Space has often been called the final frontier - so it shouldn't be surprising that many strange things lurk beyond Earth's atmosphere. Let's take a look at...
- The forming magnetar
- Quipu, titan of the void
- An emerging solar system
- The star that never was
- A chorus in space
- The years-long cosmic explosion
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| The Sun is too small to become a neutron star, let alone a black hole... (jrperes) |
The Forming Magnetar
You've probably heard of a neutron star (the compact remains of a massive star too small to become a black hole) but what about a magnetar?
Like other neutron stars, a magnetar is only around 15km across despite being the remains of a star larger than our own Sun. They are defined by their huge magnetic fields, which can heat their surfaces to 18 million degrees Fahrenheit. If the magnetic field drifts through the crust of the magnetar, it causes starquakes and can emit bursts of gamma radiation.
Researchers recently discovered what they think is the precursor to a magnetar, a massive and strongly magnetic helium star known as HD 45166. When it eventually enters supernova, the core will contract and concentrate the already potent (an estimated 43000 gauss) magnetic field into an apocalyptic 100 trillion gauss. For context, Earth's core is around 25 gauss with the field being around 50 times weaker at the surface.
Quipu, Titan of the Void
Our solar system sits in the Milky Way galaxy, which can be seen with the naked eye on some nights. NASA puts it at around 1.5 trillion solar masses (a solar mass is the equivalent of the Sun) which certainly sounds impressive.
Enter Quipu, the largest known superstructure in space. Named after an Incan string-and-knot system of counting because of it's shape, this conglomeration of galaxies contains around 200 quadrillion solar masses and spans 1.3 billion light-years - that's 13000 times the length of the Milky Way. Quipu (and other superstructures like it) are so massive that they can distort our image of the sky through large-scale gravitational lensing!
An Emerging Solar System
In 2025 researchers announced the discovery of a brightly-colored object via the James Webb Space Telescope. It consists of proto-star HH 30 forming a Herbig-Haro object - this is when gas streaming from a star slams into matter and produces a knot of gas and shockwaves.
Images reveal gas being thrown out to form a nebula-like body around the proto-star. This cloud is bisected by a dark protoplanetary disk that obscures the star, but will eventually coalesce into planets. Plumes of energized gas can be seen lancing out from the disk, illuminating the nebula.
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| The Milky Way galaxy may seem large... but it's tiny on a cosmic scale. (johnNaturePhotos) |
The Star that Never Was
One particular kind of interstellar body is the brown dwarf - a planet-like object that is almost a star. They have more mass than a gas giant, but not quite enough to ignite fusion reaction in their cores and become a star.
One recently discovered star system consists of a white dwarf (the crystallized and cooling heart of a burned out star) and a tidally-locked brown dwarf. What makes this strange is the brown dwarf having 80 times the mass of Jupiter but an equal size. It's also really hot - on the tidally locked "day" side temperatures reach 17000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the eternal night dips to a chilly 4900 degrees Fahrenheit. On average this makes it 2000 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the surface of the Sun.
This brown dwarf shares similarities with a common type of exoplanet (i.e. planet beyond our solar system) known as a "hot Jupiter." Far from being the cocktail it sounds like, these hot gas giants are usually obscured by their host stars thanks to a tight orbit. This brown dwarf is far easier to pick out as the white dwarf is dim!
A Chorus in Space
Space is supposed to be silent, but something out there is chirruping... and scientists are split on exactly how. The chirps themselves are bursts of energy lasting only a fraction of a second - they were first discovered during World War I as radio operators across the globe listened for enemy signals. Later investigation discovered chirps surrounding every planet in our solar system. They were given the name "whistler-mode chorus waves" but the scientific jury is still out on exactly what causes them.
One theory is that disturbances in curved magnetic fields (such as those around many planets) can interfere with the movement of electrons coming from the Sun. The disturbances cause the electrons to resonate, accelerating them to near-light speeds and simultaneously causing the "chirp." However, recent research has found the chirps in fairly flat areas of Earth's magnetic field, something unexplained by this theory.
So why does this matter? Well, being struck by near-lightspeed electrons can be extremely hazardous to people and objects. Understanding these chirps (and how to avoid them) could mean the difference between life and death for space explorers.
The Years-Long Cosmic Explosion
Did you know that researchers have observed a years-long explosion that could have swallowed our entire solar system?
Described as the extraordinary accretion event AT2021lwx, this explosion lasted for more than three years - in contrast, a supernova tends to be visible for a few months. Light from the blast has traveled almost eight billion light years from the Vulpecula constellation to reach us.
It's thought that the accretion event was a cloud of gas many times larger than our own Sun being "disrupted" by a supermassive black hole. Sections of the cloud have been pulled into the black hole, causing shockwaves throughout the remaining gas and leaving a donut-shaped formation around the black hole.
The AT2021lwx event is thought to have covered a region hundreds of times larger than our entire solar system, reaching a peak brightness two trillion times greater than the Sun. Amazingly, this isn't the most energetic explosion we've ever seen - gamma ray burst GRB 221009A was a more violent blast, but lasted only around ten minutes!
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