The Boomerang Nebula is located in the constellation Centaurus at a distance of 5000 light years from Earth. The temperature of the nebula is −272 °C, which makes it the coldest famous place in the Universe.
The gas flow coming from the central star of the Boomerang Nebula moves at a speed of 164 km/s and is constantly expanding. Because of this rapid expansion, the temperature in the nebula is so low. The Boomerang Nebula is cooler than even the relic radiation from the Big Bang.
Keith Taylor and Mike Scarrott named the object the Boomerang Nebula in 1980 after observing it with the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. The sensitivity of the instrument made it possible to detect only a small asymmetry in the lobes of the nebula, which gave rise to the assumption of a curved shape, like a boomerang.
The Boomerang Nebula was photographed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998, after which it was realized that the nebula was shaped like a bow tie, but this name had already been taken.
R136a1 lies 165,000 light-years from Earth in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This blue hypergiant is the most massive star known to science. The star is also one of the brightest, emitting up to 10 million times more light than the Sun.
The star's mass is 265 solar masses, and its formation mass was more than 320. R136a1 was discovered by a team of astronomers from the University of Sheffield led by Paul Crowther on June 21, 2010.
The question of the origin of such supermassive stars still remains unclear: whether they were formed with such a mass initially, or whether they formed from several smaller stars.
Pictured from left to right: red dwarf, Sun, blue giant, and R136a1:
Space is full of bizarre and even scary phenomena, from stars that suck the life out of their own kind to giant black holes that are billions of times larger and more massive than our Sun. Below are the scariest places in outer space.
1. Milky Way
The scariest places in the Universe are the galaxies in which hypernovae are born.
A hypernova or hypernova is a supernova of gigantic size (mass exceeding 20 solar masses) that exploded as a result of core collapse. The explosion occurs as a result of the fact that the supply of fuel necessary to maintain thermonuclear reactions in the core of a supermassive star is depleted.
The birth of a hypernova is accompanied by an explosion that is tens of times greater than the power of a supernova explosion.
Incredible but true: a hypernova located at a distance of 3,000 light years from Earth can easily destroy all living organisms on our planet, including even bacteria.
The closest candidate to us for the title of hypernova is the hypergiant star Eta Carinae.
This Carinae has already gained a mass of 100-150 Suns close to critical and will soon shake the Milky Way with an explosion of unknown power.
At the moment, Eta Carinae is one of the brightest celestial bodies in the Milky Way, whose luminosity is currently 5 million times higher than the Sun.
The hypergiant star is surrounded by two nebulae: a large one - NGC 3372 (Carina Nebula) and a small one - Homunculus, which formed quite recently.
And now good news, despite the fact that Eta Carinae is located in our galaxy, it is separated from us by 7500-8000 light years, and therefore, its degeneration will not be able to have a significant negative impact on the inhabitants of planet Earth.
2. Planet hell
A shower of molten stones pours from the sky, and oceans of lava bubble peacefully on the surface, silently echoed by the dark ice of the endless desert. Welcome to Hell, which astronomers have officially named CoRoT-7b.
This scary world, discovered in 2009, became the first super-dense exoplanet discovered by scientists.
The inferno, called CoRoT-7b, orbits a star slightly smaller than our Sun and is 489 light-years from Earth.
The planet CoRoT-7b is too close to its star and always turns one side towards it, as a result of which it was divided into two completely different worlds: in one, oceans of lava are seething, the temperature in which does not drop below 2500 ° C, and the other, deprived of the attention of the alien Sun, is immersed in darkness and shackled in ice.
The atmosphere of this planet consists mainly of evaporated rocks, which fall on the dark and illuminated sides of the planet in the form of hot rock sediments.
3. Planetary Nebula “Little Ghost”
As a rule, amateur astronomers begin their acquaintance with the wonderful world of the vast cosmos by aiming their telescopes at the Little Ghost Nebula.
The official name of this nebula, which is located in the constellation Ophiuchus, at a distance of ~6 light years from Earth, is NGC 6369.
From Earth, the “Little Ghost” looks like a ghostly haze of multi-colored clouds surrounding a celestial body that died thousands of years ago - a star that was never able to degenerate into a supernova.
Under the influence of ultraviolet radiation from stars, the gas cloud ionizes - the splitting of atoms into electrons and ions. As a result, a bright blue-green ring formed around the white dwarf. The red areas at the edges of the nebula are the result of insufficient ionization.
NGC 6369 is called a planetary nebula because it formed from an envelope of gas. dead star solar type, the core of which has collapsed into a white dwarf. With the death of the alien Sun, its attraction also disappeared, holding the planets orbiting around it (if there were any), which scattered in all directions throughout the Universe.
The Little Ghost Nebula is a visual representation of what our planetary system will look like in 5 billion years, when the Sun reaches the peak of its evolutionary development and ejects surface gases into space, from which a giant nebula will form.
4. Eye of Sauron
In 2008, astronomers announced that using the Hubble Space Telescope they were able to look into the Eye of Sauron, where they discovered a new planet.
No, they didn’t go crazy, and the ‘Eye of Sauron’ really exists in the form of an unofficial name for a very real space object in the constellation Pisces.
The brightest star in the constellation Pisces, Fomalhaut, commonly known as the Eye of Sauron, is located 25 light years from our planet.
The fiery 'iris' is a dense ring of planet-forming material (gases and cosmic dust), and the pupil is a gas giant, like Jupiter, Fomalhaut b.
5. Zombie Star
When a yellow dwarf dies, it grows in size and eventually sheds its surface gaseous envelope, leaving behind a dead celestial body called a white dwarf.
But sometimes the space dead comes back to life by devouring the stars around it.
Such stars are classified as la supernovae, but astronomers often simply call them “zombies.”
‘Zombies’ are born when white dwarfs begin to absorb huge amounts of matter around them (other stars, space debris and even planets). After some time (from several hundred to thousands of years), they gain a critical mass, and a powerful explosion occurs, followed by rebirth.
In the photo on the left you can see everything that remains after the explosion of the supernova Tycho, which has just begun its rebirth into la supernovae.
6. "Bat" by Orion
In March 2010, astronomers from the European Southern Observatory managed to peer into the darkest corner of the Orion constellation and take an amazing photo of the 'space bat' nebula NGC 1788.
Unlike other nebulae, which illuminate the darkness of the vacuum of space thanks to heated gases, in NGC 1788 a ghostly glow is emitted by cold gases and cosmic dust, which reflect and scatter light from the young star hidden inside the gas cloud.
The bright bat face at the center of the nebula and the gas wings extending from it in different directions appeared after a filter of three wavelengths of visible light was applied to the image taken by ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.
7. Black holes are cannibals
In the depths of the black heart of the galaxy NGC 3393, two gigantic monsters are hiding, frantically devouring each other.
In August 2011, scientists at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory released an image of a spiral galaxy in the center of which two supermassive black holes are raging at a distance of 490 light-years from each other.
Astronomers believe that NGC 3393 swallowed up a less massive galaxy, from which it inherited a second black hole. And today these two giant ‘beasts’ are desperately fighting each other, because... eventually only one of them will be able to remain in the galaxy.
Planet Earth and the galaxy NGC 3393 are separated by a distance of 160 million light years.
8. Black Widow Nebula.
A giant gas cloud shaped like a spider in an infrared image taken by NASA's space telescopeNational Aeronautics and Space Administration, an agency owned by federal government USA, reporting directly to the Vice President of the USA and financed 100% from state budget, responsible for the country's civil space program. All images and video obtained by NASA and its affiliates, including from numerous telescopes and interferometers, are published in the public domain and may be freely copied. NASA's Spitzer has spread its networks in the constellation Circinus.
The gas cloud, which astronomers have dubbed the Black Widow Nebula, is teeming with clusters of massive and supermassive stars that have formed a small yellow area at the very center of this godforsaken corner of the Universe.
The Black Widow Nebula is located 10,000 light years from Earth.
The radiation coming from the stars affects the gases surrounding them, driving them towards the center of the nebula, as a result of which the gas cloud acquired a massive body and thin legs, giving it an incredible resemblance to the species of spiders living on our planet.
9. Vampire stars
Fans of the Twilight saga will be glad to know that in the vastness of the Milky Way there are real space vampires - blue stragglers that maintain their existence by sucking the life out of young stars.
Blue stragglers are most often found in dense star clusters.
Scientists believe that stragglers absorb the gases of their closest neighbors, allowing the tiny, aging celestial bodies to gain mass and extend their lives by hundreds of millions of years.
Ecology
Space is full of bizarre and even scary phenomena, from stars that suck the life out of their own kind to giant black holes that are billions of times larger and more massive than our Sun. Below are the scariest things in outer space.
The planet is a ghost
Many astronomers said that the huge planet Fomalhaut B had sunk into oblivion, but apparently it is alive again.
Back in 2008, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope announced the discovery of a huge planet orbiting the very bright star Fomalhaut, located just 25 light-years from Earth. Other researchers later questioned this discovery, saying that the scientists had actually discovered the giant dust cloud being imaged.
However, according to the latest data obtained from Hubble, the planet is being discovered again and again. Other experts are carefully studying the system surrounding the star, so the zombie planet may be buried more than once before a final verdict is made on this issue.
Zombie stars
Some stars literally come back to life in brutal and dramatic ways. Astronomers classify these zombie stars as Type Ia supernovae, which produce huge and powerful explosions that send the stars' "innards" out into the universe.
Type Ia supernovae explode from binary systems that consist of at least one white dwarf—a tiny, superdense star that has stopped undergoing nuclear fusion. White dwarfs are "dead", but in this form they cannot remain in the binary system.
They can return to life, albeit briefly, in a giant supernova explosion, sucking the life out of their companion star or by merging with it.
Stars are vampires
Just like vampires in fiction, some stars manage to stay young by sucking the life force out of hapless victims. These vampire stars are known as "blue stragglers," and they "look" much younger than the neighbors with whom they were formed.
When they explode, the temperature is much higher and the color is “much bluer.” Scientists believe this is the case because they are sucking huge amounts of hydrogen from nearby stars.
Giant black holes
Black holes may seem like the stuff of science fiction - they are extremely dense, and their gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape if it gets close enough to them.
But these are very real objects that are quite common throughout the Universe. In fact, astronomers believe that supermassive black holes are at the center of most, if not all galaxies, including our Milky Way. Supermassive black holes are mind-boggling in size. Scientists recently discovered two black holes, each with the mass of 10 billion of our Suns.
Incomprehensible cosmic blackness
If you are afraid of the dark, then being in deep space is definitely not for you. It is a place of “utter blackness,” far removed from the comforting lights of home. Outer space is black, according to scientists, because it is empty.
Despite trillions of stars scattered throughout space, many molecules are at great distances from each other to interact and scatter.
Spiders and witch's brooms
The skies are populated with witches, glowing skulls and all-seeing eyes, in fact you can imagine any object. We see all of these forms in a diffuse collection of glowing gas and dust called nebulae that are scattered throughout the Universe.
The visual images that appear before us are examples of a special phenomenon in which the human brain recognizes the shapes of random images.
Killer asteroids
The phenomena listed in the previous paragraph may be creepy or take an abstract form, but they do not pose a threat to humanity. The same cannot be said about large asteroids that fly close to Earth.
Experts say that an asteroid 1 kilometer wide has the power to destroy our planet upon impact. And even an asteroid as small as 40 meters in size can cause serious harm if it hits a populated area.
The influence of an asteroid is one of the factors that affects life on Earth. It is likely that 65 million years ago it was an asteroid 10 kilometers in size that destroyed the dinosaurs. Fortunately for us, scientists are scanning celestial rocks, and there are ways to redirect dangerous space rocks away from Earth, if, of course, the danger is detected in time.
Active sun
The sun gives us life, but our star is not always so good. It experiences serious storms from time to time, which can have a potentially destructive effect on radio communications, satellite navigation and power grids.
Recently, such solar flares have been observed especially often, because the sun has entered its particularly active phase of the 11-year cycle. Researchers expect solar activity to peak in 2013.
How many times on a warm summer evening have we raised our heads up and admired the flickering dots in the sky. How many times have you dreamed of being outside the Earth and seeing with your own eyes the frozen and beautiful Universe. It has been attracting people for thousands of years, forcing them to overcome gravity and make a breakthrough in scientific thinking.
The universe is beautiful. But she is not as sweet and safe as she seems at first glance.
The sun is our life and our death
The sun is the heart of our system. This is a huge nuclear reactor, the energy of which is enough for life to flourish on an entire planet. The boiling sea of gas is mesmerizingly beautiful, but it is a deadly beauty.The surface temperature of the Sun reaches five thousand degrees Celsius, and the temperature at its center can be more than tens of millions of degrees.
Loops of burning gas - a consequence of the planet's electrical activity - extend thousands of kilometers beyond the Sun. These prominences are not just a beautiful sight. They carry a huge amount of radiation into space, from which the Earth's magnetic field protects us.
The energy generated by one prominence is more than the energy of 10 million earthly volcanoes. And the planet Earth will easily pass through such a loop, leaving some free space.
If airlines ever agree to make interplanetary flights, those who wish to do so will have to fly to the Sun for 20 years.
The sun is our life and our death. Today, thanks to its energy, thousands of life forms thrive on our planet. But everything comes to an end someday. The sun will die, most likely becoming a white dwarf. Even if it does not consume our planet, then its light and heat will not be enough to support life on Earth.
Comets - deadly messengers of life
Comets are free roamers of our Universe. These are small cosmic bodies that revolve around stars. The comet is a beautiful sight. The gaze is drawn to her “tail”. But this is just dust and evaporating ice, which is heated by the rays of the Sun.Scientists substantiate the theory according to which life on our planet originated thanks to comets. After all, where there is water, there is life. It is believed that the comets that crashed into the Earth during its formation brought with them water and biological material, which became the building base for all life on Earth.
But today comets are a threat to our existence. If one of them crashes into the Earth, life in all its forms could end forever.
Asteroids are insidious killers
Asteroids are the nomads of our solar system. These are fragments of dead planets. These are bodies whose mass is less than that of planets, they have an irregular shape, no atmosphere, but may have satellites.An encounter with an asteroid can be fatal for the planet. Both small and large, they pose a threat to humanity. Large asteroids are easier to detect, but even if a cosmic body with a diameter of more than three kilometers crashes into the Earth, an entire civilization may perish.
Scientists suggest that this is how dinosaurs became extinct on Earth.
Supernova - death and rebirth
Stars are like people, they live and die. When there is not enough fuel for a nuclear reaction, the star becomes unstable. Its core splits and deadly energy bursts out.The death of a star is an extraordinary and very dangerous spectacle. The upper layers of the star and radiation are ejected into space for many millions of kilometers. Emissions of deadly particles would destroy all life in its path.
If the star explosion had been relatively close to the Earth, we would not have been able to survive the catastrophic consequences of radiation on living beings.
But in the Universe nothing is wasted. There is order in this chaos. During a supernova explosion, new stars are formed chemical elements. These particles are building material for new forms of life. Calcium in our bones, iron in our blood, air in our lungs - these are the elements of a once dead star, the death of which gave life to new forms of habitation.
Black hole - incredible gravitational force
A black hole is a consequence of a deceased star with a huge mass. Black holes are the most mysterious inhabitants of space. The attraction of this object is so strong that nothing can escape from its embrace, not even light. Scientists can only guess what is inside the black hole.According to many theories, there is no time, space or matter inside, and all the laws of physics cease to exist. Many people think that a black hole pulls in everything that gets in its way. But this is not entirely true. There is a certain distance - the event horizon. If you get further beyond its boundaries, nothing will be able to escape from the deadly embrace of the black hole.
There is an assumption that our entire Galaxy may be inside a huge black hole. But to imagine this, imagination alone is not enough, and the mind may be shaken.
Pulsar - a cosmic mystery
Pulsars can be called distant relatives of black holes, because they were also formed after the death of a star. The star's core shrank so much that it became a small, bright star.Despite their size, pulsars have powerful energy. The radiation on the pulsar is greater than on the Sun.
The pulsar rotates incredibly fast - approximately 30 revolutions per second. It is incredibly dense. Just a teaspoon of the substance can weigh hundreds of millions of tons. The pulsar's magnetic field is several trillion times greater than that of Earth.
Nebulae - frozen music of the Universe
Nebulae are frozen clouds of cosmic gas and dust. This is an incredibly beautiful sight. Nebulae can rightfully be considered a star production factory, since they contain all the necessary elements for the construction of new stars. They are just waiting for the wave from the explosion of the star to push them into motion.Nebulae are located at incredible distances from Earth - thousands of light years. This is so far away that it is difficult for our minds to imagine these numbers.
Quasars - chronicles of light years gone by
A quasar is the most distant and deadliest object in the Universe. It is brighter than hundreds of galaxies. At its center is a huge black hole that is larger than billions of suns. Quasars release incredible amounts of energy. There are suggestions that quasars can emit up to a hundred times more energy than all the stars in our galaxy, and this is in a relatively small area of space.A quasar moves through space at incredible speeds - about 80% of the speed of light.
Quasars are a window into the past. After all, their light took millions of years to reach us. Some of them may no longer exist.
The universe is beautiful. It fascinates with its secrets, power and scale. Who are we by cosmic standards? Not even ants or grains of sand.
Our solar system located on the outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy, far from important events and breaking news. Even if she disappears in an instant, no one will notice.
But I really want to believe that humanity will be able to discover the secrets of space, find new worlds and remain in the history of our Universe.
A quasar is a galaxy at the initial stage of its development, in the center of which there is a huge supermassive black hole, whose mass is billions of times greater than the mass of our sun. Quasars emit so much radiation that they outshine all other objects in the Universe. For this reason, quasars are very difficult to study - the emitted radiation does not allow these objects to be seen in detail.
On average, a quasar produces about 10 trillion times more energy per second than our Sun. The black hole inside the quasar sucks in absolutely everything that is within its reach. Cosmic dust, asteroids, comets, planets and even huge stars - all this becomes fuel for this giant.
Today it is very difficult to determine the exact number of discovered quasars, which is explained, on the one hand, by the constant discovery of new quasars, and on the other hand, by the lack of a clear boundary between quasars and other types of active galaxies. In 1987, 3,594 quasars were known. By 2005, this figure had increased to 195,000. The most distant quasars, due to their incredible luminosity, hundreds of times greater than the luminosity of ordinary galaxies, are recorded using radio telescopes at a distance of more than 12 billion light years. Recent observations have shown that most quasars are located near the centers of huge elliptical galaxies.
Quasars are compared to the lighthouses of the Universe. They are visible from vast distances and explore the structure and evolution of the Universe. The quasar's radiation spectrum represents all wavelengths measured by modern detectors, from radio waves to hard gamma radiation with a quantum energy of several teraelectronvolts. Quasars are usually surrounded by a ring of cosmic dust, and depending on its location, there are two types of quasars. The first type is when the ring is located so that it does not block the quasar from the observer. Quasars of the second type are protected from telescope lenses by the “wall” of the ring.
Not long ago, using a huge telescope in Chile, scientists were able to study one of the quasars, which belongs to the second type. They discovered that this quasar is surrounded by a nebula of ionized gas that extends over 590,000 light-years, about six times the diameter of the Milky Way. The nebula serves as a bridge connecting the quasar to a neighboring galaxy, and this fact can be considered as support for the hypothesis that quasars use nearby star clusters as “fuel”.
Scientists have suggested that quasar activity is caused by galaxy collisions. First, galaxies collide and their black holes merge into the universe. In this case, the black hole finds itself in the center of the dust cocoon formed as a result of the collision, and begins to intensively absorb matter. After about 100 million years, the glow from the hole's surroundings becomes so strong that emissions of radiation begin to break through the cocoon. The result is a quasar. After another 100 million years, the process stops, and the central black hole begins to behave calmly again.
Just recently, scientists were able to photograph colliding quasars for the first time. As part of the work, scientists were interested in a double quasar, which is located at a distance of 4.6 billion light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo.
Loading...