Galleries / Battleground Galactica

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Stephen Ornes and Amber Fields; published May 7, 2008

Brightest Object

Heaviest Invisible Item

Most Surprising Explosion

Biggest Copycat

Most Rebellious

Busiest Galaxy

Coolest Quasi-Star

Most Confusing Galaxy

Most X-ray Emissions

Largest Thing Barreling Our Way

Brightest Comet (in Over a Century)

Tiniest Void

Biggest Galactic Oil Reserve

Biggest Overachiever

Deadliest Blast

Farthest Galaxy

Most Hellish Planet

Oldest Neighbors

Biggest Pileup

<p>The deeper that astronomers peer into the universe, the stranger and more extreme it seems. New instruments and techniques have recently uncovered a whole new set of cosmic superlatives: objects whose size, age, or behavior go beyond anything seen before. Here is a sampling of the latest record holders.</p><p><b>Fastest Fugitive</b>: This artist's rendering shows star HE 0437-5439, which is hurtling away from the Milky Way at 1.6 million miles per hour.</p>

<p>As bright as 10 million galaxies, a long-duration gamma ray burst named GRB 080319B was visible to the naked eye this past March even though it was a staggering 7.5 billion light-years away.</p>

<p>There's a new record holder for biggest black hole: OJ287 is about 18 billion times the mass of the sun.</p>

<p>Caltech and Penn State astronomers have found an explosive burst of gamma rays that seem to come from nowhere. Gamma rays usually follow the death of a massive star but these bursts were 88,000 light-years from the nearest galaxy.</p>

<p>Using a technique called microlensing, astronomers discovered a solar system 5,000 light-years away that contains smaller versions of our Jupiter and Saturn. This finding suggests that the Milky Way may have many analogs of our solar system.</p>

<p>Most galaxies rotate in the opposite direction that their "arms" are pointing, but pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope show that spiral galaxy NGC 4622 is spinning clockwise--the same direction as its arms.</p>

<p>Forming 4,000 stars per year and putting our own galaxy to shame (the Milky Way makes about 4 each year), GOODS 850-5 is reshaping astronomers' ideas about the rate of galaxy formation in the early Universe</p>

<p>Astronomers in France and Canada have discovered the <a href="http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/News/ColdestBD/">coldest brown dwarf star to date</a>. It's 350 degrees Celsius and will only get colder over the course of its lifetime.</p>

<p>Although dark matter is believed to be necessary for galaxy formation, Galaxy NGC 4736 has astronomers scratching their heads: There is little to no dark matter around.</p>

<p>Chinese astronomers have discovered two quasars that are discharging energy and matter along their polar axes instead of across their equators, as is usually the case, and emitting a higher than expected number of X-rays in the process.</p>

<p>Smith's cloud is expected to collide with the Milky Way in 20 to 40 million years resulting in one spectacular light show--the cloud is 28,000,000 light-years long.</p>

<p>Last October, Comet 17P/Holmes released a cloud of dust and gas that expanded to almost twice the diameter of the sun.</p>

<p>Using the quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) method, astronomers discovered the smallest black hole to date (with a mere mass of 3.8 suns) nestled in the Milky Way binary system XTE J1650-500.</p>

<p>Hundreds of lakes on Saturn's moon Titan each hold more than all the oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, based on new findings from the Cassini radar team.</p>

<p>At 100 billion times the brightness of the sun, Supernova 2005ap is 300 times brighter than the average supernova. Don't worry, it's 4.7 billion light-years away.</p>

<p>In the binary galaxy 3C321, an enormous black hole pummels a neighboring galaxy with a high-energy jet (illustrated here) brimming with X-rays and gamma rays. If any Earth-like planets lie nearby, their atmospheres will probably be destroyed by the blast.</p>

<p>This 13-billion-year-old galaxy (circled in this image from Hubble) formed 700 million years after the Big Bang, but its light is just now reaching us. As a result, we can see the bright, star-forming days of its youth.</p>

<p>Charcoal-black world HD 149026b (illustrated here) absorbs most of the radiation it gets from its very nearby star, pushing temperatures to 3700 degrees Fahrenheit, above the boiling point of lead.</p>

<p>They may not look a day over a billion, but asteroids 234 Barbara, 387 Aquitania, and 980 Anacostia (much like the asteroids drawn below) have mineral signatures putting them back 4.55 billion years.</p>

<p>Massive galaxies like ours usually form when smaller galaxies collide. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured a collision of four galaxies within a cluster called CL0958+4702. The result of this merger will be 10 times the size of the Milky Way.</p>

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