Astronomers have sought to uncover the secrets of the universe ever since men first laid eyes
upon the infinite dark skies from the father of astronomy Galileo Galilei to brilliant minds like
Carl Sagan and Edwin Hubble they have all made incredible contributions to our understanding
of the cosmos but even the most brilliant minds find themselves perplexed by the unprecedented
oddities of a few peculiar objects traveling our vast universe grew to be around 30 times
the muscle for sun and lived for a very long time exactly how long people cannot really tell
welcome to Factnomenal and today we are going to take a look at some of the rarest
stars ever discovered that have even the most seasoned astronomers scratching their heads
stay until the end to see what's behind the creepiest star ever discovered
in the midst of 1977 physicists Kip Thorne and Anna Zidkow came out with a theoretical
class of stars known as TZO they believed that TZO was a very rare phenomenon where a neutron
star cannibalizes another star they believe that to an observer this TZO would appear
as a regular red giant star but there would be something slightly off about its spectrum
of course this was just a theory but after careful examination a star discovered and archived in 1908
known as HV2112 is believed by many astronomers to be the first observable TZO in the universe
hv2112 has all the hallmarks of a TZO at this point it is believed that this star is constructed
of a neutron star inside a red giant two types of stars that are in completely different spectrums
a neutron star is so dense that a single teaspoon composed of matter from this star
could be somewhere around four billion tons in earth's gravity a red giant on the other hand
is so massive that its circumference could expand millions and millions of miles from its core the
unique capabilities of both stars once combined have changed our notions of the fundamental nature
of the galaxy it appears that somehow the merging of these two types of stars has facilitated the
transport of heavy metals like lithium rubidium and molybdenum meaning that these heavy metals
are not only made in the core of planets as we believe they were before we discovered TZOs
this major discovery has completely changed our understanding of how matter came to be
there is something about tabby's star ever since the launch of the Kepler telescope in 2009
we've discovered a plethora of new planets orbiting various stars throughout our galaxy
the most recent analysis of Kepler's discoveries concludes that 20 to 50
of the stars visible in the night sky are likely to have small possibly rocky planets
similar in size to earth and located within the habitable zone of their parent stars
one way astronomers detect new planets is by looking for a tell-tale dip in the star's light
which indicates a planet is passing in front of the star this dip in light is usually less than
one percent but on rare occasions massive planets can go beyond that one percent threshold there
just so happens to be a star system about 1,400 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus
that has detected an object that causes dips as high as 20 percent though we have no idea what
this object could be just yet it's safe to say that whatever it is it's far far larger than any
planet could ever be tabby's star officially named KIC 846 2852 has astronomers from all over the
globe scratching their heads as no one has ever detected anything this massive orbiting a star
however there are some exciting theories about what could be causing this gargantuan dip in light
the leading theories propose that it is some sort of debris perhaps disintegrated comets or
possibly a recently destroyed planet then there are others who believe it could be something
a little more sinister a team of planet hunters in the Louisiana State university have theorized
that perhaps this object could be something artificial they suggest that it could be
a device created by a highly technological civilization that harnesses the power of their sun
of course we cannot disprove any possibilities yet as we need to gather much more data but this
may be the first piece of proof that there is intelligent life out there
egg-shaped star an egg-shaped star sounds like a total joke but i kid you not this is real in fact
you have seen this oddly shaped star hundreds of times Vega is the fifth brightest star in
our night sky and it is the brightest star in the constellation of Lyrae although this star
is relatively young at 450 million years old in comparison to our sun which is 4.6 billion years
old it is a lot brighter than it should be this has baffled many astronomers throughout the years
being slightly brighter than it should is just one of the odd behaviors Vega has shown
perhaps even more puzzling is the fact that it is spinning at a constant yet incredulous rate
of 600,000 miles per hour in fact many physicists believe that it is only rotating at 90 percent
of its capacity and they also believe that if it were spinning just 10% faster it would overwhelm
its gravitational pull and literally be ripped apart because of this insane rotational speed it
makes it bulge slightly giving it the appearance of a squashed and chubby blue egg in fact it is
spinning so fast that it struggles to keep a constant temperature throughout its atmosphere
the average temperature on the equator is 1,300 Fahrenheit while the polls average seventeen
thousand nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit meaning that the poles are much brighter than the center
of the star this could potentially explain why Vega looks so bright this disparity in brightness
gives this star high contrast which makes it look like it's emitting more light than it actually
is the speed demon the great majority of stars are traveling at constant and predictable
speeds around the center of the universe this however does not apply to star he 0437-5439
located in the dorado constellation it is believed to have been formed over 30 million years ago
near the center of our Milky Way it was observed in 2005 with a cayenne 8.2 meter telescope which
is part of the European southern observatory's very large telescope array yet there is something
extremely bizarre about this particular star it seems to be traveling at 1.6 million miles
per hour not only that it seems to be unbound to any orbit which makes it even weirder than
anyone could possibly believe there are dozens of theories about how such a strange star came to be
but the most popular explanation for its extraordinary behavior is that it may have come
across a super massive black hole a few million years ago more specifically it seems that it came
across sagittarius a which is a supermassive black hole located in the center of the milky way galaxy
not only that but these physicists believe that HE0437-5439
was once part of a tri-solar system and after its interaction with sagittarius a it merged into
a single bright star which would explain why it traveled such a long journey relative to its young
age conjoined stars MY Camelopardalis is a binary star system located in the Alicante 1 open cluster
some 13,000 light years away in the constellation Camelopardalis at first glance it appears to be a
common bi-solar system though it may sound hard to believe there is absolutely nothing strange
about a planetary system with two or more stars in fact it is believed that a whopping 85 percent of
stars in the galaxy reside in multi-solar systems what is abnormal about MY Camelopardalis is that
it appears that these stars are so close to one another that their surfaces actually begin to
touch though many have theorized that supermassive stars are formed by the merging of two or more
smaller stars it has never been observed in action before the discovery of MY Camelopardalis
it is believed that these two stars will have more than 60 solar masses once they
fully merge into a single star though no one knows exactly how long it is going to take
for the merger to complete it is estimated that it can take tens of thousands of years
giving us plenty of time to examine the intricacies that encompass such a massive event
no one knows for sure what will happen once they transform into a single massive star
but it could be an explosion of the likes we have never seen before the star that would not die
zombies not the first thing you'd expect to see in space but stay tuned i've got a surprise for you
some massive stars go out with a bang as type 2 supernovae exploding and briefly outshining
entire galaxies "zombie star" iPTF14hls decided to come back from the dead confounding scientists and
astronomers alike did this zombie star really rise from a stellar grave and how would this
even be possible the short answer is we don't exactly know scientists are still trying to
figure out what exactly is going on with this star that will not die but here is what we do
know supernovas typically follow a predictable brightness curve and then fade away to become
super dense neutron stars or black holes unless of course we're talking about iPTF14hls in 2014
astronomers at the Palomar Transient Factory in San Diego California discovered this massive star
and believed it to be like any other supernova but then a few months later things got weird
researchers noticed the star getting bright again and it has done so five times over the
last several years what's even stranger is that scientists found evidence of another supernova
explosion at the same location back in 1954 what does this exactly mean some experts suggest
this could be evidence of pulsational pair instability supernova" theory which suggests
that massive stars could generate both matter and antimatter in their cores which in turn leads to a
series of explosions before the final curtain call some researchers believe that the strange behavior
of this star can be attributed to its massive size and that perhaps when it goes supernova
it behaves completely different than smaller stars like it this is one of those head scratcher type
of events said researcher Peter Nugent of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
usually when a star goes supernova that's it instead finish but this new discovery could
re-evaluate how we view star deaths so what do you think what is your favorite star on our
list let us know in the comments if you learned something new be sure to smash the like button
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