Astronomers watched 35 explosive outbursts from a rare repeating “fast radio burst” (FRB) as it shifted in frequency like a “cosmic slide whistle,” blinking in a puzzling pattern never seen before.
FRBs are millisecond-long flashes of light from beyond the Milky Way that are capable of producing as much energy in a few seconds as the sun does in a year. FRBs are believed to come from powerful objects like neutron stars with intense magnetic fields — also called magnetars — or from cataclysmic events like stellar collisions or the collapse of neutron stars to form black holes. Complicating the FRB picture, a few FRBs are “repeaters” that flash from the same spot in the sky more than once, while the majority burst once and then vanish.
Space is my jam. More strange things we’re still learning about:
There are celestial objects the size of a major city, with magnetic fields so strong they would rip the iron from your blood if it got as close as the moon.
Every planet in the solar system, and many of the dwarf planets, could fit between the earth and the moon, and still have space left over.
Know how crowded our planet is? There are voids in space hundreds of millions of lightyears across, where nearly nothing is inside. The largest we know of currently is the Böotes Void over 300MLY across, and contains only 60 galaxies. For reference, the Andromeda galaxy is only about 2 million light years away, with several smaller galaxies/clusters around us. So take a basketball and put 3 grains of sand inside, that’s about how “dense” the voids are.
only when the moon is close to apogee (Moon is furthest from Earth), otherwise you’d have to exclude Pluto and half of Neptune. https://www.wral.com/story/can-the-solar-system-fit-between-the-earth-and-moon-/16315991/
btw I tried to find diameters of planets and each site says sth different :D
Learning how empty s[pace is makes me uncomfortable. I watched a Kuzgesagt video last year about how the universe is expanding from all points and we’ll never be able to travel to other galaxies.
I just hope one day we create a warp engine of some kind to make interstellar travel possible. Right now it feels like we’re marooned on an island surrounded by dangerous ocean.
Kurzgesagt is a fantastic channel, but they don’t focus on space, which would take them from a 10/10 to a 12/10 in my opinion.
If you want some more existential dread, fascination, or just to go “huh. Didn’t know that”, there’s History of the Universe, SEA, Learning Curve, and a few others I’m sure would get recommended.
Some like Kosmos can get a bit sensational from time to time, but they also have solid videos.
PBS Space Time has a couple videos that were interesting to me but their format and voices don’t mesh with me personally, not entirely sure why.
I would like to subscribe to strange space facts. Even though I’ll never get to experience them, it feels cozy somehow just knowing about them.
What would ‘nothing’ (like in those voids) feel like, I wonder?
Like normal space, but dark and completely empty of anything except trace gasses. And given just how far away any galaxy is, I’d wager those trace gasses are extra sparse.
If Firefly is to be believed, when faced with that much nothing, some folk go mad.