But they are unusual since we have no idea how they even started in the first place. Scientists recently discovered no less than 70 rogues wandering the Milky Way, so they’re rare but not super rare by any means. Or maybe they started life as something bigger that collapsed but didn’t have the density to form a star, so it just made a little wandering planet. They may have been regular planets like Earth and Mars that were knocked out of their orbit somehow and sent like a billiard ball through space. We’re not sure what makes a rogue planet form at all. They call them rogue planets and they go where they want. Turns out there are a few planets out there that have a rebellious streak and chose not to remain in a predictable orbit around a star. They get into orbit around a star and then spin for the rest of eternity, or at least until something cataclysmic happens. Most planets tend to stick to a pretty standard game plan in space. To add a little more perspective, the solar mass of all the stars in the Milky Way has been estimated to be as much as 64 billion solar masses, meaning it would stamp out not just our solar system but the entire galaxy with room to spare. That makes it more than 15,000 times more massive than the black hole in the center of our own galaxy. Its mass has been calculated at 66 billion solar masses. The largest black hole discovered so far has the unassuming name TON 618. That’s big, but is it supermassive? Not yet. Our Milky Way galaxy has a large black hole in the middle of it that is about 4.5 million solar masses. In the center of any given galaxy you will also find a large black hole. Something 100 times the size of our sun would basically eat our entire solar system, so that’s a substantial size, right? That’s a normal black hole. That means it’s 10 to 100 times as dense as a star. There’s just something about a thing that’s bigger than it should be that can really freak you out.Ī “normal” black hole, if there is such a thing, may be anywhere from about 10 to 100 solar masses in size. Sure, we all know about black holes, but do you know about supermassive black holes? It’s the difference between a garden snail and one of these insane, cat-sized snails people sometimes have as pets. It’s predicted that it would take 10 billion times the force needed to smash steel to break through it. It’s still theoretical at the moment, but if this substance exists on the outside of neutron stars, the density of it makes it the strongest substance ever known. There may be a core of something called quark-gluon plasma in the middle, but around the crust is where protons and neutrons form the unique structures called nuclear pasta, so named because that’s the shape they take. All of these tightly compacted neutrons, protons, and electrons create layers in the star. They’re packed insanely tight and exist at around 600,000 Celsius. Inside that neutron star are a lot of neutrons, hence the name. Black holes are the only smaller and more dense celestial bodies we know about. Despite that small size, the mass of it could be 25 times the sun that birthed it. The neutron star that forms afterwards is incredibly small, relatively speaking. The origin star would have been many times bigger than our sun. A neutron star happens when a massively dense star gets so large it collapses on itself. Researchers believe there is something formed inside the dense core of neutron stars. So what is nuclear pasta? Perhaps the strongest thing that has ever existed. Nuclear pasta sounds dangerously delicious, but the name isn’t a very good descriptor of this strange phenomenon. It emits radio waves which let us track its orbit here on Earth, and that has allowed us to see that these pair of super dense stars are actually dragging space-time around with them. This thing is even smaller, the size of a city, but it’s made of neutrons packed so tightly together it’s 400,000 times heavier than Earth. While a day goes by in 24 hours here on earth, it takes about two minutes on the white dwarf. Researchers have observed a white dwarf star, the corpse of a once massive star, which is now the size of Earth but 300,000 times heavier. It’s very difficult to observe on a relatively small scale of something like our planet because the effect is incredibly small. Consider it like a whirlpool, only instead of water, it’s space and time swirling around. But it doesn’t have to be.Įinstein’s Theory of General Relativity predicts that any spinning body will drag space-time with it in a phenomenon called frame-dragging. It’s all very cool and mind-bending stuff but, for most of us, it will always be sci-fi or, at the very least, theoretical. The faster you travel in space, the more time slows down. Thanks to Star Trek, if nothing else, many of us understand there’s a relationship between space and time.
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