15 Objects In Space That We Can't Explain

from galaxies that are 13 billion years old to the changing color of Jupiter's great spot we take a look at 15 objects in space that we can't explain number 15 the moons mysterious magnetic field the moon has remained magnetically inert for eons but new research confirms that this was not always the case over four billion years ago an inner molten moon core world against a lunar mantle much like Earth's own dynamo and a potent magnetic shield extended from the moon surprisingly our scrawny little moon was actually able to generate a mightier field than ours no one knows why such a puny body displayed such potent magnetic activity with current Answers running the gamut from we don't know to magic number 14 the asteroid with rings all our gas giants are encircled by rings though most of these are tenuous wisps of debris quite unlike Saturn's massive sets of bling and now for the first time and quite unexpectedly astronomers have found rings around a much smaller body meet chariklo an asteroid measuring only 250 kilometers across yet boasting its own ring system to wreak low though the largest object in its cosmic vicinity look like an unremarkable chunk of space rock it turned out that Yuri close sports not only one but two cosmetic necklaces containing a good amount of frozen water the larger of the Rings hugging the asteroid is 7 kilometers wide while the smaller is about half that size number 13 the six tailed asteroid Hubble has revealed yet another incredible curiosity an asteroid that thinks it's a comet while the latter bodies are easily recognized by their bright streaming tails asteroids do not usually have such a feature since they possess little ice and are made mostly of heavier elements in rock so spotting an asteroid with not one but six tails was an incredible surprise it was a unique find with its six Jetts as all other pieces of cosmic debris are quite content with considerably fewer it blasts material indiscriminately into space like a cosmic lawn sprinkler number 12 the color of Jupiter's Red Storm you've probably seen amazing pictures of this massive red hurricane that's been whirling across Jupiter's southern hemisphere for at least 400 years we know that it's a hurricane like phenomenon that you could fit three earths inside it and that it's cooler and higher than nearby clouds over centuries of observation we've also discovered that it changes color moving between a pale pink and a bright red it's also shrinking unfortunately we simply don't know the answers yet number 11 hot Jupiter messes hot Jupiters or massive gas giants and tight orbit around their stars are one of the first types of exoplanets that astronomers began discovering in large numbers in our galaxy what's puzzling about these broiling behemoths is how close they are to their Suns the substances you usually find in a jupiter-like planet are found in the outer reaches of a solar system so how did these hot Jupiters even form at all at first scientists believe that they migrated slowly toward their present positions from further away spiraling towards their Suns as their solar systems form number 10 galaxies 13 billion years old the early universe was an approximation of hell a roiling opaquely dense stew of electrons and protons almost half a billion years passed before the baby universe cooled down enough to allow the formation of neutrons shortly thereafter the universal landscape settled further so that stars and galaxies could come into being a recent ultra-deep survey by the Subaru telescope located in Hawaii and run by the National astronomical observatory of Japan revealed seven of the earliest galaxies ever over 13 billion light years distant they appeared as unimaginably faint pinpricks of light number nine the incredible iciness of Saturn's rings the ultra-thin icy rings of Saturn are another familiar part of our solar system that are just as mysterious as Jupiter's red spot we know what they're made of and we understand some of the tidal forces that caused them to change shape we're also pretty sure that they formed 4.4 billion years ago right around the time when most planets in the solar system were coalescing but we still aren't sure of how they formed why they're made up almost entirely of ice and why they're able to maintain such a perfectly flat shape as they were around the planet with its many moons number eight gamma ray bursts gamma-ray bursts are often called the brightest electromagnetic events in the universe they release more energy in a few seconds than a typical star will during its entire lifetime and we've only ever seen them in distant galaxies at most they last for a few minutes UC Berkeley astrophysicist Martin circ said via email they have been known for 40 years but their cause is still unknown some have been correlated with very distant galaxies but most correlate with nothing number seven the shape of dark matter dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that appears to exert a gravitational pull on visible matter but which doesn't interact with other kinds of matter in any other observable way we know dark matter exists because the behavior of visible matter in galaxies makes no sense unless there is a lot more matter out there pushing things around and creating gravitational lenses we've even got some pretty good ideas about the structure of dark matter based on Hubble telescope discoveries we now believe it's likely that dark matter has a Webby filamentous structure and the galaxies tend to cluster around its strands and nodes number six cataclysmic variables we've seen many kinds of stars in our galaxy from red dwarfs to red giants but some stars are particularly strange especially when they come in pairs such as the case with a class of binary star called a cataclysmic variable these are white dwarfs that are in an extremely close orbit around their companions so close in fact that they are stripping the other star of all its gas the particularly odd thing about these objects is that white dwarfs are the cores of red giants and the companion stars orbits so close that they must have once been deep inside the red giant number 5 HD one zero six nine zero six B the distant monster this super monster is 11 times more massive than Jupiter and its gaping orbit highlights all sorts of flaws in our tenuous understanding of planetary formation hd's distance from its parent star is an absolutely mind-boggling 650 astronomical units or au the incredibly lonely Neptune our most distant planet lumbers around the Sun at a distance of 30 au this is already an amazing range but HD is so far separated from its parent that Neptune and the Sun are comparatively within hugging distance this huge discrepancy is responsible for the addition of many asterisks above our planetary formation theories as astronomers scramble to explain HDS distance in spite of its vast orbit and heft number 4 Uranus is stormy astronomers have been caught completely off-guard by Uranus the second farthest member of our solar family is typically frigidly calm but for some odd reason the planet is currently a wash in raging storms dazzling uranium tempest were expected back in 2007 during its Equinox as the planet completed half of its 82 year orbit and the full solar fury was unleashed directly upon the equator yet the stormy weather was supposed to be obeyed as Uranus continued its journey around the Sun it hasn't number 3 UV under production we pride ourselves on ascertaining the many universal balances that seem to occur throughout the cosmos one such correlation has been observed between ultraviolet light and hydrogen as the two have been found to coexist in well-defined proportions two accepted process says produce UV radiation unruly young stars and massive black holes but more UV radiation exists than could have been produced by the two astronomers can't explain the superfluous UV production and are forced to admit that at least one thing we thought we knew about the present-day universe isn't true that's quite disheartening considering that UV hydrogen balance was believed to be very well understood as in many times in the past astronomers are forced back to the drawing board number two KIC two eight five six nine six zero the triple star system the Kepler space observatory is usually busy hunting down new planets but it spent four years of its life tracking three gravitationally bound stars collectively known as kic two eight five six nine six zero KIC was just a run-of-the-mill triplet two little dwarf stars orbited by a third stellar body going stag nothing weird so far just three stars Kepler saw for daily dips in the light curve as the binary dwarfs crossed each other every six hours it also saw another slight decline in the observed light every 204 days caused by the eclipsing third star for now the stellar threesome has astronomers stumped number one the entire structure of the universe let's start by talking about dark energy which isn't really related to dark matter it's just that astronomers call things dark when they don't know what the heck they are dark energy is speculated to be the force that is making the universe expand maybe it's something like gravity the force that affects all matter we just don't know but many measurements that experiments do confirm that the universe is inflating all the time and is actually inflating faster and faster maps of that light have revealed something truly incomprehensible every point in the early universe seems to be pretty much the same temperature despite each point being casually disconnected from the other you

Channel: TheWacky

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Keywords: top 10, top15, space, object, objects, we can't explain, mysterious, shooting star, comet, moon

Id: SGDE6qntjbw

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2015