Universe is full of mysteries; some are solved and the others are not. There may be much more spookiest things about Universe than our imagination but here, you'll find 21 spooky things about Universe.
If you're interested in scariest space facts, then it's the right place for you.
You are now going to travel into the "scariest facts about Space"
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A ghoulish secret lurks within each of these gorgeous galaxies. Their rings are dotted with stellar graveyards!
These objects are called ring galaxies, and scientists think most of them form in monster-sized crashes.
Not just any galaxy collision will do the trick, though. To produce the treat of a ring, a smaller galaxy needs to ram through the center of a larger galaxy at just the perfect angle.
2. Black Hole's Vanishing Act
In 1992, the X-ray satellite GRANAT detected a new X-ray source, one we didn't know about before. The galaxy is full of black holes we can't see; we only find them when they eat ("accrete") stuff. The infalling gas gets hot (1 million+ degrees) and glows brightly in X-rays.
The NICER telescope revealed the trick behind a black hole's vanishing act. Well-known X-ray source GRS 1915+105 suddenly faded in 2019. NICER spotted a bright X-ray flare and found the black hole hiding behind clouds of gas!
We don't really know where these thick clouds come from (we considered a lot of possibilities and none are just right). But what's especially neat is that we can tell that behind all those clouds,
GRS 1915+105 is still active.
3. Strange Planet
A planet named LTT9779b is orbiting a Sun-like star located 260 light years away from Earth.
This planet, a little larger than Neptune, orbits very close to its star.
The planet is found in the "hot Neptune desert," where planets shouldn't exist.
Indeed, most close-in hot exoplanets are either gas giants the size of Jupiter or Saturn that have enough mass to retain most of their atmosphere using their high gravity against the evaporation caused by the star, or small rocky exoplanets that have lost their atmosphere to the star long ago.
4. Howling Wolf
Moons are not the only thing calling creatures of the night. Peering from pillars of dense gas and starlight, a howling wolf appears in Westerlund 2, coming from the left side center of the image.
Westerlund 2 is a cluster of young stars (around one to two million years old) about 20,000 light years from Earth.
5. Watchful Eye
Feeling like someone is watching you?
It might be the Ring Nebula you’re sensing from 2,000 light-years away.
The Ring Nebula is the glowing remains of a Sun-like star that measures around one light-year across. Its colors, captured here by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, represent the chemical contents of this celestial specter.
The deep blue represents helium, cyan in the inner ring glows of hydrogen, and oxygen and the red-orange outer ring represents nitrogen and sulfur.
6. Cosmic Cat's Paw
These ginormous paws that we found in the Milky Way is actually a part of a star-forming region roughly 5,000 light-years away known as the Cat’s Paw Nebula.
7. Ghost Of Cassiopeia
A ghost-like figure lies within the constellation Cassiopeia.
Reminiscent of the shadowy figures from Halloween tales, the Ghost Nebula is a ghoulish cloud of hydrogen being eaten away by ultraviolet radiation from a nearby giant star.
8. Strange Collision With Milky Way Is Going To Happen
This collision is going to be very creepy because here, one galaxy named as Andromeda, which is the closest from our Milky Way Galaxy is coming towards us with a speed of 70 miles/sec.
Here, one concept lies, i.e -
The speed in which the galaxies are moving away from us is ∝ How far the galaxies are.
This collision is going to happen in about 4 billion years.
9. Planet Emitting Electromagnetic Radiations
This is actually called the Pulsar Planet System, which is a system consisting of three planets.
It is one of the first exoplanet system ever discovered.
Its the PSR B1257+12, a pulsar which is rotating rapidly and had emit a ton of electromagnetic radiations out of its poles.
It is emitting electromagnetic radiations at just millisecond pulses.
10. Tortured Clouds
Massive stars can wreak havoc on their surroundings, as seen in this picture of the Carina nebula.
The bright star at the center is one of the most massive in the galaxy.
Its blinding glare is sculpting and destroying the surrounding nebula.
11. Rain Of Terror
A planet named as HD 189733b, may look like a friendly haven but don’t be deceived!
Weather here is deadly.
The planet’s cobalt blue color comes from a hazy, blow-torched atmosphere containing clouds laced with glass.
Howling winds send the storming glass sideways at 5,400 mph (2km/s), whipping all in a sickening spiral.
It’s death by a million cuts on this slasher planet!
12. Cosmic Horse
Actually this image, depicts a special class of star-forming nursery known as Free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globules, or frEGGs for short. This object is formally known as J025157.5+600606.
When a massive new star starts to shine while still within the cool molecular gas cloud from which it formed, its energetic radiation can ionize the cloud’s hydrogen and create a large, hot bubble of ionized gas.
Amazingly, located within this bubble of hot gas around a nearby massive star are the frEGGs: dark compact globules of dust and gas, some of which are giving birth to low-mass stars.
The boundary between the cool, dusty frEGG and the hot gas bubble is seen as the glowing purple/blue edges in this fascinating image.
13. Cosmic Candy
It looks like a piece of wrapped cosmic candy, what we see is actually the outer layers of a dying star.
The Hubble Space Telescope have captured the image of a Saturn Nebula.
Stars are powered by nuclear fusion, but each one comes with a limited supply of fuel.
When a medium-mass star exhausts its nuclear fuel, it will swell up and shrug off its outer layers until only a small, hot core remains.
The leftover core, called a white dwarf, is a lot like a hot coal that glows after a barbecue — eventually it will fade out.
Until then, the gaseous debris fluoresces as it expands out into the cosmos, possibly destined to be recycled into later generations of stars and planets.
14. Ghost Ships Everywhere
Our solar system is a bit of a graveyard for dead robots. Whether powered by solar panels, batteries, or radioactive decay, no spacecraft lives forever (that we know of).
For example, Pioneer 11 disappeared into the darkness beyond the solar system and hasn't been heard from in over 25 years. It’s probably dead though.
But there are far more ghost ships much closer to home. Some orbit the Sun, and others orbit Earth.
The surface of Mars is permanent home to about a dozen dead robots from the U.S., U.S.S.R., and the United Kingdom.
But the real cemetery of spacecraft is Earth’s Moon. During the first decade or so of the space race, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. hurled scores of robotic probes at our nearest neighbor. Some succeeded. Many did not.
And even the successful robotic spacecraft of that era are long dead, doomed to haunt the Moon forever.
15. Ghost Clouds
This creepy ghost-like creature are three huge intersecting dark lanes of interstellar dust make the Trifid Nebula, one of the most recognizable and striking star birth regions in the night sky.
The dust, silhouetted against glowing gas and illuminated by starlight, cradles the bright stars at the heart of the Trifid Nebula.
This nebula, also known as Messier 20 and NGC 6514, lies within our own Milky Way Galaxy about 9,000 light-years (2,700 parsecs) from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius.
This new image from the Hubble Space Telescope offers a close-up view of the center of the Trifid Nebula, near the intersection of the dust bands, where a group of recently formed, massive, bright stars is easily visible.
16. Spiders Lurking In Terantula Nebula
This composite of 30 Doradus, aka the Tarantula Nebula, contains data from Chandra (blue), Hubble (green), and Spitzer (red).
Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Tarantula Nebula is one of the largest star-forming regions close to the Milky Way.
Chandra's X-rays detect gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by stellar winds and supernovas.
This high-energy stellar activity creates shock fronts, which are similar to sonic booms.
Hubble reveals the light from massive stars at various stages of star birth, while Spitzer shows where the relatively cooler gas and dust lie.
17. Disembodied Remains In Universe
"Last gasps of stars"
This trio of ghastly images shows the disembodied remains of dying stars called planetary nebulas.
Planetary nebulas are a late stage in a Sun-like star's life, when outer layers have been shed and are lit by ultraviolet light from the central star.
18. Cosmic Eyes
Lurking in constellation Aquila(also known as Eagle), these celestial eyeballs (known as N89 and N90) are vast bubbles of dust and gas from new stars.
Each bubble is filled with hundreds to thousands of stars, which form from dense clouds of gas and dust.
The bubbles are estimated to be 10 to 30 light-years across the universe.
19. Snake On The Galactic Plane
The snake appears to be slithering across the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy.
It is actually the core of a thick, sooty cloud large enough to swallow dozens of solar systems.
In fact, astronomers say its "belly" may be harboring beastly stars in the process of forming.
The snake is located about 11,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.
20. Cosmic Octopus
A giant Black Hole in the ophiuchus galaxy cluster caused the biggest explosion ever seen in the Universe and the results look like, well, an Octopus.
A space octopus with arms more than 1.7 million light years long!
A giant black hole in the central galaxy of the cluster caused the explosion, blasting out jets that carved a cavity in the surrounding hot gas.
Astronomers obtained this result using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, XMM-Newton, and two radio telescopes in Australia and India.
The explosion released a factor of five more energy than the previous record holder and hundreds of thousands of times more than typical clusters.
21. Zombies In The Space
Peering into the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has spotted a mysterious glow of high-energy X-rays that, according to scientists, could be the "howls" of dead stars as they feed on stellar companions.
According to one theory, a type of stellar zombie called a pulsar could be at work.
Pulsars are the collapsed remains of stars that exploded in supernova blasts.
They can spin extremely fast and send out intense beams of radiation. As the pulsars spin, the beams sweep across the sky, sometimes intercepting the Earth, like lighthouse beacons.
But astronomers said that this theory haven't matched with their previous research.
They said more observations are planned. Until then, theorists will be busy exploring the above scenarios or coming up with new models to explain what could be giving off the puzzling high-energy X-ray glow.
[Bonus Tip]
What is the scariest thing in space?
》From my side, the scariest and creepiest thing in space is Cosmic Eyes (which is in the serial number 18 in my post), because they are something which looks like they are staring at you.
It can differ from people to people, that which can be the scariest thing in space, but you all can give your answers into the comment section below.
Conclusion
And it comes to an end of my article. I hope you enjoyed this article and learnt all the spooky things about Universe.
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