10 Space Discoveries of 2020 Show We Might Not Be Alone

[Music] on the moon iron is preserved in pristine condition because there's no oxygen it simply can't rust there but just a couple of weeks ago scientists made an unexpected discovery in the higher regions of our satellite iron is oxidized and actually rusting at first this finding perplexed astronomers to no end the presence of rust might mean people can breathe at least in certain areas of the moon but then the explanation surfaced oxygen might have got to the lifeless rock from our own planet in the absence of atmosphere solar winds beat the moon relentlessly and nothing can stop them these flares could swoop some oxygen from the upper layers of the earth's atmosphere and carry it all the way to the moon the molecules then come to rest at the highest points of the moon's surface that would explain why metals don't get oxidized in the ravines and especially under the surface of the satellite while we're on this topic the moon has long been believed to have formed as a result of a humongous impact with the earth a mars-sized celestial body could have driven itself into our planet and made part of its crust shatter the resulting debris then packed together in a tight ball which later became our moon but there's one question that's been bugging scientists the earth's crust is poor in metals so how come the moon has so much metal within it the latest research basically throws the main theory out the window so in 2020 we again know nothing about our closest neighbors coming to existence there's news from the further reaches of outer space however astronomers from mit registered a repeating signal from 500 million light years away such signals are called fast radio bursts or frbs and they're usually singular events no one knows what their sources are but they could be supernovae or bursts of energy from quasars this repeating one though is pretty creepy because it's regular for four days radio equipment captures signals all the time and then they abruptly stop but after 12 days the same pattern begins four days of constant radio bursts and 12 more days of silence astronomers managed to locate the signal as coming from a galaxy half a billion light years away from us but what causes it is still unknown it may be a spinning quasar or a supermassive black hole but an alien technology is not excluded either speaking of which there just might be about 6 billion earth-like planets in the milky way galaxy alone the latest data has shown that every fifth sun-like star can have at least one planet in its habitable zone and not just any planet mind you it has a rocky core and surface and it's of a comparable size to the earth being inside the habitable zone of its star such a planet would have high chances of becoming home to living creatures microbes at least and if there are billions of these planets in our galaxy you could safely say that at least one of them is not only inhabitable but inhabited already and now multiply this by the number of galaxies in the universe also considering that many of them are much bigger than the milky way this gives us billions upon billions of sun-like stars and earth-like planets and some of them are surely more like ours than others one such planet can be closer than you think venus the earth's evil sister might be home to microscopic life even though its surface is as hot as a furnace and showered by acid rains from carbon dioxide clouds there might be something alive in its atmosphere scientists have recently picked up traces of a gas called phosphine that can be produced by microorganisms in very small amounts it could appear by non-organic means but telescopes have found much more of this gas this discovery came as a huge surprise because venus was believed to be too hostile for any forms of life now though it might become the first ever planet apart from earth to be home to living creatures the microbes that produce phosphate probably live in the acidic clouds and they don't need oxygen to survive another promising world has been suddenly found while rummaging through old space telescope data in 2018 astronomers analyzed information received from the kepler telescope and as usual disregarded pieces they didn't think were relevant but two years later while going through this old data scientists noticed that one object was misidentified it turned out to be an exoplanet 300 light years away from earth and so much similar to it that it was almost a doppelganger to our home kepler-1649c is only six percent larger than earth and probably consists of the same minerals it also receives about as much light and energy from its star as we receive from the sun the only problem for now is that the star could flare up too often making the surface of the planet too hot and scorching its atmosphere still there's no proof of it yet and we could have a potentially habitable planet pretty close to home au microscopii or au mic for short is basically a cradle of a new star system that can be observed directly it's really close only 32 light years away and the star is very young around 150 times younger than our sun on a cosmic scale it's like a newborn baby and you can still see a cloud of debris swirling around it from the time it was born but the curiosities don't stop there nasa added a poster featuring au mike to its galaxy of horrors series because of the planet that orbits the star au mike b is so close to its sun that it makes a full circle around it in just 8.5 days being so young the star frequently throws tantrums resulting in horrible doses of solar radiation storming the poor planet as you may guess no life is possible in such conditions still the scientists are happy to have found this system because it sheds light on how stars and stellar systems are formed back to earth now the climate changes we're witnessing are most probably part of a natural cycle researchers from the university of california santa cruz have devised a pattern in our planet's climate variations and they look like extremely long seasons sometimes these states could last for millions of years and they're all related to how the earth is positioned relative to the sun the seasons were dubbed ice house pool house warm house and hot house according to the prevalent temperatures for the past 3 million years for example our planet has been in the state of ice house since the last ice age was not so long ago but humanity's actions adding to the greenhouse effect have pushed the climate state to warm house much faster than it would have come without us when it finally comes the overall temperature on earth will rise to tropical values something that the planet hasn't seen in over 50 million years what a time to be alive water on earth is actually a puzzle shrouded in mystery and covered with riddles the most popular theory is that it was brought to our planet by icy comets and asteroids that left behind not only mighty craters but the liquid substance thanks to which we can now thrive but there's now a new advance which suggests another scenario in space there's a whole lot of organic matter and under specific conditions it could yield so much water it would be enough to fill our oceans a thousand times over researchers conducted an experiment in which they heated this organic matter and obtained clear water and oil if this is confirmed in future studies it could mean that even oil appeared on earth not only thanks to fossilized remains of living beings but from outer space as well remember the huge asteroid that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs well i wasn't around then but scientists say it could be caused by something entirely different at least one mass extinction was probably a result of a supernova explosion far far away from our planet a starburst as powerful as you can imagine lit the earth brighter than the sun one day and soon its uv and cosmic rays reach the ozone layer of our planet as they did the planet's protective cover was burnt away and everything that was below suffered the consequences it took the earth hundreds of thousands of years to recover from that onslaught and if it happens again which it might we won't be able to survive luckily the closest event like this is the explosion of beetlejuice and that star is way too far from us to do any serious harm

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

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Keywords: bright side, brightside, scientific discoveries, science, recent space discoveries, latest space discoveries, facts about space, facts about space and planets, facts about space and the universe, facts about space and stars, facts about space and the solar system, facts about space bright side, bright side space facts, outer space, the universe, milky way, facts about the universe, black holes, mind blowing facts about space, facts about space in english, nasa discoveries

Id: qn1Ba-b3FNY

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020