Personally, I find Brown Dwarfs to be absolutely fascinating. An object that isn’t quite a planet and isn’t quite a star, but something in between.
What would one even look like? Would it look like a gas giant that’s glowing red, along with swirls of gas in its atmosphere like Jupiter? Or would it resemble a star and have a fiery surface like the sun? I prefer to imagine them as glowing gas giants but I don’t know how realistic that is.
Gas giants in general are fascinating to me as well, I really hope we send a probe into one of the gas giants with a camera before I die. I’d absolutely love to see what it looks like inside a gas giants atmosphere before the probe gets crushed by the increasing pressure as it descends.
I love space phenomenon in the same way as some people like scary movies, games, and environments. I feel a strong sense of dread and fear at the thought of black holes, white dwarfs, and neutron stars. It’s less about what you can see, and more about what you can’t.
It’s so bad that the most anxious and scared I’ve been in my life was on one of my first times using the FSD boost in the game Elite: Dangerous. In the game you can get boost to your ships travel by sucking up the streaming jets jutting out from white dwarfs and neutron stars. This boost can let you travel over 100ly, when average is 30ly or so. The process to do this, if done incorrectly however, can result in getting ripped out of cruising, stick, and unable to get away from these very disorienting beams before getting absolutely shredded. I have experienced nothing like it before or since.
To this day, neutron stars are both my favorite and most anxiety inducing universal phenomena! Slaughter House 5 is a really good book involving a neutron star, for those who haven’t read it.
I still forget how to tell white dwarfs from neutron stars. Both can charge you, but I think it’s white dwarfs that have 1/4 the jet range for like 1/2 the boost. Basically a deadly waste of time. But I don’t really go far. I have an icy Dolphin that can park in the normal star scoop zone and stay cool indefinitely, so the boost benefit isn’t worth it to me. But I do enjoy that empty dread of the vastness of space and the inconceivable size of celestial bodies.
And of course the dread from the excellent sound design surrounding the Thargoids, the alien enemies you can seek out. But that’s normal dread.
You ever land on mitterand hollow? Or rather, you ever let the moon known as mitterand hollow land on you? That’s an experience. It’s actually incredibly safe due to the spatial reframing, but good luck convincing your brain