Personally, I find Brown Dwarfs to be absolutely fascinating. An object that isn’t quite a planet and isn’t quite a star, but something in between.
What would one even look like? Would it look like a gas giant that’s glowing red, along with swirls of gas in its atmosphere like Jupiter? Or would it resemble a star and have a fiery surface like the sun? I prefer to imagine them as glowing gas giants but I don’t know how realistic that is.
Gas giants in general are fascinating to me as well, I really hope we send a probe into one of the gas giants with a camera before I die. I’d absolutely love to see what it looks like inside a gas giants atmosphere before the probe gets crushed by the increasing pressure as it descends.
Honestly, our moon.
I firmly believe that our moon gives us the solar system in short order.
Fuel in the form of Helium-3 (if we can figure that out). Plenty of building material. Much lower gravity well that will allow larger payloads into it’s orbit and larger ships to be constructed. As well as that lower gravity well meaning better fuel efficiency in launching just about any trajectory to anywhere else in the solar system.
Once we have the Moon, we’re 90% of the way to a solar system spanning species. Mars is cool, but not useful in any real sense other than bragging rights.
into its* orbit
I am going to mention the rogue planets, since no one else has mentioned them here yet. Those unlucky celestial bodies ejected by their home star, destined to fly through the universe alone, dark and cold, forever.
And intergalactic stars, ejected out of the galaxy
Remembers me of voids.
Magnetars. I want to throw an asteroid or something at one and watch it get ripped apart on a subatomic level purely by magnetism.
Magnetars are fucking cool as hell, I vividly remember getting a Scientific American magazine as a kid that was all about Magnetars. Such fascinating objects.
Lagrange Points (L4 and L5 specifically). Here’s a bit of space with a gravitational effect keeping you inside, but not due to mass inside it. It’s due to the relation of two other masses. Mind-boggling.
Venus. It’s got this mega-dense atmosphere. Why? It’s an anomaly when you compare it to the other similarly-sized planets in our solar system. The gas giants having thick atmospheres makes sense, but Venus? Actually, I just had a thought. The Sun’s mass generally pulls gas toward it. Gas that is in between the Sun and Mercury gets pulled into the Sun. Gas between Mercury and Venus gets pulled into the Sun too, since the closeness of the Sun makes its gravitational effect very influential compared to Mercury’s. Gas between Venus and the Earth, however, is far away enough from the Sun that it will stabilize around a Venus-sized planet. This explains the discrepancy between Mercury’s and Venus’s atmospheres. Not sure about the Venus/Earth discrepancy, but perhaps Mars’s light atmosphere is due to its lower mass.
Callisto. Why is it so dark? Why is the ice (the light splotches on the surface) like polka dots, rather than either an ocean or more diffuse?
Callisto
Past geological activity spewing dust over ice?
My two biggest are probably Sol and voids. I wish I could directly observe the phase transition as you approach the star’s core, understand it’s corona patterns and behavior, observe deeper to predict CMEs, etc it’s just so close and present in our daily lives and still very mysterious. For the voids I’m not sure maybe because it’s defined by its boundary more than its contents, but they are pretty common and some are huge and it’s just difficult to study something that is defined by its lack of something.
Black Hole and Neutron Star are my favorite celestial body.
Black Holes are infinitely fascinating!
They’re ’a thing’ we knew nothing about until Einstein wrote a paper, and even though his own math showed their existence, he doubted that they could be real.
Turns out that they are, and that they form the structure of the entire universe.
That’s my object.
My favorite thing is Quantum Field Theory! You know the field of magnetism, you played with it as a kid when you got your hands on two magnets the first time.
Turns out every particle in the standard model has its own field, and an excitation of that field manifests as that type of particle.
David Tong explains it masterfully: https://youtu.be/zNVQfWC_evg
As does HOTU: https://youtu.be/UYW1lKNVI90
EDIT: Both links above are 1+ hours each, and done in layperson terms. No degree needed, just a desire to learn something fascinating.
I always get the impression magnetism and the force keeping particles together must be similiar somehow.
The “force” keeping particles together are other particles! With their own quantum fields even.
Here’s an 8 minute primer on the Standard Model: https://youtu.be/XYcw8nV_GTs
Or our representation of them, so that we can imagine them?
Black holes just blow my mind. Even in the future, how the hell will we ever be able to study and truly understand them? Unless we find a way to break the light speed barrier, I feel like they’re going to remain as the one object we can never truly understand.
Hmm I’ll have to read about the quantum field theory, I haven’t heard of that before.
Thanks for the YouTube links, I can always use more space heavy channels in my life!
The great attractor. It’s the biggest object we known of, but actually know almost nothing about. and it’s in a spot that’s hard to see through, our galaxy’s center. Almost everything we see in the sky is heading towards that point, hence the name.
I find neutron stars fascinating. The remnant of a star that was almost big enough to form a black hole but not quite. The gravity pulls all the matter left after a supernova into a bizarre form of matter. The protons and electrons are smushed together making basically the whole thing neutrons. They’re packed together so densely, a teaspoon would weigh as much as a mountain. A star much bigger than the sun suddenly condensed into like 20km.
Plus, some form pulsars spinning so fast that it seems impossible. The record is over 1,000 rotations per second. Some form magnetars, the strongest magnets in the universe. There might be an even more exotic form of matter — “strange matter” made of strange quarks — in their core.
It’s amazing what a really big boom can do. We can’t even fathom the bigness of that kind of boom. To get a star remnant rotating faster than the human eye can detect is just… mind boggling.
You’ll definitely find video gamers who claim to be able to see that temporal resolution, of course.
If your monitor isn’t clocking 1000 Hz are you really a gamer?!?!
Your username is intriguing. Have you tried it? Is it any good?
Also, neutron stars are awesome. Densities on the order of “Mount Everests per teaspoon”? Almost unimaginable.
Almost? 😂
Far as my username goes, much like interacting with me, I don’t recommend it! lol
The S-IVB-506.
This was the third stage of the launch vehicle for Apollo 11. After entering Earth orbit, the S-IVB rocket was responsible for the translunar injection burn. Once the burn was complete, the command module, LEM, astronauts and the spent rocket were then coasting to the moon. The astronauts would detach the CSM, pitch up, translate in, extract the LEM, then thrust with RCS to get clear of the S-IVB. At this point, the rocket is still on a coarse to the moon.
Many of them orbit between the Earth and moon to this day. One is speculated to orbit between the Earth and Sun. Many impacted the lunar surface, including the one from Apollo 13.
The S-IVB-506 rocket was the one that carried Apollo 11 to the moon. It’s a piece of human history, floating silently in a heliocentric orbit above us.
What would one even look like?
Like a reddish glowing Jupiter.
Rogue black holes are terrifying
Przybylski’s Star. A star that, based on its spectrum appears to have several elements in it that really shouldn’t be there.
Just read through the Wikipedia article on that star, that’s insanely cool. I’ve never heard about this particular star before so that was a fun read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybylski%27s_Star
“Przybylski’s observations indicated unusually low amounts of iron and nickel in the star’s spectrum, but higher amounts of unusual elements such as strontium, holmium, niobium, scandium, yttrium, caesium, neodymium, praseodymium, thorium, ytterbium, and uranium. In fact, at first Przybylski doubted that iron was present in the spectrum at all. Modern work shows that the iron group elements are somewhat below normal in abundance, but it is clear that the lanthanides and other exotic elements are highly over-abundant.”
Honestly earth.
Here is so much undiscovered that could help us understand space a lot better.
Like what?
Congratulations. You win the “technically correct” award.
Hypothetical, but Black Hole Stars (one of my favourite Kurzgesagt videos).
“Normally that would be the end – today’s stars go supernova, a black hole forms and things calm down. But in this case, the star survives its own death.”
“An impossibly dangerous balance has been created – millions of solar masses pushing in, the angry radiation of a force fed black hole pushing out.”
I’m hoping that some of the new long wavelength teleescopes like JWST might have a chance of seeing one of these beasts.
I…what? Hold on, it was commonly thought that black holes effectively compress and hold infinite mass. Then math or simulations (or both) pointed out this isn’t true, I think. Running on very dim memories here. IF this is true, then somehow the solar mass of the star is, uh…well fuck me. The ADHD train came in and I lost what I was thinking.
Any chance you have a compelling link on this topic?
it was commonly thought that black holes effectively compress and hold infinite mass
Black holes definitely don’t have infinite mass. They might have infinite mass density (gravitational singularity) within them, but we can’t know for sure, since we can’t see inside black holes.