By Brian Boone

In outer space, no one can hear you say, “Hey, what even is that?” Here are the weirdest things scientists have ever noticed out in the cosmos, a fairly weird realm to begin with.

That’s the Spot. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot isn’t a solid object or a geographical feature. It’s a storm so large that it can be spotted with a telescope. It’s larger than Earth, has been going for more than 350 years, and the winds get up to around 268 miles per hour. 

Not Earth, but they get that a lot. HD 18977 33b, catalogued for the first time in 2005, stands 64 million light years away, and with its mix of blue and white, it closely resembles Earth. It’s not habitable in the slightest, however. The surface temperature hovers around 2,400°F, it constantly rains flaming hot glass, and the winds rage at 5,400 miles per hour.

Number 9. Past the boundary of our solar system, many icy structures orbit in a way that suggests a tremendous gravitational pull by some heretofore unidentified body. That would be what astronomers call Planet 9. It likely weighs about 10 times as much as Earth.

Here it comes. In 2017, Earth’s telescopes discovered the first object in our solar system confirmed to have originated in another galaxy. Oumaumua is a cigar-shaped thing, but astronomers aren’t really sure what it is or how it moves. It doesn’t have a tail like a comet and it could be propelled by the barely traceable venting of hydrogen gas. 

Hole-y odd. Black holes are weird. Even weirder: a rogue black hole that wanders around. In 2023, scientists took note of a black hole traveling through space at 4,500 times the speed of sound that’s 20 million times the mass of the sun and leaves in its wake a 200,000-lightyear-long strand of brand new stars.

Hear it is. In August 1977, an Ohio based radio telescope picked up a remarkably strong radio signal from deep space. Not of earthly origin, the sound lasted for 72 seconds, and it’s since been nicknamed “The Wow Signal” because astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote “Wow!” on a printout of the data. The sound didn’t repeat, ever, and no one has ever been able to figure out where it came from. 

It’s getting dark. While we assume the universe and everything in it is made up of matter, that’s a misleading notion. Regular, everyday matter takes up just 5% of the makeup of the universe, while 25% is dark matter and 70% is dark energy. What are those other two things? Nobody really knows, other than that it’s there, lurking overwhelmingly. It can’t be seen or directly observed, but it has a profound effect on gravitational pull of space bodies. Dark energy is an unidentified kind of energy whose sole purpose is believed to fuel and speed up the constant expansion of the universe.