The Largest…
…Galaxy is the colossal IC 1101 that lives at the heart of the galaxy cluster Abell 2029. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across, pretty big you might think. Well yes it surely is, and with around 400 billion stars in its disk, the Milky Way certainly is no tiddler. But IC 1101 dwarfs our own Galaxy, with an impressive diameter of 5 million light years, and a population of up to 100 trillion stars. This galactic whopper is 80 times larger than the Milky Way, and 2,000 times as massive. IC 1101 is 1.07 billion light years away in the Serpens constellation.
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Star is the red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris. This is a real stellar monster, that makes our own Sun look like a grain of sand by comparison. It is so big that it takes light nearly 3 hours to cross its circumference, it is 1.7 billion miles across, and if it was placed at the Sun’s position at the centre of the solar system, its surface would be at Saturn. It is so big that 7 thousand, million, million Earths would fit in its volume. It is also one of the brightest stars known.
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Planet in our Solar System Well you probably know that already, yes it’s the gas giant Jupiter, with a diameter that could comfortably hold 11 Earths side by side. Jupiter’s day is just 10 hours long, so it spins at a very fast rate. In fact the speed of rotation actually deforms the giant planet making the equator bulge outwards, and the poles flatten. Jupiter also has the largest magnetosphere in the solar system, stretching from its poles all the way out to Saturn.
…Structures are things so vast that they defy the imagination. They are the galactic super clusters, vast collections of galaxies that span hundreds of millions of light years. They form into walls, sheets, and filaments all held together under gravity, and often surround even larger voids in the universe where few galaxies exist. The Milky Way is part of the “Local Group“, a handful of individual galaxies. This in turn is part of the Virgo Cluster, a collection of up to 2,000 galaxies. The Virgo Cluster is just one part of the even larger Virgo Supercluster, just one of millions in the observable universe.
…Solar system moon is also a moon of the largest planet, Jupiter. The Jovian moon Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, and one of four main moons of the gas giant (that you can even see with binoculars by the way). Ganymede is 3,270 miles across making it bigger even than the planet Mercury. This moon is also the only one with its own magnetosphere, and scientists even think Ganymede’s hiding an ocean under that barren looking surface.
…Volcano The planet Mars is quite modest in size, being quite a bit smaller than Earth, but it definitely does things on a big scale. The largest volcano (and mountain) in the solar system is Olympus Mons. Now you don’t want to be hanging around if this thing blows its top, it’s about 17 miles high which is nearly 3 times the height of Mt Everest from sea level. and its base covers nearly the area of France. It’s an extinct volcano we think, although some of the lava flows are relatively young. The caldera of Olympus Mons is 37 miles wide, 53 miles long, and 1.8 miles deep. The caldera has two craters one 6 miles wide, and the other 10 miles wide.
…Star forming region is not actually in our Galaxy, but it’s still nearby in cosmic terms. The largest region of star burst in the local group of galaxies is contained in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a smaller satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. This vast star forming region is the Tarantula Nebula, an area spanning 200 parsecs, over 600 light years, or 380 trillion miles. The nebula is also extremely bright. If it was at the distance from Earth as the Orion Nebula is, it would be bright enough to cast your shadow on the ground, and large enough to cover the entire constellation of Orion.
…Canyon belongs to our old rusty friend Mars. The red planet sports a canyon of truly momentous proportions, Valles Marineris cuts a 2,500 mile long, 124 mile wide slice across Mars just below the equator. It is so large that if it was on Earth it would span right across the United States, it is up to 7 times deeper than the Grand Canyon, and covers about a fifth of Mars’ circumference.
The Coldest…
…Planet in our solar system is the ice giant Uranus. This planet is not the furthest out from the Sun, Neptune is further so you would expect Neptune to be colder. But Neptune radiates 2.6 times more energy out into space than it gets from the Sun, Uranus radiates less energy than it receives. Uranus generates virtually no heat from its core, and the coldest recorded temperature on Uranus is 49 Kelvin, -224 degrees C. Astronomers don’t know the real reason why Uranus is so cold, it could be due to a massive collision in its past, or the fact that the ice giant’s axis is tilted on its side.
…Known place. There is a coldest possible temperature in the universe, this absolute zero. Absolute zero, or zero kelvin is equal to -273.15 degrees C, or -459.67 Fahrenheit. Colder than this temperature is impossible, and at the point around absolute zero, matter starts to exhibit some really strange properties such as superconductivity and superfluidity. The coldest known natural place in the known universe is the Boomerang Nebula, a young planetary nebula 5,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. The dying star at the centre of the nebula is expelling material at speeds of half a million kilometres per hour, causing cooling of the Boomerang Nebula to a very chilly 1 degree above absolute zero. This is a colder temperature than even the afterglow of the Big Bang.
…Artificial object is actually a European Space Agency spacecraft designed to study the cosmic microwave background radiation…the afterglow from the Big Bang. The Planck Spacecraft’s detectors are operating at just one tenth of a degree above absolute zero, colder than even the Boomerang Nebula.
The Furthest…
…Galaxy is a small stellar system, much smaller than the Milky Way in what must have been one of the very first galaxies. Its immense distance was uncovered in January 2011 by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope. Named as UDFj-39546284 it is 13.2 billion light years away, and we are seeing it from a time just 480 milllion years after the Big Bang. It is 500 million times fainter than the faintest star visible to the naked eye, and just a hundredth the size of the Milky Way. This is from a time in the infant universe when galaxy growth was on full throttle, galaxies were assembling and growing much faster than larger modern ones we see today.
…Galaxy cluster yet detected is Cosmos-Aztec3, discovered in mid January 2011. The members of this cluster are circled in red. It lies at 12.6 billion light years away, the previous record breaker was 10.3 billion light years away. This cluster is a youngster, a proto-cluster gradually coming together to form the largest structures known to mankind. It is just tens or hundreds of millions of years old, is full of star formation, and harbours a huge a huge feeding black hole. You see it from a time when the universe was just a billion years old.
…Gamma ray burst. When a massive star comes to the end of its life, it collapses in on itself producing an exteremely violent expolsion called a supernova. A certain type of supernova is called a gamma ray burst, this is when two opposite opposing jets of intense gamma rays shoot out from the dying star. These jets are frightening, more powerful than anything else in the universe since the Big Bang. The furthest gamma ray burst yet detected is one called GRB 090429B at 13.14 billion light years away, this star exploded just 520 million years after the Big Bang. The previous distance record breaker for a gamma ray burst was GRB 090423 detected in April 2009, this was at 13.04 billion light years from Earth.
Think of it this way, by the time the Earth and Sun had formed from a cloud of interstellar gas, the light from the GRB had already been travelling for about 8.6 billion years. In the 4.5 billion years since then, simple life arose, complex life evolved, the reign of the dinosaurs came and went, mammals took over, and eventually humans beings walked the Earth. Great civilisations rose and fell, the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Aztecs, and all of modern history passed. In all this time the light had not yet reached us. The ancient light from GRB 090423, travelling at 186,000 miles per second, finally passed Earth 13.1 billion years after its star blew up, to be seen by our telescopes in April 2009.
…Object visble to the naked eye is the famous Andromeda Galaxy or M31 at 2.5 million light years from Earth. Andromeda is the nearest major galaxy to our Milky Way, it is a spiral galaxy, and a major member of our Local Group of 30 or so galaxies. The Andromeda Galaxy is thought to be twice the size of the Milky Way, and it lies in the constellation of Andromeda viewable to northern observers through late autumn and winter.
…Human made object is the Voyager 1 Spacecraft launched on 5th September 1977. Voyager is now over 17 billion kilometres from Earth, travelling at 10.5 miles per second. The spacecraft is thought to have gone through the termination shock in 2004, a place where the solar wind slows down against the interstellar medium. Voyager 1 is now heading to the heliopause, where the Sun’s solar wind is no longer strong enough and is stopped by the winds from other stars.
The Brightest…
…Star was discovered in July 2010, it is the blue hypergiant R136a1. This stellar beacon kicks out the sunshine of nearly 9 million times that of our Sun. Pretty hard…actually, impossible to imagine! R136a1 is 22,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. It lives in the largest star forming region known, the Tarantula Nebula.
…Planet in the solar system is Earth’s sister world, Venus, the second planet from the Sun and the third brightest object after the Sun and the Moon. Venus is so luminous that it has the power to punch through the evening and morning sky glow, and can very easily be seen even when it’s not even dark. Venus reflects 70% of the sunlight hitting it right back into space, from its sulphuric acid clouds. Venus is only ever visible around sunrise and sunset due to its closeness to the Sun.
…Quasar is the memorably named 3C 273at 2.44 billion light years away in the constellation of Virgo. Quasars are the most luminous objects in the universe, and the name given to a massive and distant galaxy where the region around the central supermassive black hole is far brighter than normal over most or all of the electromagnetic spectrum. This energetic central region is called an active galactic nucleus (AGN), it’s a place where an accretion disk has formed, spinning around the central supermassive black hole with material spiraling inwards. These are incredibly violent and extreme places and the friction of the material racing around the disk, as well as the dust, gas, and other material crossing the event horizon produce vast energy output in the visible, radio, infrared wavelengths, as well as ultra violet, x-ray, and the lethal gamma rays. Our Sun is just 8 light minutes away, if quasar 3C 273 was at a distance of 33 light years from Earth it would be as bright as the Sun in the sky. The image shows this quasar together with its jet of particles shooting out from its accretion disk at near light speed.
The Most Massive…
…Star is also the brightest! It’s another entry for the recently discovered stellar record breaker R136a1. This star is actually so massive that it broke the limits of what was thought physically possible for a star when discovered in mid 2010. A very easy mistake to make is to think of massive as how big something is, but a box of lead and a box of feathers can be both the same size, but the box of lead is more massive. But R136a1 certainly is no wimp, it’s about 30 times the radius of our Sun, but it’s a whopping 265 to 300 times more massive. Scientists previously thought that a star like this would never be more than around 150 solar masses. This behemoth is going to use up its fuel stores at a ferocious rate, and likely end up as a black hole…self destructing even before any planets get a chance to form in orbit around it.
…Planet in the solar system is also the largest, it is the gas giant Jupiter. Its mass is two and a half times more than all the other planets combined, and if it had been just 80 times more massive it would have formed into a star. The centre of the planet is thought to be liquid metal, hydrogen and helium crushed down into a metal alloy fluid, under the pressure of 70 million Earth atmospheres. Jupiter has 317.8 times the mass of the Earth, and just less than one thousandth of the mass of the Sun.
…Supermassive mass black hole is a real monster with quite an innocent sounding name, OJ 287. Now you have stellar black holes, and you have supermassive black holes. Stellar black holes are produced when a heavyweight star collapses down into infinite density after blowing itself apart at the end of its life in a supernova explosion. They’re usually around 10 to 20 times as massive as the Sun, and can exist anywhere in a galaxy’s disk. Supermassive black holes on the other hand are the monsters that lurk at the very centres of galaxies, and are millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. The most massive found so far is OJ 287 at 3.5 billion light years away, weighing in at an astonishing 18 billion solar masses. The big beast though has a smaller companion, a black hole of about 100 million solar masses that orbits the larger one every 11 to 12 years. Once in its orbit, the smaller one goes through the accretion disk of the larger one, creating a visible pulse.
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