10 Most Mysterious Space Discoveries!
By: Randomly Useful
Tags: Space, Discovery, Mystery, Strange, Top 10

10 Most Mysterious Space Discoveries!

1. The Martian spoon

Image from Space.com highlighting the martian spoon.

Scientists hunting for evidence of life on Mars have resorted to all manner of arcane methodologies like reading the flow patterns on long-dried riverbeds and blasting rocks with lasers to identify their chemical makeup. But really the answer was hiding in the plain sight rover that snapped this. Curiosity rover snapped this shot of what’s clearly a discarded spoon. Does it point to the existence of a long-perished soup-loving civilisation, we can’t know for sure but either way it’s a stirring image.

2. 55 Cancri e

Image from clubrunner.com

One especially flashy exoplanet, 55 Cancri e is believed to be made up entirely of crystallised diamond. If you were to buy one as the ultimate interplanetary accessory, it would set you back an estimated $26.9 Nonillion dollars, more money than that has ever existed in the history of the world. Apparently formed when one of two stars in a binary system began to cannibalise each other putting its carbon core under intense heat and pressure, the resulting planet is twice the size of our world with eight times the mass and a trillion times the flex value.

3. Saturn’s Hexagon

Image from nuclearrambo.com

Since the voyager mission which first sashayed past Saturn back in 1981, astronomers have been perplexed by an unexpected regular hexagon shape that sits on the ringed planet’s north pole. Its sides are each about 14,500 kilo meters long, longer than the diameter of the earth. And the 2006 Cassini mission revealed the hexagon even changing colour from subtle blue to burning gold.

Nobody’s entirely sure what’s going on but a team from oxford university suggests, such geometric shapes can form when two different rotating fluid bodies move at dissimilar speeds.

A team from Harvard reckon the answer comes from deep within the planet itself in the form of deep zonal jets thousands of kilo meters down where pressure is tens of thousands of times greater and the planet’s rotation and topography creates freaky shapes. Fact is it’s a bit of a mystery.

4. The Planet From Hell

Image from universetoday.com

In 2007 stargazers got all worked up by the discovery of an earth-like exoplanet called Gliese 581. Located pretty much in our backyard, a little over 20 light years away in the constellation libra, Gliese 581 orbits a friendly red dwarf star and could, in all likelihood harbour liquid water.

Alas Glieser 581, on closer inspection seems to be tidally locked, meaning one side always faces the sun while the other constantly points to the inky blackness of space. This means one half of the previously promising world is infernally hot and the other devastatingly chilly. Life could hypothetically live in the narrow strip around the edge where it’s neither too hot nor too cold but this is purely speculative. The property values on that bit would be insane anyway.

5. Fast Radio Bursts

Image from space.com

Since 2007, researchers have observed intensely strong bright repeating radio signals emanating from an unknown source billions of light years away beyond the edge of the milky way. These Fast Radio Bursts or FRBS last for mere milliseconds and have befuddled scientists who variously attribute them to colliding black holes or signs from distant technologically advanced civilisation.

Well to be seen at such range, they need to be releasing as much energy in a tiny fraction of a second as our sun does in nearly a century. One particular burst FRB121102 repeated itself some 93 time on one day in august 2017, possibly indicating a rapidly rotating neutron star or some manner of extraterrestrial morse code. Definitely aliens then.

6. The Cocktail Nebula

Image from mentalfloss.com

58 Quadrillion miles away in the neighbourhood of the constellation of Aquila, a vast cloud, 1000 times the diameter of the solar system contains enough ethyl alcohol to fill 400 trillion trillion pints of beer. This is exciting, not just because it sounds like a sweet party but because alcohol is an organic compound and this offers a tantalising hint of the possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Best of all, the cloud appears to comprise ethyl formate, a compound that helps give raspberries their taste. It will be great to visit one day.

7. Gigantic Space Reservoirs

Image from pintrest.com , screenshot from google.

12 billion light years away, there lies a quasar. Inside this quasar is a blackhole which is 20 billion times as massive as our sun. As a byproduct of its diet gobbling unimaginable quantities of dust and gas, the blackhole belches out as much energy as a thousand trillion suns. One manifestation of all that chemistry is a colossal reservoir of actual water vapour. Holding somewhere between north of 140 trillion times the amount of water in the Earth’s oceans.

8. Tabby’s Star

Image from scientificamerican.com

When Astronomer Tabitha Boyajian of Louisiana State University first clapped eyes on this object roughly one and a half thousand light years away in the constellation Cygnus, she knew something was amiss. The star known then by its romantic official name KIC846285 was dimming by upto a quarter of its brightness at unusual and irregular intervals. What’s so weird about that? Distant stars sim all the time. For instance when orbiting, bodies like planets pass between it and us. But normal dimming are regular and predictable.

Tabby’s star dips at irregular seemingly random intervals. Some have excitedly claimed this points to extraterrestrial activity, perhaps some manner of advanced alien civilisation constructing a giant Dyson sphere around all or part of that star to harness its energy.

Image of Dr. Tabitha from americanscientist.com

However Tabby (Tabitha) herself is more conservative arguing the star is probably being partially eclipsed by more humdrum objects like the remnants of a destroyed moon. Inspired by Tabby, astronomers have since identified a number of similar dipper stars whose lights dims at mysterious intervals.

Edward Schmidt, professor of astronomy at the university of Nebraska-Lincoln has identified no fewer than 21. Excitedly noting, they all seem to be roughly the same age and mass as the sun. Lending credence to the theory that it’s really little green men. “Extraterrestrial intelligence is a low probability explanation but it’s a possibility.” he said. And the search for extraterrestrial intelligence(SETI) people ought to be looking at these stars.

9. The Rouge Glow-World

A highly unusual planet known catchily as SIMP J01365663+0933473 has been observed drifting about 20 light years away untethered from its parent star. Nearly 13 times the mass of Jupiter is not only a big land but its magnetic field is some four million times the intensity of that on earth which means this rouge world is attracting a lot of attention as it meanders on its lonely journey around the milky way.

10. Przybylski’s Star

Perhaps the weirdest star a.k.a HD 101065 has been studied since the 1960’s for its bizarre chemical makeup. It’s discoverer Juan Antonie Schubelski observed signs of strontium and all 15 rare earth elements, not to mention short-lived elements like neptunium, plutonium and curium. As the star has been around for millions of years, these should have long since burned away.

Image from wikipedia.com

So what’s the deal, conventional astrophysicist believe the rare elements are elevated to the surface consistency on a sort of conveyor system powered by magnetic fields and radiation pressure from deep inside the star. Or the star basically ingested a planet rich in rare elements.

The most compelling hypothesis is that those radioactive elements were dumped there by a nearby civilisation in much the same way some mad visionaries on earth propose shooting our own nuclear waste into the sun. What could go wrong eh.