Over The Years Scientists Have Observed Some Unusual Anomalies In Outer Space From Massive Alien Superstructures To Unsettling Faces On Mars Here Are The Top 15 Most Mysterious Space Discoveries
Solar Terminator Events
the more we learn about the sun the more fascinating it becomes far from being a flaming ball of gas in the sky it's a complex network of magnetic fields plasma fountains and strange blobs of unexplained matter that are formed at its surface but recently researchers have discovered some of the most powerful events ever measured known as solar terminator events you probably know that the sun goes through a cycle of peaks and troughs in terms of activity every 11 years or so there are times when it's far more active than others towards the end of the cycle there are fewer sunspots and emissions so scientists were trying to find out what happens to kick start the process all over again they found that towards the end of the cycle weakened magnetic fields collide along the sun's equator and these trigger huge tsunamis of plasma that ripple across its surface for weeks at a time in the wake of these storms which are the most powerful to take place in the solar system giant spots begin to form on the sun and the cycle starts again quite how these terminator events are triggered is not known though and it's not entirely clear if this happens at the end of every cycle or whether it's less frequent than that one thing's for sure and that's that there's still a lot more to learn about the star that we rely on so much and what we find out could have profound consequences for us as a species
Planet Orbiting a Dead Star
in the dying stages of a star it will often go supernova which means it significantly expands in size and either destroys or expels any objects that are orbiting it at the time or at least that's how things were thought to happen a recent discovery however has shown that this is not always the case and is forced to rethink of what happens to everything in a solar system when the host star is run out of fuel after the supernova stage a star collapses back in on itself to create a super dense white dwarf these are littered throughout our galaxy and are often studied but one in particular returns some interesting results lying around 2 000 light years away from earth researchers measured emissions of hydrogen sulfur and oxygen that were coming from it which is quite unusual so they looked closer they found the elements were emanating from a ring of gas around the star which it turned out was trailing a Neptune-like planet that was orbiting it every 10 days it's something that had never been seen before and is yet to be seen anywhere either quite how the planet managed to survive so close to a star that was once supernova is not entirely clear but it proves that the assumptions that have been made about the evolution of star systemsneed to be revisited
has 83 known moons that aren't within its rings and each one of them has its own unique properties the strangest of them all though is hyperion which was first discovered in it's an irregular shape has an unpredictable rotation and is covered in craters and it was the first non-spherical moon to ever be found the current theory of why hyperion is such a strange shape that it is was once a part of a much bigger moon that was destroyed in a collision and what we see is hyperion is all that remains this large proto-hyperion could have been up to 620 miles in diameter and the release of all this material would almost certainly have had an effect on other nearby moons and potentially added to Saturn’s rings a further mystery are the craters on its surface which are so deep that probes have been unable to image what's at the bottom of them it's often referred to as a sponge moon because of the way it looks recent estimates have suggested that as much as 40 percent of the moon is actually empty space this has led to the strange wobble in its orbit which doesn't appear to follow a set pattern like most other objects do it means that it exerts a weaker gravitational force than would be expected for something its size thought to be made purely of rock and ice the Cassini probe flew quite close to it in 2005 which is why there are such good images of the moon but this also found a further mystery of hyperion it has a slight electrical charge to it and right now no one knows why
Haumea
when
the decision was made to demote Pluto from being considered a proper planet it
seemed like quite a major step to take in reality though it was because astronomers
were only beginning to understand the objects that existed in the kipper belt
at the edge of the solar system and it became clear that Pluto was just the
first one of these to have been discovered there are far more mysterious objects in that region of space though one of
which is called haumea it's an oval-shaped dwarf planet that's about a tenth
the size of earth with a diameter of 385 miles and has two moons of its own interestingly
a day on haumea lasts for just four earth hours which makes it one of the
fastest spinning objects in the whole of the solar system it's about 43 times
the distance from the sun as earth is which means it takes light more than six hours
to reach it takes 285 earth years to complete one rotation around the sun but
what's not clear is how it formed in the first place and why it's such an unusual
shape normally objects that form when material combines together will become
spherical and it's very rare for something to spines fast as haumea does it's
therefore thought that it was subjected to a large collision at some point in
history one that changed its shape and speed forever if haumea is anything to
go by the other objects in the kipper belt are likely to be just as strange which
makes it one of the last uncharted regions still to explore in our nearby stellar
neighborhood
Borisov
borisov
while omuamua was the first object to have been detected that originated from outside
our solar system it is now long past us and it's impossible to study it anymore
that's not a problem though because what they learned about it researchers have
already managed to locate another object that also came from somewhere else a
comet called borisov that had a tail more than a hundred thousand miles long the
first close-up image of it was captured in November of 2019 where it was seen
surrounded by a bright white glow the reason why it was certain that borisov
isn't from our solar system is because it's trajectory and incredible speed it
was moving so fast that it was only spotted several weeks before it passed earth
and by now it's well on its way to leaving our solar system all together that's
an impressive feat in itself considering it's taken voyager probes more than 40
years to accomplish the same thing as for its origins this still remains unclear
the region between solar systems is virtually empty with no way for new rocks
to be formed so it's unlikely that it came from a nearby star but with the
nearest being more than four light years away from us it's been a long journey
for it to get here
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