Despite active exploration, space is still full of mysteries for humanity. Only very recently were gravitational waves considered only a theory, and today their existence has already been scientifically proven. Who knows what secrets are hidden in these gloomy dark depths of the Universe. Nevertheless, even among what has already been discovered by scientists, there are a lot of extremely amazing things, the existence of which is difficult to believe.
Alcohol
This discovery was made not so long ago by an international group of scientists working with a 30-meter telescope in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. They found that Comet Lovejoy, codenamed C / 2011 W3, contains as many as 20 different types of organic molecules, including sugar and alcohol.
This periodic comet was discovered in November 2011. By all indications, its diameter should be at least 500 meters. In addition, it is one of the brightest comets known to science. It is not yet completely clear where all this organic matter came from in the gas and dust tail of Comet Lovejoy. It is possible that they were "picked up" somewhere during the comet's journey through space. Another version says that these compounds could arise from the huge interstellar molecular cloud that formed the solar system.
Source: skyandtelescope.com
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Planet of diamonds
An exoplanet with the complicated name PSR J1719-1438 b was discovered in 2009. It is located in the constellation Serpent at a distance of 3900 light years from our solar system. But what is remarkable about this planet is that, according to all calculations, it is almost entirely composed of crystalline carbon.
PSR J1719-1438 b was one of the first of its kind, but far from the only one. Today, scientists are aware of at least five such carbon planets. It is assumed that they also have an iron-containing core, but the basis of their surface is predominantly silicon and titanium carbides, as well as pure carbon. According to scientists, such planets may contain areas entirely covered with kilometers of diamonds.
Source: 3.bp.blogspot.com
Huge rain cloud
And here, without any metaphors, it is a truly gigantic accumulation of moisture, which can be conventionally called a cloud. This cloud is 10 billion light-years away and is believed to envelop a supermassive black hole. Moreover, when the term "huge" or "giant" is applied to something in space, this should be understood on a completely different scale. No, this cloud is not the size of the continent of Eurasia, for example. It is so huge that it is about 100,000 times the size of the Sun.
Source: cdn.spacetelescope.org
Cold stars
a red-hot ball, which, using a thermonuclear reaction, generates a huge amount of energy, light and heat. In any case, our native Sun is just such a star. But the truth is that some stars can have very unusual conditions for them.
Such stars, for example, are brown dwarfs. These are, so to speak, dying stars, which have almost completely used up their reserves of nuclei. Thermonuclear reactions in them are still going on, but not with such activity and not with such a strong release of heat. For example, the star WISE 1828 + 2650. She is the coldest brown dwarf known. Its surface temperature is only 25 degrees Celsius. Quite comfortable to walk around the star in shorts and a tank top.
Source: 4.bp.blogspot.com
Possible ocean of life
Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is the most likely candidate for discovering an entire ocean of extraterrestrial life. At least that's what NASA scientists think. Conditions on the surface and in the atmosphere of this satellite are extremely harsh. The average temperature is minus 170-180 degrees Celsius. In some places, methane-ethane rivers flow and even lakes are formed. Most of the surface is composed of water ice.
Nevertheless, in the findings of researchers, Titan is very often compared with our native Earth in the early stages of its development. It is not excluded that the existence of the simplest forms of life is possible on the satellite, in particular, in underground water bodies, where conditions can be much more comfortable than on the surface.
Source: news.islandcrisis.net
Lightning
Modern science is already well aware that lightning is not only an earthly phenomenon. Electric discharges have been registered in the atmospheres of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and other planets. But few people know that the most powerful lightning strikes do not occur on planets, but around black holes.
The very relativistic jets or jets that erupt from the centers of quasars, black holes and radio galaxies can in fact also be considered lightning. Extremely powerful, huge. Their nature is still very little studied. Scientists believe that such discharges are formed due to the interaction of magnetic fields with an accretion disk around a black hole or neutron star.
Source: i.space.com
Real hell
If there is real hell out there, it should definitely be the planet CoRoT-7 b. It orbits the star COROT-7 in the constellation Unicorn, which is about 489 light years away. The problem with the planet is that it is too close to its star and is always facing only one side of it.
Due to such conditions, a huge ocean of red-hot lava formed on the illuminated side of the planet. Its temperature is + 2500-2600 degrees Celsius, which is higher than the melting point of most known minerals. Therefore, almost everything on the "warm" side of the planet melted. Moreover, the entire atmosphere of CoRoT-7 b mainly consists of this evaporated rock, which then falls into colder areas in the form of rock sediments. It is assumed that this planet was once a gas giant the size of Saturn, but the star literally "boiled it off" to the core. Now it is only one and a half times the size of the Earth.
Source: imgur.com
Magnetars
Our Sun rotates around its axis in about 25 days, gradually distorting the magnetic field around itself. Now imagine a dying star, which in its death throes collapses and contracts into a tiny ball of matter. A huge, gigantic star, sometimes larger than the Sun, turns into a ball with a diameter of only a few tens of kilometers. All this time, it has been rotating faster and faster. Like a whirling ballerina who presses and spreads her arms, this star spins in the same way along with its magnetic field.
According to scientists, sometimes the magnetic field of a magnetar can be a million times stronger than that of the earth. For comparison: a magnetic field of this strength could disable your phone at a distance of hundreds of thousands of kilometers. It would seem that this is so terrible, it is enough just to keep your electronic devices away from the magnetars. But this magnetic field is so strong that it can influence matter itself, twisting atoms into thin cylinders.
Source: cdn.eso.org
Orphan planets
Even from school, everyone knows that there are stars around which the planets revolve, around which, in turn, their satellites can revolve. However, there are exceptions to all the rules. Imagine that in a huge cold space there are planets that are not tied by gravity either to the stars or to other planets. They are commonly referred to as orphan planets or wandering planets.
It is interesting that if an orphan planet is in a galaxy, then it, even without being attached to the stars, still revolves around the galactic core. Of course, the period of circulation in such cases is very long. But it may also be that the planet is in an absolutely empty intergalactic space and then it does not revolve around anything at all.
Source: ru.wikipedia.org
Time Machine
In general, the entire space and the entire Universe imagine one big time machine, in which even the distance is measured for clarity in years, light years, of course. Nevertheless, given that the size of our galaxy is about 100,000 light years, then any event that happens on one edge of it will be noticeable on the other only after 100,000 years.
But this does not mean that the speed of information propagation in the Universe is limited only by the speed of light. If you look at space in the infrared range, you can see something that has not yet happened for us. A simple example: the famous "Pillars of Creation" - a region in the Eagle Nebula. According to the Spitzer infrared telescope, the "Pillars of Creation" were destroyed by a supernova explosion approximately 6,000 years ago. But since the nebula itself is located at a distance of 7,000 light-years from Earth, we will see them for about a thousand years, although they themselves have long been gone.
Source: scoa.dk