60 Epic Things Happening in Space Right Now

a star the size of our sun can shine for about 10 billion years specifically our lovely sun is about 4.5 billion years old and has already burned half its fuel the next stage in a star's life comes when it runs out of juice internal pressure drops but gravity continues to press at some point a star simply collapses under its own weight and shrinks to the size of its core at the speed of almost a quarter of the speed of light in less than half a second a huge star turns into a small and dense object this rapid collapse creates incredible shock waves that cause the upper layers of the star to explode now an incredible amount of energy and matter is thrown into outer space at this moment luminosity of the star increases millions or even billions of times this is the flash that our scientists can see with super powerful telescopes but the light from this explosion doesn't reach our planet until many years later so in fact this star has long since faded there are several options at this point it all depends on the size of the star if its mass is small about the mass of our sun then for several months this flash will become brighter and brighter until it reaches its peak then the energy of the explosion will begin to dissipate gradually fading and cooling down a few years will pass and the temperature of the former star will match that of space and it will simply cease to exist but the heavier the star the more interesting the events will be heavy stars burn their fuel too quickly and have a much shorter life span stars weighing about eight masses of the sun can collapse into a rather unusual object which is rarely found in the universe a neutron star this dull ball is only 6 to 12 miles wide and covered with a hard metal crust about half a mile thick neutron stars can weigh about two suns and have a strong gravity force if you feel comfortable and in good shape on earth you wouldn't even be able to lift a needle or a match here what's more you would be pressed to the surface like a pancake and just unable to move but there are stars dozens of times heavier than the sun an explosion of such a supernova which weighs at least 40 times more than the sun gives birth to the most inexplicable and mysterious object in the universe a black hole at first an incredibly bright explosion occurs a shock wave spreads carrying dust and matter of the former star around like a fog and at the place of the explosion only a small black disk is left this black abyss is the heaviest object in the universe it's so heavy that its gravity curves space time around it yes the closer you are to a black hole the slower time will go for you if you could get close enough to one of them spend a couple of minutes in its orbit and return to earth you would simply not recognize your home one minute near a black hole can be a month a year or a decade on earth this depends on how heavy the black hole is but don't get too close the force of its gravity is so strong that even light can't escape from it humanity also knows about the existence of supermassive black holes they gradually build up their mass feeding on different cosmic objects just like a predator usually such super massive black holes lie in the centers of galaxies and their gravity is so strong they can hold countless stars near them most people imagine a black hole to be a starving monster with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing including light can escape it as soon as something reaches the event horizon aka the point of no return there's no way back but then how about information quantum physics which describes how everything in the world works claims that nothing can destroy data but if this nothing includes black holes well then we have a paradox on our hands that's when stephen hawking came up with a new idea can it be that black holes don't have event horizons instead they may have apparent horizons those can only trap stuff for some time after that matter or energy will escape but in a different form it means that black holes won't be able to wipe information just change it if this theory is true and there's no event horizon then there are no black holes as we know them is there going to be a big crunch a big rip or a big freeze yeah i know where you can get a big gulp many astronomers agree that the universe might end some 2.8 to 22 billion years from now if the universe is expanding and it is it means it was born from a much more compact state like rhode island and if it does have a beginning it's likely to come to an end too but scientists can't agree on the way it'll happen one of the most popular theories is a big crunch not captain crunch once the growth of the universe slows down to a crawl the gravity will become the main force it'll make the universe shrink causing planets stars and galaxies to collide with one another it'll be the big bang in reverse with everything collapsing in on itself a trip to the nearest star apart from the sun would take you five million years on a commercial airplane that's what i call a long haul flight it would take you about a hundred thousand years to travel from one end of our milky way galaxy to the other at the speed of light on a plane that's just too many zeros to fit into a single screen the sun can fit about a million earths inside it but there's a star called uy scooty that's about 1700 times larger than the sun almost everything in space is connected with everything else by gravity star systems are part of galaxies galaxies are part of clusters and clusters are parts of superclusters the largest known supercluster in the universe is the hercules corona borealis great wall that's a name it's more than 10 billion light years wide mars has the largest natural formations in the solar system the mountain three times taller than everest the canyon almost seven times longer than the grand canyon and the crater that could fit half the amazon river across it although the big bang theory is the most viable one researchers still find evidence against it for example one theory suggests there's an axis around which the whole universe rotates it's aptly named the axis of evil there's a supermassive black hole at the center of almost every major galaxy including ours black holes can attract not only stars and planets but also other black holes eventually merging and becoming one with a much greater mass the spinning movement and enormous gravity of black holes sometimes makes it throw jets of matter into space traveling at almost the speed of light there's a thing called the great attractor it's a gravitational anomaly outside our galaxy that can't be seen but is known to attract the milky way and lots of other galaxies toward itself the winds on neptune reach the speeds of 1600 miles per hour that's three times faster than a commercial airplane temperatures at the moon's south pole reach minus 397 degrees fahrenheit which just might be the coldest in the entire solar system saturn is less dense than water so if it were thrown into a giant pool it would float jupiter's moon europa is covered in a thick layer of ice but underneath it is a vast ocean of water measuring up to 100 miles deep water ice was previously thought to be rare and only common for earth but it can in fact be found all over the solar system even on mercury and the moon saturn's magnificent rings are a belt of space debris that formed after one of its moons fell apart jupiter neptune and uranus also have rings although not as splendidly as saturn's and even some asteroids have them too there are eight confirmed planets in the solar system but evidence shows there can be a ninth we just haven't discovered it yet organic matter could have been brought to earth by comets since it has been found on several of them saturn also has a never-ending storm just like jupiter but it's also peculiar for its shape it has six distinct sides mercury and venus are the only planets in the solar system that have no known moons jupiter has 79 known moons orbiting it the largest of which is ganymede and it's bigger than mercury it was thought that the milky way is a belt before but now we know it's a spiral galaxy footprints on the moon can't disappear because there's no wind to blow them off the surface there's a theoretical possibility of a white hole the reverse of a black hole nothing can enter it from outside but light and matter can escape from within it triton a neptune's moon orbits the planet in a backwards motion it's the only moon that does so and nobody knows why although there are trillions of stars in space we can only see a tiny fraction of them in the sky cheryl pluto's moon is half the size of its planet which is why pluto orbits a bit around a spot outside its own axis all the objects in space including planets interstellar dust and whole galaxies comprise just about four percent of the universe the rest is dark matter and dark energy that can't be seen and isn't fully understood you won't be able to wear a hat on venus ever and just try to stand on your feet the planet is insanely windy its upper winds blow 50 times faster than the planet rotates what's more these fierce winds never stop and can get even stronger with time wanna get away you'll have to travel 11 billion miles away from earth before ever leaving the solar system take your google maps with you you probably heard of methane gas a byproduct of natural processes such as volcanic activity and cows anyway this gas is not only a part of the martian atmosphere but also the thing that confuses astronomers to no end the thing is that the volume of methane on mars keeps wavering and scientists just can't figure out where it might be coming from can there be cows on mars as you may remember pluto used to be a planet but was stripped of this title in 2006 later it was reclassified as a dwarf planet gee make up your mind but the most unexpected fact about this celestial body is that its diameter is smaller than that of the us see for yourself the greatest distance across the country from maine to northern california is about 2 800 miles as for pluto it's only 1473 miles across in fact if you laid pluto right down in the middle of the united states it crushed the heck out of iowa kansas and nebraska bad idea the planet uranus or uranus you can't win either way rotates on its side and astronomers have no idea why the planet has chosen such an unusual position the culprits could be ancient mega-powerful collisions but so far it's just a theory by the way this is the only planet laying on its side our sun is insanely massive want some proof well 99.86 percent of all the mass in the solar system is in the mass of the sun in particular the hydrogen and helium it's made of the remaining 0.14 percent is mostly the mass of the solar system's eight planets outer space isn't a perfect vacuum it contains not only stars and planets but also clouds of interstellar dust space plasma and cosmic rays those are atom fragments dashing from the outskirts of the solar system one phenomenon people should be worried about while exploring space is cold welding if two pieces of the same kind of metal touch in space they bond and get permanently stuck together it doesn't happen on earth since water and air keep pieces separate astronauts onboard the international space station don't use their feet to walk they float around so in orbit the skin on their feet becomes very soft and starts to peel off that's why they have to take their socks off very carefully otherwise skin cells will break free and float around in the almost weightless environment earthquakes on the moon or more correctly moonquakes aren't something from science fiction they don't occur as often as on our planet and when they do it happens closer to the center of the satellite scientists think moonquakes might be caused by the gravity of earth and the sun one of the moons of saturn rhea might have a ring system consisting of three narrow bands if astronomers manage to confirm it it'll be the first time people discovered rings around a moon hey that's nothing i've had rings around my collar for years normal visible matter for example planets and stars makes up just five percent of the universe the rest consists of invisible dark energy that's 68 percent and dark matter about 27 percent add it up and there's 95 percent of space we know nothing about in its darkest areas space is freezing cold minus 454 degrees fahrenheit but try orbiting earth in the sunlight and you'll understand how scorching 250 degrees feel that's one of the reasons astronaut spacesuits are white this color is the best to reflect the heat from the sun [Music] about 700 million years ago i wasn't around then a mysterious event that occurred may have turned venus into the place it is now admittedly astronomers can't see the surface of the planet directly because it's covered with dense layers of thick clouds but space missions that have been sent to the hot planet found that venus is peppered with fire breathing volcanoes massive mountains countless craters and gigantic lava plains the temperatures on the planet are so incredibly high that they could melt lead and the atmospheric pressure is so immense that it would instantly crush any living being reckless enough to set foot on it if that's not enough the atmosphere of the planet is filled with noxious clouds of sulfuric acid which smells worse than rotten eggs carbon dioxide the main component of venus's atmosphere along with the infamous sulfuric acid creates a powerful greenhouse effect as a result the lower atmosphere and the surface of the planet are some of the hottest places in the whole solar system but the newest scientific theory claims that venus could have had a pleasant stable climate for billions of years before something went wrong astronomers did thorough research and build a model of a virtualized venus-like world this model demonstrated that for most of its history the hot planet had oceans with liquid water adequate temperatures and stable tectonic plates in fact the planet resembled earth as it used to be at the beginning of its life scientists suppose that this period of earth-like development could have lasted for more than three billion years so during that time the planet was most likely covered with oceans which were from 30 to 1 000 feet deep also some water was locked in the soil of the planet on top of that venus had stable temperatures of 68 to 122 degrees fahrenheit which you have to admit it were quite pleasant and not that different from the temperatures on earth nowadays so what i'm getting at is that for 3 billion years right until something irrevocable happened 700 million years ago venus could have been habitable

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

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Keywords: supernova explosion, interesting facts, facts about the planet, facts about the earth, facts about nature, amazing facts, facts of life, bright side, bright side videos, bright side facts, facts about animals, cool facts about space, cool facts bright side, what if mars was instead of moon, moon, mars, space suit, galaxy

Id: v1emByAD2nE

Length: 18min 2sec (1082 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021