Top 5 Mysteries of the Universe

    

1. Fermi Bubbles

The bubbles are massive, mysterious structures that emanate from the Milky Way’s center and extend roughly 20000 light years above and below the galactic plane. The strange phenomenon was first discovered in 2010 and it is made up of super high energy gamma and x ray emissions which is invisible to human eyes. Scientists have guessed that the gamma rays might be shock waves from stars being consumed by the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

 2. The Rectangular galaxy

Earlier this year, scientists have spotted a celestial body, roughly 70 million light years away with an appearance that is unique in the visible universe : The galaxy LEDA 074886 is shaped more or less like a rectangle. While other galaxies are shaped like discs, three-dimensional eclipses or irregular blobs, this one seems to have a regular rectangle shaped appearance.

 

3. What Re-ionized the Universe?

Big Bang is broadly accepted model for the origin of the universe state that cosmos began as a hot, dense point approximately 13.7 billion years ago. The early universe is believed to have been a dynamic place and about 13 billion years ago, it underwent a so-called age of re-ionization. The universe

Some fog of hydrogen gas was clearing and becoming translucent to ultraviolet light fir the first time. Scientists are puzzled over what caused this re-ionization to occur.

 

4. What’s the source of the Most Energetic Cosmic Rays?

Cosmic rays are highly energetic particles that flow into our solar system from deep in outer space, but the actual origin has been puzzling astronomers for about a century. The cosmic rays are as much strong as 100 million times the particles that have been produced in manmade colliders.

 

 

 

5. Galactic Recycling

Astronomers have noticed that galaxies form new stars at a rate that would consume more matter than they actually have inside them. The Milky Way for example appears to turn one sun’s worth of dust and gas into new stars every year, but it doesn’t have enough spare matter to keep this up long term. Astronomers noticed gas that had been expelled by the galaxies flowing back in to the center. If the galaxies recycle this gas to produce new stars, it might be a piece of the puzzle in solving the question of the missing raw matter.

 

Neutron Star Slows Down?

Neutron stars are known suddenly to begin rotating faster, but researchers say they’ve observed a sudden slowdown in one special kind of neutron star. They’ve dubbed this cosmic braking act an “anti-glitch.” The slowdown was detected in a magnetar—an ultra-magnetized neutron star that can exhibit dramatic outbursts of X-rays, sometimes so strong they can affect the Earth’s atmosphere from clear across the galaxy. The magnetar 1E 2259+586 shines a brilliant blue-white in this false-color X-ray image of the CTB 109 supernova remnant, which lies about 10,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. CTB 109 is only one of three supernova remnants in our galaxy known to harbor a magnetar. X-rays at low, medium and high energies are respectively shown in red, green, and blue in this image created from observations acquired by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite in 2002. (Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton/M. Sasaki et al.) A magnetar’s magnetic field is so strong that, if one were located at the distance of the Moon, it could wipe clean a credit card magnetic strip here on Earth. The magnetar in question—1E 2259+586 located roughly 10,000 light years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia—was being monitored by McGill University researchers using NASA’s Swift X-ray telescope in order to study the star’s rotation and try to detect the occasional giant X-ray explosions that are often seen from magnetars. “I looked at the data and was shocked—the neutron star had suddenly slowed down,” says Rob Archibald, lead author and a graduate student at McGill. “These stars are not supposed to behave this way.” Accompanying the sudden slowdown, which rang in at one third of a part per million of the 7-second rotation rate, was a large increase in the X-ray output of the magnetar, telltale evidence of a major event inside or near the surface of the neutron star. “We’ve seen huge X-ray explosions from magnetars before,” says Victoria Kaspi, professor of physics and leader of the Swift magnetar monitoring program, “but an anti-glitch was quite a surprise. “This is telling us something brand new about the insides of these amazing objects.” In 2002, NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite also saw a large X-ray outburst from the source, but in that case, it was accompanied by a more usual spin-up glitch. Puzzling stars Neutron stars are known to rotate very rapidly, from a few revolutions per minute to as fast as several hundred times per second. A neutron star glitch is an event in which the star suddenly begins rotating faster. These sudden spin-up glitches have long been thought to demonstrate that these exotic ultra-dense stellar objects contain some form of liquid, likely a superfluid. The internal structure of neutron stars is a long-standing puzzle, as the matter inside these stars is subject to forces so intense that they are presently not re-creatable in terrestrial laboratories. The densities at the hearts of neutron stars are thought to be upwards of 10 times higher than in the atomic nucleus, far beyond what current theories of matter can describe. The anti-glitch, reported in the journal Nature, strongly suggests previously unrecognized behavior inside neutron stars, possibly with pockets of superfluid rotating at different speeds. The researchers further point out in the Nature paper that some properties of conventional glitches have been noted to be puzzling and suggestive of flaws in the existing theory to explain them. They are hoping that the discovery of a new phenomenon will open the door to renewed progress in understanding neutron star interiors.