Bizarre Things Floating In Space

Space, in the words of the not-entirely-immortal Douglas Adams, is big. Really big. It's so big, in fact, that you'd actually be forgiven for believing that pretty much all of it is completely empty — hence the name. It's true that, according to science, only 4 percent of it is made up of stuff. Now, most of that "stuff" tends be planets and galaxies and black holes and all manner of freaky-deaky cosmic shenanigans, but there's also room for some weirder things up there, too.

Yes, for every millionth planet floating out in space, there's also a dead dog. For every hundred thousandth galaxy, there's a record of hit music. And for every few black holes, there's a man who discovered Pluto. The fact is that, thanks to human meddling (it's what we do best!) there's a whole lot of really bizarre stuff floating out among the stars. This is only some of it.

Space burials aren't a particularly new phenomenon. The idea of blasting your remains (that'd be your ashes, unless you've really got resources) into the cosmos has been around for decades, beginning with Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, who became the first dead person to enter outer space when his ashes were taken aboard Columbia. Parts of Roddenberry's remains have gone up a few times since, but, every time, have actually either returned back safely to Earth or burned up in the atmosphere.

One person whose remains have actually gone where no man has gone before, however, is Clyde Tombaugh. Tombaugh was an American astronomer most famous for discovering Pluto in 1930, and, long after his death, his ashes were shot into space aboard the spacecraft New Horizons with the eventual hope that they'll successfully depart the solar system. Oh, while we're at it, there's also a guy buried on the Moon. Just so you're aware.

The Cold War was a weird time. It was an era of madcap schemes, bizarre military innovations, and inexplicable competitions between East and West. Perhaps weirdest of all, however, is the time the USA attempted to remake the entire planet's ionosphere just to defend a weak point in America's communications systems. See, underwater cables (which were used for long-range communications) were vulnerable to attacks by the Soviets. Should the dirty Russians succeed in such an attack, America would be forced into communicating across the world with radio broadcasts. The problem there, though, is that the ionosphere, which allows such broadcasts, is often disrupted by solar activity.

The solution? Project West Ford. Millions and millions of tiny copper needless sent up into space to form a permanent radio reflector that would be invulnerable to attack from either the Soviets or the Sun. To cut a long story short, it didn't work, and most of the needless eventually burned up as they re-entered the atmosphere. Some thousands, however, are still up there, bunched together in clusters — a continuous cosmic monument to the sad truth that not every idea is a good idea.

What's more impressive than a piece of space debris that is fired off into the far reaches of the solar system? A piece of space debris that comes back. This is what happened with one piece of the Apollo 12 rocket, part of the spacecraft that delivered Charles Conrad and Alan L. Bean to the Moon. After detaching from the spacecraft, this section of the rocket's engine drifted off into deep space and began to orbit the Sun. In the early 2000s, however, it returned, baffling scientists, who initially believed the object (which they designated J002E3) was an asteroid.

Eventually, it began to orbit the Earth itself and came close enough to the planet that it seriously threatened other satellites in the sky. Most likely, J002E3 will eventually either burn up in Earth's atmosphere or smash into the Moon. Either way, it'll be a fitting end to an extraordinary journey.

You saw Gravity, right? It's the one where Sandra Bullock talks to herself for ages, then briefly talks to George Clooney, then (spoiler alert) it turns out she was just talking to herself after all, and then there's a fire. Well, Gravity also depicts something called Kessler syndrome, a phenomenon in which one piece of space debris collides with another, which in turn collides with more debris, slowly creating a mass of killer junk that swallows up and knocks out anything in its path. And it's a real thing, too — experts have been worried about Kessler syndrome and its potentially devastating effects on Earth's global network for years. Some, such as engineer Charlotte Bewick and Donald Kessler himself, even believe it's already happening.

One of the biggest potential triggers for the effect is Envisat, an ESA satellite that was retired in 2013. Defunct and unable to be piloted, the massive satellite is essentially a time bomb, just waiting to collide with another piece of debris and trigger the chain reaction. A scheme known as e.Deorbit, which hopes to sweep up space debris (including Envisat), is currently on the cards, but just how successful it will be is unknown.

If you're a really great guesser, you might have expected to find a Chuck Berry record or a dead monkey floating through the far reaches of outer space. What you might never expect to find, however, is water — masses and masses of it. That's what happened in 2011, when two teams of astronomers came across the largest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. It was roughly equivalent to 140 trillion times the water in all of Earth's oceans and surrounded a ridiculously huge black hole more than 12 billion light years away.

The black hole itself, known as a quasar, is 20 billion times the size of the Sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion of our Suns. Although astronomers had expected water to exist at these far distances and in such a capacity, they had never actually managed to observe it before the discovery.