derby's Seven Wonders of the Universe

[derby378]

Now, I understand that you'll probably have you own ideas of what belongs in this list - magnetars are pretty damned impressive, not to mention deadly - but take a look at my little list and see for yourself. Enjoy!

(7) Planet PSR B1620-26b, aka Planet Methuselah
This is the oldest planet yet to be discovered in the universe - a whopping 12.7 billion years old. Considering that the universe itself is an estimated 13.7 billion years old, that's mind-boggling all by itself. But PSR B1620-26b also has 2.5 times the mass of Jupiter, and it orbits a binary system of a white dwarf and a pulsar every hundred years, which indicates that PSR B1620-26b also managed to survive a supernova at some point in the distant past. Methuselah is a true survivor among planets.

(6) Neutrinos
Oh, those tiny little neutrinos. These particles are zero-dimensional, have no electric charge or color charge, travel at close to the speed of light, and can pass though a hypothetical sphere of lead 90 million miles in diameter without skipping a beat. Every second, 50 trillion neutrinos pass through your body. Weirdest of all, these subatomic enigmas may actually possess a tiny amount of mass. Dark matter? Possibly - they do not interact with either the electromagnetic force or the strong nuclear force. They are a constant puzzlement to physicists everywhere.

(5) WMAP Cold Spot
A relatively plain-vanilla term to describe what may be the largest void in the known universe. The WMAP Cold Spot is estimated to be almost a billion light-years across. By comparison, our own Milky Way Galaxy is a piddly 100,000 light-years across, and the distance from the Milky Way to the Andromeda Galaxy is only 2.5 million light-years. Get stuck in the middle of the WMAP Cold Spot, and the journey to escape this intergalactic abyss will add new meaning to the question "Are we there yet?"

(4) Cosmic Microwave Background
A primordial remnant of the Big Bang that produced the universe in the first place. Think of it as a "snapshot" of the universe when it was only 400,000 years old, when the overall temperature of the universe had dropped to a point where electrons and protons could come together to form the first hydrogen atoms. And CMB is everywhere - you can't escape from it. Not even in the WMAP Cold Spot.

(3) "Dark Matter"
What the heck is this stuff? Matter as we know it interacts with the electromagnetic force, but dark matter never does. It does produce gravitational effects on visible matter, and there appears to be a whole bunch of it throughout the universe, but our finest scientific instruments can't see it, can't detect it, can't describe any properties it might have such as mass, spin, charge, etc. Does it even exist? Even if neutrinos are a form of dark matter, there's still a lot of "something" out there that neutrinos cannot account for - but still exerts a pull on stars, galaxies, etc.

(2) Black Holes
Possibly the most terrifying objects in the universe. Anything that enters a black hole will never come out again. Not even light can escape the grasp of a black hole. At the very heart of a black hole is the zero-dimensional corpse of a supermassive star - a star that has crushed itself out of existence due to its own mass and gravity. This "singularity," as it is known, has no length, width, height, or volume of any kind - only mass, and an unimaginable amount of it, all crammed into a region of space smaller than the diameter of a proton. People, spaceships, planets, stars, it doesn't matter - if they fall into a black hole, they get crushed out of existence, their atoms torn to shreds, their protons and neutrons ripped apart like tissue paper, and their most elementary particles squashed against the non-surface of the singularity. In fact, the only thing that a black hole has to worry about is derby's Number One Wonder of the Universe...

(1) Space Itself
Space. The final frontier. Cold, dark, and totally empty. Well, not quite "empty." As it turns out, the very subquantum fabric of space - through mechanisms not yet discovered, let alone understood - manufactures an endless sea of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that destroy each other instantly. The doomed virtual pairs fill every cubic millimeter of space with a vacuum energy known as "zero-point energy;" the observation of zero-point energy's influence on physical objects is known as the "Casimir effect." You'll never be able to harness this energy to make toast or brew coffee, but zero-point energy can erode black holes over eons by means of the phenomenon known as Hawking radiation, and it might be powerful enough to cause the universe to expand forever, eventually suffering what is known as "heat death," where zero-point energy finally destroys the last black hole through Hawking radiation after a googol years (that's a 1 followed by a hundred zeros, kids), and the universe reaches an extremely low-energy state in which the only denizens of this cold, dark, and bizarre universe of the distant future are electrons, positrons, neutrinos, and photons,.

Wasn't that fun?

[Glorfindel]

1. Yes, it was, and thank you for taking the time and trouble to post it

I'm delighted to learn of planet Methuselah. I had never heard of it. Curiouser and curiouser...

[On the Road]

2. I'm Surprised That There are Any Planets 12.7 Billion Years Old

at that point, the universe consisted almost totally of hydrogen with a littel helium thrown in. Maybe it's composed of metallic hydrogen like the core of Jupiter.

[derby378]

3. Another posibility is that Methuselah is a "pulsar planet"

A pulsar planet is a body that accretes from the debris of a planet that was destroyed when its parent star went supernova.

[Posteritatis]

4. There's a lot of stuff outside that "almost totally"

Space is mindbreakingly big.