1. WASP - 12B

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Imagine a planet so dense that diamond is as abundant there as limestone is on Earth. Well, approximately 4,000 light years away, deep in the Auriga constellation, is WASP - 12B - a planet where that is exactly the case. You'd better get in there quick, though, because this planet is being literally devoured by its own sun. WASP-12B orbit its star at a distance of only 3.4 million kilometers. I know that sounds like a lot, but it's less than 1/44 of the distance between the Earth and our sun. As a result, the planet is being ripped to shreds. Its surface temperature is over 2,200 degrees Celsius and the colossal gravitational forces acting upon it have skewed it into an egg shape. At the moment it is about three times the size of Jupiter, but it's losing 6 trillion kilograms of mass every single second. It's estimates that the planet may only have another 10 million years left before it's entirely consumed. Before the planet's discovery in April 2008, scientists had speculated that events like this could occur, but this is the first ever time it has actually been observed.
2. Super Massive Electric Current

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You would think super massive black holes are terrifying enough, seeing as they're unexplored space demons from which nothing can escape- not even light. But there's one in a galaxy about 2 billion light years away, which has colossal magnetic field that's generating the highest known electric current in the universe. Thanks, nature. The galaxy in question is 3C303, and the current at its heart was discovered by scientists at the University of Toronto in 2011. At 1 quintillion amps - which is 1 with 18 zeros- this current is the equivalent of a trillion bolts of lightning, or enough to power all of Planet Earth's light-bulbs for 12 billion years. It is thought that the current is being driven out into space as far as 150,000 light years away. Considering that the Milky Way galaxy has a radius of only 100,000 light years, that's pretty damn far.
3. The Perseus Cluster

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Believe it or not, this image is not photoshopped. Nicknamed the 'Screaming Skull', it is an X-ray image of a galaxy cluster known as the Perseus Cluster, taken by the Chandra Observatory telescope. The Perseus Cluster, which sits 320 million light-years away, contains thousands of galaxies, but you can't actually see any of them here. Instead, what you are looking at is a 50 million degree cloud of intra-cluster gas. It is thought that the ghoulish form was created by a super massive black hole at the luster center, with the holes in the gas created by colossal explosions of energetic particles. Similarly spooky is the so-called 'Ghost Hand of God', a glowing, green hand reaching through space to grab a red cloud of light. This eerie sight is actually a pulsar wind nebula, which was produced by the remnants of a star that exploded in a supernova millions of years ago. And then, for the Lord of the Rings fans out there, there's this infrared image that looks amazingly similar to the iconic Eye of Sauron. In actual fact, it is the star 'Fomalhaut', which is surrounded by a large ring of debris as planets form around it.
4. Extreme Pumpkin Stars

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From skulls and zombie hands to another icinic Halloween symbol, these are 'extreme pumpkin stars'. 18 of them were discovered by NASA's Kepler and Swift missions in 2016, in the constellations of Cyqnus and Lyra - about 6000 light years from Earth. Don't let their fairly whimsical name fool you, extreme pumpkin stars are badass. They rotate at astronomical speeds, which is why they've ended up being squished into these quirky pumpkin shapes. The stars rotate in just a few days on average. That's scarily quick compared to our sun, which takes almost a month despite being much smaller. This dizzying rotation increases the regularity of unpredictable solar activities like solar flares and sunspots essentially sending the stars into overdrive and causing radio and magnetic disturbances millions of kilometers away. And then there's the X-rays that these bad boys produce. Each of the 18 pumpkun stars discovered produce X-rays at more than 100 times the peak levels ever seen from our sun. One of the suns- KSw71 - is ten times larger than our sun and produces X-ray emissions that are over 4000 times greater.
5. TRES - 2B

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This is TrES-2b, officially the darkest planet that NASA has ever discovered. It sits about 750 light years away in the constellation of Draco, orbiting the catchily-named star GSC 03549-02811, also known as Kepler-1 to its friends. It is a gas giant with a similar composition to Jupiter and orbits Kepler-1 at a relatively intimate 5 million kilometers. TrES-2b reflects less than 1% of all the light that hits it, which is less than coal or black acrylic paint. Adding to its spookiness, it's actually a mystery as to why the planet is so damn dark. One potential explanation is that the gases that make up its surface- vaporized sodium, potassium or gaseous titanium oxide - absorb all the light. Alternatively, it could be due to a lack of reflective clouds in its atmosphere, like those that make Jupiter so bright. And in case all- consuming, soul-destroying, inescapable darkness wasn't terrifying enough for you... this planet is also flipping boiling. It glows deep, deep red and scientists believe its temperature could reach up tp 1100 degrees Celsius.
6. RXJ1347

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Okay, so 1100 degrees Celsius on TRES-2B is pretty damn hot, but that'd be a cool winter's day in comparison to the temperatures in our next terrifying place. RXJ1347, a gas cloud in the constellation of Virgo, some 5 billion light years away, is the hottest known place in the whole Universe. Temperatures regularly reach a simply unfathomable 300 million degrees, which is 20 times hotter than the center of the sun. The cloud surrounds a cluster of galaxies that is approximately 5 million light-years wide, so it's not like it's a tiny astronomical blip - it's a ginormous searing mass. It is thought that this celestial hot flush was caused by two galaxy swarms colliding together at ridiculous speeds, probably over 4000 kilometers a second. According to Assistant Professor Naomi Ota of the Tokyo University of Science, if that were the case, it would constitute the most violently energetic celestial event since the Big Bang itself.
7. The Boomerang Nebula

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From one extreme to another, now this is the Boomerang Nebula, aka the coldest known place in the Universe. The Nebula is a huge cloud of gas being expelled from a dying star in the constellation Centaurus. Astronomers have found that the temperatures could drop as low as half a degree above absolute zero. If a human were exposed to temperatures so cold, their blood would freeze, all the atoms in their body would stop moving and all the body's processes would cease. So maybe it's not a great idea to choose the Boomernag Nebula for your next vacation, then. Despite being totally frigid and inhospitable, the Nebula is actually one of the most valuable locations for astronomical research. That is because it's not yet a fully-fledged planetary nebula, as its central star hasn't ionised its surroundings. In simpler terms, it's still a dying star - not a dead one. This specific stage in a star's life-cycle tends to last only about 1000 years, which in the grand scheme of things is just a tiny blink in cosmic time. We are therefore incredibly lucky to witness an event like this in our lifetime, as it could reveal answers tocomplicated questions about the life and death of stars.
8. Zombie Stars

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Normally, when a star dies, it explodes in a massive supernova and then that's it. Dead. But, in some very rare cases, there is a way they can be revived from their astronomical grave, they can become zombie stars. Let's back-track a bit during the final stage of a star's life, they become a 'white dwarf'. This is when all of a star's nuclear energy has been used up and they just cool and fade into nothingness over several billion years. However, on some occasions, these dying stars can steal energy from younger, neighboring stars. In fact, they've been known to gobble up enough fuel from a neighboring star that it triggers an extraordinary nuclear explosion. This can be powerful enough to revive the dying star, like a zombie surviving through eating the brains of the living. Officially known as a 'type one-a supernova', these zombie stars are not just freaky, they're super useful. Because they are so bright- and consistent in that brightness- they are really handy for figuring distances in the universe. This means that scientists can track the expansion of the universe, furthering our understanding of how gravity and dark energy counteract.
9. Wandering Black Holes

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Black holes are pretty terrifying as it is. It is thought that our galaxy alone contains 100 million black holes and they remain one of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe. At least they're all super far away and happy gobbling up planets and space dust in their own little corner of the universe, right? Wrong. There exists a special, horrifying kind of black hole that moves around space, consuming anything and everything in their path. They're known imaginatively as 'wandering black holes' and have been discovered traveling as fast as 5,000,000 kilometers per hour. We don't really know for certain what causes a black hole to go rogue like this. One hypothesis is that they are knocked off course by the collision of multiple galaxies and are simply sent flying. At least we're definitely safe here on Earth though, right? Wrong again. A wandering black hole in fact been discovered within our very own Milky Way. There's no immediate danger, as it's currently about 10,000 light years away, but who knows where it could end up within the next few millennia.
10. The Great Attractor

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Deep in the far reaches of the cosmos sits what can only be described as an astronomical nightmare. The Great Attractor. The Great Attractor was first theorized in the 1970s, when astronomers realized that the Milky Way was slightly warmer on one side than the other and that it was moving through space at the surprisingly speedy speed of 600 kilometers a second. Conclusion: over billions of years, something is slowly but surely pulling us, and everything near us, closer to itself. And there's no escape. he only force that could act so powerfully over such great distances, and on whole galaxies at a time, is gravity. This means there must be something huge out there that's exerting an unrelenting gravitational pull. One major problem with our understanding of The Great Attractor is that it was lays within the so-called Zone of Avoidance. This is an area of space that sits beyond the Milky Way in the direction of the constellation Centaurus. The Zone of Avoidance is completely obscured because of all the space junk- stars, gas and dust - that is cluttering up our own galaxy.We therefore have no way of seeing what could be causing this massive gravitational anomaly. Could it be a ginormous black hole, a red supergiant or maybe something that has never been discovered before ??