15 There’s a nebula that looks like a manatee, so scientists renamed it the Manatee Nebula in a special ceremony.
Image credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, K. Golap, M. Goss; NASA’s WISE
A nebula- the leftovers from a star that died in a supernova explosion about 20,000 years ago- has been renamed as Manatee Nebula because of its striking resemblance with the sea creature. The Manatee Nebula lies 18,000 light-years away in the constellation of Aquila and its official name is W50. (Source)
14 The average color of the universe is beigeish white, and is named “Cosmic Latte”
Image credits: Karl Glazebrook & Ivan Baldry (JHU)(NASA)
A team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University in 2001 determined that the color of the universe is greenish white. However, they later corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper in which they acknowledged that the color was in fact beigeish white in place of greenish white. This average color of the universe has been named as “Cosmic Latte”. The survey took into account more than 200,000 galaxies and measured the spectral range of the light from a large volume of the universe. The RGB value of Cosmic Latte is #FFF8E7. (Source)
13 The largest object in the universe has a mean size of 6-10 billion light years and theoretically shouldn’t even exist
Image credits: NASA, ESA, Harald Ebeling (University of Hawaii at Manoa) & Jean-Paul Kneib (LAM)
The biggest structure ever found in the entire universe has a mean size in excess of 6 to 10 billion light-years. Named as Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall (Her-CrB GW), the structure is larger than the theoretical upper limit on how big universal structures can be. Therefore, it technically shouldn’t exist. The structure was discovered in early November 2013 by a team of American and Hungarian astronomers led by Istvan Horvath, Jon Hakkila and Zsolt Bagoly while analyzing data from the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission. (1, 2)
Advertisements
12 A black hole produces the lowest “note” in the universe, to the tune of a B-flat that’s 57 octaves below middle C.
In 2003, Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered, what is known as the deepest “note” from the sound waves that were emitted by a massive black hole. The black in study resides in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located 250 million light years from Earth. In musical terms, the pitch of the sound that was generated by the black hole is a note B flat which is 57 octaves lower than middle-C. To put this into perspective, a typical piano consists of only seven octaves. The note which is at a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing is the deepest note ever detected in the entire universe. (Source)
11 There is a large area of space that is devoid of any galaxies that have been theorized by cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton, to be the imprint of a parallel universe.
The CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) Cold Spot is a region of space in the direction of the Eridanus constellation that was first discovered in 2004. It is postulated as one of the largest structures in the observable universe and is often described as a bubble of cold space in the cosmos. According to Laura Mersini-Houghton, this cold spot represents an imprint of a parallel universe caused by quantum entanglement between the two universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation. If true, this represents the presence of a universe in conjunction with ours. (Source)
