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.
Magnetars. I want to throw an asteroid or something at one and watch it get ripped apart on a subatomic level purely by magnetism.
Honestly earth.
Here is so much undiscovered that could help us understand space a lot better.
Lagrange Points (L4 and L5 specifically). Here’s a bit of space with a gravitational effect keeping you inside, but not due to mass inside it. It’s due to the relation of two other masses. Mind-boggling.
Venus. It’s got this mega-dense atmosphere. Why? It’s an anomaly when you compare it to the other similarly-sized planets in our solar system. The gas giants having thick atmospheres makes sense, but Venus? Actually, I just had a thought. The Sun’s mass generally pulls gas toward it. Gas that is in between the Sun and Mercury gets pulled into the Sun. Gas between Mercury and Venus gets pulled into the Sun too, since the closeness of the Sun makes its gravitational effect very influential compared to Mercury’s. Gas between Venus and the Earth, however, is far away enough from the Sun that it will stabilize around a Venus-sized planet. This explains the discrepancy between Mercury’s and Venus’s atmospheres. Not sure about the Venus/Earth discrepancy, but perhaps Mars’s light atmosphere is due to its lower mass.
Callisto. Why is it so dark? Why is the ice (the light splotches on the surface) like polka dots, rather than either an ocean or more diffuse?
I find neutron stars fascinating. The remnant of a star that was almost big enough to form a black hole but not quite. The gravity pulls all the matter left after a supernova into a bizarre form of matter. The protons and electrons are smushed together making basically the whole thing neutrons. They’re packed together so densely, a teaspoon would weigh as much as a mountain. A star much bigger than the sun suddenly condensed into like 20km.
Plus, some form pulsars spinning so fast that it seems impossible. The record is over 1,000 rotations per second. Some form magnetars, the strongest magnets in the universe. There might be an even more exotic form of matter — “strange matter” made of strange quarks — in their core.
It’s amazing what a really big boom can do. We can’t even fathom the bigness of that kind of boom. To get a star remnant rotating faster than the human eye can detect is just… mind boggling.
You’ll definitely find video gamers who claim to be able to see that temporal resolution, of course.
Your username is intriguing. Have you tried it? Is it any good?
Also, neutron stars are awesome. Densities on the order of “Mount Everests per teaspoon”? Almost unimaginable.
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.
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!
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
