The solar system is an amazing place with its mysterious planets, mysterious satellites and strange phenomena that are so outside this world that they cannot be explained.
Scientists have discovered volcanoes on Pluto that spew ice, while Mars is a haven for a truly "great" canyon the size of the United States. And, perhaps, a giant undiscovered planet is hiding outside Neptune?
We bring to your attention a list of the 10 most interesting facts about space for children, students in grade 4, short stories about the universe.
10. The Milky Way
Let's begin with The Milky Way is a disk with a diameter of about 120,000 light years with a central bulge with a diameter of 12,000 light years. The disk is far from perfectly flat and has a distorted shape, and astronomers attribute this fact to two neighbors of our galaxy - the Big and Small Magellanic clouds.
It is believed that these two dwarf galaxies, which are part of our “Local Group” of galaxies and can revolve around the Milky Way, pull dark matter in our galaxy, as in a game of galactic tug of war. Pulling creates a kind of oscillating frequency that acts on the hydrogen gas of the galaxy, which is a lot in the Milky Way.
9. Black holes
The logical question is how dangerous a black hole is, is the Earth inevitable danger of swallowing? Astronomers say the answer is no, though in the center of our galaxy lies a huge supermassive black hole. Fortunately, we are not approaching this monster - we are approximately two-thirds of the way from the center relative to the rest of our galaxy - but we can certainly observe its consequences from afar.
For example, the European Space Agency claims that it is four million times more massive than our sun and is surrounded by surprisingly hot gas.
8. Neutron stars
When a massive star dies, spewing out most of its “insides” throughout the Universe as a result of a supernova explosion, its iron heart, the star’s core, collapses, creating the densest form of observable matter in the universe is a neutron star.
A neutron star is basically a giant core, says Mark Alford, a professor at Washington University.
«Imagine a small lead ball with cotton candy around it. ”- says Alford: “This is an atom. The whole mass is in a small lead ball in the middle, and around it there is a large puffy cloud of electrons, like cotton».
In neutron stars, all atoms have decayed. The electron clouds were completely absorbed, and all this became one with the electrons moving side by side with the protons and neutrons in the gas or liquid.
7. Rogue Planets
A rogue planet (or a free-floating planet) is usually a body the size of Jupiter that lives in the space between the stars, not bound by the gravity of the parent star.
It is believed that these planets either formed directly from the collapse of interstellar gas clouds (like stars) without masses that contribute to ignition (like a brown dwarf), or they were formed in the planetary system and somehow overcame the gravity of their star and were thrown out of the system.
The first rogue planets were discovered in the late 1990s by a group of Japanese astronomers when they found evidence confirming the existence of objects whose masses resemble the masses of planets in a cluster of chameleons located about 500 light years from Earth.
Due to the complete lack of order, rogue planets can be extremely difficult to detect. However, they can still be found using various methods, such as microlensing (a phenomenon in which a star acts as a gravitational lens when it passes in front of a background star).
6. Magnetars
Heavy duty magnetic neutron stars hide and seek with astronomers. It is known that they flare up without warning, some for hours, and others for months, then fade and disappear again.
Magnetar is a widespread version of a neutron star and a general explanation of some phenomena (such as abnormal X-ray pulsars). The magnetar is currently the most powerful magnetic object known.. In fact, the magnetic field of the magnetar is powerful enough to be deadly close to it (and this is an understatement).
If we could suddenly make a magnet about a thousand times more powerful, magnetars would be twenty billion times more powerful than anything we can do. The magnetic field of a magnetar can be four billion times stronger than that of the Earth. In fact, it can erase all your credit cards from a distance of 200,000 kilometers.
5. Hypernova stars
Hypernovs are incredibly rare. In fact, the incidence of hypernovae throughout the Milky Way is estimated to be one million times a year, which makes observation of celestial explosions particularly difficult.
Twenty-five million light-years from Earth in another galaxy, astronomers have found what seems like remnants of a giant hypernova, providing new information about these huge explosions, but there are currently several theories as to what actually causes them.
One idea is that a massive star, rotating at a very high speed or enclosed in a powerful magnetic field, explodes, breaking the inner core. Alternatively, a hypernova may be the result of a collision of two stars, a merger into one giant mass and a subsequent explosion.
4. The speed of light in space
The speed of light in vacuum is 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second), and theoretically nothing can move faster than light. At miles per hour, the speed of light is very high: about 670,616,629 miles per hour. If you could travel at the speed of light, you could go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second.
Early scientists, unable to perceive the movement of light, thought that it should travel instantly. However, over time, the measurements of the motion of these wave-like particles became more and more accurate.
2. Microgravity
Microgravity is the measure to which an object in space undergoes acceleration. In general, this term is used as a synonym for "zero gravity", but the prefix "micro" indicates accelerations equivalent to one millionth (10-6) gravitational force on the Earth's surface.
Microgravity makes you taller. Under microgravity conditions, vertebrae in the spine no longer shrink under the influence of the Earth's gravityas a result of which the discs between them expand, and the spinal column lengthens, which makes you taller.
2. Gamma rays
Gamma rays have the smallest wavelength and most of the energy of any other wave in the electromagnetic spectrum. These waves are generated by radioactive atoms and in nuclear explosions. Gamma rays can kill living cells, and this is an advantage that medicine takes advantage of using gamma rays to kill cancer cells.
Gamma rays travel to us through the vast distances of the universe, only to be absorbed into the Earth’s atmosphere. Different wavelengths of light penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere to different depths. Instruments aboard high-altitude balloons and satellites, such as the Compton Observatory, give us the only view of the sky of gamma radiation.
1. Dark matter and dark energy
Dark matter is five times superior to ordinary matter. It seems to exist in clusters around the Universe, forming a kind of forest on which visible matter unites into galaxies. The nature of dark matter is unknown, but physicists have suggested that it, like visible matter, consists of particles.
At this point, several experiments are being conducted to search for dark matter. But scientists actually discovered its existence decades ago.
In the 1930s, astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky observed the rotations of galaxies that form the Coma cluster, a group of more than 1000 galaxies located more than 300 million light-years from Earth. He estimated the mass of these galaxies based on the light that they emitted.
He was surprised to find that if this estimate is correct, at the speed with which the galaxies move, they should fly apart. In fact, the cluster needed at least 400 times the mass to hold together. Something mysterious seemed to hold a finger on the scale; it seemed that invisible “dark” matter was being added to the mass of galaxies.