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5 Things Found in Space Guaranteed to Blow Your Mind
Space is a fascinating place. Our planet alone is a wonder, but there have been many mind-bending discoveries which have been made in space. Here’s our list of 5 of the craziest things that have been found in space:
The Diamond Planet – The planet known as 55 Cancri e is two times the size of Earth and a 1/3 of it is made up of diamond. That’s right, a planet sized space diamond.
This phenomenon occurred when the bigger part of a binary star (two stars that are close to each other) exploded, causing a supernova, leaving behind a pulsating star and a white dwarf, which was lost matter but kept its carbon core, and eventually was cannibalised by the pulsating star, allowing it crystallise and turn into diamond inside the star.
Gravitational Lensing – Gravity as we all know, is the force which keeps us and everything (well, most things around us) grounded.
However, in space it has a few different properties than here on Earth, one of them is the ability to bend light around objects. Dubbed “gravitational lensing” by scientists, these lenses magnify distant galaxies and even projects “holograms” of them, making one galaxy for example, seem like three.
Hypervelocity Stars – As if you thought stars couldn’t get any more cosmic.
Hypervelocity Stars are giant balls of gas and energy which can be as big as four times the size of our own sun and are created when a star system is sucked into a Supermassive Black Hole and ejects the energy back at a speed of up to 2,000,000 miles per hour.
The picture below shows six Hypervelocity Stars that were ejected from a black hole at the heart of our galaxy just three years ago.
The Large Quasar Group – Also known as the LQG, the Large Quasar Group is made up of a whopping 73 Supermassive Black Holes, whereas normal quasars are usually made up of one and has been dubbed the “largest and most massive known structure in the known universe” since its discovery in 2012.
Spanning over 4 billion light-years in diameter (compared to our galaxy which is a measly 100,000 light-years in diameter) the LQG is so huge that it breaks the laws of modern astronomy which states that the maximum size of any cosmic structure should be 1.2 billion light-years in diameter.
Rogue Planets – If supermassive black holes, hypervelocity stars and diamond planets haven’t blown your mind yet, then this next one if sure to. Rogue Planets.
The eight planets (or nine if you include Pluto) in our solar system are not the only ones, despite what many people think.
Rogue Planets are planets that don’t orbit around anything and fly through space until they’re stopped by something. As interesting as it sounds, you should also bear in mind that they’re about the size of Jupiter (some bigger) and there are around 200 billion of them in the universe and they pass through our galaxy every single day, that's more than the number of stars there are in the universe.
