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The universe is not only stranger than we suppose,
it's stranger than we can suppose.
  

There are 19 pages on this website covering various aspects of Astronomy, to view them all you can go to the Site Map below

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Earth...the strangest planet of all
Earth...
The strangest planet in the known Universe

 

the full moon
Our companion The Moon.
How our planet captured the Moon has many theories. It is moving away from the Earth at a distance of 2.5 cms per year which is not much on a human scale but given another few million years it's lack of gravitional pull on the oceans will be catastrophic for the planet as we inhabit it today.

 

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How our Earth came to have a Moon that was the perfect size and mass to enable all the benefits that our planet enjoys could be put down to sheer co-incidence, but some people think the co-incidence's are far too many to put down to the simple act of change. See the Solar Universe page for a little bit more information.

 

Gamma Ray Burst
Gamma-Ray Burst

Gamma-Ray bursts were discovered in 1967, accidentally, by U.S. satellites deployed to monitor possible violations of the nuclear test ban treaty. At first, researchers thought they occurred relatively nearby, perhaps in our own Galaxy. But evidence collected in recent years shows that they are scattered throughout the Universe -- all seemingly far away and hence, very very old. The sources of these high-energy flashes remain a mystery. The current most likely theory seems to be that at least some of them come from so-called hypernova explosions, which are supernovas creating Black Holes rather than Neutron Stars.

 

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On April 23, 2009, the Swift satellite detected a Gamma-ray burst that was a massive 13 billion light years away. This object is now the most distant known object in the Universe. The burst occurred when the Universe was only 630 million years old, a mere one-twentieth of its current age. This event is now called GRB 090423

 

Black Hole
Artists impression of a Black Hole in action.
Where would all our best loved space movies be without the theory of the Black Hole?

 


Hypervelocity Stars are young and fast,
and they’re on their way out of the Galaxy. The first hypervelocity star was discovered by astronomers using the Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona. It travels at about 850 km/s (528 miles/sec). This is more than twice the velocity needed to escape the Milky Way. is expected to leave the Galaxy altogether within 80 to 100 million years.

 

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Hypervelocity Stars were first theorized to exist in 1988. The theory was that binary Star systems at the Galaxy's center would occasionally wander too close to the massive Black Hole looming there, which would disrupt their orbital dance.
While one of the pair was captured by the Black Hole, the other would be sent rocketing off at an incredible speed. In 2005, astronomers discovered the first "hypervelocity" Star careening out of a Galaxy at nearly 530 miles per second (10 times faster than ordinary Star movement).

My local Astronomy group

 

 

 

 


It might sound strange because we live on one, but planets really are some of the more mysterious members of the Universe. So far, no theory can fully explain how disks of gas and dust around Stars form Planets -- particularly rocky ones like ours. And as for planets having Oceans...well scientists are still scratching their collective head's trying to figure out where they came from. So to reiterate the point, at this moment in time the strangest thing in the Universe is our home planet ...Earth.


Ok, so we have Black Holes, Nebula's, Quasar's and all manner of other exciting stuff in the Universe, but thus far, and despite all of Hubble's marvelous pictures we only truly know of 1 planet with life...our own marvelous Earth.

 

Our Planet Earth

Our planet is infested with life, a true jewel in the known Universe, and every scrap of this life (vegetable and biological) is oh so precious, because it may not be repeated anywhere else in the Universe. The National Science Foundation’s “Tree of Life” project estimates that there could be anywhere from 5 million to 100 million species on planet Earth, but science has only identified about 2 million.
And what's probably even stranger then all those life forms is us.
Thus far, we seem to be the only creature who questions what the Universe is all about... just think of how amazing that is, and if we destroy ourselves... just think of how stupid that would be.
Either way, with or without us, the Universe will still go on.


Black Holes

Beyond a Black Hole's gravitational border -- or event horizon -- neither matter nor light can escape. Astrophysicists think dying Stars about 3 to 20 times the mass of the Sun can form these strange objects. At the center of Galaxies, Black Holes about 10,000 to 18 billion times heavier than the Sun are thought to exist, enlarged by gobbling up gas, dust, Stars and smaller Black Holes.
At the center of the Milky Way, a Black Hole (2.6 million times as massive as our Sun) gobbles gas and Stars and anything else that comes within its gravitational pull. This cosmic food is thought to swirl into the center, like water going down a bathtub drain.

But all this swirling should create lots of friction, which should generate enormous energy. The Black Hole should, therefore, be very, very bright -- in visible light, X-rays and other wavelengths ...instead it is very faint.
Why?
Is there not much stuff falling in?
Or is the stuff falling directly in instead of swirling (again the simple vision of water going down a plughole), thereby creating less friction?
Or is some... as yet... unknown effect preventing us from seeing the radiation?
Astro-scientists are scratching their collective heads trying to work that one out, but they reckon that the answer is tantalisingly near ...I, for one, can't wait to hear it.

Neutron Star's

The Sun spins about once every 25 days, gradually deforming its magnetic field. Imagine a dying Star heavier than the Sun collapsing into a wad of matter just a dozen miles in diameter. Like a spinning ballerina pulling his or her arms inward, this change in size spins the Neutron Star -- and its magnetic field -- out of control. A Neutron Star is so dense that on Earth, one teaspoonful would weigh a billion tons!
Neutron Stars are one of the possible ends for a Star. They result from massive Stars which have mass greater than 4 to 8 times that of our Sun. After these Stars have finished burning their nuclear fuel, they undergo a supernova explosion. This explosion blows off the outer layers of a Star into a beautiful supernova remnant. The central region of the Star collapses under gravity. Because Neutron Stars form from burnt-out Stars, they do not glow. The collapse of the Star causes the matter to be converted into mostly neutrons, hence the name Neutron Star.


Young neutron Stars rotate fiercely -- 10 to 100 times a second. And many have magnetic fields trillions of times more powerful than Earth's. These strong magnetic fields focus light, radio waves, and other forms of radiation emitted by the Star into two narrow jets. These jets line up in the direction of the Star's magnetic field and stream into space, one heading north, one heading south. If the north-south magnetic field is angled differently than the Star's axis of rotation, the jets sweep through space like the beams from a lighthouse. If these beams cross Earth, we see pulses of radiation with each rotation of the Star. Scientists call these neutron Stars pulsars, short for "pulsating radio Star."

 

Weird Moons

Scientists conception of what a Moon actually is has taken on a whole new meaning recently when space rocks were discovered orbiting other space rocks. In one set up an asteroid 90 miles (145 kilometers) wide has its own "moonlet" about one tenth that size, just 500 miles away on an orbit of just 4 days.
And in yet another example two asteroids of roughly the same size are orbiting each other. Scientists are scratching their collective heads on that one.
The math says that these Asteroids should not be able to hold a Moon in orbit...yet they do! How these small Moons escape being destroyed by other space rocks is a complete mystery. Their small mass generates so little gravity that even the tug of the mighty Sun should be enough to disturb the delicate balance between them. Theories abound but as yet no real answer has risen to the top of the pile.

Dark Energy


What really has everyone on the planet confused -- including scientists -- is Dark Energy. It seems to pervade all of space and push Galaxies farther and farther away from one another at increasingly faster speeds. Some cosmologists think this expansion will leave the Milky Way Galaxy as an "island universe" in a few trillion years with no other Galaxies visible. Others think the rate of expansion will become so great that it will result in a "Big Rip." In this scenario, the force of Dark Energy overcomes gravity to disassemble Stars and Planets, the forces keeping particles sticking together...the molecules in those particles.... and eventually the atoms and subatomic particles.
For a little more about Dark Energy go to the Dark Universe page.

 

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Milky way galaxy
It wasn't all that long ago that Astronomers and Scientists were looking far off into deep space in search of answers to Black Holes, now the theorists of space have returned to our own cosmic backyard, solidifying the theory that there's a big black gravity monster just 26,000 light-years away, in the very center of our home Galaxy. (One light-year is equal to 5.88 trillion miles, or 9.46 trillion kilometers.) The revelation has researchers scrambling to study what is by far the closest Black Hole around.
Researchers are now convinced that the Milky Way has built itself up over the eons, in part, by swallowing smaller Galaxies. Streams of stars and clouds of gas represent the remnants of this galactic feasting.

For more number crunching go to the Numerical Universe page

 

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Artists impression of waht a black hole travelling through space might look like
Artists impression of what a Black Hole traveling through space might look like

 

Brown Dwarf forming copyright Don Dixon
Brown Dwarf forming

Suspected since 1963 and confirmed to exist in 1995, Brown Dwarfs are enormous compared to the planets in our solar system. They can be up to 75 times as massive as Jupiter. Somewhere near or above that range, an object has enough mass to generate thermo-nuclear fusion -- converting hydrogen to helium and a Star is born. In effect Brown Dwarf's might be considered as failed Stars.

 

eta-carine
Eta-Carine

An explosive Star within our Galaxy is showing signs of an impending eruption, at least in a cosmic time frame, and has for quite some time. From 1838 to 1858, the star called Eta-Carinae brightened to rival the light of Sirius, the brightest Star in the sky, and then faded to a dim star. Since 1940 it has been brightening again, and scientists think Eta Carinae will detonate in 10,000 to 20,000 years. Fortunately, Eta Carinae is far away, at least 7,500 light-years from Earth. If it explodes, most of its energy will be scattered or absorbed in the vast emptiness of space. It also happens to be tilted about 45 degrees from the line of sight to Earth, so any type of gamma-ray burst,would miss the Earth. Cosmic rays would be diffused by magnetic fields, and most of the damaging light would not affect life on Earth.

 


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The force that helps stars ignite, planets stay together and objects orbit is one of the most pervasive yet weakest in the cosmos, we call it Gravity. Scientists have fine-tuned just about every equation and model to describe and predict Gravity, yet its source within matter remains a complete and utter mystery.