Whether it be ancient ruins on Mars, dark matter, or even Super-Earths, there are many awesome space mysteries that puzzle researchers today. We’ve rounded up five of the most interesting for your viewing enjoyment. Continue reading to see them all.
A super-Earth is an extrasolar planet with a mass higher than Earth’s, but substantially below the mass of the Solar System’s smaller gas giants Uranus and Neptune, which are both more or less 15 Earth masses. The term super-Earth refers only to the mass of the planet, and does not imply anything about the surface conditions or habitability. The alternative term “gas dwarfs” may be more accurate for those at the higher end of the mass scale, as suggested by MIT professor Sara Seager, although in actual parlance, mini-Neptunes seems more common.
The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including the historical universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists and can exist: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them. The term was coined in 1895 by the American philosopher and psychologist William James. The various universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes.
3. Mars Ruins
According to Richard Hoagland, NASA is hiding a number secrets, including the discovery of microbes on the surface of Mars. The discovery was supposedly made by unmanned space probe Viking in 1976. While there are many images floating around the internet, there are currently no official statements confirming the ancient ruins.
2. Dark Enegy
In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that permeates all of space and tends to accelerate the expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the most accepted hypothesis to explain observations since the 1990s that indicate that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for 73% of the total mass-energy of the universe.
1. White Holes
A white hole, in general relativity, is a hypothetical region of spacetime which cannot be entered from the outside, but from which matter and light have the ability to escape. In this sense, it is the reverse of a black hole, which can be entered from the outside, but from which nothing, including light, has the ability to escape. White holes appear in the theory of eternal black holes. In addition to a black hole region in the future, such a solution of the Einstein field equations has a white hole region in its past. However, this region does not exist for black holes that have formed through gravitational collapse, nor are there any known physical processes through which a white hole could be formed.