10 Things About Our Solar System That Stump scientists

Mercury about 3.8 billion years ago a huge asteroid is about to collide with the planet fragments are flying in different directions along with the blast wave when the dust settles we see a crater almost the size of Lake Ontario the most interesting thing here is the shape of the crater it looks like a spider a round body in the center and a bunch of legs that spread out from the crater in different directions but the strangest thing is that the spider's legs don't quite line up with the center scientists can only guess how such a landscape was formed some think that the picture of the spider appeared there much earlier and the meteorite falling almost into its Center was just a coincidence but we still don't have a clear explanation of how such scars could have appeared on the surface of mercury another mystery about Mercury is how it was born one Theory claims that the planet used to be Venus's moon but over time it succumbed to the Sun's gravity the star literally ripped Mercury away and the little planet began orbiting it what might prove this theory is the rotation periods of Mercury and Venus Mercury is gradually losing its rotational speed one day on this planet now equals 58 Earth days and continues to increase at the same time after losing its heavy load Venus has started rotating a little faster another theory says that mercury collided with Venus shortly after the appearance of the solar system at that time proto-mercury was slightly larger than the planet we're familiar with these days but then Mercury lost part of its crust after colliding with Venus and a little later Venus collected this debris but scientists still can't come up with a definitive answer as to how Mercury was formed Uranus a gas giant 18 earth sun distances from our home this planet seems calm compared to other giants like Jupiter with its earth-sized storms and still Uranus has something unusual to boast about this dark spot for example was detected by the Hubble telescope in 2006 at that time it was almost twice the size of Alaska a few years later bright spots appeared there it turned out that they were methane clouds that moved across the surface of the planet at a speed of 300 miles per hour but we don't know what exactly causes such storms on Uranus maybe we can solve this Secret by looking at another mystery of Uranus this planet rotates while lying on its side if you look at the axis of our planet you'll see that it's vertical and only slightly tilted it's the same for most of the planets in our solar system but not Uranus its axis is almost horizontal and pointed toward the sun one of the poles of Uranus is fully illuminated at almost all times the polar day on the planet lasts for 42 Earth years when the tilt of Uranus's axis changes the polar day starts on the other side of the planet the other pole plunges into darkness for 42 years this change of seasons can cause severe storms on the planet's surface but why exactly Uranus lies on its side is unknown perhaps billions of years ago the gas giant collided with several asteroids that were about to become a young Planet such a protoplanet similar in size and weight to Earth could have tilted Uranus after crashing into it but it's still just a hypothesis now let's go to Jupiter's moon Europa the big mystery here is whether there is life on this Moon scientists don't deny such a possibility all you see on the moon's surface is ice the stripes you may spot are actually long wide cracks for a long time scientists thought this moon was nothing more than a block of ice but now they think there might be liquid water inside the core of Europa is heated by the tidal forces of Jupiter this warm core melts the ice around it so there really could be a huge ocean under the ice crust since water is the basis of Life different microorganisms could exist there but we would only find out if we sent a probe there we would have to drill through two dozen miles of solid ice and start searching in an ocean twice the size of all water reservoirs on earth look at Saturn's moon Titan it's the second largest moon in the solar system it's 50 percent bigger than Earth's natural satellite it's the only place in our solar system other than Earth where liquid water has been proven to exist but the most interesting thing about Titan is its atmosphere its 250 miles thick this distance is almost 40 times greater than the average cruising altitude of commercial planes on earth and its 95 nitrogen for comparison Earth's atmosphere is 79 nitrogen which means they're quite similar the mystery is that no one knows how this atmosphere appeared there one Theory suggests that many years ago meteorites hit Titan surface almost non-stop massive rocks collided with the crust raising the pressure and temperatures on the Moon Under such conditions the ammonia in the air decomposed into nitrogen and hydrogen the heavy nitrogen fell on Titan's surface while the light hydrogen Rose and flowed out into space but some scientists dispute this Theory another mystery of the solar system is the hypothetical star Nemesis and whether it really exists if you look at all the stars of our galaxy most of them are paired which means that two stars orbit around each other statistically the sun must also have a companion so some scientists have made an assumption that the largest mass extinctions on Earth were related to some mysterious object in space they hypothesized that there was a red dwarf somewhere within 1.5 light years away from the center of the solar system and every approach of this dwarf star to the asteroid Cloud Disturbed these space Travelers every time it happened several asteroids began their journey toward Earth and caused a mass extinction but this star hasn't yet been discovered and many scientists question this hypothesis now let's look at the very edge of the solar system a photon of light has to travel one year to get here scientists believe the Oort cloud exists in that area it's a hypothetical region where tons of asteroids and blocks of ice gather into clouds it's the furthest place where the sun's gravity still works presumably this spherical Cloud wraps around the solar system this is the region where long period comets are thought to originate they fly all the way through the solar system and then return to the Oort cloud this journey can take thousands of years even more exciting there could be a gas giant called taiki in that region some scientists say it might be four times the size of Jupiter so far no research has confirmed its existence although the Oort cloud is still considered hypothetical some scientists believe that comets from that area are responsible for the major mass extinctions on Earth now let's go beyond the borders of the solar system there the 500 light years away from Earth there's the closest to our home planet black hole black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe they're so heavy that they attract not only matter but also light even more they slow down time once something gets trapped in a black hole's gravity it never escapes light and matter gradually settle near the Event Horizon and soon disappear into Infinite Darkness time flows differently here one minute near a black hole can be equal to weeks on Earth the biggest mystery is what exactly is inside a black hole some speculate that there's nothing but crushing pressure that destroys anything that gets there others say it might be a portal to another dimension or a wormhole to another place in the universe if it was true white holes would exist as well as exits from black hole portals and wormholes but no white hole has been found so far now how about going to the hypothetical border of the entire universe it's called the aerodynus supervoid if you look at the map of the universe you'll see an empty cold spot about 1 billion light years wide the entire Milky Way galaxy is only one hundred thousand light years across the main mystery is how the spot appeared one Theory says this void is the Scar left by the Collision of two parallel universes imagine that universes are giant bubbles and one day two of these bubbles collided that's when the parallel universe ripped several galaxies out of our bubble so far this is the only explanation for how such a huge cold void could appear in our universe now really an object weighing billions of times the mass of our sun must be easy to find right wrong unfortunately it might not be that simple like in the case with a missing black hole but let's travel to the Galaxy cluster Abel 2261 hosting a supermassive black hole at its Center or at least that's where it's supposed to be the main problem is this giant space phenomenon is nowhere to be found now supermassive black holes are Mega monsters churning slowly at the center of their home galaxies they gather tremendous clouds of gas and dust around them which makes them swell up the sizes the human mind can't begin to imagine if a supermassive black hole like the one that dwells at the center of our home Milky Way galaxy moved even a little bit closer to our solar system we'd be doomed the distance between this huge thing and Earth could be several dozens of light years and still it would wreak havoc on our planet Earth along with other things making up the solar system would be tugged into the black hole's orbit and doomed to spin around it for eternity or longer hey who knows right so it's good that such black holes stay away from us at the moment so let's see what happened to that runaway supermassive black hole from that gigantic cluster of galaxies around 2.7 billion years away from our planet scientists have been looking for it with the help of NASA's Chandra x-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope but so far no resolve the main problem with finding a black hole is that it's uh well black and spaces you guessed it black too so there's no contrast whatsoever that could help astronomers spot the hole but scientists haven't given up yet after all they have a lot of other Technologies to find black holes small and big in the vastness of space some of these methods involve watching the Stars orbiting black holes sometimes it's a fake gravitational wave signal which is produced when two black holes Collide but the most reliable technique is watching dust and gas falling to their Doom the thing is black holes are space objects with insane gravity so regions of space surrounding them are usually a bit chaotic gas and dust getting pulled into the bottomless Abyss compressing and heating up in the process it releases a flood of X-ray radiation so astronomers look for extremely bright x-ray sources in the universe chances are those are the last gasps of giant clumps of material before they disappear into a black hole then why can't scientists find such x-ray signatures left by the black hole and able 2261. one of the most mysterious things about its disappearance is that radio telescopes have spotted some signs of massive plumes of superheated material launched at one point within the last 50 million years these plumes were most likely caused by a large black hole which is nowhere to be found these days so at the moment we can only play a guessing game maybe two medium-sized black holes collided pushing the newly merged giant out of the center of the Galaxy the observations of the stars in that Galaxy have shown a clump of dense material a few thousand light years away from the Galaxy's core maybe it's the runaway black hole but disappointingly no x-ray signals are coming from that clump or the hall might still be there in its rightful place but it's you know slumbering if it doesn't get a fresh supply of gas and dust it has nothing to feed on as a result it can't release a flood of x-rays but again the answer do not disturb the black hole is sleeping now isn't very satisfying why isn't it getting its base food what happened 50 million years ago does that clamp of material speeding away from the Galaxy Center so see questions and no answer so far at least we know what black holes look like well kinda it's actually the shadow of a black hole's Event Horizon visible against the glowing superheated material falling inside the hole the first ever mug shot of a black hole appeared in 2019 but the data for its creation was collected in 2017. it took an international team consisting of more than 200 astronomers two years to assemble the image we can admire this amazing space phenomenon thanks to a vast Global Network of telescopes called The Event Horizon telescope collaboration or simply EHT why such a name the thing is that the event horizon is a point of no return on the outskirts of a black hole when something for example matter radiation or Light reaches this boundary there is no way for it to escape the black hole's clutches anyway to capture that very first image of a black hole scientists created a virtual telescope that turned out as big as our planet by combining the power of eight powerful radio telescopes but it wasn't an easy feat the researchers had to simultaneously point the telescopes in a meticulously planned order with the help of precise atomic clock set on each telescope plots to keep the chances of rain in bad weather to a minimum they even constructed the telescopes in super dry regions such as the Atacama Desert in Chile and the South Pole on each observation day the telescope gathers roughly 350 terabytes of data that's 10 times the amount of data collected every day at the Large Hadron Collider but let's speak more about black holes themselves there are Stellar black holes smaller but even more dangerous than their supermassive Piers they appear when stars that have run out of their star food fall into themselves if a star used to be big enough it keeps compressing and compressing some more and voila a baby Stellar black hole is born but even if I call such a hole a small one it's still five to several tens of times heavier than the Sun unlike their massive siblings hypothetical many black holes could be really tiny not bigger than an atom even so just one minuscule thing would have the mass of a thousand SUVs one Theory claims tons of micro black holes could have been created right after the big bang and the beginning of the universe some scientists even go as far as to say that a couple mini black holes pass through our planet every day there is a supermassive black hole smack dab in the middle of our galaxy The Milky Way its name is Sagittarius A star and it's 4.3 million times as heavy as the sun and nope we aren't going to be pulled into this hole it's more than 26 000 light years from Earth too far to have any influence on our planet by the way recently astronomers have discovered that this supermassive black hole might be leaking if it's true it probably means that Sagittarius A star isn't a sleeping giant as previously thought it might still be active and the leakage recorded by scientists may be the whole hiccuping while swallowing clouds of gas maybe we should burp this baby if you ever find yourself near a black hole get ready that time will significantly slow down it may work for you if you aren't eager to grow older just don't let yourself be tugged beyond the point of no return another danger of hanging around a black hole is that it might start behaving like a massive Galactic volcano from time to time black holes flare up but instead of spewing lava they produce enormous amounts of energy and it makes gaping holes in the surrounding material and gas a short time ago scientists discovered one of the largest craters in the universe radio and x-ray telescopes detected a supermassive black hole that threw a temper tantrum many many years ago it happened in a galaxy cluster about 390 million light years away from Earth the crater Left Behind which was actually a hole punched in the cluster's hot gas could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies okay mind blown I'm out of here now did you know that there's an astronomical object in which space and time actually swap places how does that work and what exactly does swapping space and time mean well let's figure it out imagine that you're on a spacecraft the vehicle can only move straight your path leads to some inevitable point and you have no idea what lies ahead you can only hope that it won't be too bad meanwhile everything around you is complete Madness a chaotic collage of many historical events what do you see ancient humans and dinosaurs the birth of the universe uh future who knows that's what the universe would look like if we swap time and space and theoretically this is what you would see if you fell into a black hole and somehow were able to survive but how is something like this even possible first of all let's discuss time and space imagine drawing a light bulb on a sheet of paper then grab one more sheet and draw how it lit up right now it's just a small circle of light another sheet the circle of light is growing it gets bigger and bigger in size until finally it turns into a giant Circle in real life the bulb lights up in the blink of an eye that's because the speed of light is the fastest in the universe but here on our drawings we captured the propagation of light frame by frame we see how over time the light has grown from a small dot to a large Circle but if you connect these circles doesn't it remind you of some shape for example a cone yes exactly this is called a light cone and time is the central axis of this cone why because light turns from a small dot into a large Circle over time to remember it let's draw a Time Vector an arrow inside the cone it goes from the past to the Future meanwhile the circles are space in space we can move however we want in any direction we can move up or down in zigzags and so on but no matter what zigzags we draw along the timeline we're always moving forward we can't turn back in time and we can't stop it this helps us Define time and space time is the direction in which the light cone is oriented this is the direction where all our paths lead and where our future inevitably lies and space is the whole variety of directions perpendicular to the timeline this is a straightforward graph if it could be applied to the entire universe then time would flow the same everywhere however if you've washed at least some popular Sci-Fi movies you know that this isn't the case in reality time can be crazy for example if you're chilling near a black hole what will be two hours for you may turn out to be 20 years for your friend on Earth but why well take a deep breath now gravity comes into play oh I know about gravity it's that thing that helps me to stand on the ground you may think but it's much much more complicated than that gravity is one of the basic physical forces in our world and it's incredibly powerful in fact she's such a girl boss that she can distort space and time she can literally influence the speed of time Like An Almighty Wizard how well let's take something slightly bigger than the life bulb for example a supernova somewhere in the universe a star has just made a boom how do we know about it well nothing in the universe no sound no radio waves nothing travels faster than light so we'll know about the birth of a supernova only when we see it and this will happen only when its light cone grows enough and reaches our planet so the light cone grows and grows so far everything is fine and finally it reaches our planet but there's a catch you see our planet is very massive very massive and it has pretty strong gravity what happens then gravity changes the direction of the light cone it begins to attract the cone to the center of our planet and with it it also attracts our Arrow of time that means it slows the time down and the closer the light cone is to us the more the arrow bends and the slower time goes what does it mean well for example the fact that the watch on your ankle will lag behind the watch on your wrist that your head is aging faster than your legs and that astronauts in Earth's orbit age a little slower than people on earth this is what scientists call general relativity right but how does this relate to our topic how can we understand what will happen if we swap space and time nah don't worry we're almost there now imagine a cosmic body with incredibly strong gravity it bends time and space so much that it feels like they swap this is a black hole a black hole attracts absolutely everything to its Center no stars planets no light can escape from there let's say our light cone is approaching it first as usual time begins to bend toward the center of the black hole attracted by its gravity but the gravity is very strong so it bends more and more and time goes slower and slower the closer you're to the center in the end the light cone crosses the boundary of the black hole the so-called Event Horizon at this point it gets so distorted that now it's literally pointing downwards we can say that time has changed its direction time is pointing downwards what kind of nonsense is that you may ask it'll be easier to explain in a real example imagine you're a crazy astronaut who decided to jump into a black hole and there's an observer in the spaceship who watches you doing this for some reason first for you nothing changes you look at your watch you see that five minutes have passed and everything's okay but for the Observer first of all you'll fall for a very long time the Observer has been sitting there for 50 years and you're still falling all because your time has slowed down secondly since space is also distorted near the black hole The Observer will see how you'll begin to stretch like spaghetti this is a scientific term by the way it's called spaghettification and then you finally crossed the Event Horizon The Observer doesn't see you anymore light cannot escape from a black hole so your image won't reach the Observer even if you're still inside and what about you what if you somehow survived Remember the Time arrow is pointing to the center of the black hole what does it mean it means that now the center of the black hole is your future it isn't a place it's a fate that you can't change and wherever you came from as well as the rest of the universe no longer exists for you because now it's not a place but an event from the past and since you can't turn back time you'll never be able to come back but what is around you complete chaos the Rays of light now move in all directions forward backward and so on the Rays depicting the events of the past the future the present all this is moving around you in reality space and time didn't swap places but it feels like they did because in space you can now only move forward as if along a straight line and time reflected in the light rays surrounds you everywhere and moves in all possible directions and here we go back to the beginning this horrifying example helps us imagine what it would feel like if time and space got reversed of course all this is just theories and guesses the very idea that we're moving in some One Direction the one we haven't Chosen and there's complete time chaos around sounds quite frightening and yet it would be a very interesting experience sounds dangerous why don't you go first that's it for today so hey if you pacified your curiosity then give the video a like and share it with your friends or if you want more just click on these videos and stay on the bright side

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE Series

Views: 14,324

Keywords: analytical skills, astrology, astronomer, astronomy, beautiful facts about space, black hole, bright side, bright side space facts, bright side videos, brightside, creative thinking, critical thinking, education, facts about solar system, facts about space, facts of life, improve your memory, interesting videos, intriguing videos, mysteries, recent space discoveries, space, strangest planets in space, what if, what other planets look like, Solar System, scientists, Solar, moon

Id: rQeHC4emEDk

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023