Top 10 Weird Facts in Space That Will Scare the Crap Out of You

Only a mediocre one percent of the observable Universe has been mapped by astronomers and they have already found out some surprising and spine-chilling facts that will scare the crap out of you.

1. Gliese 581c

Planet Gliese 581c is 20 light years from Earth. It orbits a red dwarf star that has a mass around one third of that of the sun. The planet is classed as a Super Earth (exoplanets which have up to 10x the mass of Earth). It is most likely tidally locked, meaning one side of the planet is always facing its host star while the other is in constant darkness. It is thought the planet's hot side surface temperatures are similar to those on Venus.

Great, Gliese 581c is a planet that is hell on one side and a dark freezer on the other half.

2. Titan’s Lakes

Saturn’s largest moon Titan is strangely earth-like; it has mountains, valleys, rivers and lakes but that moon has a Nitrogen-rich atmosphere.

Do you fancy a swim in a river or lake made of liquefied odourless fart gas? Those rivers and lakes of Titan do not contain water but are a liquid hydrocarbon mixture of methane and ethane.

3. Boomerang Nebula

The Boomerang Nebula is officially the coldest known place in the entire Universe. colder than the frigid background temperature of space.

So why is this nebula so incredibly cold? It’s actually cooling itself off as it grows, astronomers have found.

The Boomerang Nebula is a protoplanetary nebula located 5,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. . With a temperature of just one degree Celsius above absolute zero point of minus 273 degrees Celsius, it is even colder than large parts of the rest of the universe, which are cold just minus 270 degrees Celsius. The star at the center of the Boomerang Nebula is dying because it has its hydrogen supply, consuming its fuel. It puffs up the so-called red giants and hurled with great force its gaseous envelope away. It is the only object colder than the Cosmic Microwave Background which is 3 K. The nebula was formed by the high-speed outflow of gas from the core of the star at speeds of 600,000 km/hr. The cause of the nebula’s very low temperature is due to the rapid expansion.

That expansion creates a cooling effect — similar to how expanding gas in refrigerators helps keep your ice cream from melting.

4. Planet HD 189733b

There is a planet orbiting the star HD 189733, about 60 light-years from Earth. It is less hospitable than Earth: known as HD 189733b, the planet is a giant, gaseous world resembling Jupiter, but much hotter. With a surface temperature of 1800°F (980°C), rainstorms of molten glass (yup, glass) and winds that reach 4,000 m.p.h. (6,400 k/h). It is unlikely to support life.

This super-hot glass rain is just one consequence of the close proximity between the gas giant alien planet HD189733b and its sun. Scientists said this causes day time temperatures to soar.

5. TrES-2b the Dark Planet

Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet, dubbed TrES-2b, is heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius). Planet TrES-2b reflects back less than 1% of the light it receives, making it darker than any known planet or moon, darker even than coal. It is 750 light years away, and was discovered producing slight eclipses in 2006.

In our solar system, Jupiter is swathed in bright clouds of ammonia that reflect more than a third of the sunlight reaching it. In contrast, TrES-2b lacks reflective clouds due to its high temperature.

TrES-2b star's intense light heats the planet to a temperature of more than 1,800° Fahrenheit - much too hot for ammonia clouds. Instead, its exotic atmosphere contains light-absorbing chemicals like vaporized sodium and potassium, or gaseous titanium oxide. Yet none of these chemicals fully explain the extreme blackness of TrES-2b. However, the planet is not entirely black. It's extreme heat means it gives off a faint red glow, similar to burning embers.

6. Jupiter's Moon Io

A lunar body with a non-stop extreme makeover, Io is the innermost of the four Galilean moons of the planet Jupiter. It is the fourth-largest moon. It may resemble a pizza with anchovies. It changes the fastest — its surface remakes itself more quickly than any other — and because it’s the most volcanically violent place known anywhere.

More than 100 active volcanoes dot Io’s landscape, and at least a half-dozen are always erupting. Because of the volcanic activity, Io’s atmosphere contains mostly sulphur dioxide. Io’s orbit cuts across Jupiter’s powerful magnetic lines of force, turning Io into an electric generator. As Jupiter rotates, the magnetic forces strip away about a ton (1,000 kg) of Io’s material every second. The material becomes ionized and forms a doughnut-shaped cloud of radiation called a plasma torus.

This makes Io’s surface suffer the highest radiation of any known object, as well.

7. Magnetars

A magnetar is essentially an incredibly magnetic neutron star. Neutron stars have powerful magnetic fields due to their heavily compressed cores, but a Magnetar amps this up a trillion notches, due to the fact they contain some of the densest material in the universe. Since these stars are essentially pure nuclear matter, they are so dense that a thimbleful would weigh on the order of millions of tons.

This magnetic field wouldn’t only be deadly to robots getting too close; it could easily kill a flesh and blood person even if he were 1000 km away as it would rip apart the very water molecules in the body.

The nearest magnetar is 190 quadrillion kilometers away from Earth.

8. Dark Matter

Artist's impression of the expected dark matter distribution around the Milky Way

If you piled up all of the visible objects we know of, it would only account for 5% of the universe’s total mass and at least 27% consist of what we call dark matter. This is a hypothetical kind of matter which cannot be seen by telescopes but is detected by using its gravitational and radioactive effects.

Dark Matter is a particle (or composed of particles), like electrons, quarks, protons, but fundamentally different in the way it interacts. What type of particle it is, is yet to be seen, but evidence suggests that it could be part of some completely new family of particles.

9. Wandering Black Holes

A black hole is a point in space with so much gravity that not even light (the fastest thing around) can escape. To an observer it would just appear as a sphere of perfect blackness. At the heart of a black hole is an object called a singularity, a point of zero size and infinite density. A Black Hole is an object for which nothing can get a high enough escape velocity to get away from it.

Originally, it was thought that rare super massive black holes were capable of roaming across the universe. But now we know that many more fast-moving regular black holes do exist. They are capable of traveling hundreds of millions of miles an hour sucking up anything in their path and hurling nearby objects in every direction.

10. Evil Eye Galaxy

Is it possible for a galaxy to look evil?

The Black Eye or Evil Eye galaxy gets its nicknames from the band of light-absorbing dust that appears in front of the star system's bright center. The enormous dust clouds obscuring the near-side of this galaxy’s central region are laced with the telltale reddish glow of hydrogen associated with star forming regions. Messier 64, as the Black Eye galaxy is more formally known, is thought to have taken on its sinister appearance after it collided with another galaxy perhaps a billion years ago.

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References:

www.solarsystemquick.com
www.space.com
www.cfa.harvard.edu
www.seeker.com
theness.com
blog.kaggle.com
www.werebel.net
hysicsforidiots.com
apod.nasa.gov

Pics by Google Images for noncommercial use

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