Overview of the largest space objects and phenomena.
We know from school years that the largest planet is Jupiter. It is he who is the leader in size of the planets of the solar system. In this article we will tell you which is the largest planet and space object in the universe.
What is the name of the largest planet in the universe?
TrES-4- is a gas giant and the largest planet in the universe. Oddly enough, this object was discovered only in 2006. This is a huge planet, which is many times the size of Jupiter. It revolves around the star, just like the Earth around the Sun. The planet is colored orange-brown, because the temperature on its surface is more than 1200 degrees. Therefore, it does not have a solid surface, it is basically a boiling mass, consisting mainly of helium and hydrogen.
Due to the constant occurrence of chemical reactions, the planet is very hot, it radiates heat. The strangest thing is the density of the planet, it is very high for such a mass. Therefore, scientists are not sure that it consists only of gas.
What is the name of the largest planet in the solar system?
One of the largest planets in the universe is Jupiter. This is one of the giant planets that are predominantly gas. The composition is also very similar to the Sun, mostly composed of hydrogen. The rotation speed of the planet is very high. Because of this, strong winds form around it, which provoke the appearance of colored clouds. Due to the huge size of the planet and the speed of its movement, it has a strong magnetic field that attracts many celestial bodies.
This is due to the large number of satellites of the planet. One of the largest is Ganymede. Despite this, recently scientists have become very interested in Jupiter's moon Europa. They believe that the planet, which is covered with a crust of ice, has an ocean inside, with the simplest possible life. Which makes it possible to assume the existence of living beings.
The biggest stars in the universe
- VY. Until recently, it was considered the largest star, it was discovered back in 1800. The size is about 1420 times the radius of the Sun. But at the same time, the mass is only 40 times larger. This is due to the low density of the star. The most interesting thing is that the star has been actively losing its size and mass over the past few centuries. This is due to the passage of thermonuclear reactions on its surface. Thus, as a result, an early explosion of this star is possible with the formation of a black hole or a neutron star.
- But in 2010, NASA's Space Shuttle discovered another huge star that lies outside the solar system. She was given a name R136a1. This star is 250 times larger than the Sun and shines much brighter. If we compare how brightly the Sun shines, then the glow of the star was similar to the radiance of the Sun and the Moon. Only in this case, the Sun will shine much less, and more like the Moon than a huge giant space object. This confirms that almost all stars age and lose their brightness. This is due to the presence on the surface of a huge amount of active gases that constantly enter into chemical reactions and decompose. Since the discovery, the star has lost a quarter of its mass, just due to chemical reactions.
The universe is not well understood. This is due to the fact that it is simply physically impossible to arrive on planets that are at a distance of a huge number of light years. Therefore, scientists are studying these planets with the help of modern equipment, telescopes.
VY Big Dog Top 10 largest space objects and phenomena
There is a huge number of cosmic bodies and objects that amaze with their size. Below is the TOP 10 of the largest objects and phenomena in space.
List:
- is the largest planet in the solar system. Its volume is 70% of the total volume of the system itself. At the same time, more than 20% falls on the Sun, and 10% is distributed among other planets and objects. The most interesting thing is that there are many satellites around this celestial body.
- . We believe that the Sun is a huge star. In fact, it is nothing more than a yellow dwarf star. And our planet is only a small part of what revolves around this star. The sun is constantly decreasing. This is due to the fact that hydrogen is synthesized into helium during micro-explosions. The star is painted in a bright color, and heats our planet due to an exothermic reaction with the release of heat.
- Ours. Its size is 15 x 10 12 degrees of kilometers. Consists of 1 star and 9 planets that move around this bright object in certain trajectories, which are called orbits.
- VY is a star located in the constellation Canis Major. It is a red supergiant, its size is the largest in the universe. In comparison, it is about 2000 times larger in diameter than our Sun and the entire system. The intensity of the glow is higher.
VY - Huge reserves of water. This is nothing more than a giant cloud, inside of which there is a huge amount of water vapor. Their number is about 143 times greater than the volume of the earth's ocean. The scientists named the object
- Huge black hole NGC 4889. This hole is located at a great distance from our Earth. It is nothing more than a funnel-shaped abyss, around which there are stars, as well as planets. This phenomenon is located in the constellation Coma Berenices, its size is 12 times larger than our entire solar system.
- it is nothing more than a spiral Galaxy, which consists of a multitude of stars, around which planets and satellites can revolve. Accordingly, the Milky Way may contain a huge number of planets on which life is possible. Because on them there is a possibility that there are conditions favorable for the origin of life.
- El Gordo. This is a huge cluster of galaxies that are distinguished by a bright glow. This is due to the fact that such a cluster consists of only 1% of stars. The rest falls on hot gas. This is what causes the glow. It was by this bright light that scientists discovered this cluster. The researchers suggest that this object appeared as a result of the merger of two galaxies. The photo shows the glow of this merger.
El Gordo - superblob. This is something similar to a huge space bubble, which is filled inside with stars, dust and planets. It is a collection of galaxies. There is a hypothesis that it is from this gas that new galaxies are formed.
- . It is something strange, like a labyrinth. This is the cluster of all galaxies. Scientists believe that it is not formed by chance, but according to a certain pattern.
The universe has been studied very little, so over time, new record holders may appear and will be called the largest objects.
VIDEO: The largest objects and phenomena in the Universe
El Gordo means "fat man" in Spanish. This is how astronomers named the largest and hottest known cluster of galaxies in our universe. The El Gordo cluster is located 9.7 billion light-years from Earth. It consists of two separate smaller clusters colliding at speeds of several million kilometers per hour.
Pulsar J1311-3430 or "Black Widow" weighs as much as two suns, but it is no more than the width of the state of Washington. Every day, this super-dense neutron star is getting bigger, "eating" a nearby companion star. In 93 minutes, the pulsar makes a complete revolution around its victim, bringing down streams of radiation on it and taking away its energy. This process has one outcome: one day the victim will finally disappear.
A year on the asteroid (3753) Cruitney lasts about the same as on Earth - 364 days. This means that this celestial body rotates at almost the same distance from the Sun as our planet. Our orbital twin was discovered in 1986. However, there is no threat of a collision: Cruitney will not come closer to Earth than 12 million kilometers.
Rejected by its "parent" star, the lone planet CFBDSIR2149 wanders the universe at a distance of 100 light-years from us. Most likely, this wanderer was thrown out of her solar system during the turbulent years of its formation, when the orbits of other planets were determined.
The Smith Cloud is a giant collection of hydrogen gas that is millions of times heavier than the Sun. Its length is 11 thousand light years, and its width is 2.5 thousand years. The shape of the cloud resembles a torpedo, and in fact it is the same: the cloud rushes towards our galaxy and crashes into the Milky Way in about 27 million years.
At 300 thousand light-years from the center of the Milky Way is a satellite galaxy, which is almost entirely composed of dark matter and gas. Scientists discovered evidence of its existence in 2009. And only a few months ago, astronomers managed to find four stars 100 million years old in this accumulation of dark matter.
The blue hue of Marble Planet HD 189733b is associated with the oceans. In fact, this is a gas giant, rotating in an orbit close to the star. There has never been water. The temperature exceeds 927 degrees Celsius. And the “sky blue” is created by rain from molten glass.
When our universe was only about 875 million years old, a black hole with a mass of 12 billion suns formed in space. By comparison, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way (pictured above) is only 4 million times as massive as the sun. Supermassive J0100+2802 lies at the center of a galaxy 12.8 billion light-years away. Now scientists are puzzling over the question: how did she manage to reach such sizes in such a short period of time?
The star R136a1 is 256 times heavier than the Sun and 7.4 million times brighter than it. Scientists believe that colossi of this size may appear as a result of the merger of many smaller stars. The lifespan of a fiery chimera is only a few million years, after which its components burn out.
The Boomerang Nebula, located 5,000 light-years from Earth, is the coldest place in the universe. The temperature inside the cloud of gas and dust reaches -272 degrees below zero. The cloud is expanding at a speed of about 590 thousand kilometers per hour. The gas of the nebula is cooled by rapid expansion in the same way as the refrigerant in refrigerators.
Our ranking includes the largest, coldest, hottest, oldest, deadliest, lonely, dark, brightest and other "very-very" objects that man has discovered in space. Some are literally within reach, while others are on the edge of the universe known to us.
October 27, 2015, 03:38 pmThe ancient pyramids, the tallest skyscraper in the world in Dubai, almost half a kilometer high, the grandiose Everest - just looking at these huge objects is breathtaking. And at the same time, compared to some objects in the universe, they are microscopic in size.
The largest asteroid
Today, Ceres is considered the largest asteroid in the universe: its mass is almost a third of the entire mass of the asteroid belt, and its diameter is over 1000 kilometers. The asteroid is so large that it is sometimes referred to as a "dwarf planet".
largest planet
The largest planet in the Universe is TrES-4. It was discovered in 2006 and is located in the constellation Hercules. A planet called TrES-4 orbits a star that is about 1,400 light-years away from planet Earth.
The planet TrES-4 itself is a ball that consists mainly of hydrogen. Its size is 20 times the size of the Earth. The researchers claim that the diameter of the discovered planet is almost 2 times (more precisely, 1.7) the diameter of Jupiter (this is the largest planet in the solar system). The temperature of TrES-4 is about 1260 degrees Celsius.
The biggest black hole
In terms of area, black holes are not that big. However, given their mass, these objects are the largest in the universe. And the largest black hole in space is a quasar, whose mass is 17 billion times (!) More than the mass of the Sun. This is a huge black hole at the very center of the galaxy NGC 1277, an object that is larger than the entire solar system - its mass is 14% of the total mass of the entire galaxy.
largest galaxy
The so-called "super galaxies" are several galaxies merged together and located in galactic "clusters", clusters of galaxies. The largest of these "super galaxies" is IC1101, which is 60 times the size of the galaxy that hosts our solar system. The length of IC1101 is 6 million light years. By comparison, the Milky Way is only 100,000 light-years across.
The largest star in the universe
VY Canis Majoris is the largest known star and one of the brightest stars in the sky. It is a red hypergiant located in the constellation Canis Major. The radius of this star is about 1800-2200 times greater than the radius of our Sun, its diameter is about 3 billion kilometers.
Huge deposits of water
Astronomers have discovered the largest and most massive reservoir of water ever found in the universe. The giant cloud, about 12 billion years old, contains 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth's oceans combined.
A cloud of gaseous water surrounds a supermassive black hole located 12 billion light-years from Earth. This discovery shows that water has dominated the universe for almost its entire existence, the researchers said.
largest cluster of galaxies
El Gordo is located more than 7 billion light-years from Earth, so what we are seeing today is just an early stage of it. According to the researchers who have studied this galaxy cluster, it is the largest, hottest and emits the most radiation than any other known cluster at the same distance or further.
The central galaxy at the center of El Gordo is incredibly bright and has an unusual blue glow. The authors of the studies suggest that this extreme galaxy is the result of a collision and merger of two galaxies.
Using the Spitzer Space Telescope and optical imaging, scientists estimate that 1 percent of the cluster's total mass is stars, and the rest is hot gas that fills the space between the stars. This ratio of stars to gas is similar to the ratio in other massive clusters.
SuperVoid
More recently, scientists have discovered the largest cold spot in the universe (at least known to the science of the universe). It is located in the southern part of the constellation Eridanus. With its length of 1.8 billion light years, this spot baffles scientists, because they could not even imagine that such an object could really exist.
Despite the presence of the word “void” in the title (from the English “void” means “emptiness”), the space here is not completely empty. This region of space contains about 30 percent fewer clusters of galaxies than their surroundings. According to scientists, voids make up to 50 percent of the volume of the universe, and this percentage, in their opinion, will continue to grow due to super-strong gravity, which attracts all the matter around them. Two things make this void interesting: its unimaginable size and its relation to the mysterious cold relic spot WMAP.
superblob
In 2006, the title of the largest object in the universe was given to the discovered mysterious cosmic “bubble” (or blob, as scientists usually call them). True, he retained this title for a short time. This 200-million-light-year-long bubble is a gigantic collection of gas, dust, and galaxies.
Each of the three "tentacles" of this bubble contains galaxies that are four times denser among themselves than is usual in the Universe. The cluster of galaxies and gas balls inside this bubble are called Liman-Alpha bubbles. It is believed that these objects were formed approximately 2 billion years after the Big Bang and are real relics of the ancient Universe.
Shapley Supercluster
For many years, scientists have believed that our Milky Way galaxy is being pulled across the universe toward the constellation Centaurus at a speed of 2.2 million kilometers per hour. Astronomers theorize that the reason for this is the Great Attractor, an object with a gravitational force that is enough to attract entire galaxies to itself. True, scientists could not figure out what kind of object this was for a long time, since this object is located beyond the so-called "zone of avoidance" (ZOA), a region of the sky near the plane of the Milky Way, where the absorption of light by interstellar dust is so great that it is impossible to see what is behind it.
As soon as scientists decided to look deeper into space, they soon discovered that the "great cosmic magnet" is a much larger object than previously thought. This object is the Shapley supercluster.
The Shapley Supercluster is a supermassive cluster of galaxies. It is so huge and has such a powerful attraction that our own galaxy. The supercluster consists of more than 8,000 galaxies with a mass of more than 10 million Suns. Every galaxy in our region of space is currently being pulled by this supercluster.
Supercluster Laniakea
Galaxies are usually grouped together. These groups are called clusters. The regions of space where these clusters are more closely spaced are called superclusters. Previously, astronomers have mapped these objects by determining their physical location in the universe, but recently a new way of mapping local space has been invented, shedding light on data previously unknown to astronomy.
The new principle of mapping the local space and the galaxies located in it is based not so much on the calculation of the physical location of the object, but on the measurement of the gravitational effect exerted by it.
The first results of the study of our local galaxies using the new research method have already been obtained. Scientists, based on the boundaries of the gravitational flow, mark a new supercluster. The importance of this study lies in the fact that it will allow us to better understand where our place in the universe is. The Milky Way was previously thought to be inside the Virgo supercluster, but a new method of investigation shows that this region is just an arm of the even larger Laniakea supercluster, one of the largest objects in the universe. It stretches for 520 million light years, and somewhere inside it we are.
Great Wall of Sloan
The Sloan Great Wall was first discovered in 2003 as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a scientific mapping of hundreds of millions of galaxies to determine the presence of the largest objects in the universe. Sloan's Great Wall is a gigantic galactic filament of multiple superclusters spread out across the universe like the tentacles of a giant octopus. At 1.4 billion light-years long, the "wall" was once thought to be the largest object in the universe.
The Great Wall of Sloan itself is not as well understood as the superclusters that lie within it. Some of these superclusters are interesting in their own right and deserve special mention. One, for example, has a core of galaxies that together look like giant tendrils from the side. Another supercluster has a very high level of interaction between galaxies, many of which are currently undergoing a merger.
Group of quasars Huge-LQG7
Quasars are high-energy astronomical objects located at the center of galaxies. It is believed that the center of quasars are supermassive black holes, which pull the surrounding matter onto themselves. This results in huge radiation, which is 1000 times more powerful than all the stars inside the galaxy. Currently, the third largest object in the universe is the Huge-LQG group of quasars, consisting of 73 quasars scattered over 4 billion light-years. Scientists believe that this massive group of quasars, as well as similar ones, are one of the main precursors and sources of the largest objects in the universe, such as, for example, Sloane's Great Wall.
Giant gamma ring
Stretching for 5 billion light-years, the Giant galactic gamma-ray ring (Giant GRB Ring) is the second largest object in the universe. In addition to its incredible size, this object attracts attention due to its unusual shape. Astronomers studying bursts of gamma rays (huge bursts of energy that are formed as a result of the death of massive stars) discovered a series of nine bursts, the sources of which were at the same distance from the Earth. These bursts formed a ring in the sky, 70 times the diameter of the full moon.
Great Wall of Hercules - North Corona
The largest object in the universe was also discovered by astronomers as part of their observation of gamma rays. Called the Great Wall of Hercules - Northern Corona, this object spans 10 billion light-years, making it twice the size of the Giant Galactic Gamma Ring. Since the brightest bursts of gamma rays are produced by larger stars, usually located in areas of space where there is more matter, astronomers each time metaphorically see each such burst as a needle prick into something larger. When scientists discovered that there were too many gamma ray bursts in the region of space towards the constellations Hercules and the Northern Corona, they determined that there was an astronomical object here, most likely a dense concentration of galaxy clusters and other matter.
space web
Scientists believe that the expansion of the universe is not random. There are theories according to which all the galaxies of the cosmos are organized into one incredible structure, resembling filamentous connections that unite dense regions. These filaments are scattered between less dense voids. Scientists call this structure the Cosmic Web.
According to scientists, the web formed at a very early stage in the history of the universe. The early stage of the formation of the web was unstable and heterogeneous, which subsequently helped the formation of everything that is now in the universe. It is believed that the "threads" of this web played a big role in the evolution of the Universe, thanks to which this evolution accelerated. The galaxies inside these filaments have a significantly higher star formation rate. In addition, these threads are a kind of bridge for gravitational interaction between galaxies. After forming in these filaments, galaxies move towards galaxy clusters, where they eventually die.
Only recently have scientists begun to understand what this Cosmic Web really is. Moreover, they even detected its presence in the radiation of the distant quasar they were studying. Quasars are known to be the brightest objects in the universe. The light of one of them went straight to one of the filaments, which heated up the gases in it and made them glow. Based on these observations, scientists have drawn threads between other galaxies, thus compiling a picture of the "skeleton of the cosmos."
space objects
In astronomy, space objects are natural or artificial celestial bodies that are outside the Earth's atmosphere. Artificial space objects are space vehicles or their parts that separated during flight. Natural space objects include celestial bodies: stars, planets, their satellites, comets and asteroids. Such a strict interpretation is not always followed today. Thus, according to the UN Conventions 1971 and 1974, the term "space object" is used only in relation to objects of artificial origin.
clot of matter
But the popular publication USA Today, citing a message about the discovery of Japanese astronomers, on the contrary, calls a cosmic object not a celestial body, but a clot of stellar matter. This 200 million light-year-long star formation, consisting of three curvilinear outgrowths, was discovered using the powerful new Subaru and Keck telescopes, and is considered the largest discovered in the universe.
But if we still talk about celestial bodies, then, of course, the largest of them are stars. Looking from Earth like small bright dots in a dark sky, stars are huge globular clusters of gases heated to an incredibly high temperature. The myriad stars that exist in the universe differ from each other in age, size, density, composition and temperature.
Star sizes
The largest star ever found by man was discovered in 2010. At the European Southern Observatory, with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, British scientists observed the stars of the Large Magellanic Cloud, where several luminaries were found, many times larger than the Sun.
Astronomers, who until now believed that stars can reach maximum sizes exceeding the size of our star by no more than 150 times, were amazed - the star R136a1 is 265 times larger than the Sun! If this supergiant were in our Galaxy, it would be brighter than the Sun as much as the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Naturally, this star is also the largest star in the Universe (from those discovered by astronomers).
Star evolution
According to the existing theory of stellar evolution, all luminaries “lose weight” throughout their lives, and supermassive stars are more intense than others. The date of the alleged formation of the star R136a1 is about a million years, during which time it is estimated to have lost up to one-fifth of its initial mass. Then its mass at birth should have exceeded the mass of the Sun by 320 times. Stars of this magnitude, according to scientists, can be extremely rare, and mainly in superdense star clusters.
Surely everyone at least once in their life came across another list of natural wonders, which lists the highest mountain, the longest river, the driest and wettest regions of the Earth, and so on. Such records are impressive, but they are completely lost when compared with space records. We present you the five "most-most" space objects and phenomena described by New Scientist magazine.
The coldest
Everyone knows that it is very cold in space - but in reality this statement is not true. The concept of temperature makes sense only in the presence of matter, and space is practically empty space (stars, galaxies and even dust occupy a very small volume of it). So when researchers say that the temperature of outer space is about 3 kelvins (minus 270.15 degrees Celsius), they are talking about the average value for the so-called microwave background, or cosmic microwave background radiation - radiation that has survived from the time of the Big Bang.
And yet, there are many very cold objects in space. For example, the gas in the Boomerang Nebula, 5,000 light-years away from the solar system, has a temperature of only one kelvin (minus 272.15 degrees Celsius). The nebula is expanding very rapidly - the gas that composes it is moving at a speed of about 164 kilometers per second, and this process leads to its cooling. Currently, the Boomerang Nebula is the only object known to scientists whose temperature is below the temperature of the CMB.
The solar system also has its record holders. In 2009, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) found the coldest point in the vicinity of our star - it turned out that the extremely frosty place in the solar system is very close to Earth in one of the shadowed lunar craters. Compared to the cold of the Boomerang Nebula, 33 kelvins (minus 240.15 degrees Celsius) does not seem such an outstanding value, but if you remember that the lowest temperature recorded on Earth is only minus 89.2 degrees Celsius (this record was recorded at the Antarctic station "Vostok"), the attitude changes slightly. It is possible that with further study of the Moon, a new pole of cold will be found.
If we include in the concept of "space objects" devices created by people, then in this case the first place in the list of the coldest objects should be given to the orbital observatory "Planck", more precisely, to its detectors. With the help of liquid helium, they are cooled to an incredible 0.1 kelvin (minus 273.05 degrees Celsius). Extremely cold detectors are needed by "Planck" in order to study the same relic radiation - if the devices are warmer than the cosmic "background", then they simply will not be able to "detect" it.
Hottest
Warm temperature records are much more impressive than cold ones - if you can only run up to zero kelvins in the minus direction (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius, or absolute zero), then there is much more space in the plus direction. So, only the surface of our Sun - an ordinary yellow dwarf - warms up to 5.8 thousand kelvins (with the permission of the readers, the Celsius scale will be lowered in the future, since the "extra" 273.15 degrees in the final figure will not change the overall picture).
The surface of blue supergiants - young, extremely hot and bright stars - is an order of magnitude warmer than the surface of the Sun: on average, their temperature ranges from 30 to 50 thousand kelvins. Blue supergiants, in turn, are far behind white dwarfs - small, very dense stars, into which luminaries, whose mass is not enough to form a supernova, are believed to evolve. The temperature of these objects reaches 200 thousand kelvins. Supergiant class stars are some of the most massive in the universe, with masses up to 70 solar masses, can heat up to a billion kelvins, and the theoretical temperature limit for stars is about six billion kelvins.
However, this value is not an absolute record. Supernovae - stars that end their lives in an explosive process may exceed it for a short time. For example, in 1987, astronomers registered a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a modest galaxy located next to the Milky Way. A study of the neutrinos emitted by the supernova showed that the temperature in its "innards" was about 200 billion kelvins.
The same supernovae can also produce much hotter objects - namely, gamma-ray bursts. This term refers to gamma-ray emissions that occur in distant galaxies. It is believed that a gamma-ray burst is associated with the transformation of a star into a black hole (although the details of this process are still unclear) and may be accompanied by a heating of matter up to a trillion kelvins (a trillion is 10 12).
But this is not the limit. At the end of 2010, during experiments on the collision of lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider, a temperature of several trillion kelvins was recorded. The experiments at the LHC are designed to recreate the conditions that existed a few moments after the Big Bang, so indirectly this record can also be considered cosmic. As for the actual origin of the Universe, then, according to existing physical hypotheses, the temperature at that moment should have been written as a unit with 32 zeros.
The brightest
The SI unit of illuminance is lux, which characterizes the luminous flux incident on a unit surface. For example, the illumination of a table near a window on a clear day is about 100 lux. To characterize the light flux emitted by space objects, it is inconvenient to use lux - astronomers use the so-called stellar magnitude (a dimensionless unit that characterizes the energy of light quanta that has reached the instrument's detectors from the star - the logarithm of the ratio of the flux recorded from the star to some standard one).
With the naked eye in the sky, you can see a star named Alnilam, or Epsilon Orionis. This blue supergiant, 1.3 thousand light-years away from the Earth, is 400 thousand times more powerful than the Sun. The bright blue variable star Eta Carina overtakes our star in luminosity by five million times. The mass of Eta Carina is 100-150 solar masses, and for a long time this star was one of the heaviest stars known to astronomers. However, in 2010, in the RMC 136a star cluster, it was discovered that if you put the star RMC 136a1 on an imaginary scale, then 265 Suns will be required to balance it. The luminosity of the newly discovered "big man" is comparable to the luminosity of nine million Suns.
As in the case of temperature achievements, supernovae occupy the top lines in the list of brightness records. Outshine the brightest of them - an object called SN 2005ap - will be able to nine million Suns (more precisely, at least nine million and one).
But the absolute winners in this nomination are gamma-ray bursts. The average burst briefly "flares" with a brightness equal to that of 10 18 Suns. If we talk about stable sources of bright radiation, then in the first place will be quasars - the active nuclei of some galaxies, which are a black hole with matter falling on it. When heated, the matter emits radiation with a brightness of more than 30 trillion suns.
The fastest
All space objects are moving relative to each other at breakneck speed due to the expansion of the universe. According to the most commonly accepted estimate today, two arbitrary galaxies located at a distance of 100 megaparsecs are moving away from the Earth at a speed of 7-8 thousand kilometers per second.
But even if you do not take into account the general scattering, celestial bodies are very quickly passing by each other - for example, the Earth revolves around the Sun at a speed of about 30 kilometers per second, and the orbital speed of the fastest planet in the solar system, Mercury, is 48 kilometers per second.
In 1976, the man-made device Helios 2 surpassed Mercury and reached a speed of 70 kilometers per second (for comparison, Voyager 1, which recently reached the borders of the solar system, is moving at a speed of only 17 kilometers per second). And the planets of the solar system and research probes are far from comets - they rush past the star at a speed of about 600 kilometers per second.
The average star in a galaxy moves about 100 kilometers per second relative to the galactic center, but there are stars that move through their cosmic home ten times faster. Superfast luminaries often accelerate enough to overcome the gravitational pull of the galaxy and go on an independent journey through the universe. Unusual stars make up a very small part of all stars - for example, in the Milky Way, their proportion does not exceed 0.000001 percent.
A good speed is developed by pulsars - rotating neutron stars that remain after the collapse of "ordinary" luminaries. These objects can make up to a thousand revolutions around their axis per second - if an observer could be on the surface of the pulsar, he would move at a speed of up to 20 percent of the speed of light. And near rotating black holes, a wide variety of objects can be accelerated almost to the speed of light.
The biggest
It makes sense to talk about the size of space objects not in general, but breaking them into categories. For example, the largest planet in the solar system is Jupiter, but compared to the largest planets known to astronomers, this gas giant seems like a baby, or at least a teenager. For example, the diameter of the planet TrES-4 is 1.8 times the diameter of Jupiter. At the same time, the mass of TrES-4 is only 88 percent of the mass of the gas giant of the solar system - that is, the density of the strange planet is less than the density of the cork.
But TrES-4 ranks only second in size among the planets discovered to date (total) - WASP-17b is considered the champion. Its diameter is almost twice that of Jupiter, while its mass is only half that of Jupiter. So far, scientists do not know what the chemical composition of such "bloated" planets is.
The largest star is the luminary with the name VY Canis Major. The diameter of this red supergiant is about three billion kilometers - if you lay out along the diameter VY of the Great Canis of the Sun, then they will fit from 1.8 thousand to 2.1 thousand pieces.
The largest galaxies are elliptical star clusters. Most astronomers believe that such galaxies are formed when two spiral star clusters collide, but just the other day a work appeared, the authors of which. But for now, the title of the largest galaxy remains with the object IC 1101, which belongs to the class of lenticular galaxies (an intermediate option between elliptical and spiral). To travel from one edge of IC 1101 to the other along its long axis, light has to travel as much as six million years. It runs through the Milky Way 60 times faster.
The size of the largest voids in space - the regions between galactic clusters, in which there are practically no celestial bodies, far exceeds the size of any objects. So, in 2009, this was found with a diameter of about 3.5 billion light years.
Compared with all these giants, the size of the largest man-made space object seems quite insignificant - the length, or rather the width of the International Space Station is only 109 meters.
