10. Hypervelocity stars
You have probably looked out into the night sky and wished upon a shooting star (which essentially are really just meteors). But that does not mean fast moving stars do not exist. Yes, they are rare (about 1 in a million), but not non-existent. The first hyper-velocity star was discovered in 2005 moving away from the centre of the galaxy at about 10 times the speed of a normal star.
9. Black holes
There really is nothing much in the universe that is much stranger than a black hole. When the mass of billions of stars is squeezed into a single point, it is called a black hole. But you cannot really see it because its gravitational pull is so strong, not even light can escape it and the black hole is therefore invisible.
8. Magnetars
If the mass of a star heavier than the sun is squeezed to a few miles in diameter. With the speed with which it spins, a magnetar gains a temporary magnetic field which is trillions of times stronger than that of Earth’s. Now this magnetic field is strong enough to render your credit card unworkable from a distance of hundreds of thousands of miles away.
7. Neutrinos
Imagine taking a penny out of your pocket and holding it up for a second. Without you noticing, about 150 billion neutrinos passed through that coin as if it were not there at all. After performing certain tests, scientists have found that neutrinos originate in the stars and from the Big Bang. What is strange about these particles is that they seem to just disappear!
6. Dark matter
If you take all of the energy and matter in the universe and pile it up into a huge chunk, you would not believe what you would observe. All of the stars, planets, comets and asteroids in all of the galaxies make up only about 23 percent of the universe. The rest of the matter is invisible to the naked eye (thus “dark” matter”)
5. Dark Energy
Just like dark matter, dark energy also makes up 77 percent of the total energy in the universe. It is thought that this is the energy that is moving the galaxies farther and farther from each other. In a few trillion years, dark energy will cause the Milky Way to become an island galaxy with no other galaxies in sight.
4. Planets
Planets might not feel all that strange because we as humans happen to live on one. But it might be difficult to imagine just how mysterious planets are. We do know that planets form out of the dust around stars. But exactly how the dust adds up to make giant planets is not yet entirely clear.
3. Gravity
The force that pulls two objects towards each other is called gravity and that is practically all we know about it. There is no definitive theory that conclusively defines the origin of this force. There is one theory that infinitesimally small particles called gravitons exude this force in matter, but it is not known whether it would ever be possible to detect these particles.
2. Life
There are all forms of matter and energy all over the universe but only in a few places are good enough to be able to sustain life. Right now we do not know whether life exists on a planet other than Earth, in the entire universe, but there are some rough estimates that it should.
1. The Universe
The mother of all mysteries is actually the universe itself. How did it come into being and if the Big Bang Theory is to be believed, exactly why that happened is difficult to determine.
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