According to astronomy, planets the size of
Neptune couldn’t possibly form and sustain any kind of atmosphere while orbiting their
parent stars at a close proximity. Well, forget what I just said, -- because
I didn’t quite understand any of it either – but last year, astronomers found exactly
this kind of planet! And it’s not the only planet that defies
all our knowledge. Will scientists have to reconsider their picture
of the Universe? Ooh -- Let’s find out! Exoplanets are the hottest topic in astronomy
right now, and with every new discovery, we’re getting more and more confident of our view
of the Universe we live in. But some of those discoveries simply baffle
the mind! The planet I’m talking about is called NGTS-4b. I like Vulcan better, but they didn’t ask
me. That planet was found by the Next-Generation
Transit Survey, or NGTS, located in the Atacama Desert, Chile. This base of robotic exoplanet search is aimed
at finding super-Earth and sub-Neptune planets. It uses a method that measures the dimming
of a star, which happens when a planet crosses the line between a star and a point of observation. The duration and magnitude of the dimming
help to figure out the size, density, and how far the exoplanet is from its parent star. NGTS-4b is, at least for now, the only known
sub-Neptune sized planet that orbits its star in a so-called “Neptunian Desert”. And it’s called Desert for a reason; the
radiation coming from the stars in Neptunian Deserts is pretty vicious. Normally it would evaporate any kind of atmosphere
from any planets in close proximity and leave them as small, blazing-hot rocks. Scientists can only guess at why this didn’t
happen to NGTS-4b. This planet still has an atmosphere, and it’s
about 80% of the size of Neptune. It orbits the star at an astonishing speed
– a full circle in 1.3 days. One suggestion is that the planet wasn’t
always that close to the star and it just recently migrated there, so its atmosphere
is evaporating right now. Another possible explanation for the existence
of NGTS-4b is that its atmosphere was a lot larger in the past and we’ve found it just
in time to watch the final round of the show. That would mean that we can observe the process
and see for ourselves how it happens. And this isn’t the first surprising discovery
of NGTS. On October 31, 2017, the NGTS-1b planet was
discovered. This planet is a hot-gas giant, almost exactly
the same size as our neighbor Jupiter. But the strange thing about this planet is
that it orbits a red dwarf star that’s only half the size of our Sun. This has never been seen before, and in theory,
such huge planets shouldn’t orbit stars so small. There probably won’t be a sensible explanation
for this until other similar planets are found. But for now – nobody knows how it’s possible! A Neptune-sized planet so close to its star
and huge planets orbiting small stars are puzzling enough, but how about the planet
that should’ve been swallowed by its star by now, but still stands firm in its orbit? That’s right, something like this was also
found in the vast space of the Universe. Kepler-78b is the planet. We’ll have a quiz on these names later. It’s just a little bit bigger than the Earth. It’s supposedly as dense as the Earth and
has a similar composition, but it’s even closer to its host star than NGTS-4b. One year on this planet lasts only 8.5 hours;
that’s how long it takes for the planet to go full circle around the star. The closest planet to our Sun, Mercury, is
about 36 million miles from it. Kepler-78b orbits its star at a distance of
less than 1.5 times the diameter of the star itself. That’s less than 1 billion miles from the
surface of the star, and as far as we know, it’s absolutely impossible. Kepler-78b is constantly getting closer and
closer to the star it orbits, and one day, it’ll be swallowed by it. But for now, the planet stands firm. And that’s not even the most puzzling part;
how, in a name of the Universe, did this planet even come to be? As far as we know, there’s absolutely no
way for a planet like Kepler-78b to be formed so close to a star, and there’s also no
way for it to migrate so close without crashing into the star. More than that, if you imagine how things
were when the planet was formed, it appears that its star was even bigger at that time. And that means that Kepler-78b was formed…
right in the place where the star once was? This simply doesn’t make any sense for astronomers
today. All they can do is collect more information
about this planet and hope to find other similar ones, so they can learn more about planet
formation in the future. Now, let’s turn from blazing desert planets
at risk of being devoured by their own suns, to somewhere really dark. To a planet that’s so far from its star,
it shouldn’t exist. The planet I’m talking about is – prepare
yourself because it’s going to be a mouthful – HD 106906 b. For simplicity, lt’s just call it “Bob”. This planet is the only known companion orbiting
not one star, but two stars at the same time. The planet is 11 times more massive than Jupiter
and is orbiting the binary star at an unimaginable distance. It’s 69 billion miles away from the core
of the system. What’s even stranger is that this system
is still really young, only 14 million years old. Just for a point of reference, our system
is 4.5 billion years old! How it’s possible for a planet this big
to form this far from its parent star is just incomprehensible. Once again, the most possible explanation
is that it was formed near the star but later pushed farther out. Yet there’s still one cool possibility. This planet could’ve been a failed star. This means that some collections of gas crashing
into other similar clouds could react and form a binary star system. But what if one such gas-clump somehow failed
and became a giant gas planet instead? It’s possible, though it’s just a theory. And finally, the big surprise: impossible
planets may be a lot closer to us than you think! How about our own solar system? You know all that buzz going on around Pluto? At one time it’s a planet, and then suddenly
it’s not. What happened here? Did Pluto forget to renew its planet license
or something? Jokes aside, there was a prediction that there’s
some kind of ninth planet in the Solar System long before the discovery of Pluto in 1930. But about half a century later, when our technology
was making a huge leap forward, we were able to see that Pluto is just one of around 70,000
objects in its region of space. There’s a big collection of asteroids, ice,
and dust called the Kuiper Belt. Here, other objects – some just as big as
Pluto – were discovered. And as we know, there can’t be several planets
placed in the same orbit. One object discovered in 2005, named Eris,
is said to be even bigger than Pluto, but it still can’t be called a planet. At least Pluto got all the fame first, before
Eris showed up. It would be a closed case for the ninth planet,
but this story seems to be much more complicated. Evidence found in 2016 by astronomers Gongjie
Li and Fred Adams, suggests that there actually is a strange Planet X in the Solar system. Only, it’s far more distant than even Pluto
and the Kuiper Belt. We don’t know for sure exactly how far it
is, but the estimated distance of its orbit varies from 40 billion to 140 billion miles
from the Sun. That’s 400 to 1500 times farther than the
Earth is from the Sun! The problem is – contrary to all the evidence,
it’s not supposed to be there. We just don’t know any possible way for
a planet to form at such distance from its host star. The most probable explanation for the Ninth
Planet’s distance is that it was once a gas-giant, like Jupiter, but it couldn’t
compete, and the gravitational forces of other planets pushed it further away. While this is possible, another theory suggests
that the Ninth Planet was formed at a great distance in the first place, but then it was
torn out from its orbit by another star passing relatively near to the Sun. It seems like similar things happened quite
often when the Solar System was only starting to form. Still, the simulation shows that those explanations
aren’t ideal. The chances of the proposed scenarios coming
to life are estimated from 2% to 10%. In simple terms – all of them are quite
unlikely! Guess only time and lots of research will
tell. What do you think? What are astronomers missing in their attempts
to explain the origin of impossible planets? What about impossible burgers? Who knows, maybe your idea is the key to a
better understanding of the Universe? Let me know down in the comments! If you learned something new today, then give
this video a like and share it with a friend. But – hey! – don’t go Star Trekking
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