20 Space Objects Ranked By How Badass They Sound

This is a galaxy without reserves of star-forming matter. Viewed edge-on, it has a lens shape with a bulge in the middle and no spiral arms. Astronomers classify it between a spiral galaxy (like our own Milky Way) and a more elongated elliptical galaxy. This image is NGC 2787, 24 million light years away in the Ursa Major constellation.

Five galaxies sharing a compact space, these beauties are found in the Pegasus Constellation with a strong telescope. At one time, astronomers saw these as mere smudges in the sky. Now we can analyze their stunning details with both optical and infrared telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope.

A literal hellworld. A lava planet would likely be tidally locked to its nearby star, meaning one side would be perpetually hot, with lava flows, molten rock and little else. The other side would have cooled lava rock. The rocky planet would probably also stream dust behind it. Evidence from the Spitzer Telescope indicates that the 55 Cancri e planet is one such hellscape.

A star no bigger than a large city, made of neutron matter that emits strong radio waves at regular intervals. Researchers in South Africa discovered nine-millisecond pulsars, which means they blast radiation very rapidly.

Often in the guise of a red supergiant star (like Betelgeuse), this is a pulsar that has horned its way into the core of another star. The weird object is actually a hybrids of a red supergiant and a neutron star.

An energetic supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy actively gobbling matter. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is training its sights on several extremely distant quasars to examine them in the infrared range, to see what the universe was like billions of years ago.

A spooky, highly energetic radio burst from deep space. A single burst can produce as much energy in a few thousandths of a second as the sun does in a month, as this study shows. But these bursts can vary a lot in their brightness and how long they last.

A neutron star with an extra-powerful magnetic field after the star goes supernova. The magnetic field can be so strong that getting closer than about 620 miles would dissolve your atoms.

An unusual galaxy where most of the stars are contained in a ring far from the center of the galaxy. So why does this galaxy have a much older, red and yellow center, while its outer ring is dense with blue stars? This Hoag’s Object is roughly 100,000 light years across, and located 600 million light years away toward the Snake Constellation.

After the sun goes red giant, it will become a white dwarf. After the white dwarf expends its electron matter, it will go dark and become a black dwarf. This is trillions of years in the future and we will all be dead by then.

An old-timey term for an object too massive to be a planet and too small to be a star. We call them brown dwarfs now. Which is too bad.

When a star large enough to go supernova explodes, its core typically collapses into either a neutron star or a black hole. A blitzar is a neutron star that spins so fast it collapses into a black hole.

What felt like only 1 hour to astronauts on the far off Miller’s Planet near a black hole in the film Interstellar, Earth experienced as a 7 years. While that event is fiction, the mind-bending scenario of time dilation—due to the passage of time relative to its observer’s locations—is realistic. Closer to home, you can see the effects of time dilation with these atomic clock experiments.

The birthplace of stars, emerging from a stellar graveyard, a nebula is rich with elements. The Omega Nebula also goes by the name Swan Nebula for its elegant gas formations and is one of the largest star-forming regions in the Milky Way Galaxy. It is 5,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius and you can see it with a good pair of binoculars.

A hot, luminous star that has lost nearly all of its hydrogen and is now burning and fusing helium. Someday, our sun will undergo a similar loss of hydrogen, causing it to process helium stores instead. But a Wolf-Rayet star is different—it’s 25 times more massive than our home star.

A really cool sounding object that probably doesn’t exist. A small group of physicists think black holes might not exist and the candidates we’ve discovered so far are actually weird, dense dark energy-producing stars.

Since they probably don’t exist, here’s a picture of a dog swimming instead. I’m sorry to have lied to you.

Theoretical intermediate-mass black holes that formed in the weird hot matter soup in the moments just after the Big Bang and now roam the universe silently, unseen. We’re talking, within one second of the Big Bang. Depending on exactly when and how they formed, these weird black holes could have been almost vanishingly tiny, or had masses 100,000 times greater than the Sun.

A really, really, really bright, powerful supernova, it’s also called a collapsar. If a star more than 30 times our sun’s mass suddenly collapses, it forms a rotating black hole that shoots twin energetic jets.

A seemingly rocky planet that is actually a gas giant whose proximity to another star strips away its hydrogen and helium atmosphere, in a process called “hydrodynamic escape.” This kind of “planet” is still a hypothetical concept; it is the best explanation for the odd data that NASA’s Kepler space telescope found.

A quasar whose jets are pointed directly at Earth. A muon neutrino—a very high energy neutrino—found in Antarctica appears to have come from a blazar. Blazars pose no danger to us, but they are fascinating.