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.
The thought of Quark Stars have fascinated me ever since I first read about them, about maybe fifteen years ago, a supernova remnant that is dense enough to overcome neutron degeneracy pressure, not dense enough to become a singularity.
The Cosmic Microwave Background was emitted when the Universe was around 370,000 years old, the oldest light in the Universe but the way space expands and accelerates, the distance at which the photons we detect now were emitted and when they reach us, is all distorted and crazily stretched. If you want to visualize how light moves as slow as a snail in the grand scheme of things, look no further.
Neutrinos, as far as we know the closest a particle with mass approaches zero, to the infinitesimal point that it’s thought it doesn’t derive its’ mass from the Higgs Field. Then there’s the as-yet elusive Cosmic Neutrino Background, emitted when the Universe was less than a second old.
What would one even look like?
Like a reddish glowing Jupiter.
Super Earths, because we know so little about them. They are the most common planet type (based on census from Kepler and TESS), but our solar system doesn’t have one, so we have no idea what they are like. Models and simulations give a few possible compositions, resembling mini-Neptunes, or water worlds with thick oceans, or more like Earth. Maybe all are possible. Earth-like rocky super-earths may be more geologically active than Earth, due to stronger convection and thinner crust. If they orbit a K-type dwarf, they could be candidates for super-habitable planets, with conditions even better for life than Earth.
“Super Earth, our home…”
Sorry, I get what you’re talking about but my mind has been permanently tainted to think of Helldivers now whenever I see a mention of Super Earth’s haha.
But to be serious, I agree completely. Massive rocky planets are a fascinating topic, and the idea of a planet even more habitable for life than Earth is hard to even imagine but is a fascinating concept. I’ve also read about “evaporated” gas giants, where the star’s stellar wind has blown away the thick atmosphere of a mini Neptune and left behind just the rocky core, which is thought to have a ton of water left.
Such a shame I wasn’t born in a future where we can casually explore space, that may never be a reality but I like to think it will be.
I’m fascinated by the ice moons of the gas giants, which is why I am so excited for missions like Juice, Europa Clipper, and Dragonfly.
Imagine if we found even simple single celled life in the subsurface oceans that are theorised to exist beneath their surfaces. It’d be the single biggest discovery in the history of humanity IMO even if it’s just bacteria.
Are we still doing “Uranus”?
