The more closely we look at the universe, the more beautiful and confusing it becomes.
(Image source: Torrance Hodgson/ICRAR/Curtin University)
The width of the radio jellyfish is more than 1 million light-years.
The Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) above Earth and tens of millions of light-years apart from many of the interstellar objects it studies, pushes "remote work" to a new extreme. Even as the Earth world beneath it grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, the strange and wonderful space world above it continues to flood with new discoveries, and astronomers have opened the curtain on black hole monsters, invisible giant magnetic structures, and the treasure trove of extraterrestrial planet universes.
Remind everyone that the farther away from Earth, the stranger our universe becomes. Here are the 10 best, most extreme and most mysterious structures of space discovered in 2021.
1. The "Pac-Man" star in the southern sky
The supernova remnant N63A in the Large Magellanic Galaxy bears an incredible resemblance to the Pac-Man star.
(Image source: NASA/ESA/HEIC and Hubble Heritage Team (STSCI/AURA))
It is said that in space, no one can hear you play "Wakka". Tell this to the gas wreckage of the ancient supernova of the Pac-Man, whose shape can be recognized by the typical video game enthusiast at a glance. The object, officially known as N63A, is a star that collapsed under conditions of self-weight and is located in the Large Magellanic Nebula, 163,000 light-years from the Milky Way. It is accidental that this shape is presented by the dispersion of superheated gases. But it's no coincidence that the bright "dynamic particles" in Pac-Man orbit are, according to NASA researchers, young stars cast by the same cloud of gas from the ill-fated ancestral star that gave birth to Pac-Man long ago. What a pity...... It seems that the star has run out of extra life.
2. Ghostly jellyfish, brought back to life
The radio jellyfish nebula is more than 1 million light-years wide.
(Image source: Torrance Hodgson, ICRAR/Curtin University)
The Milky Way Cluster is the largest known structure of a cluster in the universe bound together by gravity. They may contain thousands of galaxies, huge clouds of hot gas, and sometimes one or two glowing ghosts like jellyfish. In the Abell 2877 cluster in the southern sky about 300 million light-years from Earth, astronomers have discovered such a jellyfish. This cosmic jellyfish is only visible in a narrow band of radio light, more than 1 million light-years wide.
According to a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, we have never observed such a large structure of the universe in such a narrow band of light. This jelly-like cosmic structure may actually be a "radio phoenix" — a cosmic structure produced by a high-energy explosion (such as a black hole explosion) that gradually disappears over millions of years as the structure expands and electrons lose energy, and is finally reactivated by another cosmic catastrophe ( such as the collision of two galaxies ). The result is a huge structure that emits light at some radio frequencies but rapidly dims at all others. It is a ghost, whether it is like a jellyfish or a phoenix, it is a whole.
3. An ultra-rare planet in the nose of Orion
GW Orion has three stars at the center of three wobbly rings of dust. Astronomers believe there may also be a rare three-solar planet here.
(Image credit: ESO/L. Cal ada, Exeter/Kraus et al.)
Don't sneeze, Orion! This year, scientists found convincing evidence that the rarest type of planet in the universe — a world orbiting three stars at the same time — is perched at the top of the Hunter's massive, gas-filled nose.
The star system, known as GW Orionis (or GW Ori), is about 1,300 light-years from Earth and is a tantalizing research target; three dusty orange rings of stars nested in each other, the system looks like a giant bull's eye in the sky. At the center of this bull's eye are three stars—two locked into a tight binary orbit, and the third orbiting two large distances around the other two.
In a paper published in the Monthly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the researchers based on previous data showing that one of the star system's three rings was almost certainly caused by a giant, Jupiter-sized planet present within one of the rings. If confirmed by future research, this massive world would be the first "ring three" planet ever detected in the universe, or planet orbiting three stars — and would bring real benefits to Skywalker Luke's double-sun parent planet, Tatooine.
4. A spiral-shaped black hole energy cannon
The latest images of the elliptical galaxy Messier 87 show a powerful jet stream with a corkscrew-like spiral structure. The jet stream extends 8,000 light-years outward from the black hole at the center of the galaxy.
(Image credit: Pasetto et al., Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF)
In 2019, researchers released the first (and only) photo of a supermassive black hole, a massive object with a mass of about 6.5 billion times that of the Sun, located in the galaxy Messier 87, about 55 million light-years from Earth. This year, scientists used the Super-Sequence Observatory in New Mexico to look at the monster object again, focusing on the huge stream of matter and energy spewing out from the center of the black hole. The team's analysis suggests that this huge jet of material could not have been a direct beam, but was rather twisted into a strange "double helix" structure by a corkscrew-like magnetic field that erupts from the black hole and goes deep into space for nearly 3,300 light-years. The researchers say it's the longest magnetic field ever detected in the Milky Way's jets, and it offers a new perspective on one of the most common phenomena in the universe.
5. Protect the invisible "barrier" at the center of the Milky Way
Data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope provides an artistic depiction of the galactic center.
(Image source: NASA Goddard)
The center of the Milky Way functions like a giant particle accelerator that emits cosmic ray beams of charged matter into the universe at near the speed of light. When researchers tried to map the density of cosmic rays near the galactic center in Nature Communications on Nov. 9, they found something puzzling: Even as cosmic rays poured out of the galactic center on a massive scale, a mysterious "barrier" made it impossible for a large portion of incoming cosmic rays to enter the galactic center. The team can only speculate on the source of this cosmic ray barrier, but believes it could be the central black hole of the Milky Way Galaxy — the terrible Sagittarius A*
6. The giant "dock" of ancient galaxies
Images of the G237 native galaxy cluster, whose different colors represent different observed wavelengths.
(Image credit: ESA/Herschel and XMM-Newton; NASA/Spitzer; NAOJ/Subaru; Large Binocular Telescope; ESO/VISTA. Polletta, M. et al. 2021; Koyama, Y. et al. 2021)
In a study in Astronomy & Astrophysics, scientists discovered a giant "shipyard" that built galaxies, similar to the growth process of the Milky Way. This massive structure, known as the Protocluster, contains more than 60 galaxies, is located 11 billion light-years from Earth and is in a part of the universe that is only 3 billion years old. Protoclusters like these form in regions of space in which long strands of gas crisscrossed by long filaments called "filaments" provide a power source of hydrogen for gravity to coalesce into stars and galaxies. The young galaxies that have gathered in this "dock" seem to be growing at a greedy, almost unrealistic rate, the researchers said. The discovery suggests that ancient protoclutoclusters were far more efficient at assembling the foundations of the modern universe than researchers imagined.
7. A 500-light-year-wide "hole" in the Milky Way
New research suggests that the molecular clouds of Taurus and Perseus are split apart by a giant "hole" that may have been created by an ancient supernova.
(Image source: Alyssa Goodman/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian)
In the beautiful Milky Way, two gas nebulae of equal status appear side by side. These huge gas nebula-forming regions, known as "molecular clusters," span the sky and appear to form a bridge between Taurus and Perseus. It's a celestial story about interstellar love — and, according to recent research, it's also a huge optical illusion.
A new 3D map of the area, provided by the European Space Agency's Gaia Space Observatory, shows that these seemingly close nebulae are actually hundreds of light-years apart, separated by a vast empty sphere completely devoid of gas, dust and stars. According to a study published Sept. 22 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, this newly discovered divide, known as the Perseid-Taurus superhull, is about 500 light-years wide and may have been caused by catastrophic supernovae millions of years ago. The good news, the researchers write, is that this ancient explosion may have accelerated star formation at the edge of the hypercosk, giving this interstellar tragedy a happy ending.
8. The magnetic "tunnel" that twists around the solar system
The image on the right shows the night sky in a radio polarized wave, and the arrow points to a filament.
(Image source: Dominica Radio Astrophysical Observatory/Villa Elisa Telescope/ESA/Planck Collaboration/Stellarium/J. West.)
Earth, along with the rest of the solar system and some nearby stars, could be trapped in a giant magnetic tunnel — and astronomers can't find a reason for it. In a paper on the pre-published database arXiv, astronomers suggest that a giant, invisible magnetic reel tube about 1,000 light-years long, could orbit the solar system. The team investigated two of the brightest radio-emitting gas structures near the Milky Way— the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region— and found that although the two structures are located in different directions in the sky, there may be connections between them.
The evidence connecting these structures, the researchers say, is a long, twisted scroll of charged particles and magnetic fields, similar to a "curved tunnel" that envelops everything in between, including the solar system. It's unclear where this magnetic "tunnel" comes from, but "scrolls" like this could be ubiquitous in the universe and could be part of a comprehensive network of crisscrossing magnetic field lines.
9. The first view of a "fragmented" star
Black holes tear stars into filaments and wrap around themselves like balls of yarn.
(Image source: NASA//CXC/M. Weiss)
Black holes are omnivores. When an unfortunate star gets too close to these greedy objects, the extreme gravitational pull of the black hole pulls the star into a long strip, a process known as "noodleization." Researchers saw this irregular process for the first time in May, when a black hole weighing 30 million times the mass of the Sun and 750 million light-years from Earth trapped a passing star in its clutches.
The bright flashes of light, X-rays and radio waves produced by this catastrophic encounter can be clearly detected by telescopes on Earth. But it also revealed unusual patterns of absorption lines around the black hole's polar regions, revealing a long beam of light that wrapped around the black hole like a ball of yarn. Because most of the absorption lines typically occur near the black hole's equator, the researchers concluded that what they witnessed must be the process of stellar metamorphism. Now, how do they send a giant tissue to another galaxy to wipe their tears?
10. A "mysterious hut" on the far side of the moon
The Mysterious Lodge "appears on the horizon of the lunar surface as a cube-shaped protrusion.
(Image source: CNSA/Our Space)
Finally, how about describing an object that is closer to Earth than the mysterious objects mentioned above, a "mysterious lodge" standing proudly on the far side of the moon? China's Yutu 2 probe spotted the cube-shaped anomaly on Oct. 29, which protruded from the otherwise uniform horizon. Is it an alien obelisk, like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or something more boring, like one of the many boulders on the moon? According to the China National Space Administration, the Jade Rabbit will take two or three months to take a closer look — and hopefully, a satisfactory answer. Until then, we will remain optimistic about observing the sky above us.
BY: Brandon Specktor
FY: Roundabout
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