Honestly, our moon.

I firmly believe that our moon gives us the solar system in short order.

Fuel in the form of Helium-3 (if we can figure that out). Plenty of building material. Much lower gravity well that will allow larger payloads into it’s orbit and larger ships to be constructed. As well as that lower gravity well meaning better fuel efficiency in launching just about any trajectory to anywhere else in the solar system.

Once we have the Moon, we’re 90% of the way to a solar system spanning species. Mars is cool, but not useful in any real sense other than bragging rights.

Black Hole and Neutron Star are my favorite celestial body.

My two biggest are probably Sol and voids. I wish I could directly observe the phase transition as you approach the star’s core, understand it’s corona patterns and behavior, observe deeper to predict CMEs, etc it’s just so close and present in our daily lives and still very mysterious. For the voids I’m not sure maybe because it’s defined by its boundary more than its contents, but they are pretty common and some are huge and it’s just difficult to study something that is defined by its lack of something.

The great attractor. It’s the biggest object we known of, but actually know almost nothing about. and it’s in a spot that’s hard to see through, our galaxy’s center. Almost everything we see in the sky is heading towards that point, hence the name.

Rogue black holes are terrifying

I am going to mention the rogue planets, since no one else has mentioned them here yet. Those unlucky celestial bodies ejected by their home star, destined to fly through the universe alone, dark and cold, forever.

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.

Primordial black holes and rogue planets.

The thought of Quark Stars have fascinated me ever since I first read about them, about maybe fifteen years ago, a supernova remnant that is dense enough to overcome neutron degeneracy pressure, not dense enough to become a singularity.

The Cosmic Microwave Background was emitted when the Universe was around 370,000 years old, the oldest light in the Universe but the way space expands and accelerates, the distance at which the photons we detect now were emitted and when they reach us, is all distorted and crazily stretched. If you want to visualize how light moves as slow as a snail in the grand scheme of things, look no further.

Neutrinos, as far as we know the closest a particle with mass approaches zero, to the infinitesimal point that it’s thought it doesn’t derive its’ mass from the Higgs Field. Then there’s the as-yet elusive Cosmic Neutrino Background, emitted when the Universe was less than a second old.

What would one even look like?

Like a reddish glowing Jupiter.

Hypothetical, but Black Hole Stars (one of my favourite Kurzgesagt videos).

“Normally that would be the end – today’s stars go supernova, a black hole forms and things calm down. But in this case, the star survives its own death.”

“An impossibly dangerous balance has been created – millions of solar masses pushing in, the angry radiation of a force fed black hole pushing out.”

I’m hoping that some of the new long wavelength teleescopes like JWST might have a chance of seeing one of these beasts.

Quasars

Magnetars. I want to throw an asteroid or something at one and watch it get ripped apart on a subatomic level purely by magnetism.

Lagrange Points (L4 and L5 specifically). Here’s a bit of space with a gravitational effect keeping you inside, but not due to mass inside it. It’s due to the relation of two other masses. Mind-boggling.

Venus. It’s got this mega-dense atmosphere. Why? It’s an anomaly when you compare it to the other similarly-sized planets in our solar system. The gas giants having thick atmospheres makes sense, but Venus? Actually, I just had a thought. The Sun’s mass generally pulls gas toward it. Gas that is in between the Sun and Mercury gets pulled into the Sun. Gas between Mercury and Venus gets pulled into the Sun too, since the closeness of the Sun makes its gravitational effect very influential compared to Mercury’s. Gas between Venus and the Earth, however, is far away enough from the Sun that it will stabilize around a Venus-sized planet. This explains the discrepancy between Mercury’s and Venus’s atmospheres. Not sure about the Venus/Earth discrepancy, but perhaps Mars’s light atmosphere is due to its lower mass.

Callisto. Why is it so dark? Why is the ice (the light splotches on the surface) like polka dots, rather than either an ocean or more diffuse?

Black Holes are infinitely fascinating!

They’re ’a thing’ we knew nothing about until Einstein wrote a paper, and even though his own math showed their existence, he doubted that they could be real.

Turns out that they are, and that they form the structure of the entire universe.

That’s my object.

My favorite thing is Quantum Field Theory! You know the field of magnetism, you played with it as a kid when you got your hands on two magnets the first time.

Turns out every particle in the standard model has its own field, and an excitation of that field manifests as that type of particle.

David Tong explains it masterfully: https://youtu.be/zNVQfWC_evg

As does HOTU: https://youtu.be/UYW1lKNVI90

EDIT: Both links above are 1+ hours each, and done in layperson terms. No degree needed, just a desire to learn something fascinating.