The universe is constantly surprising us, always destroying what we think we know in every aspect of the endless abyss that surrounds us. Carl Sagan described it best: Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known. Whenever we go looking for proof of a certain concept or idea, something completely unrelated to what we thought we understood is turned upside down. The universe will naturally contain some of the strangest coincidences and phenomena you’ve ever seen, from unicorn-shaped galaxies and Mickey Mouse-shaped craters on Mercury to nebulae and shooting stars. Here we will look at 6 of the strangest phenomena in the universe!
A 186-year-old tornado on Jupiter
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a high-pressure storm on the giant planet Jupiter that is said to be as bad as Earth’s worst hurricanes. It’s so big you could fit three of our Earths in it. In 1979 Voyager 1 took amazing photos of this phenomenon. With these and other photographs of Jupiter, they have allowed scientists to see different colors in the clouds around the Great Red Spot, suggesting that the clouds rotate counterclockwise around the spot at different altitudes. Big red spot
has been observed from Earth for about 400 years as large enough to be seen by ground-based telescopes. In 1665, Giovanni Domenico Cassini is said to have been the first to officially observe this miracle. Obviously this is quite difficult to confirm, but one thing is for sure, this dwindling power plant is dying, getting smaller and smaller over time. Nevertheless, it is still one of the strangest spectacles in the universe.
The largest reservoir of water in space
The largest and most distant reservoir of water in space ever discovered was found in 2011. The water is equal to 140 trillion times the water in Earth’s oceans. Water surrounds a quasar containing a giant black hole called APM 08279+5255 – 20 billion times the size of the Sun and more than 12 billion light-years away. The quasar is powered by a supermassive black hole that slowly engulfs the surrounding gas-filled disk or dust, producing huge amounts of energy. The energy production of this quasar is equal to one thousand trillion suns. All the water vapor in the Milky Way is 400 times less than in this quayar. Water vapor surrounds the black hole in a gaseous circle that reaches hundreds of light years, a light year is about six trillion miles. Although the gas is -53 degrees C and 300 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere, it is five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than what is typical in galaxies like the Milky Way. Measurements of steam and other molecules, such as carbon monoxide, suggest that there is enough gas to feed the black hole until it grows to about six times its mass, but who knows what will happen to it until then.
A supermassive black hole defies science
The largest black hole in the universe was discovered in 2015, J0100+2802 inside the largest quasar, with the highest brightness of any known quasar. J0100+2802 is puzzling astronomers because, with a mass of 12 billion suns and a luminosity of 420 trillion suns, it is 7 times brighter than the previous brightest quasar. It was formed only 900 million years after the Big Bang and should not be anywhere near the size it is for its age. This black hole is located 12.8 billion years away from Earth. Xiaohui Fan, author of the study that discovered this phenomenon, summed up its impressiveness perfectly: “How could a quasar so bright and a black hole so massive form so early in the history of the universe, in an era shortly after the earliest stars and galaxies had just appeared? ” The significance of this finding cannot be understated as it has forced astronomers to rethink their understanding of quasars and their formation.
Diamond planet
55 Cancri e, discovered in 2004, is a planet in the Milky Way that is at least one-third diamond. 55 Cancri e is known as a super-Earth, with a radius twice that of Earth and a mass eight times greater. It orbits its host star, 55 Cancri which is found about 40 light years from Earth in the constellation of Cancer, in just 18 hours, remember it takes Earth 365 days to orbit our Sun.
A big cloud of raspberry flavored rum
Sagittarius B2, a giant molecular cloud of gas and dust found about 390 light-years from the center of the Milky Way, contains massive amounts of ethyl formate. Ethyl formate, a chemical compound, is responsible for giving this behemoth its raspberry and rum scent. Sagittarius B2 has a mass that is 3 million times that of the Sun and spans an area of about 150 light years. Temperatures in the cloud range from 27 degrees C to -233.2 degrees C. Don’t get too excited as there are plenty of other chemical compounds, including propyl cyanide. This alcoholic wonder contains billions of liters of alcohol. The composition of Sagittarius B2 was studied in Spain by astronomers using the IRAM radio telescope. The cloud actually contains enough ethyl alcohol to fill 400 trillion trillion beers. To consume that much, every person on earth would have to drink 300,000 pints every day for a billion years.
A planet of burning ice
Gliese 436 b is a planet about the size of Neptune and was first discovered in 2004. It was found about 30 million light years from Earth and is about 20 times larger. It orbits only 6.9 million kilometers from its star and lasts 2 days and 15.5 hours, while the Earth orbits about 150 million kilometers from the Sun. Gliese 436 b has a minimum surface temperature of 245 degrees C. The water that exists on the planet, known as ice-X, is held together by enormous gravitational forces despite the extreme temperatures. The substance, of course, is not ordinary ice, its compressed water is similar to the way diamonds form from carbon. These forces prevent water molecules from evaporating and escaping the planet, instead becoming tightly packed deep inside.
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