The scariest things in space. Hypergiants - Possible Earth Killers

10 strangest objects in the universe

I think we all agree that space is a totally insane place. And exactly as close and understandable to us as distant and unimaginable. It may seem to you that the landscape on a planet with two Suns is the same as somewhere beyond the Moscow Ring Road, but this is the merit of science fiction writers. In fact, there are stranger things in space. Let's take a look at them.

Falling stars

I think everyone knows that stars do not fall - they are just meteors that burn out upon entering the atmosphere. But what many do not know is that really shooting stars also exist, and they are called moving. These are large balls of incandescent gas racing through space at a speed of millions of kilometers per hour.

When a binary star system is swallowed up by a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy, one of the two partners is swallowed and the other is thrown away at high speed. Imagine a huge ball of gas, four times the size of our Sun, rushing at great speed.

Hell planet

Gliese 581 - just "hell of a hell". Seriously. The planet with all its nature seeks to kill you. Despite this, scientists have established that this hell may be the most likely candidate for future colonization. The planet revolves around a red dwarf, many times smaller than our Sun, the luminosity of which is only 1.3% of our star. The planet is much closer to its star than we are to ours. Because of this, it is in a state of blocked tide: one side of the planet is always facing the star, while the other looks out into space. Like our moon.

Tidal blockage has led to interesting features. If you go out on the side of the planet facing the Sun, you will surely melt like a snowman. On the other side of the planet, you will definitely freeze instantly. However, it is theoretically possible to live in the “twilight zone” between the two extremes.

Life on Gliese 581, if any, has its difficulties. The star revolves around a red dwarf, which means there is a red sky above the planet, thanks to the lower frequencies of the visible spectrum. A living hell. Photosynthetic elements will have to get used to the constant bombardment of infrared radiation, which will stain them deep black. No salad would look delicious on a planet like this.

Castor system

If one or even two suns are not enough for you, look at the Castor system. As one of the two brightest points in the constellation Gemini in our night sky, this system is still brighter than its partner. The fact is that the Castor system is not one, not two, but all six stars orbiting a common center of mass. Three binary star systems revolve around one another - two hot and bright A-type stars and four M-type red dwarfs. Taken together, these six stars produce 52.4 times the luminosity of our Sun.

Space raspberry and space rum

For the past few years, scientists have been studying the dust cloud at the center of our Milky Way. If God is out there, then he has a good imagination: this dust cloud called Sagittarius B2 smells like rum and tastes like raspberries.

This cloud of gas is composed mostly of ethyl formate, which gives raspberries their taste and rum their distinctive odor. The giant cloud contains billions, billions and again billions of this substance - and it would be wonderful if it were not saturated with particles of propyl cyanide. The creation and distribution of these complex molecules remains a mystery to scientists, so the intergalactic restaurant will remain closed for now.

Planet of Searing Ice

Remember Gliese? This "hell" that we visited earlier? Let's go back to the same solar system. As if one murderous planet wasn't enough. Gliese supports a planet made almost entirely of ice - with a temperature of 439 degrees Celsius. Gliese 436 b is a hot ice cube. The only reason this ice remains solid is because of the gigantic amount of water present on the planet. pulls all this in the direction of the nucleus, compressing the water molecules so tightly that they cannot evaporate.

This planet will adorn the neck of any girl, and maybe even some Bill Gates.55 Cancri e - made entirely of crystal diamond - would cost $ 26.9 million. Probably even the Sultan of Brunei dreams of this at night.

The giant diamond planet was once part of a binary star system until its partner began to devour it. However, the star was unable to carry its carbon core with it, and the carbon simply turned into diamond under the influence of heat and tremendous pressure - with a surface temperature of 1,648 degrees Celsius, conditions were almost ideal.

A third of the planet's mass is pure diamond. While the Earth is covered in water and abundant in oxygen, this planet is made up of graphite, diamond, and several silicates. The huge gem is twice the size of the Earth and eight times heavier, which ranks it among the "super-earths".

If there is an object somewhere that can show us the origins of the primordial galaxy, then this is it. The Himiko Cloud is the most massive object ever discovered in the early universe, and dates back just 800 million years after the Big Bang. The Himiko Cloud amazes scientists with its gigantic size, about half the size of the Milky Way.

Himiko dates back to the so-called reionization era, or 200 million to one billion years after the Big Bang - and this is the first glimpse of early galaxy formation that scientists have been able to observe. Previously it was assumed that the Himiko cloud may be one large galaxy with a mass of about 40 billion from the sun, however, according to the latest data, there may be three galaxies in the Himiko cloud at once, and relatively young ones.

The largest water reservoir in the universe

Twelve billion light-years away, in the heart of a quasar, is the largest water reservoir in the universe. It contains approximately 140 trillion times more water than Earth's oceans. The water, unfortunately, takes the form of a massive cloud of gas several hundred light years in diameter. It is located next to a colossal black hole in the heart of a quasar, and the hole, in turn, is two hundred billion times larger than our Sun and at the same time constantly spews out energy equivalent to that which would have produced 1000 trillion suns. Well, this is for you to roughly imagine the scale of the local brew.

The strongest electric current in the universe

Just a couple of years ago, scientists stumbled upon an electric current on a cosmic scale: 10 ^ 18 amperes, or roughly one trillion lightning. Lightning is believed to originate in a huge black hole in the center of the galaxy, the core of which is believed to contain a "powerful space jet." Apparently, the black hole's powerful magnetic field allows it to launch these lightning bolts through dust and gas at a distance of more than 150 thousand light years. And if you think that our galaxy is large - one such lightning is one and a half times its size.

A huge group of quasars

Perhaps the Himiko cloud is large enough - half the size of our galaxy. What about a structure that is so huge that it breaks the traditional principles and laws of modern astronomy? This structure is the Large Quasar Group (LQG).

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is only a hundred thousand light-years across. Think about it: if something happens at one end of the galaxy, it will take a hundred thousand years for light to reach the opposite end. When we see an event on the other side of the galaxy, it means that the event happened when the human race was just beginning to form. Well, now take that distance and multiply it by forty thousand.

The vast group of quasars is 4 billion light years across. A cluster of seventy-four quasars violates the rules of standard astrophysics, since the maximum size of any cosmic structure can be only 1.2 billion light years across.

Scientists have absolutely no idea how this gigantic structure formed, since they previously knew clusters only a hundred million light years across. The giant structure absolutely does not care about the laws of physics, which say that when viewed from a distance, the universe looks relatively homogeneous.

And in November 2013, an even more severe structure of the Universe was discovered - the Great Wall of Hercules - the Northern Crown. It spans over 10 billion light years across.

The Boomerang Nebula is located in the constellation Centaurus, 5,000 light-years from Earth. The nebula has a temperature of −272 ° C, which makes it the coldest known place in the universe.

The gas stream from the central star of the Boomerang Nebula moves at a speed of 164 km / s and is constantly expanding. Due to this rapid expansion, the nebula has such a low temperature. The Boomerang Nebula is colder than even the relict radiation from the Big Bang.

Keith Taylor and Mike Scarrott named the object the Boomerang Nebula in 1980 after observing it with the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. The sensitivity of the device made it possible to record only a slight asymmetry in the lobes of the nebula, from which the assumption appeared about a curved, like a boomerang, shape.

The Boomerang Nebula was photographed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998, after which it became clear that the nebula was shaped like a bow tie, but that name was already taken.

R136a1 lies 165,000 light-years from Earth in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This blue hypergiant is the most massive star known to science. Also, the star is one of the brightest, emitting light up to 10 million times more than the Sun.

The mass of the star is 265 solar masses, and the mass during formation is more than 320. R136a1 was discovered by a team of astronomers from the University of Sheffield led by Paul Crowter on June 21, 2010.

Until now, the question of the origin of such supermassive stars remains unclear: whether they formed with such a mass initially, or they were formed from several smaller stars.

In the image from left to right: red dwarf, Sun, blue giant, and R136a1:

Man has always sought to find materials that leave no chance for their competitors. Since ancient times, scientists have been looking for the hardest materials in the world, the lightest and heaviest. The thirst for discovery led to the discovery of ideal gas and ideal black body. We present to you the most amazing substances in the world.

1. The blackest substance

The blackest substance in the world is called Vantablack and consists of a collection of carbon nanotubes (see carbon and its allotropic modifications). Simply put, the material consists of an infinite number of "hairs", hitting which, light bounces from one tube to another. Thus, about 99.965% of the light flux is absorbed and only a tiny part is reflected back outward.
The discovery of Vantablack opens up broad prospects for the application of this material in astronomy, electronics and optics.

2. The most flammable substance

Chlorine trifluoride is the most flammable substance ever known to mankind. It is the strongest oxidizing agent and reacts with almost all chemical elements. Chlorine trifluoride can burn through concrete and easily ignite glass! The use of chlorine trifluoride is practically impossible due to its phenomenal flammability and the impossibility of ensuring the safety of use.

3. The most poisonous substance

The most powerful poison is botulinum toxin. We know it under the name Botox, this is how it is called in cosmetology, where it found its main application. Botulinum toxin is a chemical secreted by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum. In addition to the fact that botulinum toxin is the most poisonous substance, it also has the largest molecular weight among proteins. The phenomenal toxicity of the substance is evidenced by the fact that only 0.00002 mg min / l of botulinum toxin is enough to make the affected area deadly for a person for half a day.

4. The hottest substance

This is the so-called quark-gluon plasma. The substance was created by the collision of gold atoms at near light speed. Quark-gluon plasma has a temperature of 4 trillion degrees Celsius. For comparison, this figure is 250,000 times higher than the temperature of the Sun! Unfortunately, the lifetime of a substance is limited to one trillionth of one trillionth of a second.

5. The most corrosive acid

In this nomination, the champion is fluoride-antimic acid H. Fluoride-antimonic acid is 2 × 10 16 (two hundred quintillion) times more caustic than sulfuric acid. It is a very active substance that can explode when a small amount of water is added. The fumes of this acid are deadly poisonous.

6. The most explosive substance

The most explosive substance is heptanitrocubane. It is very expensive and is only used for scientific research. But a slightly less explosive HMX is successfully used in military affairs and in geology when drilling wells.

7. The most radioactive substance

Polonium-210 is an isotope of polonium that does not exist in nature, but is manufactured by man. It is used to create miniature, but at the same time, very powerful energy sources. It has a very short half-life and is therefore capable of causing severe radiation sickness.

8. Heaviest substance

This is, of course, fullerite. Its hardness is almost 2 times higher than that of natural diamonds. You can read more about fullerite in our article The hardest materials in the world.

9. The strongest magnet

The world's strongest magnet is made up of iron and nitrogen. At present, details about this substance are not available to the general public, but it is already known that the new super-magnet is 18% more powerful than the strongest magnets currently in use - neodymium. Neodymium magnets are made from neodymium, iron and boron.

10. The most fluid substance

Superfluid Helium II has almost no viscosity at temperatures close to absolute zero. This property is responsible for its unique property of seeping and pouring out of a vessel made of any solid material. Helium II has prospects of being used as an ideal thermal conductor in which heat is not dissipated.

How many times on a warm summer evening we raised our heads up and admired the twinkling dots in the sky. How many times have you dreamed of being outside the Earth and seeing the frozen and beautiful Universe with your own eyes? It attracts people for thousands of years, forcing them to overcome gravity and make a breakthrough in scientific thinking.

The universe is beautiful. But she is not as sweet and safe as it seems at first glance.

The sun is our life and our death

The sun is the heart of our system. This is a huge nuclear reactor, the energy of which is enough to bloom life on an entire planet. The boiling sea of \u200b\u200bgas mesmerizes with beauty, but it is deadly beauty.

The temperature of the Sun's surface reaches five thousand degrees Celsius, and the temperature at its center can be more than tens of millions of degrees.

Loops of burning gas - a consequence of the planet's electrical activity - burst out of the Sun for thousands of kilometers. These prominences are not just beautiful sight. They carry a huge amount of radiation into space, from which the Earth's magnetic field protects us.

The energy produced by one prominence is more than the energy of 10 million Earth's volcanoes. And the planet Earth will easily pass through such a loop, leaving more free space.

If airlines ever agree to make interplanetary flights, those who wish will have to fly to the Sun for 20 years.

The sun is our life and our death. Today, thanks to his energy, thousands of life forms flourish on our planet. But it all ends someday. The sun will die, most likely, turning into a white dwarf. Even if it does not absorb our planet, then its light and heat will not be enough to support life on Earth.

Comets - deadly messengers of life

Comets are the free vagabonds of our universe. These are small cosmic bodies that revolve around stars. The comet is a beautiful sight. The gaze rivets to her "tail". But this is only dust and evaporating ice that the sun's rays heat up.

Scientists substantiate the theory according to which life on our planet originated from comets. After all, where there is water, there is life. It is believed that comets that crashed into the Earth during its formation brought with them water and biological material, which became the building base for all life on Earth.

But today comets are a threat to our existence. If one of them crashes into the Earth, life in all its forms could end forever.

Asteroids are insidious killers

Asteroids are the nomads of our solar system. These are fragments of dead planets. These are bodies whose mass is less than that of planets, they have an irregular shape, there is no atmosphere, but there may be satellites.

An encounter with an asteroid can be fatal to the planet. Both small and large, they pose a threat to humanity. Large asteroids are easier to detect, but even if a space body more than three kilometers in diameter crashes into the Earth, an entire civilization could die.

Scientists suggest that this is how dinosaurs died out on Earth.

Supernova - death and rebirth

Stars are like people, they live and die. When there is not enough fuel for a nuclear reaction, the star becomes unstable. Its core shatters and deadly energy bursts out.

The death of a star is an extraordinary and very dangerous sight. The upper layers of the star and radiation are thrown into space for many millions of kilometers. The release of deadly particles would destroy all life in its path.

If the explosion of a star was relatively close to the Earth, we would not be able to survive the catastrophic consequences of the influence of radiation on living things.

But in the Universe, nothing is wasted. There is order in this chaos. During a supernova explosion, new chemical elements are formed. These particles are the building blocks for new life forms. Calcium in our bones, iron in our blood, air in our lungs - these are the elements of a once deceased star, whose death gave life to new forms of life.

Black hole - incredible gravity

The black hole is a consequence of a deceased star with a huge mass. Black holes are the most mysterious inhabitants of space. The attraction of this object is so great that nothing can escape from its embrace, not even light. Scientists can only assume what is inside the black hole.

According to many theories, there is no time, space and matter inside, and all the laws of physics cease to exist. Many people think that a black hole pulls in everything that comes in its path. But it is not so. There is a certain distance - the event horizon. If you go further beyond it, nothing will be able to escape from the deadly embrace of the black hole.

There is an assumption that our entire galaxy may be inside a huge black hole. But to imagine this, one fantasy is not enough, and the mind can be shaken.

Pulsar - a space mystery

Pulsars can be called distant relatives of black holes, because they were formed after the death of a star. The core of the star shrank so much that it made a small bright star.

Despite their size, pulsars are very energetic. Radiation on the pulsar is greater than on the Sun.

The pulsar spins incredibly fast - about 30 revolutions per second. It is unimaginably dense. In total, a teaspoon of the substance can weigh hundreds of millions of tons. The pulsar's magnetic field is several trillion times greater than that of the Earth.

Nebulae - the frozen music of the universe

Nebulae are frozen clouds of cosmic gas and dust. This is an incredibly beautiful sight. Nebulae can rightfully be considered a factory for the production of stars, since they contain all the necessary elements to build new stars. They are just waiting for the wave from the explosion of the star to push them into motion.

Nebulae are located at incredible distances from Earth - thousands of light years. This is so far away that it is difficult for our mind to imagine these numbers.

Quasars - chronicles of the past light years

Quasar is the most distant and deadliest object in the universe. It is brighter than hundreds of galaxies. At its center is a huge black hole larger than billions of suns. Quasars release incredible amounts of energy. There are suggestions that quasars can emit energy up to a hundred times more than all stars in our galaxy, and this is in a relatively small area of \u200b\u200bspace.

A quasar moves through space at an incredible speed - about 80% of the speed of light.

Quasars are a window to the past. After all, their light reached us for millions of years. Some of them may no longer exist.

The universe is beautiful. She bewitches with secrets, power and scale. Who are we by cosmic standards? Not even ants or grains of sand.

Our solar system is located on the outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy, far from important events and breaking news. Even if it disappears in an instant, no one will notice.

But I really want to believe that humanity will be able to discover the secrets of space, find new worlds and remain in the history of our Universe.

Ecology

The cosmos is full of bizarre and even scary phenomena, ranging from stars that suck life out of their kind to giant black holes that are billions of times larger and more massive than our Sun. Below are the scariest things in outer space.

The planet is a ghost

Many astronomers said that the huge planet Fomalhaut B has sunk into oblivion, but it seems to be alive again.

Back in 2008, astronomers using the NASA Hubble Space Telescope announced the discovery of a huge planet that orbits the very bright star Fomalhaut, located only 25 light-years from Earth. Other researchers later questioned this finding, saying that scientists had actually discovered a giant cloud of dust being displayed.

However, according to the latest data from Hubble, the planet is being discovered over and over again. Other experts are carefully studying the system surrounding the star, so the zombie planet may be buried more than once before a final verdict is made on this issue.

Zombie Stars

Some stars literally come back to life in violent and dramatic ways. Astronomers classify these zombie stars as Type Ia supernovae, which generate huge and powerful explosions that send the "insides" of stars into the universe.

Type Ia supernovae explode from binary systems that consist of at least one white dwarf - a tiny, superdense star that has stopped going through nuclear fusion. White dwarfs are "dead", but as such they cannot remain in a binary system.

They can return to life, albeit for a short time, in a giant explosion along with a supernova, sucking life from their companion star or by merging with it.

Stars are vampires

Just like vampires from fiction, some stars manage to stay young by sucking the vitality from hapless victims. These vampire stars are known as "blue stragglers" and they "look" much younger than their neighbors with whom they were formed.

When they explode, the temperature is much higher and the color is "much bluer". Scientists believe this is the case because they are sucking huge amounts of hydrogen from nearby stars.

Giant black holes

Black holes may seem like science fiction objects - they are extremely dense, and the gravity in them is so strong that even light cannot escape from them if it comes close enough to them.

But these are very real objects that are quite common throughout the universe. In fact, astronomers believe supermassive black holes are at the center of most, if not all galaxies, including our own Milky Way. Supermassive black holes are mind-boggling in size. Scientists recently discovered two black holes, each with a mass equal to the mass of 10 billion of our Suns.

Incomprehensible cosmic blackness

If you are afraid of the dark, then being in deep space is clearly not for you. It is a place of "extreme blackness" far from the comforting lights of the home. Outer space is black, according to scientists, because it is empty.

Despite the trillions of stars scattered throughout the cosmos, many molecules are at great distances from each other to interact and scatter.

Spiders and witch brooms

Heaven is inhabited by witches, glowing skulls and all-seeing eyes, in fact, you can imagine any object. All of these forms we see in a diffuse collection of glowing gas and dust called nebulae, which are scattered throughout the universe.

The visual images that appear before us are examples of a special phenomenon in which the human brain recognizes the shapes of random images.

Killer asteroids

The phenomena described in the previous paragraph may be creepy or take on an abstract form, but they do not pose a threat to humanity. The same cannot be said about large asteroids that fly close to the Earth.

Experts say that the asteroid, 1 kilometer wide, has the power to destroy our planet in a collision. And even an asteroid as small as 40 meters can cause serious harm if it enters a populated area.

The impact of an asteroid is one of the factors that affects life on Earth. It is likely that 65 million years ago, it was an asteroid 10 kilometers in size that destroyed the dinosaurs. Luckily for us, scientists are scanning celestial rocks, and there are ways to redirect dangerous space rocks away from Earth, if danger is detected in time.

Active sun

The sun gives us life, but our star is not always that good. Serious storms play out on it from time to time, which can have a potentially devastating effect on radio communications, satellite navigation and the operation of electrical networks.

Recently, such solar flares have been especially frequent, because the sun has entered its especially active phase of the 11-year cycle. The researchers expect solar activity to peak in 2013.