The cosmos is full of secrets that a person is just beginning to reveal. NASA and other space organizations of the world annually launch satellites to look deep into space and find answers to unresolved questions. In the process of space exploration, many strange things have been discovered that are amazing. Let's take a short trip to the mysterious galaxies and learn about the strangest and most amazing things that scientists have found in the vast expanses of the universe.
1
Galaxy sombrero
The Sombrero Galaxy is a spiral galaxy located 28 million light-years from our planet. In the center of the galaxy is a supermassive black hole surrounded by a giant disk of gas-dust substances. According to scientists, the mass of the black hole is estimated at about 1 billion stars. This makes it one of the most massive known black holes. For example, the mass of the largest black hole in the center of our galaxy is 4.3 million solar masses.
Due to the high density, active star formation occurs at the center of the Sombrero galaxy, which leads to increased luminosity. Outwardly, the galaxy resembles a Mexican hat, which is why it got its name. This galaxy is considered the brightest known. And she's pretty photogenic, isn't she?
2
Very big stars
In the picture: the comparative dimensions of the Earth and the Sun.
Our Sun (🌞) is 109 times larger than the Earth in size and occupies 99% of the total mass of the Solar System. If we put the Sun and the Earth near, then we will not even immediately see this tiny point.
Now you can imagine such an object, which is 1,500 times larger than our luminary. A star called VY Canis Major is one of the brightest and has a diameter of about 1.9 billion kilometers and is 3900 light years from us.
According to some reports, the radius of this star can reach 2100🌞. And this means that if it were in the place of our luminary, with its volume it would fill the orbit of Saturn, which is 9 times the orbit of the Earth. For example, let's say that if the diameter of VY Bolshoi Dog was 28 meters (the height of a 9-story building), then the diameter of the Sun would be about 1.5 centimeters. Surprisingly, with such dimensions, the star has a mass of 17🌞.
By the way, about the most beautiful and unusual stars in the Universe, our site most-beauty.ru has an interesting article.
3
Space dragon
In 2009, the Hubble telescope captured a stunning dragon-shaped mirage formed by spiral galaxies together. From us to the space dragon, 10 billion light-years. This is a normal spiral galaxy, but its light rays bend on the way to Earth due to the gravity of an intermediate cluster of galaxies, creating the illusion of an extended galaxy. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing.
4
Snail nebula
In the photo: Snail Nebula in different light spectra
The Helix Nebula is a huge interstellar cloud of dust, helium, hydrogen and other gases. This nebula is also called the "God's eye" or "Cat's eye." Incredibly beautiful object is 650 light-years from Earth.
This is nothing but the remains of an exploding star, the spectral class to which our Sun belongs. The star threw off its excess shell, and became a white dwarf. And the shell turned into a nebula moving from the star at a speed of about 31 km / s. The diameter of the nebula is 2.5 light years. It is easy to calculate that the explosion occurred a little more than 10 thousand years ago.
5
Giant Butterfly Effect
In the photo: Planetary nebula NGC 6302 (Beetle nebula, Butterfly nebula). Hubble telescope. 2009
The butterfly effect in space is a kind of consequence in which a small change on the one hand leads to big changes on the other. It recalls the waves that occur after a stone is thrown into the water. Under certain conditions, when a star is destroyed, a huge amount of gas and dust is released, reminding us of the wings of a butterfly. A very beautiful and difficult to understand phenomenon.
By the way, we have written an article with many photos about the most beautiful butterflies in the world.
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Asteroid with rings
On the picture: Comparative sizes of the centaur Hariklo, Pluto and the Moon.
Not so long ago, in March 2014, astronomers announced the discovery of an asteroid with rings in the solar system. The centaur (10199) Hariklo turned out to be such an asteroid. Its diameter is 257 kilometers and it is located between the orbits of Uranus and Saturn. Its rings are very dense and formed of ice. It has at least 2 rings 7 and 3 kilometers thick, 391 and 405 kilometers away from the center of the asteroid.
7
Hyper speed stars
The speed of hyper speed stars is very high. It exceeds the rotation speed of the galaxy in which such a star is located. The speed of such stars can be equal to 1000 or more kilometers per second. Scientists were able to detect only 20 of these hypersonic stars.
There are several reasons for the appearance of such stars. Most often, stars receive significant speed as a result of the destruction of one star from a system of binary or triple stars.
In addition, some of the single stars can develop such a speed when traveling at a close distance from the black hole.
Star US 708 is hyper speed. It has the highest speed in our galaxy - 1200 km per second. What so dispersed her? It turns out she used to be in a binary system of stars that were very close to each other. Over time, one of the stars absorbed the substance of the other, until it exploded, giving the second an unprecedented speed. Over time, US 708 will leave the borders of our galaxy.
Can a star accelerate even more? Theoretically, yes! According to scientists, with a certain passage of a star next to a system of two supermassive black holes, a star can accelerate to several tens of thousands of kilometers per second. Just imagine. And if such a star has a planetary system with the presence of intelligent life, then what will it be like for these inhabitants to be intergalactic travelers!
8
Mickey Mouse Crater
Sometimes scientists compare space finds with terrestrial objects. So, in the southern hemisphere of Mercury, a huge spot was discovered that looks like the face of Mickey Mouse. This picture is a lot of craters that are collected on an area of 105 kilometers. The photo was received from the Messenger spacecraft on June 4, 2012, and on June 16 it appeared in the public domain.
9
Martian face
In 1976, astronomers managed to get a very interesting and strange photo from the surface of Mars, over which controversy still has not ceased. A huge face resembling a human is visible on it. This photo was a gift to ufologists and lovers of secret and mystical stories, many called the unusual object the “Martian Sphinx”. The photo captures the region of Kydonia, located in the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet. The amazing location of the table mountains in combination with the direction of the sun's rays created such an unusual illusion. It turned out that this is just a beautiful optical illusion created by the hills.
And here is a photograph of the “Martian Sphinx”, taken in 2001. As you can see, she has nothing to do with her face.
10
Triple black hole
It is believed that all galaxies have supermassive black holes in the center. For example, in our galaxy, there are at least two of them. And thousands more small black holes revolve around the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers have found a galaxy with three supermassive black holes. Disputes arose immediately in the scientific community. Some astrologer scientists have suggested that the three black holes are just an illusion, but their assumptions have not been confirmed. Now this phenomenon is being carefully studied.
And what exactly did scientists observe, and how did they make out black holes? In fact, they observed in relative proximity three amazing space objects - they were quasars. These incredibly bright objects glow due to gas falling into huge black holes located in the centers of galaxies. Although the quasar is smaller than our solar system, it alone can eclipse a galaxy of one hundred billion stars.
In recent years, about 100,000 quasars have been observed, some of which were double. But for the first time, three quasars were discovered that were so close to each other. Three quasars are separated by a distance from 100,000 to 150,000 light years, which corresponds to the width of our Milky Way, i.e. they are within the same galaxy.
In the picture: quasar's art image
“Quasars are extremely rare objects. Finding two of them so close together is very unlikely if they were randomly distributed in space, ”said research supervisor George Jorgowski, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology,“ to find three is unprecedented. ”
One of the quasars in the triplet, called LBQS 1429-008, was discovered in 1989 by a group of astronomers led by Paul Hewitt of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge.
Hewitt’s team later noticed what seemed like a weak companion to their quasar, but they rejected it as a visual illusion created by gravitational lensing, when light moving toward the Earth from distant galaxies bends under the influence of gravity of massive objects such as star clusters clumps of dark matter or other galaxies encountered in their path. Sometimes this can create mirror images of the galaxy in one or more different places in the sky.
Quasar structure
But new observations revealed the third, even weaker companion of the Hewitt quasar duo and, no less important, the absence of any galaxy that could have the effect of lensing. The team also observed slight differences in the properties of the three quasars, which are best explained if the quasars are physically different objects.
Double quasars are thought to form when two galaxies, each of which contains its own supermassive black holes, merge together. Although combining two black holes is thought to simply create a large black hole, the merger of the three black holes is expected to be more exciting and interesting.
“Three is much better than two, because the dynamics of the three gravitationally interacting bodies are chaotic, in contrast to the much more regular movement of two bodies just spinning around each other,” said Frederick Racio of Northwestern University in Illinois.
Razio did not participate in the observations of the triple quasar, but his team recently performed theoretical work, showing that interactions between three supermassive black holes can occur several times a year in the observed universe.
Racio's work also predicts that triple collisions between quasars can throw one or two quasars at tremendous speed out of the galaxy.
The discovery of the triple quasar gives astronomers a rare idea of the early and much more chaotic period of the universe. The quasar trio is located at a distance of about 10.5 billion light-years in the constellation Virgo. This means that light from those quasars that astronomers now see was emitted when the universe was a little over 3 billion years old. In that early era, the universe was much smaller; galaxies were also smaller and collided much more often.
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Unicorn nebula
The Unicorn Nebula or the Triphid Nebula is another large cloud of mixed gases. As the name implies, it looks like a mythical creature - a unicorn. Here is such a strange nebula among millions of others in infinite space. You can find it in the constellation Sagittarius, and it is removed from us at a distance of 2 to 9 thousand light years.
12
Horsehead Nebula
Continuing the theme of unusual nebulae, we consider a dark nebula in the constellation Orion. Perhaps we will not describe this beautiful object much, but simply admire its photo.
By the way, on our site most-beauty.ru you can see photos of the most beautiful horses in the world.
13
Magnetar
A magnetar is a rare type of neutron star that has an extremely powerful magnetic field. Because of this, the star decays, forming electromagnetic flows from gas and dust. It has the form of several hyperbole. The first case of magnetar was recorded in 1979. Then they began to look for an explanation of the data obtained, and in 1992 they first introduced the theoretical model of the magnetar, which was confirmed by subsequent studies. Today, science knows a little more than a dozen confirmed magnetars. Surprisingly, a single flash of such an object lasting a fraction of a second is capable of releasing energy equal to that which the Sun releases within one year.
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>>> PART 2. The most amazing things in space <<<