10: The Space Eye NASA space telescopes have discovered a giant
cosmic eye.
The telescopes looked into the Helix Nebula where they captured one of the most amazing
celestial phenomena ever, a glowing space eyeball the likes of which we have never seen
before.
But just what is this great eye in the sky?
The Helix Nebula, aka NGC 7293, consists of a dying star about 650 light-years from us
in the Aquarius constellation.
This dying star is what scientists call a planetary nebula.
NASA used their Spitzer Space Telescope to capture long-wavelength infrared light, along
with their Galaxy Evolution Explorer to look at ultraviolet light.
Looking at these different light sources at once shows a huge, glowing pupil in the center
of a light burst like the eye of God.
You can only see it when viewing the ultraviolet radiation and infrared wavelengths at the
same time.
Believe it or not, this incredible phenomenon is a sneak peek at what will happen in our
own solar system in around 5 billion years.
Our sun will eventually turn into a planetary nebula as well when it reaches the end of
its life, fresh out of hydrogen and helium for the fusion that takes place in its core.
When this happens, our sun will expel its gaseous layers into an explosion of glowing
shells.
It will then become its very own cosmic eye, looking like the Eye of Sauron depicted in
the Lord of The Rings films in space.
9: The Explosive Death of a Giant Star For the first time in history, astronomers
have witnessed one of the most powerful space phenomena.
They saw a red supergiant star in its last days of life just before it exploded!
They actually saw it die and transform into a supernova.
The star was first found back in 2020 by a team of researchers with Northwestern University
and the University of California.
They used the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii to keep tabs on the star until it died.
According to astrophysicist Wynn Jacobson-Galan, it was dramatic and violent, unlike anything
we have ever seen before.
The reason this is so incredible is that supernovas are the biggest explosions that we know about.
They only really happen with massive stars, ones that are around 12 times bigger than
our own.
And even though we've seen them before, we've only ever seen them after the event has happened.
This is after gas and debris has been exploded out into space.
The debris from these cosmic explosions is actually what's needed to form new stars and
to produce the elements found right here on Earth.
This particular supernova is in a faraway galaxy, over 120 million light years from
us.
What that means is that it actually exploded 120 million years ago, and we were only able
to see it happen now.
Researchers got lucky and were able to watch the star as it got brighter and brighter,
spitting out gas before it blew up.
The actual explosion took less than a minute.
8: Glass Rain On Exoplanet HD 189733b, the rain is a literal
nightmare.
In fact, the entire planet is a nightmare.
Looking through a telescope, it seems to be a rather ordinary world out in space, like
a big blue marble in the middle of nothing.
It does indeed look bright blue, with little swirls of white – just like a real marble.
But the blue should not be mistaken for the same friendly skies we have here on Earth.
The weather on this planet is terrifying and deadly.
The wind on HD 189733b blows at gusts of up to 5400 mph.
Just think about how phenomenal that is for a second.
The wind is blowing at seven times the speed of sound.
If you were to try to step foot on the planet, your spaceship would get caught in a whirlwind
so fast and so powerful you would literally be whipped around the planet in an endless
cyclone.
And then there's the rain to contend with!
The planet has one of the rarest weather systems, one that produces glass rain.
It literally rains glass!
And because of the intense winds, it rains glass sideways.
This means you would be ripped to shreds during a rainstorm as you were hurdling around the
marble in the endless hurricane.
The blue color of the planet isn't a suggestion of tropical oceans like those here on Earth,
but rather of a torched atmosphere that has clouds full of silica particles.
What do you think a planet that rains glass would look like?
Tell me in the comments!
7: The Butterfly Nebula The Butterfly Nebula has got to be one of
the most gorgeous phenomena anywhere in the universe.
It's known scientifically as NGC 6302 or Caldwell 69.
It's a bipolar planetary nebula found in the constellation Scorpius.
The structure inside the nebula, the one that looks like a beautiful, red-glowing butterfly,
is one of the most complex things ever observed inside a planetary nebula.
Remember the great cosmic eye we talked about earlier?
This is kind of the same thing, but not quite.
In the center of the butterfly is a star, same as with the eye.
But this star is one of the hottest that scientists have ever identified.
The surface temperature is upwards of 250,000 degrees Celsius or 450,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Even for a white dwarf, it's unbelievably hot.
The Butterfly Nebula was first identified in 2009 by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The reason it looks like a butterfly has to do with a dense equatorial disc of gas and
dust.
The disc has formed a bipolar structure kind of like an hourglass, what we think of as
the butterfly’s wings.
But all the glowing light and tiny dots you see inside the wings are actually ionization
walls and knots.
It’s all crystalline water ice, quartz, silicates, and other space particles.
Pretty incredible, right?
6: Galactic Collisions The Hubble Space Telescope captured a fascinating
phenomenon in which one galaxy appeared to be on a collision course with another.
The image taken by the telescope is truly unique.
It shows spiral galaxy NGC 105 plunging into the edge of its neighboring galaxy as if the
two were about to merge.
And while it may look like that, that's not actually the case.
It's just an illusion.
NGC 105 is 215 million light-years away from us, hiding in the constellation Pisces.
Even though it appears to be crashing into its neighbor, it's just the result of the
way that the two galaxies are aligned in the night sky.
Its neighbor is actually quite far away, at a distance that's not even known to astronomers.
It's all due to trick photography, a complete fluke because of where the two galaxies are
in relation to NASA’s Hubble Telescope.
It’s like if you jump at the right angle with a photographer crouched, getting a shot
of you leaping over one of the pyramids.
Only, this is on a much larger and more amazing scale.
But here's something even more amazing.
Astronomers were focusing on NGC 105 because it contains a pair of astrological phenomena.
It has cephid variables, meaning it contains a rare class of pulsating stars.
It also has cataclysmic supernova explosions, meaning the galaxy contains several stars
that are in the catastrophic death strokes of their lives.
These two phenomena, because they produce such extraordinary light, are used by scientists
to measure distances through space.
NGC 105 is now helping astronomers figure out how fast the universe is expanding by
acting as a kind of marker in their galactic map.
5: Black Holes Black holes are arguably the most fascinating
cosmic phenomena most people are aware of.
A black hole is formed when a very large star collapses and then continues to grow by absorbing
cosmic energy and merging with other black holes.
Scientists have known about these for years, especially since they're so easy to identify.
Because a black hole sucks in any light that gets near it, they can be seen in space as
literal black holes, or voids of light.
Plus, they give off so much radiation that astronomers can see a very specific type of
radiation light leaking out of them.
It's not real light, but rather only visible using special instruments.
Astronomers even know that there's a supermassive black hole, meaning one that is ridiculously
huge and powerful, inside our very own Milky Way galaxy.
And here's where things get terrifying.
According to Dr. Alessandro Sfondrini from the Institute for Theoretical Physics, a black
hole could delete the universe.
Yes, the entire universe.
It's not going to happen yet, but perhaps in the future.
When a black hole becomes large enough, it could potentially swallow every single thing.
One black hole gets so big it merges with another, the same thing happens throughout
the universe, until all matter in existence is sucked into a void without light or gravity.
The only good news is that it won't happen for a few trillion years.
What do you think of the theory that all of existence could be eaten by a black hole the
size of the entire universe?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments and don't forget to hit subscribe before the
end of the video!
4: Diamond Super Earth There are so many planets in the universe
that it's hard to even imagine them all.
And while most are fairly boring pieces of rock, there is one alien planet that's something
of a phenomenon.
It's called Planet 55 Cancri e, and scientists say it's the very first planet they've ever
discovered that's literally made out of diamonds.
An entire planet filled to the brim with a simple mineral that people here on Earth spend
thousands of dollars to wear around their necks.
How is this possible?
It all comes down to the ratio of carbon to oxygen.
At the very center of the solar system, located 40 light years from our own, scientists identified
a carbon-to-oxygen ratio of over 1.
This suggested that the planet located at the very center of the system was made primarily
of diamonds.
The planet itself is a super earth, about twice as large as our planet with a mass eight
times greater.
It’s chemical makeup, in theory, could mean that its surface is a rocky terrain of diamond
instead of standard rock.
And it’s all because of insanely high carbon levels.
3: Jupiter’s Spot When it comes to space phenomena, one of the
rarest and most unique features of our specific solar system is the great red spot of Jupiter.
It was first observed by the amateur astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwab in 1831.
This tells us the storm inside the red spot has been going on for at least 150 years.
But scientists believe it's been significantly longer than that.
But just what’s going on in the great red spot that's so interesting?
It's basically just one massive storm.
It's a storm over twice as wide as our own planet, because of how big the planet Jupiter
itself is.
Just a single storm is bigger than two Earths combined.
The storm circles the southern hemisphere, with winds along the edge reaching somewhere
around 425 mph (683 kph) That's double the strongest hurricane ever recorded on Earth.
The big mystery is that scientists can't figure out what started the storm hundreds or thousands
of years ago.
They also don’t know why it just continues moving north to west, then south again.
It could theoretically go on forever.
In fact, because Jupiter doesn't have a solid surface, the storm has never technically made
landfall.
Rather than a surface, Jupiter has a sky over 44 miles (70.8 km) deep, filled with layers
of ammonia ice, hydrosulfide, and water ice vapor.
It’s all balanced over an ocean of liquid hydrogen.
Underneath the ocean of liquid hydrogen is actually the core of Jupiter, something scientists
have no idea about.
Nobody knows what the core of Jupiter is made of, it’s all a raging mystery.
2: Earth 2.0 About 111 light-years away from us is the
very best candidate for human habitability.
It's Earth 2.0, the best and closest exoplanet that humans may one day migrate to.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope even discovered water vapor in the atmosphere
of the planet, suggesting it could have liquid water.
It's a total anomaly, seeing as these types of “Goldilocks” planets are so rare they
could be considered phenomena.
The planet orbits a star slightly smaller than our sun, yet it’s in the perfect habitable
zone where it could be warm enough for liquid water and not so hot that it would make life
impossible.
The proper name for Earth 2.0 is K2-18b.
It was first identified by NASA's Kepler spacecraft in 2015.
Its mass is 8 times that of Earth, meaning it's either a giant block of ice like Neptune
or a rocky world with an atmosphere rich in hydrogen.
Either way, it’s the only planet right now located outside of our cozy solar system that
has an appropriate temperature for supporting water.
Crude models, according to National Geographic, have predicted average temperatures of between
100- and 116-degrees Fahrenheit, or 37.7 and 46.6 degrees Celsius.
If we are ever to leave Earth and try to colonize a new world, this could potentially be it.
1: Dark Matter & Dark Energy Dark matter is the craziest phenomenon in
the universe, and something that scientists barely have a tangible grasp on.
Dark matter and dark energy are both cosmic forces that nobody has been able to see or
detect, but that scientists say are pretty much everywhere.
It all began in 1998 when scientists realized the universe isn't just expanding, its expansion
is getting faster.
This implied that an unknown force is driving the expansion, pushing the universe out from
every angle.
This unknown force was dubbed dark energy.
Dark matter is a little different than dark energy.
It's confusing to say the least.
It's invisible and doesn't interact with light or ordinary matter, yet there seems to be
more of it than the normal matter that we can see.
Scientists believe the phenomenon of dark matter is responsible for 25% of the universe.
Around 70% of the universe is dark energy.
Only 5% is actual matter that we can see and interact with.
And that's basically as far as anyone has gotten.
The good news is that with the recent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists
are hopeful that they'll be able to uncover some of the more complex cosmic mysteries
of the universe.
Hopefully, one of them is dark matter.
Which of these amazing cosmic phenomena would you love to witness from the deck of a spaceship?
Let me know in the comments and thanks so much for watching.
If you haven’t already, remember to hit subscribe for more awesome videos!
Come back soon, and I can’t wait to share more incredible phenomena and discoveries
with you!