14 Common Myths About Space Aren't True At All

now as much as we love epic space battles with blasters cutting through the black void and causing cheerful booms that's not exactly what happens when something explodes in the big black space is basically vacuum meaning it has no oxygen and oxygen is an essential part of any process of burning we have here on earth you might argue that stars can burn and explode into supernova but that's not exactly true either stars don't rely on oxygen so they're not burning there are constant thermonuclear reactions going on inside them so a spaceship can only explode like that if it has a nuclear power plant installed in it if it doesn't then the only special effect you get is a brief flash that disappears in the blink of an eye liquid oxygen which is often on board spaceships is very quick to burn out in the vacuum of outer space as for the boom oxygen plays a crucial role here too sound only travels thanks to molecules of air bumping into each other since there's no air in space the whole scene would be pretty much absolutely silent and that's not a bad thing either just imagine how deafening would the sun be if the sound could travel in space despite what many sci-fi directors want us to believe there's no dark side to the moon our satellite is tidally locked with earth meaning it's always turned to us with one side while the other always looks away the sun is much farther from us than the moon and we're both turning round and round warming and lighting the side and that in turn it means that once in every short while the moon is lit by the sun from either side it's just that we can't see it from where we are while things appear weightless in outer space there's actual gravity all over the place it becomes weaker the further you get from a heavy object like our planet but it's still there in fact there's not a single place in the universe that isn't affected by gravity of this or that cosmic object everything that has mass has gravity as well yes even you and me but space objects are so massive that they tug smaller things towards them that's why the planets of the solar system orbit around the sun and our whole milky way galaxy orbits around its own center scientists believe there's a supermassive black hole there about four million times heavier than the sun which keeps all the stars and systems from flying apart our movie hero leaves the orbit of mars on their trusty spaceship and heads on towards jupiter their face is grim and determined even though they know what threat awaits them ahead the asteroid belt they pitch and yaw dodging the asteroid flying at enormous speeds toward the spacecraft but one of them still hits it no just a scratch thankfully finally our hero leaves the danger zone and wipes the sweat from the brow with a shaking hand sounds familiar but couldn't be further from the truth asteroids in the belt between mars and jupiter are so few and far between that if you ever travel through it you might not even encounter one the whole way there are about 1.5 million sizable space rocks flying there give or take a half million but let's not forget space is a vast place the distance between two asteroids of any significant size would be millions of miles so a space chase with two ships weaving between floating rocks would be quite boring in there space is often depicted as a black cold and desolate place especially when a movie astronaut leaves the safety of their spaceship everything about this description is okay except for the cold part it's only true if you find yourself in some really far corner of our galaxy that has no nearby stars but if you're for example in the earth's orbit and directly facing the sun the temperature in the cosmic vacuum could reach a scorching 250 degrees that's why spacesuits are white this color reflects light better than any other still the temperature at your back which isn't exposed to the sun's rays can be really freezing indeed heat doesn't spread equally through space so if you're not turned towards a heat source you get very very cold speaking about the sun it somehow always appears yellow in movies the fact is the color we see from earth is an optical illusion created by our planet's atmosphere just as the blue sky during the day the light from the sun spreads in the atmosphere and gets distorted making colorful spectacles at dawn and does in the vacuum of space there's nothing to reflect the light so the sun appears as it really is white that ball of glowing gas is that hot there's a bright flash in the sky followed by a tail of smoke and a red-hot space rock crashes into the ground leaving a huge charred crater after impact well although the smokey tail and the crater are partly true meteorites don't really have a chance to become that hot while falling meteorite is an asteroid that somehow entered the earth's atmosphere and survived the friction enough to fall on the surface this happens pretty often we just don't usually see those rocks because they're normally quite small and fall into uninhabited areas but even if one falls within a city the crater would appear because of the sheer speed of the meteorite not its heat they do get much hotter because of friction yet not so much as to burn everything on the ground on impact as much as we want to believe in instant communication between spaceships and planets it's not possible at least not yet modern communication systems rely on radio signals that have a pretty slow speed compared to the vast expanses of space it would take years for such a signal to travel even one light year let alone hundreds and thousands if you want to send a message to a galaxy far far away be prepared to wait a couple of millennia and then a couple more to receive a reply on that note space is not as crowded and full of events as is often shown on the silver screen it's mostly a rather lonely place where planets stars and other objects are separated by billions of miles of nothingness even if you have a spaceship that can travel at the speed of light most of the time you'll only see black void full of stars and planets far away the distances are enormous out there even between the closest objects for a better understanding the moon which you can see so well on a clear night is about 239 000 miles away as like traveling around the earth almost 10 times in a row warp drives that can distort space-time and get you to a distant corner of an alien galaxy in the blink of an eye that's a staple of any space opera spaceships capable of such a feat are always shown as instantly accelerating from zero to faster than light according to the law of physics people on board should well at least be pushed into their seats hard more strictly speaking no one would be able to survive such an acceleration because it's too many g's on a fragile human body until we find a way to reduce the effects of overload we can't even start thinking of space warps water isn't the rarest and most precious resource in the universe in fact there's a humongous space cloud several million light years away from us that consists entirely of water its reserves would be enough to fill all our oceans 140 trillion times over and many planets some even in our solar system seem to have liquid water on them the most precious resource in space is life and that requires a lot more stuff to appear than just liquid water astronauts are often shown working out on the iss and sci-fi space stations and that much is true they do need physical activity but the reason isn't that they need strong bodies to work in space the gravity out there is much weaker and astronauts don't use their muscles as much as on earth so when they come back to the surface gravity hits them as a sledgehammer and their bodies feel squishy to alleviate those effects they train every day although they say we can see millions of stars on a clear starry night that number is much more modest about three thousand all the rest are other objects that are also luminous and mistaken for stars planets distant galaxies and even artificial satellites they're simply being illuminated by real stars just like the moon and become seen but because they're that far away we can't tell if they're stars or not still you gotta admit it's all still pretty cool

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

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Keywords: bright side, brightside, movie myths, movie explosions, false myths, popular myths, myth debunking, myth or truth, myth or fact, dark side of the moon, myths about space, space myths, facts about space, facts about planets, facts about the universe, facts about stars, facts about the solar system, facts about black holes, bright side space facts, mind blowing facts about space, things movies get wrong, what color is the sun, explosions in space, misconceptions about space

Id: kCbA6F186vA

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021