The universe is like a box of chocolates.
Each discovery excites both the scientific community and the imagination, but the most exciting is still behind the scenes.
And every inherently unthinkable star, planet, or meteor shows how little we really know about the universe.
A new type of storm... on the star
NASA's Spitzer and Kepler telescopes are a powerful tandem that recently found a completely unexpected phenomenon on a small star: a storm.
Just 53 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, a Jupiter-sized L-dwarf named W1906+40 showed a strange spot similar to Jupiter's red spot. Unlike its cousin, a brown dwarf of similar size, W1906+40 is a bona fide star that produces its own light. However, it is difficult to call it light: this tiny stellar object is relatively cold - only 2,000 degrees Celsius.
The W1906+40 is so warm (in the sense of not hot or cold) that clouds form and twist in its atmosphere. These clouds, spurred on by the star's inner fury, created a dark spot at the north pole that astronomers mistook for a sunspot. And while it can't be seen directly, scientists have identified its presence by the dimning that occurs every nine hours.
Cloud conditions have also been observed on brown dwarfs, but these understars are not strong enough to support fusion. The longest storms on their surface are unlikely to last more than a day. The storm on the W1906+40 is strong after two years.
New mysterious globular cluster
Globular clusters are spherical collections of thousands of stars. The age of some of them is comparable to the age of the universe; some of them traveled for billions of years before settingtling on the outskirts of the galaxy that formed.
Our Milky Way is large, but has only 150 clusters at its disposal. More massive galaxies attract more clusters, and the nearest galactic monster, Centaurus A (NGC 5128), an elliptical galaxy 12 million light-years away, has 2,000 globular hangers-on.
But not all clusters of Centauri A are interesting. As a rule, the mass of the cluster is commensurate with its brightness, and the brightest sources are also the most massive. But in the process of studying 125 clusters in Centauri A, astronomers found that some have much more mass than we see.
Scientists have proposed two equally curious solutions: dark matter or black holes. Globular clusters don't often contain dark matter, unlike galaxies, but these few may have gotten it through an incomprehensible mechanism. Black holes are also massive enough to produce the observed effect. If so, Centauri A becomes a cosmic minefield with eerie voracious black holes on the periphery.
New brightest supernova
The Ohio State University Observatory, dubbed the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN, consonant with "asassin," "automatic survey of the entire sky for supernovae") recently discovered the most ridiculous star death ever observed.
In 2015, the double telescopic array "Brutus" and "Cassius" stumbled upon an unremarkable spot of light. Subsequent observations revealed a strange spectrum of light emanating at the specified location, and finally the South African Large Telescope confirmed a cloud of extremely bright gas with an unidentified 15-kilometer object in the center. Scientists suspect that this is a former supernova, several times breaking the previous record - so wild that it released 600 billion suns into the Universe.
ASASSN-15lh, as it has been called, is so magnificent that it exceeds the limits of our scientific understanding. Astronomers can't explain the strength of this supernova normally, but they do have a few ideas. Perhaps this is the wild thagoy of one of the most massive stars in the universe. It turns out that these elite stars exist, it's just that we may not have seen any yet.
Similarly, a millisecond magnetar may be suitable as an explanation. These objects rotate at an incredible speed. If you convert this huge rotational energy into light, you can get just such an explosion that astronomers have observed.
A new type of star music
Astronomers are tracking down the oldest stars in the galaxy, and a recently updated method has allowed them to detect an ancient group of stars from the early days of the Milky Way.
The study, conducted by the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham, allowed us to look into the hearts of eight elderly stars living in the globular cluster Messier 4 (M4) some 7200 light years away and hear music inside. These stars are much older, thicker and redder than the Sun, and (most surprisingly) filled with sound. These "resonant acoustic oscillations" perturb the stellar matrix and cause tiny but detectable changes in brightness.
The newly invented ability to measure these oscillations gave rise to the field of asterosseismology, another way to study stars. Astronomers can use this technique to determine the age and mass of a star. These fluctuations confirmed theoretical calculations and showed that the stars of M4 are 13 billion years old. These are the oldest stars in the galaxy.
A new type of stars with an oxygen atmosphere
The star SDSSJ124043.01+671034.68 ("Dox", as it is called briefly) is similar to any other star, for several buts: its name is difficult to pronounce and its outer layer is 99.9% oxygen. This incredible star — a white dwarf — is unique in our catalog of 4.5 million stars, including 32,000 confirmed white dwarfs.
The history of its discovery is also remarkable. Looking for remarkable stars, scientists study spectral graphs that reflect the elemental composition of the star. Unfortunately, strangeness is a human concept, so you have to identify strange things by eye, machines can not be trusted. This particular case was noticed by student Gustavo Orica, who looked at about 300,000 spectral diagrams, several thousand a day before he found the Dox.
Typically, white dwarfs are covered with light volatile elements that are produced during the life cycle of a star. But "Dox" somehow surrounded itself with a fluffy shroud and acquired an atmosphere of almost pure oxygen, seasoned with a small pinch of other elements, like neon and magnesium.
Scientists have no idea how this happened, but suggest that the Dox was once a companion of the red giant. He transferred the substance in the form of superhot gas to his stellar wife until Dox ate too much, the lid exploded and all the light material went into deep space.
A new type of space mountain
Jupiter's ever-lava-spewing moon Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. It orbits just 400,000 kilometers from its pot-bellied, gaseous "folder" and powerful gravitational forces chew the moon like gum.
Thanks to countless cycles of gravitational torment, Io is now dotted with sulphurous geysers, hellish lava flows, and jagged mountains. This hundred mountains are unlike any other in the solar system: they exist in isolation and stick out directly from the shaky surface of the satellite, unlike the grouped and sloping mountains on other worlds.
As the simulation shows, the compressive forces work together with lava flows to produce these strange vertical mountains. Io's surface is constantly covered with fresh lava from its 400 active volcanoes (surprisingly for a moon-sized body) that cover the moon's plains with five inches of molten matter every ten years.
Accumulations of ash and lava create extreme pressure that increases with depth, thanks to the spherical nature of (most) moons. When the tension becomes unbearable, the ground splits and a massive peak is ejected.
A new type of unexpectedly young hot Jupiter
Hot Jupiters are gas giants that somehow happen to be close to their stars. Some of them are locked in such tight orbits that the star's gravity eats up small bodies layer by layer, and the possible planet PTFO8-8695 b rotates so close that it completes its orbit every 11 hours.
PTFO8-8695 b is also one of the youngest planets, as its star, PTFO8-8695, is only two million years old. This is paradoxically small – most hot Jupiters have stars billions of years old.
Astronomers think that all hot Jupiters migrate because it is too hot near the star for gas giants to form. Gas planets merge in quiet cool conditions; similarly, the giants in our solar system are beyond the asteroid belt.
The fate of PTFO8-8695 b is unknown, but not so pessimistic. It seems that some hot Jupiters settle in stable orbits and may be able to live long enough.
A new type of extinct space rocks
Oest 65, an ancient space stonerich in iridium and neon, is unlike any other in our collection of 50,000 space souvenirs. It belongs to the type of meteorites that we may never see again, because according to astronomers, the brutal collision in which Oest 65 appeared, erased its parental bodies into powder.
This meteorite fell 470 million years ago and settled in the lower part of the ancient ocean, which is now part of the Swedish quarry. His parent was, most likely, a space potato 20-30 kilometers wide, large enough to grab a good piece of the Earth, when compared with the relatively hilenky asteroid Chicxulub, which destroyed the dinosaurs (10 kilometers).
The orbital potato collided with an even more gigantic space rock 100-150 kilometers wide, giving rise to many small pieces that violently collapsed on Earth. These chondrites still wander around the Sun, although we will probably never find a sample similar to Oest 65.
A new type of exosystem
When astronomers discovered the planet 2MASS J2126-814, it was like a world that exists completely separately, in itself. This planet, a wandering gas giant 12-14 times more massive than Jupiter, is doomed to forever wander through the cosmic expanses in search of the sun, which can call its own.
But this story has a happy ending. Astronomers have found another object following the outcast planet, a red dwarf named TYC 9486-927-1. Both bodies are 100 light-years from Earth and seem to be moving together – it turns out that the planet is not alone at all.
Scientists realized that they had discovered the largest solar system known to date. The parent star is located 1,000,000,000,000 kilometers from the planet. Imagine life forms peering into the night sky and unable to distinguish their own star from other similar points in the sky.
2MASS J2126-8140 orbits 140 times the orbit of Pluto, which is 6 billion kilometers from the Sun. Such a situation could not result from the traditional method of the birth of the solar system in the process of disk collapse, and scientists believe that these two bodies appeared from one giant trickle of intergalactic gas.
A new type of solid planet
Solid planets like Earth depend on mass limits. If one grows too thick, its gravitational pull attracts more and more hydrogen and inflates to the gas giant. Usually so. But the planet Kepler-10c, with a mass of 17 Earth and having no gas, shows astronomers a muzzle.
They found this planet floating 560 light-years in the constellation Draco using the Kepler space observatory in conjunction with Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands. Kepler-10c — 30,000 kilometers in diameter — was originally ranked among the gas giants of a funny size — mini-Neptunes — relatively small planets with dense layers of gas.
But the mini-Neptune hypothesis dissolved when mass measurements showed that Kepler-10c somehow managed to squeeze 17 Earth masses into that framework. For a mini-Neptune, this is too "meaty" and suggests that the planet is made up of solids.
Kepler-10c, with its age of 11 billion years, is a space centenarian. Its advanced age suggests that there were many heavy elements lurking in the early universe, and increases the likelihood that the cosmos contains many more rocky planets than previously thought.
