Just look outside and you’ll see all sorts of strange, self-reproducing plants and animals crawling on a blue ball of semi-molten rock covered in a thin, hard crust and covered in a thin layer of gases. All you have to do is meditate for a moment to realize that this universe is amazing.
However, our planet represents a small fraction of the strange phenomena that can be found lurking in the universe, and every day astronomers uncover new surprises. In the following lines, we take a look at some of the most strange objects in space:
Mysterious radio waves
Since 2007, researchers have been receiving extremely strong, bright radio signals lasting just a few milliseconds. These mysterious flashes are called fast radio bursts (FRBs), and they appear to be coming from billions of light-years away. Recently, scientists were able to capture a recurring FRB, which flashed six times in a row, the second such signal ever seen that could help them unravel this mystery.
Nuclear pasta
The strongest matter in the universe is formed from the remains of a dead star. According to the simulations, the protons and neutrons in the star’s contracting shell could be subjected to insane gravitational pressure, squeezing them into linguine-like tangles that would explode if 10 billion times the force required to shatter steel was applied to them.
Haumea: The dwarf planet with rings
The dwarf planet Haumea, which orbits in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, is indeed unusual. It has a strange elongated shape, two moons and a day that lasts only 4 hours, making it the fastest orbiting large object in the solar system. But in 2017, Haumea became even stranger when astronomers watched it pass in front of a star and observed very thin rings orbiting it, likely the result of a collision sometime in the distant past.
A moon has a moon
What’s better than the moon? A moon orbiting a moon, which the Internet has dubbed the Moon. Also known as submoons, monitos, grandmoons, minimoons and moons, the Moons are still only theoretical, but recent calculations suggest that there is nothing impossible in their formation. Perhaps one day astronomers will discover one.
A galaxy devoid of dark matter?
Dark matter – the unknown substance that makes up 85% of the matter in the universe – is strange. But researchers are sure of at least one thing: dark matter is everywhere. So team members were puzzled about a strange galaxy they discovered in March 2018 that appeared to contain almost no dark matter. Later work suggested that the celestial oddity actually contains dark matter, although this discovery paradoxically gave credence to an alternative theory that posits that dark matter does not exist at all. Gather together, astronomers!
The most unusual star
When astronomer Tabitha Boyajian of Louisiana State University and her colleagues first saw the star known as KIC 846285, they were astonished. Nicknamed Tabby’s Star, this object will decrease in brightness at irregular intervals and for odd periods of time, sometimes by as much as 22 percent. Various theories have been conjured, including the possibility of a strange giant structure, but at present, most researchers believe that the star is surrounded by an abnormal ring of dust that causes the darkness.
High-electric Hyperion
The title of the strangest moon in the solar system can be attributed to several celestial bodies, such as Jupiter’s hypervolcanic moon Io, and Neptune’s geyser-spewing Triton. But one of the strangest of these planets is Saturn’s Hyperion, an irregular pumice-like rock that is pockmarked with numerous craters. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which visited the Saturn system between 2004 and 2017, also found Hyperion charged with a “particle beam” of static electricity streaming into space.
Directed neutrino
The single high-energy neutrino that struck Earth on September 22, 2017, was not, on its own, exceptional. Physicists at the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica see neutrinos with similar energy levels at least once a month. But this one was special because it was the first to arrive with enough information about its origin so astronomers could point telescopes in the direction it came from. They discovered that it had been blasted to Earth 4 billion years ago by a supernova, a massive black hole at the center of a galaxy that was consuming the surrounding material.
Living fossil galaxy
It is an ultra-diffuse galaxy (UDG), meaning it is as large as a galaxy like the Milky Way but its stars are spread out so thinly that they are almost invisible. But when scientists saw the ghostly DGSAT 1 in 2016, they noticed that it was sitting completely alone, unlike other UDGs, which are usually found in groups. Its characteristics suggest that the faint object formed during a completely different era in the universe, just a billion years or so after the Big Bang, making DGSAT 1 a living fossil.
Image of a double quasar
Large objects bend light enough that it can distort the image of objects behind them. When researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar from the early universe, they used it to estimate the expansion rate of the universe, and found that it is expanding faster today than it did then, a finding that is inconsistent with other measurements. Now physicists need to find out if their theories are wrong or if something else strange is going on.
Infrared flux from space
Neutron stars are extremely dense objects that form after the death of a normal star. They typically emit radio waves or higher-energy radiation such as X-rays, but in September 2018, astronomers detected a long stream of infrared light coming from a neutron star 800 light-years from Earth, something that had never been observed before. The researchers suggested that a disk of dust surrounding the neutron star could generate the signal, but a final explanation has yet to be found.
Rogue planet with aurora borealis
Rogue planets are drifting across the galaxy, thrown away from their parent star by gravitational forces. One special feature in this category is known as SIMP J01365663+0933473, a planet-sized object 200 light-years away whose magnetic field is more than 200 times stronger than Jupiter’s. This is powerful enough to generate flashing auroras in its atmosphere, which can be seen with radio telescopes.
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Giant animals… Will the universe surprise us with recent discoveries?
