The Boomerang Nebula is located in the constellation Centaurus, 5,000 light-years from Earth. The nebula has a temperature of −272 ° C, which makes it the coldest known place in the universe.
The gas stream from the central star of the Boomerang Nebula moves at a speed of 164 km / s and is constantly expanding. Due to this rapid expansion, the nebula has such a low temperature. The Boomerang Nebula is colder even relict radiation from the Big Bang.
Keith Taylor and Mike Scarrott named the object the Boomerang Nebula in 1980 after observing it with the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. The sensitivity of the device made it possible to record only a slight asymmetry in the lobes of the nebula, from which the assumption of a curved, like a boomerang, shape appeared.
The Boomerang Nebula was photographed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998, after which it became clear that the nebula was shaped like a bow tie, but that name was already taken.
R136a1 lies 165,000 light-years from Earth in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This blue hypergiant is the most massive star known to science. The star is also one of the brightest, emitting up to 10 million times more light than the Sun.
The mass of the star is 265 solar masses, and the mass during formation is more than 320. R136a1 was discovered by a team of astronomers from the University of Sheffield led by Paul Crowter on June 21, 2010.
Until now, the question of the origin of such supermassive stars remains unclear: whether they formed with such a mass initially, or they were formed from several smaller stars.
In the image from left to right: a red dwarf, the Sun, a blue giant, and R136a1:
El Gordo means "fat man" in Spanish. This is how astronomers called the largest and hottest known cluster of galaxies in our universe. The El Gordo cluster is located 9.7 billion light years from Earth. It consists of two separate smaller clusters, colliding at several million kilometers per hour.
Pulsar J1311-3430, or Black Widow, weighs as much as two Suns, but is no wider than Washington State. Every day, this superdense neutron star grows larger, "eating" a nearby companion star. For 93 minutes, the pulsar makes a full revolution around its victim, raining streams of radiation on it and taking away its energy. This process has one outcome: one day the victim will completely disappear.
A year on the asteroid (3753) Cruithney lasts about the same as on Earth - 364 days. This means that this celestial body rotates at almost the same distance from the Sun as our planet. Our orbiting twin was discovered in 1986. However, there is no threat of collision: Cruithney will not come closer than 12 million kilometers to Earth.
Rejected by its parent star, the lonely planet CFBDSIR2149 wanders the universe 100 light-years away. Most likely, this wanderer was thrown out of her solar system during the turbulent years of its formation, when the orbits of other planets were determined.
The Smith Cloud is a giant cluster of hydrogen gas that is millions of times heavier than the Sun. Its length is 11 thousand light years, and its width is 2.5 thousand years. In shape, the cloud resembles a torpedo, and in fact - too: the cloud rushes towards our galaxy and crashes into the Milky Way in about 27 million years.
In 300 thousand light years from the center of the Milky Way is a satellite galaxy, which is almost entirely composed of dark matter and gas. Scientists discovered evidence of its existence in 2009. And only a few months ago, astronomers managed to find four stars 100 million years old in this cluster of dark matter.
The blue hue of the Marble Planet HD 189733b is associated with the oceans. In fact, it is a gas giant orbiting close to the star. There has never been water. Temperatures exceed 927 degrees Celsius. And the "heavenly blue" is created by the rain of molten glass.
When our universe was only about 875 million years old, a black hole with a mass of 12 billion Suns formed in space. By comparison, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way (above) is only 4 million times heavier than the Sun. Supermassive J0100 + 2802 is located in the center of a galaxy located 12.8 billion light years from us. Now scientists are racking their brains over the question: how did she manage to achieve such dimensions in such a short period of time?
The star R136a1 is 256 times heavier than the Sun and 7.4 million times brighter. Scientists believe that colossi of this size could appear as a result of the merger of many smaller stars. The life span of a fiery chimera is only a few million years, after which its components burn out.
The Boomerang Nebula, 5,000 light-years from Earth, is the coldest place in the universe. The temperature inside the cloud of gas and dust reaches -272 degrees below zero. The cloud is expanding at a speed of about 590 thousand km per hour. The gas of the nebula is cooled by its sudden expansion, just like the refrigerant in refrigerators.
Our rating includes the largest, coldest, hottest, oldest, deadliest, lonely, darkest, brightest - and other "very-very" objects that a person managed to find in space. Some are literally at hand, while others are on the edge of the universe we know.
Space objects
In astronomy, space objects are natural or artificial celestial bodies outside the Earth's atmosphere. Artificial space objects are spacecraft or parts thereof that have separated during flight. Natural space objects include celestial bodies: stars, planets, their satellites, comets and asteroids. Such a strict interpretation is not always adhered to today. Thus, according to the 1971 and 1974 UN Conventions, the term "space object" is used only in relation to objects of artificial origin.
Clot of matter
But the popular publication USA Today, quoting the message about the discovery of Japanese astronomers, on the contrary, calls a space object not a celestial body, but a clot of stellar matter. This stellar formation stretching 200 million light years, consisting of three curvilinear appendages, was discovered with the help of the new powerful Subaru and Keck telescopes, and is considered the largest ever discovered in the Universe.
But if we still talk about celestial bodies, then, of course, the largest of them are stars. Looking from Earth as small bright points in the dark sky, the stars are huge globular clusters of gases heated to incredibly high temperatures. The myriad stars that exist in the universe differ from each other in age, size, density, composition, and temperature.
Star sizes
The largest star ever found by man was discovered in 2010. At the European Southern Observatory using space telescope "Hubble" British scientists observed the stars of the Large Magellanic Cloud, where several stars were discovered, many times larger than the Sun.
Astronomers, who until now believed that stars can reach maximum sizes exceeding the size of our star no more than 150 times, were amazed - the star R136a1 is 265 times larger than the Sun! If this supergiant were in our Galaxy, it would be brighter than the sun as much as the sun is brighter than the moon. Naturally, this star is also the largest star in the Universe (from those discovered by astronomers).
Evolution of stars
According to the existing theory of stellar evolution, all luminaries "lose weight" throughout their life, and supermassive stars are more intense than others. The date of the alleged formation of the star R136a1 is about a million years, during which time it is estimated to have lost up to one fifth of its initial mass. Then its mass at birth should have exceeded the mass of the Sun by 320 times. Stars of this magnitude, according to scientists, can be extremely rare, and mainly in superdense star clusters.
R136a1 is the most massive star in the universe known to date. Credit & Copyright: Joannie Dennis / flickr, CC BY-SA.
Looking at the night sky, you understand that you are just a grain of sand in the endless space of space.
But, many of us may also wonder: what is the most massive object in the Universe known today?
In a sense, the answer to this question depends on what we mean by the word “object”. Astronomers observe structures such as the Great Wall of Hercules-Northern Crown, a colossal string of gas, dust, and dark matter that contains billions of galaxies. Its length is about 10 billion light-years, so this structure may be called the largest object. But it's not that simple. The classification of this cluster as a unique object is problematic due to the fact that it is difficult to determine exactly where it begins and where it ends.
In fact, in physics and astrophysics, “object” has a clear definition, said Scott Chapman, an astrophysicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax:
“It's something tied together by its own gravitational forcessuch as a planet, star, or stars orbiting a common center of mass.
Using this definition, it becomes a little easier to understand what is the most massive object in the universe. In addition, this definition can be applied to various objects depending on the scale in question.
Photo of Jupiter's north pole, taken by the Pioneer 11 spacecraft in 1974. Credit & Copyright: NASA Ames. For our relatively tiny species, planet Earth, at 6 septillion kilograms, appears huge. But it's not even the biggest planet in Solar system... Gas giants: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter are much larger. Jupiter's mass, for example, is 1.9 octillion kilograms. Researchers have discovered thousands of planets orbiting other stars, including many that make our gas giants look small. Discovered in 2016, HR2562 b is the most massive exoplanet, approximately 30 times more massive than Jupiter. At this size, astronomers are not sure if it should be considered a planet or classified as a dwarf star.
In this case, the stars can grow to enormous sizes. The most massive known star is R136a1, its mass is between 265 and 315 times the mass of our Sun (2 nonillion kilograms). Located 130,000 light-years from the Large Magellanic Cloud, our satellite galaxy, this star is so bright that the light it emits actually rips it apart. According to a 2010 study, electromagnetic radiation emanating from the star is so powerful that it can carry material away from its surface, causing the star to lose about 16 Earth masses each year. Astronomers don't know exactly how such a star could have formed, or how long it will last.
Huge stars located in the stellar nursery RMC 136a, located in the Tarantula Nebula, in one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, 165,000 light years away. Credit & Copyright: ESO / VLT. The next massive objects are galaxies. The diameter of our own galaxy Milky Way is about 100,000 light years old, it contains about 200 billion stars, with a total weight of about 1.7 trillion solar masses. However, the Milky Way cannot compete with the central galaxy of the Phoenix cluster, located 2.2 million light years away and containing about 3 trillion stars. At the center of this galaxy is a supermassive black hole - the largest ever discovered - with an estimated mass of 20 billion suns. The Phoenix cluster itself is a huge cluster of approximately 1,000 galaxies with a total mass of about 2 quadrillion Suns.
But even this cluster cannot compete with what is probably the most massive object ever discovered: a galactic proto-cluster known as SPT2349.
“We won the jackpot by discovering this structure,” said Chapman, head of the team that discovered the new record holder. "More than 14 very massive individual galaxies in space not much larger than our Milky Way."
An artist's illustration showing 14 galaxies that are in the process of merging and will eventually form the core of a massive galaxy cluster. Credit & Copyright: NRAO / AUI / NSF; S. Dagnello. This cluster began to form when the universe was less than one and a half billion years old. The individual galaxies in this cluster will eventually merge into one giant galaxy, the most massive in the universe. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, Chapman said. Further observations showed that the overall structure contains about 50 satellite galaxies, which in the future will be absorbed by the central galaxy. The previous record holder, known as the El Gordo Cluster, weighs 3 quadrillion Suns, but the SPT2349 probably outweighs it by at least four to five times.
That such a huge object could have formed when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old surprised astronomers, as computer models suggested that such large objects would take much longer to form.
Given that humans have only explored a small portion of the sky, it is likely that even more massive objects may be lurking far into the universe.