Space is full of scary places, planets, stars, moons, but there are some things that really send shivers down your neck. We’re here today to take a look at them and learn some interesting facts about them.
Stephenson 2-18
Stephenson 2-18 is the largest star we know of, with a diameter of around 1.8 billion miles. To put that in perspective, it would engulf the entire orbit of Saturn and still be larger. You could fit around 10 billion suns inside of it. It is around 20,000 light years away from us so there is no chance of visiting it in our lifetime. This red hypergiant star resides in the Scutum constellation and has a luminosity(light emitted) of around 440,000 times that of our sun.
Rouge Black Holes
Black holes are scary enough, but rouge black holes are even scarier. Rouge black holes are black holes that do not orbit or have any sort of connection to any other objects. They are just floating in space, anywhere and everywhere. They are invisible, silent wanderers with no route to follow. The scary part is that there are millions of these in our Milky Way Galaxy. And one could be headed straight for Earth and we would have no clue.
Oumuamua
Oumuamua is the Hawaiian word for scout, or tip of the spear. This object is very unknown and is made of mostly frozen nitrogen. It is moving very very fast through the Milky Way and very briefly flew through our Solar System. It is a long thick object that is around half a mile long and 500 feet thick. It was discovered on October 19, 2017 using the STARRS telescope in Haleakala, Hawaii. What’s crazy is the fact that most of the questions about it may never be answered, as it has flown far past our solar system.
Ton 618
Ton 618 is the largest black hole we know of. With a diameter of 390 billion kilometers or 242 billion miles and a mass 66 billion times that of the sun. It is located in the Ton 618 elliptical galaxy that is around 10.8 billion light years away from us. It is classified as an ultramassive black hole and is also known as a quasar due to it being extremely luminous and eating up gas and other space debris. It was discovered in 1957 and was thought to be a bright star. It was later identified as an ultramassive quasar central black hole of a far away galaxy.
These places are far away, but also close, though interstellar travel is a thing of science fiction. Nobody knows what the future holds. Our universe is huge. Anything could be out there…
