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.
Black Hole and Neutron Star are my favorite celestial body.
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.
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
Honestly earth.
Here is so much undiscovered that could help us understand space a lot better.
Congratulations. You win the “technically correct” award.
Like what?
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?
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.
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.
Rogue black holes are terrifying
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.
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
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.
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!
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?
I love space phenomenon in the same way as some people like scary movies, games, and environments. I feel a strong sense of dread and fear at the thought of black holes, white dwarfs, and neutron stars. It’s less about what you can see, and more about what you can’t.
It’s so bad that the most anxious and scared I’ve been in my life was on one of my first times using the FSD boost in the game Elite: Dangerous. In the game you can get boost to your ships travel by sucking up the streaming jets jutting out from white dwarfs and neutron stars. This boost can let you travel over 100ly, when average is 30ly or so. The process to do this, if done incorrectly however, can result in getting ripped out of cruising, stick, and unable to get away from these very disorienting beams before getting absolutely shredded. I have experienced nothing like it before or since.
To this day, neutron stars are both my favorite and most anxiety inducing universal phenomena! Slaughter House 5 is a really good book involving a neutron star, for those who haven’t read it.
I still forget how to tell white dwarfs from neutron stars. Both can charge you, but I think it’s white dwarfs that have 1/4 the jet range for like 1/2 the boost. Basically a deadly waste of time. But I don’t really go far. I have an icy Dolphin that can park in the normal star scoop zone and stay cool indefinitely, so the boost benefit isn’t worth it to me. But I do enjoy that empty dread of the vastness of space and the inconceivable size of celestial bodies.
And of course the dread from the excellent sound design surrounding the Thargoids, the alien enemies you can seek out. But that’s normal dread.
You ever land on mitterand hollow? Or rather, you ever let the moon known as mitterand hollow land on you? That’s an experience. It’s actually incredibly safe due to the spatial reframing, but good luck convincing your brain
Super Earths, because we know so little about them. They are the most common planet type (based on census from Kepler and TESS), but our solar system doesn’t have one, so we have no idea what they are like. Models and simulations give a few possible compositions, resembling mini-Neptunes, or water worlds with thick oceans, or more like Earth. Maybe all are possible. Earth-like rocky super-earths may be more geologically active than Earth, due to stronger convection and thinner crust. If they orbit a K-type dwarf, they could be candidates for super-habitable planets, with conditions even better for life than Earth.
“Super Earth, our home…”
Sorry, I get what you’re talking about but my mind has been permanently tainted to think of Helldivers now whenever I see a mention of Super Earth’s haha.
But to be serious, I agree completely. Massive rocky planets are a fascinating topic, and the idea of a planet even more habitable for life than Earth is hard to even imagine but is a fascinating concept. I’ve also read about “evaporated” gas giants, where the star’s stellar wind has blown away the thick atmosphere of a mini Neptune and left behind just the rocky core, which is thought to have a ton of water left.
Such a shame I wasn’t born in a future where we can casually explore space, that may never be a reality but I like to think it will be.
Same here! Excuse me, I think I hear some bots…now where did I leave my autocannon…?
We can’t visit other star systems within our current lifetimes, but there’s no reason we can’t build bigger and better telescopes over the next few decades. That’s the next best thing, and we can do it from the comfort of our home planet!
The idea behind the heliosphere and all its related parts are really interesting. Something about a giant space bubble/teardrop flying through the galaxy that blows my mind. Learning about termination shock and the sink basin example really gave off this weird sense of cosmic grandeur that can be somewhat replicated on earth. As above so below kinda thing.
Przybylski’s Star. A star that, based on its spectrum appears to have several elements in it that really shouldn’t be there.
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.”
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.
Here’s a good bit more in depth read about it, it is excellent
Thanks!
Edit: Finished reading the article, and it was great! Gonna be scrolling through that website tonight as my night reading before bed. Thanks again for the link!