10 most frightening objects and phenomena in space

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Heavenly bodies can cause awe even in the most impressionable people.

1. Concentration of cold

The universe is generally pretty cool. The average temperature of outer space is 2.7 K (-270, 45 ° C). But deep in space, about 5,000 light-years from Earth, lies an even colder region - the Boomerang Nebula.

Its temperature is only 1 K (-272, 15 ° C) - that's just one degree above absolute zero.

Therefore, the Boomerang Nebula is considered the coldest object in the known universe. Scientists speculate that it formed when a binary star shed part of its hydrogen envelope in two huge jets at a speed of about 164 km / s. This explains the characteristic shape of the nebula.

The released streams of ionized gas expanded so rapidly in space that individual molecules of matter, scattered over great distances, cooled even below the average temperature of the universe.

2. Black hole - outcast

Being the center of an entire galaxy and then being thrown away is a sad fate. But this is exactly what happened with the black hole 3C 186. Scientists assume that only another black hole is capable of this. After all, in order to move such a colossus, you need an energy equal to 100 million simultaneously exploding supernovae.

Apparently, a couple of billion years ago, two galaxies collided, and one black hole pushed the other from its home with its gravitational field.

The outcast black hole has flown more than 35,000 light-years from the center of its galaxy to its outskirts - this is more than the distance between the Sun and the center of the Milky Way. She was so accelerated that she could move from the Earth to the Moon in 3 minutes.

This speed was enough for the black hole to leave its galaxy in 20 million years and set off on an eternal journey through the Universe. And now this piece of singularity is flying in empty space. 3C 186 is the most massive drifting black hole ever seen: it weighs more than a billion of our Suns combined.

3. Cloud

When astronomers discover water on some seedy planet, the media rush to dub it "potentially habitable." As if water in space is so rare.

But in fact, at least fill it up. For example, the black hole APM 08279 + 5255 is surrounded by a monstrous cloud of water vapor. This fog contains 140 trillion times more water than our planet.

But what is really there, in our entire galaxy 4,000 times less H2O than APM 08279 + 5255 gathered around itself.

True, the distance between the particles of water vapor in this cloud is very large, so that the atmosphere of our planet is 300 trillion times denser than it. The black hole itself is 20 billion times more massive than the Sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.

This cloud is not only the largest, but also the oldest known. It was formed when the universe was only 1.6 billion years old.

4. Voices of celestial bodies

Everyone knows that there is silence in space, which is why battles in Star Wars are often criticized for "flickering" lasers. Sounds are vibrations in the air, so we hear nothing in an airless environment.

However, if the vacuum could transmit sound, and our ears could catch it, we would hear a lot of interesting and frightening at the same time. For example, here is the radio emission converted into sound waves, which is produced by the celestial bodies of our solar system. They were recorded and published by NASA.

NASA Spooky Sounds from Across the Solar System

The playlist contains the low, humming howl of the Sun, the voices of Saturn and its moon Enceladus, reminiscent of the howl of blizzards, the noise and whistle in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, which was recorded by the Juno probe before disappearing there, echo from the surface of Titan and other strange "sounds" from deep space. This call of heavenly bodies both attracts and frightens.

5. Trinity

Collisions of galaxies are not uncommon in the Universe. Even our own Milky Way will collide with Andromeda in 4.5 billion years. And while words like "galactic cannibalism" and "collision" sound threatening, there really isn't anything particularly scary about it. The distances between the stars are such that the galaxies will simply merge together. For example, 200 million years ago this happened with the Milky Way and the dwarf galaxy - SagDEG.

But the interaction of three galaxies at once is a much rarer phenomenon.

Two ordinary spiral galaxies and another, irregularly shaped, merged together to form the Bird system, so named because of its characteristic shape.

The wings of a “bird,” that is, the arms of galaxies stretched by tidal forces, extend for more than 100,000 light years. The "head" moves away from the rest at a speed of about 400 km / s. And new stars are formed in it every year - about 200 solar masses a year.

6. Galactic storm

You may have heard that the gas giant Jupiter often has lightning storms that are visible from orbit. They are several times more powerful than earthly ones. But both ours and Jupiter's thunderstorms are nothing compared to the monstrous storm raging in the heart of the galaxy 3C303.

At its center is a supermassive black hole. The powerful magnetic fields that it creates generate an incredible electric current - 10 to the 18th power of amperes.

This is the strongest current ever observed in the universe.

For comparison, the most powerful lightning on Earth has a force of up to 500 thousand amperes.

In addition, the black hole is constantly throwing jets of matter out of its galaxy, and its huge jet reaches 150,000 light-years in length - more than the estimated diameter of our Milky Way. It's good that this thing is located two billion light-years from Earth and the "rays of good" it sends out are not aimed at us.

7. Heart of Darkness

TrEs-2b is a very unusual planet. It is a gas giant, but not the same as our Jupiter: it is slightly larger and black at the same time. Absolutely black. The planet's geometric albedo is less than 1%, meaning it reflects less than a percent of its star's light.

TrEs-2b is blacker than the blackest acrylic paint you can find, blacker than charcoal or soot.

At the same time, its black atmosphere is heated to 980 ° C, and therefore the planet emits a barely noticeable reddish glow. A black circle surrounded by a crimson glow is an ominous sight.

8. Star Fidget

HM Cancer is a double star composed of two white dwarfs. They revolve around each other at a speed of more than 400 km / s, making a full revolution in 5.4 minutes! Moreover, they are separated by only 80,000 km - 1/5 of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. It is the fastest binary star we know of.

Just imagine what a crazy dance you would see looking at this couple from the surface of some planet nearby …

Or they wouldn't, because the binary star emits a huge amount of X-rays. After about 340 thousand years, the rotation will end, and one star will fall on another. In the meantime, they are approaching 60 cm per day.

9. Great nothing

There are billions and billions of galaxies in the Universe, but they are located quite unevenly. There are areas where they are not crowded. But there are also places through which you can fly at the speed of light of a millennium and not meet not only stars, but just not a single decent piece of matter. The density of matter there is about one atom per cubic meter. These empty areas are called voids.

The largest at the moment is the Bootes Void - a circular region of space with a diameter of about 330 million light years. Strictly speaking, about 60 galaxies were counted in it, so it is not completely empty, but this number is too small for such a huge space. Here's what the American astronomer says about him:

If the Milky Way were in the center of the Bootes void, we would not have known about the existence of other galaxies until the 1960s.

Gregory Aldering

Imagine what it would be like to live on a lonely planet, placed in this void, and to see in the night sky not the shining of the stars, but endless darkness.

And, by the way, in the photo above, which walks on the Internet and pops up whenever Bootes is mentioned in popular science articles, in fact, he is not. This is the Barnard 68 Nebula, a cloud of molecules twice the size of the Sun and about half a light-year across. In general, a mere trifle next to the entrance.

10. Center of mass

Our galaxy, like the galaxies of Andromeda, Triangle and others that make up the so-called Local Group, do not stand still. They are moving towards … something. This something is a gravitational anomaly called the Great Attractor. And it slowly (at a speed of about 600 km / s) attracts all nearby galaxies.

It is impossible to understand what the Great Attractor is, because it is located practically in the very center of the Zone of Avoidance - this is an area of the sky obscured by the disk of the Milky Way.

It is only known that the Great Attractor weighs as much as 10,000 of our Galaxies, or 10 to the 15th power of the Suns.

What will happen when the Milky Way crawls to it - no one knows. However, there is plenty of time to build theories, because it is separated from us by about 75 megaparsecs, or 250 million light years.

But what is most interesting is that the Great Attractor is not stationary either. It, in turn, moves towards the Shapley Supercluster - a huge group of 8,000 galaxies with a mass of more than 10 million billion Suns.