Tue. Dec 17th, 2024

Space Oddities (we’ve found some weird stuff…)

As space is so vast and full of wonders, as we venture further into the unknown, more incredible and odd things surface. Here are a few of the weirdest things we’ve found in space so far:

Dark matter: It is a dark and elusive substance, accounting for approximately 85% of matter in the cosmos. Dark matter cannot be seen or touch (just like how I can’t feel the love you showered for me on my b-day), but we can infer its presence based purely on what it does to ordinary matter through gravity.

Dark energy: In addition to normal matter and dark matter, there’s dark energy, which makes up around 70 per cent of the universe. The universe is expanding, at an accelerating rate due to dark energy.

Neutron stars: In other words, they’re really dense things formed from a massive star’s final collapse. A teaspoonful of matter from a neutron star would weigh billions of pounds on Earth.

Black holes: A black hole is an area in the fabric of space-time where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing—not even light! —can escape. Massive stars collapsing at the end of their lives form black holes.

Exoplanets: Planets orbiting other stars are called exoplanets. ## Instruction: You are provided a sentence written by AI, rewrite so that it looks like a human wrote it. In the past few decades astronomy has found hundreds and thousands of exoplanets; even some which can be inhabited.

On top of all the strange and foreign objects in space, there have been some weird terrestrial finds as well. For example:

Space junk: 🚀Space Junk —is garbage in space which means, an object orbiting the earth which has finished its role. The space junk we refer to is an accumulation of obsolete satellites, disused rocket pieces, things that astronauts dropped on their way into orbit or out of it.

Water bears: Water bears are tiny organisms that are remarkably tough. Extreme-temperature conditions such as outer Space.

Space snow: So there’s ice called space snow in the rings of Saturn. The formation of space snow: When small particles of ice and rock are subjected to ultraviolet rays from the sun, they create space snow.

Cosmic rays: Cosmic rays are ultra-high-energy particles flying through the cosmos at nearly the speed of light. Cosmic rays originate from multiple sources, such as supernovas and black holes.

Space lightning: Planetary lightning is what we call lightning that occurs within the atmosphere of a planet or moon. Lightning in space is much stronger than the lightning we experience here on earth.

We have discovered all these freaky things — and more — out there in space! And as we keep exploring space, there will definitely be other weird things we’ll find.

Let’s deep dive into Dark Matter & Dark Energy

Dark Matter:

There’s a mystery in the big picture of the universe that has puzzled astronomers and scientists for years. This mysterious, invisible stuff called dark matter is essential for holding our universe together and makes up some 27% of all mass and energy in the cosmos. And get this — dark matter constitutes a whopping 85% of all the MATTER OUT THERE! It is not something we can see, yet it does manifest its influence on visible matter through gravity. This mysterious cosmic enigma has sparked an enduring pursuit of discovery through which we hope to reveal its hidden essence and grasp its immense significance for the universe.

The idea of dark matter was first introduced in the 1930’s when Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky discovered something odd while examining the Coma Cluster of Galaxies. Zwicky observed that the visibly apparent matter — like stars and galaxies — was insufficient to account for the gravity keeping the cluster held together. There was something else, some darkness at hand — there must have been. Therefore, the concept of dark matter was conceived.

The strongest evidence for the existence of dark matter is derived from the observation of galaxy rotation curves. If astronomers plot the velocities of stars within galaxies, they’d anticipate a decrease in velocity as you get further away from the galactic center. But, the data says something else. For one thing, stars far from the center of galaxies rotate more quickly than can be accounted for without extra, undetectable mass—dark matter—bending their orbit through gravity. The presence of this mysterious substance can be traced from this fact only.

So… what is dark matter, and why can we not see it? It’s its inherent nature that holds the key to that question. Scientists believe dark matter is made up of mysterious particles that don’t interact with light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. While normal matter — which includes stars, planets and all the things that we are able to observe – emits, absorbs and reflects light, this is not true of dark matter. It’s entirely invisible and therefore can’t be seen using standard telescopes.

It’s been an adventure taking physicists to the far corners of the cosmos and inside the bowels of particle physics labs in search of dark matter. There are numerous experiments aimed at indirectly detecting dark matter particles by observing what they do with ordinary matter. Some examples include detectors buried deep below the Earth’s surface designed to detect infrequent collisions of dark matter with atomic nuclei. Also, with particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists hope to generate dark matter particles by replicating conditions at the beginning of time and space. These attempts have produced useful leads but the elusive quarry remains dark matter.

If dark matter exists, its presence has profound consequences for how the universe itself is structured and will develop in future times. It’s due to its gravity which causes galaxies and galaxy clusters to form. Galaxies such as ours wouldn’t be here without dark matter. Plus, dark matter is crucial in the cosmic tango between dark energy — the bizarre force pushing the universe’s expansion into hyperdrive, and gravity … well, you know, the one pulling stuff back together.

Research and exploration continue on the journey towards understanding how dark matter works. Various missions in space and observatories on Earth are working towards understanding what is known as dark matter. The upcoming James Webb Space telescope will help us learn more about the cosmic distribution of dark matter soon. And on top of that, researchers are continually tweaking their experiments and looking for elusive signs of dark matter itself.

To sum up, dark matter is the hidden builder of the Universum: It builds universes in its own image. This “dark matter”, which is implied to exist through its gravitational consequences, is one of the biggest enigmas of 21st century astronomy. What we’re searching for is one of the few pieces missing from an otherwise comprehensive jigsaw puzzle, and it serves an equally important purpose to help fill in other holes we don’t know about yet, providing us with more depth to the very intricate cosmic picture of something And as more and more scientists reveal the mystery of darkness, we gradually get acquainted with the fabric of the cosmos itself.

Cosmic Enigma: Dark Energy’s Expanding Mystery

In the vast fabric of space there is something insubstantial, elusive, unknowable — dark matter making up about 27 percent of the universe’s total mass-energy content. It’s an elusive and mysterious force called dark energy, which baffles us with its complexity and holds sway over the cosmos, fueling the endless expansion of space at ever-increasing speeds. Now we turn our gaze inward, toward dark energy and the essence of creation itself.

Dark Energy’s Puzzling Secrets

It’s an enigma of the universe. Wherein, as opposed to regular matter or dim matter, it is essentially composed of particles which we can’t see with our eyes straight away. It’s not a tangible substance; it’s a theoretical type of energy that pushes against the fabric of space causing cosmic expansion with each passing year.

The Discovery

Dark energy was unpredicted, but its discovery shattered the foundations of astrophysics and cosmology. It all started when watching the distant supernova’s, catastrophic blasts of passing-away stars. The cosmic signals were yardsticks, telling us not only that the Universe has been expanding, but that its expansion is actually speeding up. There was something no one knew about; “dark energy” was causing the universe to expand faster than ever imagined.

The Cosmic Puzzle

Perhaps one of the more baffling things about dark energy is we have no idea what it is. Dark refers only to what we don’t know; it’s something we cannot see, a thing pervading all of space. It’s thought to be a feature of vacuum space — an idea that raises questions about the nature of “nothing”. Or perhaps it may be something entirely new and exotic, and behave differently than any particle known.

Einstein’s Legacy

The appearance of dark energy as the key protagonist in cosmology has also brought new questions to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. This revolutionary hypothesis explains gravity as the warping of space-time due to mass and energy. But with the arrival of dark energy something truly weird happens — it seems as though space-time itself is expanding, and it possesses this very strange, antigravity quality. This is a deep challenge to the foundational principles driving the cosmos.

The Quest for Answers

Researchers around the world are working around the clock on cracking the code of dark energy. They use cutting-edge tools, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider, to look into space and explore what lies beneath to understand everything from the fabric of space itself to the mysterious nature of energy. It’s become one of the great adventures of the modern era — an interdisciplinary mission to find answers, which transcends boundaries and binds scientists together in their quest for understanding.

Conclusion

The mysterious force behind cosmic inflation — dark energy — still puzzles and stimulates researchers and fans around the world. Its mysteriousness stumps our core convictions regarding what the Cosmos is and also redefines how we perceive the Universe’s future. We gaze into the infinite blackness of space and are confronted with the reality that ours is a universe of endless enigmas yet to be exposed, one revelation after another. The mystery of dark energy calls out for us to keep probing, to exceed the confines of our understanding, and to partake in the infinite beauty of the cosmos.

We will meet again with further details in another blog!

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