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The Most Interesting Thing in the Universe

á´…eparted

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I couldn't help but make the title a little click-baity.

To you, what do you think the most interesting thing is in the universe? I'm talking about celestial bodies here. So, a particular star, galaxy, planet, black hole, comet, asteroids, supercluster. That sort of thing.

Provide a link and explain why. Discuss.
 

á´…eparted

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It's difficult to pick just one, but I have to go with ESO 146-5(link) due to it's scale.

ESO 145-6 is the largest galaxy known. It's 1.4 billion light years away. It's technically several galaxies in a cluster, but are believed to be undergoing a merging event, and are all closely gravitationally bound. It has a mass of 30 trillion solar masses- 300 times more massive than our milky way galaxy. Due to it's huge mass, it exibits incredible gravitational lensing. If you watch the video in the wikipedia link it shows this and really gives you a sense of how massive it is.
 

Virtual ghost

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Black holes are clearly the most abstract object in the universe. But saying "black hole" is very corny answer in my opinion.


Therefore I will go with Neutron stars. Due to the fact that they have ultra high density/mass that can crush atoms, very very fast rotation speeds and can harm life from much much further away then a black hole. Not to mention that by adding mass they can turn into a black holes. For some reason I find them weirder than black holes, probably because everyone heard for various other types of objects in space while with neutron stars that doesn't seem to be the case.


Just "google" there is plenty of info around.
 

Jaguar

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Pluto. Its very existence stirs up the shit and makes people think. Still.
 
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The monkeys and dogs we sent into outer space were put on the evolution fast track by the Ogopogo alien race. Those dogs and monkeys and their descendants are smarter than us now. They've got a really awesome space colony with water slides and ice cream growing on trees right beside bananas.
 

ceecee

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Pluto. Its very existence stirs up the shit and makes people think. Still.

I'm interested to know what is beyond Pluto.
sorry-not-sorry-but-pluto-doesn-t-deserve-being-called-a-planet-487270-3.jpg
 

Mole

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The most interesting thing in the universe is the universe itself, for, since 1998 we have known the universe is accelerating away from us in every direction.

Also the universe is not limited by the speed of light, so parts of the universe are already accelerating away from us faster then the speed of light, and so are lost to us forever.

Ask yourself some simple questions: did the Trinity create our expanding universe, or perhaps it was Yawah, or maybe it was Allah who set the universe expanding in every direction, or perhaps it was the Rainbow Serpent who gave us the expanding universe, or perhaps it was the God, Ganesh, or perhaps the Egyptian Gods, or the Babylonian Gods, or the Ancient Greek Gods, or the Roman Gods, or the Viking Gods? Who knows?

We don't even know what living in an expanding universe means. Yet our religions are full of certainty. We refuse to look at the universe and instead we gaze steadfastly at our own navels.
 

Coriolis

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I am most intrigued by the idea of dark matter and dark energy. Supposedly dark matter makes up ~27% of the universe, and dark energy 68%, leaving only 5% "normal matter". Not much is understood about either, and their nature is tied up in the origins and future of the universe.
 

Doctor Cringelord

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Well, I'm interested in Brown Dwarf Stars and Gas Giant Planets lately. Jupiter, in its formation, was just shy of the requirements to become a brown dwarf star. Most of what I've read suggests the mass would have to have been about 15 times greater to become a brown dwarf, at which point this would be a binary star system.

I personally consider brown dwarfs to be in an intermediary class that can't really be considered a star or a planet.

Brown dwarf - Wikipedia

Gas giant - Wikipedia

Cosmic Structures: Brown Dwarfs, Gas Giants, and Stars

Gas Giant Planets, Small Failed Stars: Is There a Difference?

Brown Dwarfs: Failed Stars Resembling Planets

https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/brown_dwarf_detectives.html

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/se...brown-dwarf-star-gas-giant-exoplanet-20130906

brown_dwarf_size.jpg


And I'm also interested in hypothetical megastructures like Dysan Spheres and giant habitat rings/ringworlds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a11183/could-we-build-a-ringworld-17166651/

And I'm curious how large terrestrial planets can be.

https://www.universetoday.com/13757/how-big-do-planets-get/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Earth

http://www.iflscience.com/space/largest-rocky-exoplanet-weve-ever-found/

And wormholes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole

https://www.space.com/20881-wormholes.html

And the shape/nature of the universe/multiverse

https://www.space.com/18811-multiple-universes-5-theories.html
 

Kas

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I don't have one "most interesting", but I have a thing for nebulas and supernovas :wubbie:
 

Magic Poriferan

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I suppose it's probably not what the theoretical physicists are into (they probably like anomalies I can't really appreciate), but I'm into the exoplanets and other star systems. It's hard to choose a favorite, it could probably change all the time, but for now I'm going to say it's this one.

Let me tell you how I feel about these things.

I was born at an interesting time for this subject. You see, I spent all my childhood without knowing about exoplanets. I'd already been alive for several years when the first one was discovered, and of course scientific discoveries both take time to ramp up and to become common public knowledge. So, I was taught a certain view about astronomy as a kid. The view was that the solar systems were very, very boring. It was often assumed that other solar systems existed, but they were imagined to exist within a strict set of parameters. They were, unsurprisingly, imagined to stick very closely to the structure of our own solar system. The boundaries for what kinds of planets could form was also given only a little freedom outside of what sort of planets existed in our solar system. As a child, I found this disappointingly monotonous, and so inferior to my imagination.

I only vaguely started to be aware that exoplanets existed and that they might be pretty strange in my teen years, but of course the real glut of information on other planetary systems did not begin until Kepler was launched, and then everything changed. Mind you, right from the very beginning, things were strange. The first confirmed exoplanet orbited a pulsar, and that was a good harbinger for how many assumptions were going to be blown out of the water. In less then 10 years Kepler has discovered over 2000 exoplanets which have been a parade of curiosities. Planets around all classes of stars, and super giants, pulsars, binary systems, maybe even black holes. A large portion of the planet's we've found are of a kind unprescribed when I was a child, hot jupiters and neptunes, or sometimes called Cthonic planets; large gas planets that orbit their stars nearly as or even nearer than Mercury, causing their thick gaseous atmospheres to constantly blaze off of the core. But there are lots of interesting one-offs. An almost entirely water planet that probably has a core of extremely hot ice. An almost entirely carbon planet with core of non-crystaline diamond and surface that may have dunes of graphite. One of my favorites is a very hot, silicon rich planet that may actually have a weather system analogous to earth's except its made of pure silicon or silicon compounds. That is, it may have silicon vapor clouds, and rain molten glass, which turns into solid glass on the ground like snow or ice. I could keep listing them, but I have to stop myself somewhere.

The stars themselves get pretty crazy, too. There's a star with a diameter wider than that of our entire solar system. There are stars closely orbiting the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy, some orbiting at speeds around 3% the speed of light.

The funny thing is, I'm very pessimistic about space exploration. I do not think humans will ever see any of these places up close. I think this solar system is the only place we'll ever live. And yet, I still love learning about these things, knowing they are out there, and trying to imagine their implications. And it feels so good compared to the boring universe I was told existed when I was a child.
 

Mole

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Since 1998 we have known the universe is accelerating away from us in every direction. Do you think the universe doesn't like us? How do you feel about the universe accelerating, yes accelerating, away from us in every direction? Do you think the universe cares about us? What will happen when all of the universe, except the Milky Way, is accelerating away from us in every direction at faster than the speed of light? How do you feel about being left alone in the blackness of the universe for ever?

How does it make you feel?
 
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Since 1998 we have known the universe is accelerating away from us in every direction. Do you think the universe doesn't like us? How do you feel about the universe accelerating, yes accelerating, away from us in every direction? Do you think the universe cares about us? What will happen when all of the universe, except the Milky Way, is accelerating away from us in every direction at faster than the speed of light? How do you feel about being left alone in the blackness of the universe for ever?

How does it make you feel?

It makes me feel like someone is a broken record. Ffs man! You, me, everyone we know, this planet - all of it will be long gone before that. Besides the Milky Way is going to collide with Andromeda in about 4 billion years so fucking relax and find something else to rip your hair out over. Damn.

We are infants gazing out of a crib and attempting to understand the most complex thing that's ever existed. Truth is stranger than fiction and I'm betting we haven't seen a fraction of how truly strange and amazing and terrifying the universe actually is.
 
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