for its bizarre chemical makeup its discoverer juan antonie schubelski observed
signs of strontium and all 15 rare earth elements not to mention short-lived elements like neptunium
plutonium and curium as the star has been around for millions of years these should have long since
burned away so what's the deal conventional astrophysicists believe the rare elements are
elevated to the surface consistency on a sort of conveyor system powered by magnetic fields
and radiation pressure from deep inside the star or the star basically ingested a planet rich in
rare elements the most compelling hypothesis those radioactive elements were dumped there
by a nearby civilization in much the same way some mad visionaries on earth propose shooting
our own nuclear waste into the sun what could go wrong eh and here's a bonus fact for those who
stay till the end actual shooting star hyper velocity stars are actual stars
not meteors barreling through the void at millions of miles an hour what's their hurry cosmologists
reckon that when a binary star system is gobbled up by the supermassive black hole lurking at
the heart of a galaxy one gets eaten while the other is spat out at frightening velocity up to
one third of the speed of light so far science is aware of around 1 000 of these hurtling monsters
let's hope they give us a wide berth what do you think can you suggest any other weird space object
let us know in the comments and don't forget to subscribe for more thoroughly cosmic tech content