- [Voiceover] Science fiction tends to envision
the universe as similar to our personal experiences.
Aliens look an awful lot like humans.
Planets look like snapshots of Earth,
and stars resemble our Sun.
In truth, the Universe has the possibility
to contain just about anything and we're learning
a whole lot of it is actually staggeringly
different from what we might expect.
These are the 10 Strangest Things Found in Space.
No known event in the Universe puts out as much
energy as a gamma ray burst.
Lasting between a few milliseconds and several
hours, gamma ray bursts are hundreds of times
brighter than supernovas and trillions of times
brighter than the Sun.
In fact, if we converted all of the Sun's mass
to energy, it wouldn't be as powerful as a single
gamma ray burst.
Many bursts are thought to be the product
of the collapse of very dense, quickly rotating
stars, a powerful jet of gamma rays can be
ejected as a star transforms into a neutron star,
magnetar, or black hole.
If current theories are right, over 80% of the matter
in the Universe is dark matter.
We can't visibly see it, it does not radiate
measurable energy, it doesn't absorb radiation,
rocking the emissions of other celestial bodies.
So why do we think it even exists?
Because the Universe as a whole operates as if there
is far, far more mass in it than we can detect.
We see the influence of dark matter through
the effects of gravity, which is entirely
dependent on mass.
Planet 55 Cancri E, also known as Janssen,
is about twice as big as Earth but eight times
as massive and is comprised primarily of carbon.
Not just any carbon, however; heat and pressure
have transformed a third of the planet into diamond.
55 Cancri E was the first rocky planet to be
discovered with a radically different chemical
makeup than Earth.
In our own solar system, the rocky planets
are made primarily of silicon-oxygen compounds.
Sagittarius B2 is a 150-light-years-wide
molecular cloud inside the Milky Way.
Included in those molecules are high quantities
of alcohol.
The center of the cloud is a comfortable
80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Also present is ethyl formate.
That's interesting to scientists because it's
a major precursor to amino acids, which are
necessary for life as we know it.
The rest of us can find it interesting because
it naturally smells of rum and is partly responsible
for the flavor of raspberries.
If there's a natural party center
of the Universe, this might be it.
CID-42 sits four billion light years away.
At some point in its history it collided with another
galaxy and the two fused.
The black holes at the center of those galaxies
also fused, forming a single, super-massive black hole.
The weird part, however, is what happened next.
The gravity waves from the collision ejected
that black hole to space at the speed of several
million miles an hour.
The fact that this could happen to an object
millions of times more massive than the Sun
is a little mind-boggling and may get you
to better appreciate the raw power of the Universe.
If a diamond planet isn't cool enough for you,
the Universe appears to have one-upped itself
and made a diamond star.
It's a white star, the remnants of a sun-sized
star now compressed into the size of Earth.
It's extremely cold, too cold for us
to detect directly.
Granted, that could still be as much as 3,000
degrees Kelvin or 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit,
but that's dead cold for a star.
The only way this unnamed star could be so cold
and not be older than the Milky Way in which it
resides, is for its carbon to have compressed
into diamond.
Because they're so hard to detect, it's entirely
possible that many other diamond white dwarfs exist.
We only found this one because it exists
in the binary system with an observable pulsar
and the very catchy name
of PSR J222-0137.
Twelve billion light years away is the largest
known reservoir of water vapor in the Universe,
about 140 trillion times more water
than can be found on Earth.
This reservoir orbits around a black hole which is
slowly capturing most of this water mass.
Besides being the largest collection of water
in the Universe, it's also the oldest, having
existed for a couple of billion years
after the Big Bang.
Most of the Universe, even parts that appear
completely empty, emit cosmic microwave background
radiation but there is an area in the Eridanus
Constellation, some half a billion to one billion
light years across, that is a CMB Cold Spot.
For some reason, this gigantic area of space
isn't radiating nearly as much radiation as
the rest of the Universe.
It's suspected that this region of the Universe
is a supervoid, a patch of space unusually devoid
of matter, including the pesky, undetectable
dark matter, but that just pushes the question
back a step.
Why is that area of our Universe so desolate?
You'd think separating planets from stars would
be easy, right?
Not really.
Brown stars are thought to have formed similarly
to stars but never reached the mass necessary
to fuse hydrogen into helium.
Most of the energy they throw out is infrared,
rather than visible light, a very low-energy
form of radiation, and they can get cold.
The smallest subclass of brown dwarfs is
the YDwarfs and the coldest of those is only
about 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
In many ways, brown dwarfs are similar
to gas giant planets.
They're about the size of Jupiter but are more
massive and gas giants, including those in our own
solar system, emit their own radiation, as well.
Galaxy 3C303 is ejecting what appears to be an
electric current from its center.
The current is a trillion times greater than
a lightening bolt on Earth and it extends some
150,000 light years.
Scientists theorize that the magnetic fields
of a black hole in the center of the galaxy
are generating the current.
Super dense structures are already thought
to eject jets of different types of energy.
Black holes do it in the form of quasars while
neutron stars do it as pulsars.
However, they throw the energy off as radiation.
Instead, 3C303 throws off electricity.
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