Personally, I find Brown Dwarfs to be absolutely fascinating. An object that isn’t quite a planet and isn’t quite a star, but something in between.
What would one even look like? Would it look like a gas giant that’s glowing red, along with swirls of gas in its atmosphere like Jupiter? Or would it resemble a star and have a fiery surface like the sun? I prefer to imagine them as glowing gas giants but I don’t know how realistic that is.
Gas giants in general are fascinating to me as well, I really hope we send a probe into one of the gas giants with a camera before I die. I’d absolutely love to see what it looks like inside a gas giants atmosphere before the probe gets crushed by the increasing pressure as it descends.
That irregularly light reflecting thing that didn’t quite follow the trajectory it was supposed to that just flew through the solar system a few years back on its way to somewhere else and we never got a chance to look closely at it to see what the fuck it even was
Oumuamua
Thank you for providing the name. I can’t believe I missed this, how fascinating is it 👀
Primordial black holes and rogue planets.
M87
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87
Freaking enormous galaxy. Is unusual in almost every way.
Honestly earth.
Here is so much undiscovered that could help us understand space a lot better.
Like what?
Congratulations. You win the “technically correct” award.
The idea behind the heliosphere and all its related parts are really interesting. Something about a giant space bubble/teardrop flying through the galaxy that blows my mind. Learning about termination shock and the sink basin example really gave off this weird sense of cosmic grandeur that can be somewhat replicated on earth. As above so below kinda thing.
White dwarfs are cool. I think it’s something like at least 1 quadrillion years to cool down to become a black dwarf.
I’ll add Neutron stars on top of that, the dead core of a star living on to slowly cool for an unfathomable amount of time. Also, Red Dwarfs eventually becoming Blue Dwarfs as they age is cool af too.
Once it cools down, what sort of matter will remain? Would it have a solid surface one could walk around on?
Not without shredding you due to high gravity and magnetism still.
Ah, that’s a pity. I guess I’ll just have to continue enjoying them from afar.
Black Hole and Neutron Star are my favorite celestial body.
My two biggest are probably Sol and voids. I wish I could directly observe the phase transition as you approach the star’s core, understand it’s corona patterns and behavior, observe deeper to predict CMEs, etc it’s just so close and present in our daily lives and still very mysterious. For the voids I’m not sure maybe because it’s defined by its boundary more than its contents, but they are pretty common and some are huge and it’s just difficult to study something that is defined by its lack of something.
Black Holes are infinitely fascinating!
They’re ’a thing’ we knew nothing about until Einstein wrote a paper, and even though his own math showed their existence, he doubted that they could be real.
Turns out that they are, and that they form the structure of the entire universe.
That’s my object.
My favorite thing is Quantum Field Theory! You know the field of magnetism, you played with it as a kid when you got your hands on two magnets the first time.
Turns out every particle in the standard model has its own field, and an excitation of that field manifests as that type of particle.
David Tong explains it masterfully: https://youtu.be/zNVQfWC_evg
As does HOTU: https://youtu.be/UYW1lKNVI90
EDIT: Both links above are 1+ hours each, and done in layperson terms. No degree needed, just a desire to learn something fascinating.
I always get the impression magnetism and the force keeping particles together must be similiar somehow.
The “force” keeping particles together are other particles! With their own quantum fields even.
Here’s an 8 minute primer on the Standard Model: https://youtu.be/XYcw8nV_GTs
Or our representation of them, so that we can imagine them?
Black holes just blow my mind. Even in the future, how the hell will we ever be able to study and truly understand them? Unless we find a way to break the light speed barrier, I feel like they’re going to remain as the one object we can never truly understand.
Hmm I’ll have to read about the quantum field theory, I haven’t heard of that before.
Thanks for the YouTube links, I can always use more space heavy channels in my life!
Honestly, our moon.
I firmly believe that our moon gives us the solar system in short order.
Fuel in the form of Helium-3 (if we can figure that out). Plenty of building material. Much lower gravity well that will allow larger payloads into it’s orbit and larger ships to be constructed. As well as that lower gravity well meaning better fuel efficiency in launching just about any trajectory to anywhere else in the solar system.
Once we have the Moon, we’re 90% of the way to a solar system spanning species. Mars is cool, but not useful in any real sense other than bragging rights.
into its* orbit
This going to sound basic but I find the vacuum part of space to be the most interesting from an engineering POV.
We are all use to having an atmosphere we can convex heat out to but as there is no atmosphere where do you send your excess heat to?
You can only radiate it away, and it’s slooooow
Ah yeah, there’s a radiators modpack for KSP.
Are we still doing “Uranus”?
The S-IVB-506.
This was the third stage of the launch vehicle for Apollo 11. After entering Earth orbit, the S-IVB rocket was responsible for the translunar injection burn. Once the burn was complete, the command module, LEM, astronauts and the spent rocket were then coasting to the moon. The astronauts would detach the CSM, pitch up, translate in, extract the LEM, then thrust with RCS to get clear of the S-IVB. At this point, the rocket is on a coarse to the moon.
Many of them orbit between the Earth and moon to this day. One is speculated to orbit between the Earth and Sun. Many impacted the lunar surface, including the one from Apollo 13.
The S-IVB-506 rocket was the one that carried Apollo 11 to the moon. It’s a piece of human history, floating silently in a heliocentric orbit above us.
What would one even look like?
Like a reddish glowing Jupiter.
Hypothetical, but Black Hole Stars (one of my favourite Kurzgesagt videos).
“Normally that would be the end – today’s stars go supernova, a black hole forms and things calm down. But in this case, the star survives its own death.”
“An impossibly dangerous balance has been created – millions of solar masses pushing in, the angry radiation of a force fed black hole pushing out.”
I’m hoping that some of the new long wavelength teleescopes like JWST might have a chance of seeing one of these beasts.
I…what? Hold on, it was commonly thought that black holes effectively compress and hold infinite mass. Then math or simulations (or both) pointed out this isn’t true, I think. Running on very dim memories here. IF this is true, then somehow the solar mass of the star is, uh…well fuck me. The ADHD train came in and I lost what I was thinking.
Any chance you have a compelling link on this topic?
it was commonly thought that black holes effectively compress and hold infinite mass
Black holes definitely don’t have infinite mass. They might have infinite mass density (gravitational singularity) within them, but we can’t know for sure, since we can’t see inside black holes.