You Never Know What You'll Find

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A series on SPACE relative topics, because I love it!

I can always look to space when I want a perspective check. Whether it is finite or infinite, it never limits my imagination. I can always count on it to leave me nonplus when envisaging its entirety. Going off of Carl Sagan's note, let's check out some of the things that have been discovered so far.

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A New Home?

Gliese 5A1C has been determined to be a habitable future colonization. It's stuck in a state of tidal locking. Meaning one side of the planet is always facing the star, while the other side is always facing away. This is due to its distance from the sun. The heat from the star side of the planet will instantly incinerate you. While on the opposite side of the planet where there is no sun, you would freeze you instantly. In between is a small segment where life could theoretically exist.

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A Tasty Snack?

Sagittarius B2 is a gas cloud that tastes like raspberries and smells of rum. Predominantly consisting of ethyl formate which is known to give raspberries their taste and rum its smell.

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Can You Get Some More Ice, I'm Burning Up?

Gliese 436B, coexisting in the same solar system as Gliese 581C, is a planet made almost entirely out of ice. At 439 degrees Celsius, it's literally a burning ice cube. With the vast quantity of water on the planet, the molecules are pulled together so densely by gravity that evaporation does not occur.

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A Familiar Face?

Captured by Nasa in 2012, is the iconic image of Mickey Mouse formed by Mercury’s craters. It spans 65 miles wide, consisting of three craters that were impacted again, adding incredible detail to the visage.

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A Do Over Device or the Whole Best Trash Compactor?

Black holes are one of space’s most mysterious objects. The theoretical Singularity lies at the heart of these gravitational super powers. They have Event Horizons, a point of no return, in which even light can’t escape because the gravity is so strong. Would the law of causality break down allowing you to travel back in time, upon entering one? The gravitational singularity is a region where the space-time curvature, supposedly, becomes infinite.

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What Am I Seeing?

Gravitational lensing happens when gravity bends the path of traveling light coming toward an observer. Above is a blue star directly behind the yellow star. Light being bent emitted from the blue star is warped as it travels past the yellow one.

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Tesla's Dream?

The universe’s largest electrical current is estimated to equal a trillion lightning bolts and a billion billion amps (10^18 amps). The current is believed to be generated by powerful magnetic fields found inside galaxy 3C303's central black hole. The bolts travel through gas and dust up to 150,000 light years away, over one and half times the span of our Milky Way.

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Can We Stop Worrying About Money Now?

“The Diamond Planet” 55 Cancri e, is made out of crystallized Diamond. Worth $26.9 Nonillion dollars. That is $26.9 dollars followed by 30 zeros. One-third of the mass of the planet is believed to be pure diamond, while the rest includes graphite. The planet is two times the size of Earth and has eight times the mass.

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Wonder If It's Salty?

Containing 140 trillion times the amount of water in Earth's oceans and 12 billion light years away is the Universe’s largest water reservoir. It is located near a colossal black hole, 20 billion times the size of the sun, at the center of a quasar. The amount of energy it releases is equivalent to 1,000 trillion of our suns.

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No Big Deal?

The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across. Meaning it would take 100,000 years for the light to reach from end to end. Now multiply that 40,000 times for the Large Quasar Group (LQG). The LQG is 4 billion light years across. We have no idea how it was formed because it was believed to be theoretically impossible for structures the size of LQG to exist. The group of 74 quasars that form the LQG breaks some of the standard laws of physics, as the maximum size of any cosmic structure should be only 1.2 billion light-years across.

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With an estimated 100 billion galaxies in our observable universe it is hard to say that anything isn’t probable in terms of new discoveries. Maybe entering a black hole is the key to unlocking the multiverse or traveling back in time to alter the course of events. At the end of the day I am happy to allow my mind to expand out to the far reaches of this place we call home, and to live in wonder of all it has to offer.

Image Sources: First, Second, Third, Forth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh