In space, anything is possible. Tiny black
holes, planets made of diamonds, and stars
no hotter than a cup of tea. Anyway…
The biggest star
If WOH G64 was in place of the Sun, the Earth
would be inside it, and closer to its center
than surface. Its volume is 17 billion times
larger than the Sun’s! Good thing it's 160,000
light-years away from us.
The brightest star
Actually, the real thing is 163,000 light-years
away. Somewhere in the Large Magellanic Cloud
lies R136a1– a star 8.7 million times brighter
than the Sun. This star is also the most massive
astronomers ever found.
Most elusive signals in space.
Fast radio bursts or FRB are radio signals
so intense, the Sun produces this much energy
in 80 years. These flashes rarely appear in
one place twice but there were cases when
FRB repeated continuously before going silent.
Some say they can be related to neutron stars
or to matter falling into a black hole.
The coldest star.
Those are brown dwarf stars that essentially
failed at continuing to be hot. For a long
time, the coldest of them was just as hot
as boiling water, but then a star was found
with a temperature barely reaching 8°F.
The fastest star in the galaxy.
US 708 is a rogue star that flies right through
our Milky Way galaxy and will eventually escape
it entirely. It's traveling at 745 miles per
second! But in theory, beyond our galaxy,
there can be stars flying close to the speed
of light.
A nebula with the strangest shape
Nebulae are giant clouds of gas able to take
almost any shape, but Red Square Nebula is
just that: huge red square. Astronomers have
no idea how exactly it could appear. But there
it is!
The most mysterious star.
Astronomers can discover exoplanets by measuring
how star's light dims when the planet passes
in front of it. Tabby's Star is unique in
this way – it loses up to 22% of its brightness,
no planet can do this. A huge cloud of dust
could, but Tabby's Star is too old to have
it. Every answer only provides more questions.
The strangest space object in the Solar System.
Haumea is a dwarf planet, located in the Kuiper
Belt in the outer reaches of our system. It's
the fastest spinning object around – the
day here lasts only 4 hours. Despite its small
size, Haumea has its own set of rings, which
is unprecedented.
The most famous black hole.
It's the one astronomers took a photo of – a
whole bunch of smaller telescopes worked together
as a huge virtual telescope to take a snap
of M87*. That place is a real hole is you
ask me. This black hole is located in the
center of the Messier 87 galaxy, 53 million
light-years away from us.
The smallest planet.
Kepler-37b is only slightly bigger than the
Moon and has a little under one-third of the
Earth's mass. Despite that, it's still considered
to be a planet orbiting Kepler-37 star.
The smallest star.
It's 2.5 times smaller than Earth. It's a
pulsar – a form of a neutron star, and that
means it's so dense that even with this size,
its mass is much bigger than the Sun's.
The darkest planet.
The hot Jupiter-like planet TrES-2b orbits
its host star really close, yet it can't reflect
almost any light from it. The planet’s surface
is so black it absorbs all the light.
The emptiest space.
In the Universe, galaxies are arranged into
groups, then into clusters and filaments,
but between these colossal structures lie
huge cosmic voids with little to no galaxies
inside them. As a result, any given part of
the Universe would look like a sponge with
holes inside – those are voids.
The most distant galaxy ever discovered.
We see the GNz-11 galaxy as it was 13.4 billion
years ago. But calculations show that this
galaxy is really 32 billion light-years away
from us due to the constant expansion of the
Universe. Buh Bye!
The most unwelcoming potentially habitable
planet. Gliese 581c is a super-earth planet
orbiting its star in a so-called habitable
zone – close enough to be warm and have
liquid water on the surface, but far enough
not to cook up. The only problem is that it's
always turned to its star with one side, which
is too hot, while the other is too cold and
dark. In the middle, though, there might be
a narrow stripe with just the right temperature.
The tastiest part of space.
Sagittarius B2 is a huge molecular cloud not
far (in cosmic terms) from the center of the
Milky Way. Scientists recognized more than
50 different molecules in it, but one of them
is the same stuff that makes the taste of
raspberries.
The farthest human-made object in space.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, it provided
numerous data and photos of planets like Jupiter,
Saturn, and their moons. Today, Voyager 1
is already beyond the borders of the Solar
System, almost 14 billion miles away.
The most powerful quasar.
Quasars are active galactic cores consisting
of supermassive black holes surrounded by
charged matter — the accretion disk. When
this matter falls into a black hole, it releases
extreme amounts of energy. The most powerful
radio signal from quasar came from 3C 273,
and it’s the brightest quasar ever discovered.
The strangest planet.
Gliese 436b is a really hot planet made of
ice. The surface temperature here should be
at around 830°F, but the ice doesn’t melt
because of the planet’s enormous gravity.
The largest structure
It’s called the Great GRB Wall – a supercluster
consisting of a huge number of galaxies, gravitationally
linked to each other. It would take 10 billion
years for light to go from one end of it to
another, which means that it takes up around
one-ninth of the whole observable Universe.
The biggest lightning
The 3C303 galaxy has a quasar in its core
that emits a huge cosmic jet. In this jet,
astronomers found an electric current measuring
at 10 to the 18th amps. It's like a trillion
bolts of lightning striking all at once.
The smallest black hole
Those are supposed to be supermassive, but
IGR, located in the constellation Scorpius,
is just 3 to 10 times more massive than the
Sun. In black hole terms, it’s teeny-tiny.
The most expensive planet.
About a third of planet 55 Cancrie consists
of carbon, and given the temperature and pressure
below its surface, all of this carbon has
to be in the form of diamonds. It's literally
like dirt there.
The most prolific galaxy.
Dubbed the Baby Boom galaxy, it’s the brightest
starburst galaxy known to science. It produces
one new star every 2 hours and 12 minutes
on average and 4,000 stars per year. The Milky
Way galaxy produces only 10 stars per year.
The strangest galaxy's shape.
This prize goes to the Hoag's Object – a
so-called ringed galaxy with an elliptic core
in the center, a huge gap further on, and
a ring of stars and systems beyond that.
The hottest exoplanet.
It's Kepler-70b that orbits really close to
its host star and has an estimated surface
temperature of more than 13,000°F.
The coldest planet.
This planet is 13,000 light-years away from
us and I'm not saying its full name, but here
are the facts: it's about as big as Earth;
it’s about the same distance from its star;
and this star is just 8% of the Sun's mass.
Because of that, the planet is an icy wasteland
like nowhere else in the Universe.
The most planets in the habitable zone.
It's the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system. It consists
of 7 planets, 5 of them are close to Earth
in size, and three are located in the habitable
zone of their host star. It means this system
alone has 3 candidates for the possible development
of life.
The planet with most stars.
Double-star systems are quite widespread in
the Universe, but exoplanet Kepler-64b orbits
a double-star that orbits a double-star. 4
stars at once!
The oldest discovered star.
12,400 light-years away from us lies a star
that is over 12 billion years old – almost
three times older than the Sun.
The most unique place in The Universe.
Zooming in – from the Milky Way galaxy,
to our Solar system, and finally at last,
the Earth. As scientists know, there is no
bigger mystery in the world than life, and
how it came to exist, and this is the only
world we know of so far, that contains that
precious life. Kinda blows your mind doesn’t
it?
