What we see only makes up 5% of the universe apparently.
The other parts being dark energy and dark matter.
What is dark energy and dark matter?
Anything the scientists don’t know that messes up their equations.
Dark matter is that big error in the theory of gravity, sorry Newton.
There may not even be dark matter!!!
For some context I only made it up to eleventh grade physics.
After that I kinda spaced out.
Heh.
But anyways my name is Abbey and today I am bringing you Top 10 mysterious discoveries
found in space.
Let’s get right into it.
10 Wow!
Signal In 1977, the Big Ear Radio Observatory at
the Ohio State University caught a 72 second signal that was louder than anything else
in the sky, and got its name from the wow written in red pen beside the numbers representing
the circles.
In 2006, Astronomer Antonio Paris suggested that the Wow!
Signal from 1977 was a natural phenomenon created by a comet.
266P Christensen was the name, emitting bizarre radio signals was the game.
But the original astronomer who discovered the signal, Jerry Ehman, said no way!
Well really, what he said was, "We do not believe the two-comets theory can explain
the Wow!
Signal."
So, same thing.
Some think the signal could be from another space mystery, a blip in the machinery, or
- possibly extraterrestrial life.
Maybe aliens were trying to send us a little voice message but we weren’t ready.
This leads me into our next one, which is another kind of signal.
At number nine, Repeating fast radio bursts Fast Radio Bursts or FRBs are brief bursts
of radio waves from deep space.
There not an agreement on what they are or where they are coming from, but there has
been talk that these flashes of radio energy could be coming from a supernova remnant or
a neutron star orbiting a black hole.
When it comes to repeating fast radio bursts, it’s different.
Since they aren’t as jumbled and disrupted during their journey, it’s thought they
come from a calmer environment.
This idea is supported by the fact that repeat FRBs are also about ten times longer in duration
than standard FRBs.
Ten milliseconds to one millisecond respectively.
So, what could the calmer environment they come from be?
Say it with me now, aliens, aliens, aliens.
At number 8 neutrinos AKA Ghost Particle Now, I’m not going to even attempt to go
over physics because I stopped it the second I stopped studying for my grade 11 physics
exam in high school.
But at their basics, Neutrinos are tiny particles with almost no mass and nearly no charge.
Kind of neutral, like their name.
Since there’s not much to them, they are similar to nothing.
Nothing as in the concept.
Nothingness.
Because of this, they get their moniker “ghost particles”.
They travel at near light speeds and originate from stars and supernovas.
Which means, the sun gives off neutrinos.
But the cool thing is that neutrinos can come from really far and have a lot of energy.
Last year scientists were even able to trace one really energized one to a galaxy about
4 billion light years away from earth.
There’s a lot we don’t know about Neutrinos, which is where the mystery of them lies.
Onto number 7 Exomoon For a long time scientists were only able
to locate moons within our own galaxy.
We’ve found exoplanets, sure, rotating around stars outside our solar system.
But exomoons have been tougher to locate, possibly due to their smaller size.
It was a mystery in itself wondering if moons were just a thing in the milky way.
But an exomoon may have been discovered last year.
About the size of Neptune, it orbits a huge exoplanet called Kepler-1625.
It’s a big moon, bigger than any in our solar system, but the mass ratio of planet
to moon between Kepler-1625 and the exomoon is similar to earth and our moon.
So there are exomoons!
There’s so much out there we don’t know, wow.
Talking about moons, let’s talk about number 6 Enceladus
Enceladus is one of Saturn’s moons.
New info about it and it’s plumes that rise from it’s subsurface ocean came out in the
Journal Nature.
It’s plumes are apparently home to some complex organic molecules and one study detailed
the latest data.
In a statement by study co-author Christopher Glein, a scientist that specializes in extraterrestrial
chemical oceanography, he says they’ve “found organic molecules with masses above 200 atomic
mass units.
That's over ten times heavier than methane.
With complex organic molecules emanating from its liquid water ocean, this moon is the only
body besides Earth known to simultaneously satisfy all of the basic requirements for
life as we know it."
So are we hopping over to Enceladus?
Haha, no.
At least not yet hmmm
And while we are talking about moons that may host life in our own solar system, let’s
hit number 5, Europa (Jupiter’s Moon) Ya, it’s covered in ice, but beneath that
icy exterior is a salty liquid ocean and scientists and researchers think there’s a plume there.
From what I’ve said about Encelacus, we know a plume means hope.
Gasses being released from below the surface indicate that there could be microbes living
by or in vents deep on the ocean floor.
That is, if there are the necessary ingredients to host that life.
But maybe.
The discover of these plumes is the first step.
Next is to see what is in them.
Number 4, Pinwheel Star System Apep Out in space, scientists have discovered a
Wolf-Rayet star system that involves 3 stars.
Two massive stars are orbiting one another and another star is bound to those two by
gravity, 8000 light years away in the milky way galaxy.
The result is a pinwheel like star system, with a wind of material and dust cloud surrounding
it.
It’s the first pinwheel like star system discovered, so its future outcome is unknown.
If it slows down it could explode as a normal supernova, but if it’s speed maintains,
it will collapse at the poles first, think flattening, and produce a gamma ray burst.
If that’s aimed at us, it could strip the ozone from our atmosphere.
But that shouldn’t be for awhile, because the wolf-rayet stage in a stars life lasts
a few hundred thousand years.
Number 3, Bose-Einstein condensate A mysterious state of matter, well, the fifth
state of matter.
We know gases, liquids, solids, and the ever cool plasma state.
But what’s even cooler?
Bose-Einstein Condensate.
In 2018, on the international space station, scientists cooled a cloud of rubidium atoms
to barely above absolute zero.
This produced a Bose-Einstein condensate in space.
They did this with lasers to take energy away from the atoms, because when the atoms reach
that low a temperature they clump and start to behave as a single atom.
And yes, while this state of matter was predicted on earth by an Indian physicist named Saty
endra Nath Bose, it became a reality in space.
Number 2, 'Oumuamua Scientists discovered the first known interstellar
object to pay our solar system a visit in 2017.
Scientists were confused as to whether or not it behaved more like a comet or an asteroid
when a reddish cigar shaped object whizzed past us.
It was named Oumuamua, and, according to NASA, “observations suggest this unusual object
had been wandering through the Milky Way, unattached to any star system, for hundreds
of millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system.”
What makes ‘Oumuamua really cool is its shape.
Scientists determined the passing objects shape because of its brightness.
It’s brightness would vary by a factor of ten as they hypothesized that it spun on its
axis every 7.3 hours.
Then they determined that its length was possibly ten times as long is it is wide.
This is atypical since elongated objects we have seen so far haven’t been more than
three times longer than their width.
So that got some people thinking.
What if it wasn’t a cigar shaped rock, what if it was another kind of visitor.
Hmmm, what do you think?
Number 1, Absolutely Massive Black Hole A wild discovery from researchers at Australian
National University was them locating a quasar, AKA a supermassive black hole.
It’s 12 billion lightyears away, and is the brightest quasar that can be seen at the
moment.
It’s so massive, awesome, and hungry that existing science on black holes needed to
be reviewed.
What we believe to be true now is that black holes have a limit to how fast they grow proportional
to their mass.
This quasar is about the size of 20 billion suns, so, if we use the speed limit formula
to go back in time about 1.2 billion years to the big bang, it would be the size of 5000
suns.
What makes this so odd is that the average black hole is the size of 50 suns.
5000 is huge, and how was it already that big so close to the big bang?
Or is the math for black holes different?
But those are all of the spacey thing I have for you today, the Top Ten mysterious discoveries
found in space, and that’s a lot of info.
I think space is really cool because there’s so much out there that we don’t know, and
at the same time, there’s so much on earth we don’t know.
Wow, Socrates was right.
I know that I know nothing.
So what blows your mind?
Let me know down below with a comment and while you are down there give us a like and
a subscribe.
That’s all I have for you for today, until next time, bye!