Are These Planets More Habitable Than Earth? | How The Universe Works

our universe is violent the cosmos is full of planets from hell what we have is a collection of monsters super hot worlds roasting at thousands of degre Frozen planets too cold for Life desolate worlds seared by deadly radiation even planets where Rock rain from the sky we have hundreds and hundreds of these things we found and they're crazy we search the heavens for worlds like our own and find planets where life could not possibly survive how can the universe be so weird is the earth a oneoff the only habitable planet in the universe or are there war worlds like ours out there just waiting for us to [Music] find look out at the cosmos billions of galaxies trillions upon trillions of stars and one profound question is anyone else out there we want to find another Earth is there a pale blue dot orbiting some star out there in the galaxy [Music] the search is on for worlds that could Harbor life we're searching for our own vision of ourselves out there in space we're searching for our [Music] Heaven we've already discovered more than 700 planets beyond our solar [Music] system and yet these exoplanets look nothing like our own boy were we wrong all these solar systems that we're seeing in out of space we find that they don't look like our solar system at all we are the Oddball we're the [Music] freaks these are nightmare worlds and the cosmos is full of them we're finding all different flavors of hell all these different ways that planets can go wrong so that's where we are right now searching for heaven finding [Music] hell these are worlds where life couldn't possibly survive [Music] could we really be alone a cosmic fluke in a universe hostile to life we may soon have the answer now we have discovered hundreds of exoplanets in out of space at the rate of over one exoplanet a week in a few years that will probably be thousands and in the end there could be millions or even billions of these things waiting for us to discover them how could all of them be planets from Hell The Quest For answers Starts Here 63 light years from Earth we've discovered a planet it's even larger than Jupiter and it has a serious problem its orbit is incredibly tight it's closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun and 30 times closer in than the earth the result is a super heated [Music] hell but there's another reason why nothing could survive here and that's the Ferocious wind the surface is battered by a NeverEnding storm we can't see these winds with our telescopes but we know the super storm [Music] exists because of this NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope Spitzer can see things that we can't it doesn't use visible light instead it sees an infrared it's a part of the light spectrum we don't see with our eyes infrared is [Music] heat one advantage of studying the universe of infrared is it gives us this opportunity to see the light coming from planets around other stars when you try to look at the light of a planet next to the light of a star the star is hundreds of thousands of times brighter than that planet which renders the planet very very faint but if we push into the infrared part of the spectrum the internal heat of the planet just as my internal heat causes the planet to Glow now it's observable and measurable Spitzer gives us something completely new the very first weather map of a planet beyond our solar system this simple image is a technological Triumph the colors represent temperature differences but the map also proves the planet has hellish winds that's because the hot spot isn't where it should be one side of the planet permanently faces the star so its Center should be the hottest point on the planet it isn't something pushes the planet's hot spot to the side and that takes incredible [Music] Force only a Non-Stop six th000 mph hurricane could be this powerful 20 times stronger than the strongest winds on Earth eight times the speed of sound a small shift on a weather map evidence of SuperSonic wind raging on an alien planet truly a planet from [Music] hell we're finding new planets at a staggering rate an average of one a week each one could be an earth earth like heaven but the more we explore them the more hellish worlds we find and some are so nightmarishly hot that they're more than uninhabitable they shouldn't even exist this Jupiter sized gas planet is too 256 light years from Earth in infrared it shines like a star thousands of times brighter than Venus the hottest planet in our solar [Music] system it's a blistering 3700 [Music] de it's nearly impossible for a plan planet to get this [Music] hot its hellish temperature provides a clue to its [Music] appearance only an absolutely black object could absorb enough light from its star to reach such scorching [Music] temperatures if you were coming up on the night side away from the Star you would just see this blackness in front of you very little radiation very little light it would almost just look like the stars were avoiding a part of the [Music] sky just as black pavement absorbs sunlight and heats up on a sunny day the Black Planet roasts beside its star we don't understand its atmospheric chemistry there's nothing on Earth that can absorb so much [Music] light the planet's only color comes from a scorching hot spot as you flew around to the day side things would begin to glow red hot there'd be a huge swirl in storm all red and glowing what a hellish [Music] World deep inside clouds of titanium oxide swirl around a solid heart 100 times heavier than Earth Darkness visible another world from [Music] hell but some planets are even bigger seemingly impossible [Music] puzzles here's a mystery every astronomy textbook says that gigantic Jupiter sized planets form way out in out of space where it's really cold so why is a Jupiter sized Planet what's it doing inside the orbit of mercury Jupiter type planets can only form far from their parent stars out in the cold of space a gas giant orbiting this close means these monsters can move this is wasp 12b a scorching vision of hell it's so close to its star that its orbit lasts just one Earth day this world is so hot it's over 4,000 de fah this is just crazy hot wasp 12b is one of the hottest planets in our galaxy we've never seen anything like this before this certainly is one of the most violent environments in the universe wasp 12b is only 2 million miles from its star searing heat puffs up its atmosphere giving it the density of Styrofoam in a big enough bathtub it would float we actually think it's so close to its star that the gravity the tidal effect of gravity warps it into almost an egg shape it's not even round it's it's a blong thousands of miles beneath the puffed up atmosphere lies a solid core it's rich in carbon and the pressures are extreme there could be mountains of diamond and graphite and seas of liquit tar but wasp 12b won't last long it orbits so closely that its star is literally tearing it apart ripping away nearly 190 quadrillion tons of gas a year 10 million years from now wasp 12b will vanish the question is how did it get so close in the first place this is the birth of a solar system in the center a new star around it swirls a disc of microscopic dust grains these are planets in the making the dust grains Collide and every time they Collide they merge and so they get bigger and bigger and so they sort of grow like the dust bunnies under your bed and you have 100,000 years or a million years to make a very big Dust Bunny and they get bigger and bigger and [Music] bigger trillions of miles from the Star it's cold enough for ice to [Music] form ice picks up dust and gas these gaseous clumps grow bigger and bigger over millions of years eventually they become gas giants in our solar system the gas giants Jupiter Saturn Neptune and Uranus all form this way in the distant orbits we still see today so how did wasp 12b end up up so searingly close to its star the answer gravity this planet is huge 40% more massive than [Music] Jupiter its immense gravity disturbs the dust dis it formed from creating turbulence [Music] and so the planet creates waves in the disk you know sort of density waves and you can sort of think of them as like waves on an ocean the gas giant becomes a galactic Surfer over hundreds of thousands of years the planet rides the waves inward toward the star as the planet gets closer and closer to the star it starts to feel the radiation from the Star more and more and so it heats up surfing millions of miles from the cold outer reaches of the star system into the tight scorching orbit we see today an ice cold world becomes a planet from Hell nobody had any real clue that you could form a Planet a billion miles out from a star it somehow moved in that is incredible but that's really the only explanation of how these planets got so close to their stars in the first place wasp 12b is bizarre but it isn't [Music] alone we've found many of these super high hot super close Giants we call them hot Jupiters battered by supersonic winds blacker than night hotter than hell but these hot Jupiters all have one thing in common there's no life here so these planets are just about as different from the earth as you can possibly imagine in fact we've now found over a hundred of these things rendering them so common that the question really emerges which ones are the weirdos them or us this planetary roller coaster has consequences as they spiral inward hot Jupiter caused chaos they create a whole new class of planets from Hell orphan worlds flung away from their star into the emptiness of interstellar [Music] space planets orbit Stars between the stars is a vast sea of Darkness we've always thought of space as being empty that would be considered its defining characteristic that's why we call it space but when Planet Hunters switched from gazing at stars to staring deep into space they made an amazing [Music] Discovery out of the darkness between the stars planets began to appear first one dark gas [Music] giant then several [Music] more eventually 10 dark starless planets emerged from the shadows of space I wonder what it would be like to be on one of these rogue planets in between Stars the night sky would be perfectly black there'd be festooned with stars it be beautiful but if you were at one of these planets you would be in a world of Perpetual night there would be no Sunrise or Sunset there would be no warmth of the sun these planets formed around a star but now they roam the darkness of interstellar space their Journey here was violent each one forced from its home orbit by the gravity of a hot Jupiter a jupiter-sized planet is an 800 lb gorilla where does it sit anywhere it wants to hot Jupiters are killers as they surf in toward their star their immense gravity disrupts the system hurling planets from their orbital paths it flings into outer space any small planet so any Planet unfortunate enough to be orbiting close to the mother star would be flung into outter space with a passing Jupiter these planets will never again feel the heat or see the light of a star all the rogue planets we've found so far are gas giants but perhaps there are smaller Rocky worlds too worlds that were once like Earth the large jupiter-like planets are just easier to see but there's no reason to assume there also aren't smaller orphan planets maybe as a Jupiter planet moves in toward the star and plays ping pong with the planets even something like Earth could have gotten kicked out then you would have this this cold Frozen little world just streaking between the Stars dark and lonely these planets are victims of a violent gravitational battle Frozen orphaned Earth twins there may be hundreds of billions with a be of these planets roaming the Galaxy now there are only a couple of hundred billion stars in the galaxy so that means these rogue planets may actually outnumber [Music] Stars right now we find an average of at least one new exoplanet a week as our technology improves we'll see smaller and smaller planets orbiting Stars Worlds with a solid surface like our own but the first rocky planets we found are nothing like Earth these planets have been to Hell and back we have found hundreds of alien worlds and now for the first time we're finding small planets made of rock just like [Music] Earth planets this size are potential homes for life but instead we find more planets from Hell weird nightmarish and [Music] uninhabitable this is cororo [Music] 7B a world of violent [Music] extremes two Hells in one it's so close in that it star looms 360 times larger in the sky than our sun on Coro 7B the first Hell is unimaginably Hot the surface is a furnace roasting at 4700 [Music] de lava boils turning the atmosphere into vaporized Rock when a cooler front moves in small Pebbles condense and rocks rain from the sky if that's not a classic vision of hell I don't know what is but that's only half the story The Hot Side of the planet is locked permanently facing the star Beyond is the Twilight Zone it's temperate here cool enough to turn the lava oceans into Solid Rock but this Pleasant zone is narrow travel further and you descend into a second [Music] hell this is the dark Dark Side the half of the planet that never sees the sun Eternal darkness and Savage cold the temperature is hundreds of degre below zero so one side is hot another side is cold you either have you know fire or ice in the extreme the coldest places in the universe and the hottest places in the universe you couldn't think of a worst place to end up the planet was not always this way turn back the clock 1.5 billion [Music] years Coro 7B is forming but it isn't rocking it's a gas J giant 100 times bigger than Earth it migrates in toward its Star as it closes in the star blowtorches gas from the planet its gaseous shell blasts off into space to reveal a rocky core Coro 7B is the skeletal remains of a hot Jupiter its parent star has reduced this once massive gas giant to a rocky [Music] Cinder it's hard to imagine planets more extreme than Coro 7B yet they do exist Rocky worlds machine gun by deadly cosmic [Music] rays this is a pulsar 7,000 trillion miles away from [Music] Earth it's a kind of cosmic [Applause] Lighthouse this unbelievably tiny world just 10 m across fires an intense beam of radiation through space as regularly as an atomic clock a single cubic centimeter the size of a keyboard key actually has about as much mass as Mount Everest smash a Mount Everest into a cubic centimeter the whole stock star which is only about 10 m across is like that it's one of the most hostile environments in the universe anything nearby gets hammered by intense gravity and magnetism no one expected to find a Planet here but this Pulsar has [Music] three small rocky near Earth's ized they were the first exoplanets ever discovered and the last place you would ever find life it's got a tremendous magnetic field it's blasting out x-rays so these poor planets are just getting cooked by radiation the word earthlike I don't think could be applied to these guys at all the X-ray beam strafes the planets over and over over firing radiation a million times more deadly than medical x-rays slowly stripping their surfaces away these are sterile worlds everybody admits there's no chance for life at least as we know it on the planets that orbit the pulsar radiation Cooks pulse our planets to death the opposite hell is no better Frozen worlds too cold for life in the constellation Scorpius 20,000 light years away is a red dwarf [Music] star red dwarfs are tiny and relatively [Music] cool and this planet is too far away to fill what little heat there is it's so distant it's orbit lasts 10 Earth years it's the coldest planet we have found in the universe its surface is a frigid 370° below zero this is a world made entirely of ice methane ammonia and nitrogen are gases on Earth here they form a frozen toxic Frost glaciers and canyons and Cliffs of ice are the only terrain here hell really has frozen [Music] over our search for Earth's elusive twin reaches another dead end perhaps we are truly [Music] alone or will our first tantalizing glimpses of an alien world potentially perfect for life change [Music] everything Earth the only habitable World in our solar system but in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars can we really be [Music] alone it's a question that Planet Hunters are trying to answer the whole purpose in my opinion of the discovery of exoplanets is to establish our true place in the universe who are we where do we belong in the cosmic scheme things are there other planets that can have life just like ours that's where NASA's Kepler space telescope comes in Kepler lets us calculate how far a planet is from its star that's critical in figuring out whether it could sustain life life on Earth is only possible because we're the perfect distance from from the Sun not too hot and not too cold just right for liquid water oceans rivers lakes rain and life you know journalists say follow the money astronomers say follow the water because water is the universal solvent that dissolves most chemicals and that's where DNA got off the ground and where there's liquid water there could be life we're looking for planets that are not too close to their parent star where all the water would boil away and not too far away from their parent star where all the water would be tied up in a in a frozen form we're looking for that goldilock zone where the temperatures are just right for liquid water to pool on the surface once Kepler has identified a new planet astronomers check whether it lies in the habitable zone of its parent star so far Kepler hasn't found a single confirmed Earth [Music] twin but it has identified more than 2,000 planetary possibilities and it's this sheer abundance of planets that gives scientists hope the important thing to remember is that even though we're finding all of these these terrible planets that are just completely unlivable is that we're finding lots of them we're finding hundreds and thousands of these planets and what that's telling us is that planets are easy to make and that means that even rare things are probably out there in large numbers even if the Earth is a rare precious Jewel in our galaxy there may be dozens or hundreds hundreds of them out [Music] there Kepler has opened our eyes to a universe full of planets we can now guess at how many there might be in our own Galaxy 50 billion 50 billion worlds just waiting to be discovered and we think 1% could be in the Goldilocks zone of their star that's 500 million planets each with a Chance of harboring life right here on our own [Music] doorstep we haven't found one yet but we're getting [Music] closer this is glea 581 a red dwarf star 20 light years from Earth glea 581 is a tiny little star if the sun were the brightness of about 100 watt light bulb then gisa 581 would be like a little Christmas tree light a tiny little fairy light very very small this shifts the Life Zone in because now if you want to be warm enough you need to snuggle up right next to the star the star has four planets three are too close and hot for liquid water but the fourth is different it's a rocky World twice the size of Earth and it's right on the edge of the goldilock [Music] Zone in theory if the planet has a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere it could trap enough heat to have clouds rain and oceans it would be a strange place to live twice Earth gravity bathed in permanent red [Music] Twilight but right now this weird world is the closest we have to a planet like [Music] ours it's a promising start when we actually know for a fact that up there around that star is a planet like Earth that's going to just fundamentally change how people look at the sky and how people perceive their place in the universe so that's going to be a profound moment not just for me but I think for Humanity in [Music] general our goal is to find another Earth but along that path we are going to find more things than we could have ever possibly imagined and that's the part I love about this the most we don't know what craziness is going to be around the next Corner when we're looking for more planets I can't even [Music] imagine two decades ago the only planets we knew were right here in our solar system now there are hundreds all very different from our [Music] home the universe is filled with hell worlds super hot Ultra cold violent and bizarre but the universe is also unimaginably vast with so many stars there are probably countless earthlike Heavens all we have to do now is find them

Channel: Naked Science

Views: 23,977

Keywords: doc, documentary film, documentaries, HD documentary, education, history, informative, what if, science documentary, what if scenario, mystery, astronomy, how the universe works, colonization, space life, solar system, space colonization, better than earth, more habitable, habitable, habitat, migrate, universe, exoplanet, nasa, space, space exploration, space x, earth, science, facts about solar system, living on mars, mars, facts about the universe, cosmos, kepler telescope, kepler

Id: 4eiJ1lfwRsQ

Length: 42min 35sec (2555 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2024