NASA Discovers Mysterious Structure In Solar System!

it seems that the solar system has been studied inside and out our spaceships have visited all of its planets and even managed to take their pictures but today we'll show you our solar system in a completely new light you'll discover secrets that haven't been revealed yet hear eerie sounds coming from the solar system see strange objects that frighten and amaze scientists and even look inside the solar system's bodies but let's start from the very beginning the birth of the sun and the planets orbiting it it's interesting how early astronomers thought we were the center of the universe that everything including the sun revolved around the earth now we have a much better picture of where we are in the cosmos and some ideas on how everything formed our solar system developed inside a structure estimated to be around 13.6 billion years old a cosmic structure almost as old as the universe itself the milky way galaxy is incredibly vast with an estimated visible diameter of one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand light years across and could easily contain over two hundred billion stars this all sounds remarkable and it is but data also shows the milky way and its neighbors are residing in the outback of the cosmos in fact the milky way galaxy sits on one of the largest known voids in the universe now let's take a closer look at where we are in this galaxy this is the orion arm it's a minor spiral arm of the milky way galaxy that's three and a half thousand light years across and ten thousand light years in length if we zoom in on a small section of this arm we find a yellow main sequence star in a place called the orion spur which is a connecting structure between two larger arms there's nothing special about this star its size is precisely the definition of one solar mass and it's actually quite small compared to other stars and for the record about 90 percent of stars in the universe are main sequence stars which fuse hydrogen atoms to form helium atoms in their cores but there is one thing that makes it special it's our star right now we're all floating on a tiny blue marble called earth around this star we call the sun along with seven other planets and countless smaller objects such as dwarf planets asteroids and comets but how did this stuff in our solar system get made let's talk about the sun for a minute it's known as a population 1 or metal rich star with the highest metallicity out of the three populations of stars and is the most commonly found star in the milky way star formation is a complicated process and somewhat difficult to explain but the nebula hypothesis is the most widely accepted model explaining the formation and the evolution of the solar system the sun formed some 4.6 billion years ago from a giant cloud of gas and dust rich in heavy elements this vast cloud of hydrogen silicates iron water and other substances called a solar nebula began to spin and collapse under its own gravity some astronomers say this could have been triggered by the shock wave of a nearby supernova from an older population 3 star which caused the solar nebula to spin and flatten into a disk the same way that galaxies form most of the nebula's material was pulled towards the center to form our sun which some astronomers say took around 100 million years the big mind-blowing thing about all this is that the sun accounts for a whopping 99.8 percent of our entire solar system's mass despite ancient astrological beliefs the solar system is anchored by the sun this star began its life as a protostar enshrouded in the solar nebula cloud accreting more material and creating a proto-planetary disk collisions of gas and dust within this flattened disk concentrated the material into a thin flat plane and the tiny fraction of the remaining point two percent of material was distributed at varying distances from the newborn sun astronomers call this a pluto planetary disk the place from where all planets are born around an evolving protostar [Music] no one knows for sure how objects in our solar system came to be and since the sun's planets formed a long time ago much of the evidence for exactly how this happened has been lost but we think we have an idea of how it might have happened from studying neighboring stars and their planetary systems as this very hot disk of leftover material from the creation of the sun cooled tiny particles began to collide and stick together forming kilometer-sized planetesimals planet formation isn't entirely understood but the accretion model shows that planetesimals grow larger initially by accreting pebble-sized objects until they reach their pebble isolation mass when this mass is reached accretion of gas onto the planetary core can start closer to the forming protostar larger pieces continue to collide with each other forming rocks and then bigger objects by a process called runaway accretion resulting in the rapid formation of moons and much larger planetary embryos once their gravitational influence grew the planetary embryos went through a stage of violent mergers as clumps of rocks and ice continue to collide and accumulate creating terrestrial planets near the star that are made of rock and various metals these are the inner rocky planets we know of today in our solar system mercury venus earth and mars as for the outer regions of our solar system gas and dust were being pulled together to create four other celestial bodies a couple of these new planets became ice giants due to their incredible distance from the sun we know these outer planets as jupiter saturn uranus and neptune there is a hypothesis of how the two big gas giants jupiter and saturn were formed the big challenge is understanding how a solid planet grows large enough to capture gas astronomers believe planets first form as solid objects made of materials like rock metal and ice if the planet becomes big enough it can capture an atmosphere from the surrounding cloud of gas in which the planets are forming for a planet like earth or mars this atmosphere is relatively thin and makes up a small fraction of the planet's total mass but larger planets like jupiter and saturn can gain thicker atmospheres and above a certain mass pull in more and more gas until something stops it these two gas giants are made mostly of hydrogen and helium gases and may have had a small rocky core in the beginning of their formation planetesimals that weren't big enough to accumulate enough material to form a planet become moons asteroids or comets other loose material around some gas giants became planetary rings thus the solar system was born but things were about to get more chaotic during its evolution our solar system once experienced a fiery meteor shower of apocalyptic proportions asteroids collided with the inner planets keeping their surfaces hot and molten astronomers call this the late heavy bombardment and think it could have happened around 4.48 billion years ago astronomers believe this bombardment was caused by the gas giants moving around and pulling lots of smaller objects towards them and in turn flinging those objects at the smaller inner planets while we're talking about these inner terrestrial worlds it's worth mentioning that earth stands out from the other planets because of its high water content and there's a big debate about where this water came from now when we look at the earth from space it looks like a giant globe of water with some land here and there but if you took all the water on the planet and put it into a ball this is what it would look like the larger globe is all the water on in and above the earth the two smaller ones are liquid fresh water and the smallest is freshwater lakes and rivers when you look at it this way it seems like a lot less water however it's a lot more water than other planets but how did the earth get its water in the first place researchers have found a rare type of meteorite called an estate chondrite that has a similar isotopic composition to terrestrial rocks no one knows where these rare meteorites formed but their composition leads some to believe they formed closer to the sun in the early solar system they can be seen as the remnants of the planetary material that was present in the inner solar system upon further study of these meteorites something unexpected was discovered these enstatite chondrite meteorites contained sufficient hydrogen to have delivered three times the amount of water in the earth's oceans another hypothesis is that the earth's water might have simply come from the nebular material from which the planet accreted despite this we still have no idea where the earth's water came from the late heavy bombardment period could have caused some cataclysmic things to happen to other planets uranus is arguably the most mysterious planet in our solar system simply because we don't know much about it we've only visited the planet once with the voyager 2 spacecraft but there is a reason that we mention this mysterious planet during the birth of our solar system the poles along which the sun earth and nearly all the planets in the solar system are pointed in the same direction however uranus is the oddball in the solar system because its axis of spin is tilted by 98 degrees yes uranus spins on its side so what could have happened to cause this some researchers running computer simulations believe a rock the size of the earth slammed into uranus and knocked it onto its side the massive collision also created at least nine of its 27 moons the planet neptune took shape when the rest of the solar system formed like the other planets gravity pulled in swirling gas and dust until it became the ice giant it is today like its neighbor uranus neptune may have formed closer to the sun and moved to the outer solar system about 4 billion years ago but our solar system extends much further than the eight planets that orbit the sun just past neptune's orbit lies the creeper belt a sparsely occupied ring of icy rocks that are almost all smaller than the popular dwarf planet pluto and there's even more out past the creeper belt is the mysterious earth cloud which is a giant spherical shell of material that surrounds our solar system that's between 1 000 to 100 000 astronomical units thick it's never been directly observed but it's predicted to exist from data based on the mathematical models and observations of comets that likely originated from there the earth cloud is thought to be made up of trillions of pieces of icy space debris with some pieces that are as big as mountains or bigger this cloud of debris orbits the sun as its boundary of gravitational influence about 1.6 light years away this means that some objects in the urt cloud can turn around and move back towards the sun and those objects could possibly collide with planets on their way while the earth cloud is a hypothetical structure the largest comet ever seen in history was recently spotted coming from this direction bernardinelli berstein is an icy rock with a nucleus blacker than coal that stretches 129 kilometers across that's larger than the u.s state of rhode island and 100 000 times more massive than a typical comet it's currently traveling towards us at 35 000 kilometers per hour and is supposed to reach us by the year 2031 but there's no need to worry as nasa says the closest it'll get to earth is 1.6 billion kilometers it's really mind-boggling to think about how the solar system formed and to know that everything began with our sun its formation triggered by the stellar winds of a supernova but there's something else you probably don't know nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many of those elements came through several supernovas when carl sagan said we are made of star stuff he wasn't being metaphorical actually it's 100 true maybe that's why humans have gazed up into the heavens for centuries longing to travel to the stars and distant worlds and in a sense travel back to where we came from since we began exploring space we've been looking farther out in the solar system to see what's there and in 1992 we discovered the kuiper belt an icy cold and dim region beyond neptune's orbit there have been a lot of interesting discoveries there recently and some strange and mysterious objects have been found floating around in the belt and one of these has scientists completely baffled what are these objects and is it possible one of them is an alien ship get ready to find out the answers to this and more the kuiper belt has millions of strange objects in it some are 100 kilometers wide and some are really huge measuring 1000 kilometers in diameter so what are they kuiper belt objects or trans-neptunian objects are the remnants of the very birth of our solar system that happened about 4.5 billion years ago it's a huge volume of space as you can imagine while we had just discovered a tiny fraction of this region we've already found about 2 000 kuiper belt objects however some of them raise more questions than they give answers in april 2016 the new horizons probe reached the dark and mysterious kuiper belt as the probe was moving past pluto and nearing the belt it discovered a weird object on a strange trajectory it was given the name aaron and it was measured at 133 kilometers in diameter while researchers were looking at it it appeared to grow brighter and then dim in a precise rhythm suggesting it was spinning most objects in the belt are made of ice and rock but this thing seemed to be made of something different astronomers were right but aaron was spinning so fast about once every five and a half hours that if it was made of ice and rock it should have torn itself apart from the centrifugal force alone but it didn't scientists started to wonder what is it and what's it made of it was time to get in for a closer look so nasa steered the new horizons probe in its direction but something weird happened as the probe approached pluto on its way communications were suddenly lost as if something was jamming its signal and as the probe moved away from aaron communications were again restored which turned out to be a computer glitch but nasa was prevented from finding out the truth about the intriguing spinning object some researchers suggested that the spinning is creating artificial gravity in the middle of our own and it could be some giant ship something you may have seen in science fiction films however the gravity would not be enough for human passengers but for some other form of alien life it could be could this object be an interstellar alien craft of some kind like oh muammur is thought to be most likely not but there is always a slim chance if you were an alien species and you wanted to get a look at the strange creatures known as humans the kuiper belt would be the perfect place to hide perhaps in the future we'll get another chance to get close and figure out exactly what our own is still there are kuiper belt objects we know a lot about in 2014 astronomers discovered a weird celestial body in the outer reaches of our solar system its estimated size was roughly 32 kilometers across and what's truly interesting is its shape resembles a snowman in fact scientists have long struggled to understand how such a shape could have formed the object was named arakoth and has been visited by the u.s space probe in 2019 it's become the most distant space object we ever examined at such a close distance aracoth is an example of the most primitive object in the solar system so you may think there's nothing interesting about it however for scientists flying past arakoth was as thrilling as exploring pluto up close so what's so special about it one theory suggests that our solar system formed from a dense cloud of space dust and gas all that material as gravity pulled it together transformed into the planetary system we see today there's just a tiny gap here we don't know what happened in between these stages and because the average kuiper belt temperature is about minus 370 degrees fahrenheit or minus 220 degrees celsius kbo's are typically well preserved so they can fill in those gaps and aracoth is one of the missing puzzle pieces in studying this weird shaped flat object scientists came closer to uncovering how space bodies in our solar system were formed aracoth is a contact binary object meaning it consists of two parts stuck together and since these lobes differ in color it could indicate they have once been separate objects that formed from dust in the primordial cloud over four billion years ago but how did they come together without seriously damaging each other it turns out collisions that took place billions of years ago weren't that fast and violent in the case of this kbo gravity made the two separate parts slowly rotate around each other and bind together in a slight collision each celestial body has an intriguing formation story and if you'd like to see a video about the birth of our sun and our solar system let us know in the comments still arakoth isn't the only mind-boggling object the kuiper belt has to offer the next object isn't famous for its size at 650 kilometers or its shape or color but what's strange is this object's density that's 18 less than that of water which means it can easily float the object has the name 2002 ux25 and its low density is a big mystery one way to explain it is the celestial body's high porosity or gaps in its structure however it's commonly seen in objects less than 350 kilometers in diameter larger objects are too massive for such a low porosity because the force of gravity compresses their material leaving no room for these gaps is this kuiper belt object a forensic oddity something that will change planetary formation theories or is it something more complicated whatever the reason we've got to learn more about average sized kbo's density to define it for sure another intriguing object is almost four times the size of ux 25 and it's got a lot of stories attached to it this one's a planetoid a minor planet that consists of rock and ice and it's about 1300 kilometers wide but scientists speculate it should have been twice its size sometime in the past it's possible that this kbo had a collision with pluto and lost its material as a result what astronomers cannot wrap their heads around is why this object's temperature has risen from about minus 360 degrees fahrenheit to minus 260 degrees fahrenheit millions of years ago did something or someone heat it up we don't know yet the kuiper belt object is called kwawa and throughout the last several years scientists have found water ice present on its surface what's more there could have been an ocean on this planetoid in the past and that's not all we know about kwawa it also has a bright surface which could indicate the kbo may have had geological activity such as cryo volcanoes not so long ago we all know what volcanoes are but cryo volcanoes are something different although they both act similarly the one with the weird name erupts ice chunks water methane and ammonia instead of magma and ash quite a breathtaking view as you can imagine and we could probably witness this phenomenon in the future but there's no planned mission to qua why yet but if there will be one we'll make sure to tell you about it there's also an intriguing space body outside the kuiper belt but it's still worth mentioning once astronomers had discovered and observed it the object raised tons of questions one of them was about its mysterious composition we're used to thinking that the majority of space bodies outside our solar system are made of ice as a result they're usually either white or gray however what we see with this object is quite different because it's nearly as red as mars another mystery is how oddly this space body moves its orbit isn't like anything we've seen before it's called sedna and it moves as close as 11 billion kilometers to the center of our solar system then sedna drifts away to about 135 billion kilometers it's such a great distance that it needs roughly 11 000 years to make a full circle sedna along with other celestial bodies is thought to be a part of a collective gravity when space objects orbit another object like a binary star they pull and push on each other and it affects their orbits one mind-blowing suggestion is that sedna and a few other space objects could have been the reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs as the orbit of these objects fluctuate they can shoot nearby comets into the solar system and even towards earth since cedna swings back and forth so far it seems there's some unforeseen force that pulls on sedna and the force is the hypothetical planet nine located far beyond the kuiper belt it's estimated to be about five to six times the size of our planet although it hasn't been found yet there's the theory it could be an alien imposter that came from a different star system other scientists suggest it's an ancient black hole whatever the case is planet nine is supposedly hiding somewhere in our solar system and it's hard to detect because of the bright row of stars in our milky way however a recent study suggests it may be closer and brighter than we think and if it's brighter it can be easier detected if found we could stumble upon a mega earth or a mini neptune so how do we find it well scientists are currently using different telescopes to scan the section of the sky where planet 9 could be their best shot however will be the vera rubin observatory equipped with a powerful 8.4 meter telescope when completed in 2023 the telescope will be repeatedly scanning about two-thirds of the sky looking for everything from asteroids to the mysterious planet nine if we discover it one day it'll become the first time a planet is found in the last 200 years there are also quite bigger trans-neptunian objects out there and some of them are so big they're called dwarf planets one of the biggest kuiper belt objects ever discovered is also the 25th largest body in the solar system and there are hundreds of thousands of space objects in it although this tno is nearly 46 astronomical units from us it's the brightest object in the kuiper belt after pluto in fact the object's big size was one of the reasons pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet this kuiper belt object is called make make and scientists will struggle to answer why it is bright while its moon mk2 is as black as charcoal what's also weird is they expected it to have an atmosphere but it doesn't have one all we know is it's quite cold about -400 degrees fahrenheit or -240 degrees celsius and these two factors make life impossible there so far there are no planned flyby missions to make make nearly every object we found in the kuiper belt has its mysteries and the next one has got a couple of them this dwarf planet is known for its strange shape two moons and an odd rotation plus this is the most distant space body that has rings around it and we don't know why the object's name is haumea and it's the third closest dwarf planet to our star the weird shape of this kbo resembles a rugby ball similar to how you throw a balloon filled with water and it kind of flattens this object's elongated shape was created as it was spinning through space as a result how mayer's day lasts only 3.9 earth hours which is also one of the shortest days in the entire solar system if you lived on haumea for one year one day equals four hours and comparing that to a 24-hour earth day you'd be 283 years old back on earth while most of this object is rock its outer layer is thought to be covered with ice the same ice you find when you open your freezer however there's also a weird red spot on its surface that may be rich in minerals but we're not sure about the origin of this spot just yet perhaps it could be something quite different from what scientists are thinking maybe even a sign of extraterrestrial life given how many new things we discover in space it's possible that we might find alien technology one day the galileo project launched in 2021 is going to try and find alien artifacts in space and here on earth and while the chances of finding something significant are small it could become the breakthrough we've been waiting for since the launch of the first space rocket even if the project fails to detect such signs it could still find eye-opening explanations for o muammua and ufos the project team claimed it would make all discoveries publicly available so stay tuned as we'll definitely let you know about them once they come as we learn new things about something we start to believe we know a lot about it but this isn't often the case with space our solar system is much much bigger than you'd expect and you'd be surprised how little we know about it but soon with the launch of a next generation telescope that might change does this mean we would finally detect an elusive planet nine will we find some other secrets our solar system has stored for us and would it all change the way we perceive our place in the cosmos now get ready to discover answers to this and more referred to as planet nine but sometimes referred to as planet x before pluto's reclassification this is an elusive world orbiting far beyond neptune it's been a mystery for scientists for decades since the beginning of the 20th century astronomers suspected the existence of a large body affecting uranus and neptune but once voyager 2 approached neptune in 1989 and sent us back data it became clear we had wrong calculations it turned out there was nothing weird about the two gas giants it looked as though the hunt for planet x came up empty but that wasn't the end just recently one curious scientist decided to look through the 38 year old data from the infrared astronomical satellite the very first telescope that managed to scan about 96 of the night sky and among about 250 000 point sources there were three specifically interesting ones but how do you look for something in our solar system if you take a telescope and look in a specific direction of the night sky you'll see a bunch of dots some of those are distant stars and some are solar system objects so how do you distinguish one from the other you look at an object's motion if it barely moves or doesn't move whatsoever the chances are it's located quite far but if an object travels a significant distance in space within a relatively short period of time it means it's close enough in our solar system only one out of three objects from the iras data that met astronomers requirements was captured moving through space this is when the scientific community became thrilled if the iras data is right a planet we've been looking for should be three to five times as massive as earth and orbit at a distance of approximately 225 astronomical units one au being the distance from earth to the sun which is 149 million 597 thousand hundred 870.7 kilometers but the other two scientists involved in the search didn't agree with that conclusion however they found yet another theory of planet nine's existence and once again the search got a new course on the outskirts of our solar system lies six space bodies called extreme trans-neptunian objects and they aren't just some random objects they all have one thing in common that make scientists curious all six of them have an orbit pointing in one direction and because the chances of such distant space bodies with such an alignment are roughly naught point naught naught seven percent we know there's something causing it a gravitational influence of a much larger body somewhere out there all the strange phenomena could be explained by a planet two to four times the radius of the earth and almost as massive as neptune it would also have a highly eccentric orbit getting close to our sun at about 200 au and then moving away at a mind-blowing 1200 au such an elongated orbit would have a 20 000 year orbital period the only thing scientists lacked to make their theory look promising were several objects with even stranger elongated orbits but as it turns out another astronomer has just discovered such objects exactly where this theory would predict them to be still knowing planet nine's orbit doesn't tell you where on its orbit it currently is nevertheless there are things that scientists know for sure and by means of pure logic and mathematics they could make predictions on where to look for it for example at its nearest point of the sun planet 9 has a brightness of 18th magnitude so if it recently was that close to us on its orbit it would have been easily spotted and because of that we think it's closer to its furthest point where it's as faint as 25th magnitude which makes it harder to notice how bright is that the smaller the number the brighter the object to compare pluto's average magnitude is approximately 15. thankfully 25th magnitude is still in the range of what the hubble space telescope is able to detect this is 10 billion times fainter than the human eyes can see so while we don't know for sure where it is we have decent proof to think it's there you may think it's impossible to find such a distant object given the data we have but we've already found a planet based on our predictions once neptune astronomers of the past believed something was tugging uranus but they couldn't find any reasonable explanation later one scientist using classical celestial mechanics made a prediction on the location of a hypothetical planet that was supposed to be in charge of what was happening to uranus using those calculations astronomers were able to locate neptune exactly where it was predicted to be in just one night but while neptune orbits our sun at about 30 astronomical units planet 9 is expected to be much further away because of the great distances and how dim planet nine is our chances aren't that high but that could change very soon a new generation of telescopes are on their way and one of them is currently being built in chile scheduled to begin operations in the fall of 2023 this is going to be an 8.4 meter telescope with a 3200 megapixel camera on board the camera the size of a car is going to be the largest camera constructed for astronomical purposes with such a tool scientists could not only verify if planet nine actually exists but also find roughly 20 terabytes worth of space objects and other phenomena in one night just in a year the observatory will be able to capture more of the cosmos than all the telescopes on earth ever did combined this can turn our perception of the universe and our place within it upside down if you'd like to see a full video about this telescope and what it could find make sure to let us know but what if we scan every point of the sky where planet nine could be and find nothing well there's an idea that planet nine could be mistaken for a primordial black hole that would cause similar gravitational effects although it's purely hypothetical as we haven't detected one yet at the very dawn of the universe when everything was much denser and hotter primordial black holes popped in and out of existence within just a second and depending on when during that second such a black hole was born its mass could have been as little as 5 to 10 grams or as enormous as 100 000 solar masses the thing is if our calculations about an elusive planet's mass are correct a primordial black hole a few times the mass of earth would only be the size of a grapefruit or even smaller than a human fist and if that's the case we've no chance of finding it with a telescope ever although we may just detect it with the more aggressive method the idea is to send hundreds or even thousands of small laser-propelled spacecraft and test the gravitational field of a possible primordial black hole even if just a few of these tiny spacecraft pass a black hole at a distance of tens of astronomical units and sends us back data it would be enough but how would we know if we were right we could figure out if a black hole is really out there by measuring intervals between those signals if it's there the signals will lengthen under the gravitational influence of this mysterious object yes planet nine has a lot of theories surrounding it and even that isn't the last one after all planet nine could have once been a rogue planet or such that was freely wandering through space without a stable orbit and sometime in the past it could have been captured by our star's gravity that may seem unintuitive to you but some studies show that in our galaxy there are more planets unattached to a star than those orbiting one what's interesting is that according to simulations in sixty percent of cases rogue planets just enter a solar system and leave it but in one out of ten cases such a planet could take another planet with it on its way out but there's also a 40 chance that a rogue planet won't be able to escape a solar system once it enters it there is one possibility of what planet nine could be besides we've already discovered some rogue planets in the past looking for such worlds is no easy task a rogue planet a star behind it and an observer should be aligned almost perfectly and the only way we know if it's there is if gravity bends the light emitted by a star behind it when a planet flies past it two such events with perplexing names became promising rogue planet candidates one of them is suggested to have a mass range between neptune and earth while the other one could be as massive as jupiter or even as a brown dwarf not so long ago the kepler space telescope possibly detected four new earth-sized rogue planets wandering through our milky way so far we don't know much about rogue planets but what's interesting is that some scientists think they can actually be habitable but how could a planet that doesn't get enough light sustain life well there are three possible scenarios subsurface oceans tidal heat and an active galactic core the odds for life on the surface of such space objects are close to zero that's true subsurface oceans on the other hand could not only host microbes but something bigger as well a rogue planet's interior or its highly dense hydrogen atmosphere would trap some heat and prevent these oceans from freezing even within our solar system lies a frozen object that has liquid water on it europa jupiter's moon a massive moon surrounding such a planet could also cause tidal heating under the right circumstances if a smaller celestial body orbits a much larger one at close distance the gravitational pull of a larger body would distort the shape of a smaller one and similar to the way a piece of wire heats when you bend it it would heat that object a rogue planet traveling through space near an active galactic nucleus would also be able to get enough light from the center of a galaxy and as long as a rogue planet stays within one thousand light-years from the galactic core it could even sustain photosynthesis our solar system is a strange place with its four giant worlds and four smaller planets to scientists this looks odd as if something was missing and what are the chances that astronomers working centuries apart repeatedly come to the exact same conclusion there is something there well far far out the most distant object ever found by a human being in our solar system it's just some 130 a you away at another 1000 au to that number and you arrive at the farthest point of planet 9's orbit so there's still a long way till we master our searching abilities but hopefully vera rubin observatory will be a huge step towards finding out more about the mysterious place we live in at the farthest reaches of the solar system lie the ice giants uranus and neptune their calm looking blue atmospheres huge ominous storms delicate sets of encircling rings and moons with icy terrain hold many unsolved mysteries nasa's voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited these two planets in the 1980s but the visits were very short but now scientists have learned some really amazing things about both these planets and something is probably happening on their surface that you won't believe [Music] there's four gas giants out there in our solar system but unlike jupiter and saturn uranus and neptune are rich in water most of that water is in the form of ice and now new studies found there may also be oceans under their icy layers but that's not all researchers now say these oceans could be rich in magnesium but these oceans might be made of something else entirely and we'll get to that soon we need to mention that even though uranus and neptune are considered gas planets they're also called ice giants because of their rocky icy cores which are much larger than the amount of gas they hold but some strange things have been discovered lately and researchers have been trying to figure out what is happening on the surface of these two ice giants not only that but some have wondered what it might be like if you try to land on any so-called surface of neptune and uranus you may have also heard that it could actually rain diamonds on these planets and now some researchers believe that both uranus and neptune could have oceans of liquid diamonds now that sounds wild but how is this possible keep that in mind because we're going to get to that in a couple of minutes but first let's take a look at each of these planets and we'll tell you the most incredible things that have been discovered up to now you have to admit that uranus is a bit of a sad and lonely world one that's tired of being the butt of many bad jokes including that one however its name is actually a reference to the greek god of the sky this freezing world was the first planet ever discovered using a telescope in 1781 by william herschel and is about 2.9 billion kilometers from the sun voyager 2 got as close as 80 000 kilometers from the planet and captured only a handful of images but those images had astronomers thinking it's possible that something really big crashed into uranus in the early days of the solar system not once but twice the result of these two big impacts left the planet rotating on its side this means it's orbiting the sun like a rolling ball which by the way takes 84 earth years to go around once uranus has 27 moons and they could have formed from these big collisions that put the planet on its side also its magnetic north and south are way different from its polar north and south because of this there are some really bizarre seasonal effects imagine a planet that has its south pole pointing at the sun while the north pole is shrouded in complete darkness for 21 years in 2011 telescope showed something strange happening on the planet a big fuzzy white spot appeared on its frigid blue cloud tops and astronomers claimed it was a giant methane storm in fact some of these storms have been spotted by the hubble telescope huge storms half or more the size of the entire usa the average temperature in the methane and ammonia clouds is minus 128 degrees celsius winds on the planet can reach up to 144 kilometers per hour and by the way saturn isn't the only planet in the solar system to have rings around it uranus has two sets of rings both orbiting above its equator but its icy twin neptune is even farther away from the sun some 4.5 billion kilometers away and it takes 165 years to orbit the sun voyager 2 was able to get as close as 4828 kilometers to neptune which appears to be made up mostly of ices and rock and could possibly have a rock ice core about 1.2 times the size of the earth and around 10 times the earth's mass its atmosphere is made up of 3 4 hydrogen and 1 4th helium with a small amount of methane that produces clouds the bluish colour of the planet is from light scattering and red wavelength absorption by the methane in its atmosphere like jupiter's giant iconic red eye neptune also has a huge dark vortex an anti-cyclonic storm called the great dark spot that's 11 000 kilometers across almost as big as the earth and it's racing across neptune at 1 100 kilometers per hour but that's not all in fact neptune has the most ferocious and fastest planetary winds in the entire solar system reaching 2 000 kilometers per hour definitely no place for a holiday the energy for those high speed winds is not coming from the sun but what might actually be happening closer to the core of the planet in fact neptune appears to have some kind of internal heat source and radiates twice as much energy as it gets from the sun and even though it's farther away from the sun than uranus it's a bit warmer thanks to neptune's atmosphere which is probably holding in heat from its hot core now both of these planets have unstable and strange magnetic fields that are strongly tilted relative to each planet's rotation axis and are significantly offset from the physical center of each planet it's been a long mystery for some time now and no unsure why these magnetic fields act so strange the magnetic field on neptune is 27 times more powerful than that of the earth while uranus only has a magnetic field one third as strong as the earth and we'll explain in a minute what scientists think is causing the magnetic fields to act strange even though it might seem really cold on both of these worlds and the magnetic fields are bizarre intense heat and pressure thousands of kilometers below the surface of each planet may tell a different story the atmospheres of both planets are primarily made up of hydrogen and helium with small amounts of methane below these atmospheric layers is a super hot super dense fluid of icy materials like water methane and ammonia that wrap around the planet's core because of this astronomers studying these two ice giants have come to the conclusion that it could be raining diamonds closer to the surface of each planet this is possible because deep inside both these ice giants pressure and heat builds until gaseous hydrogen turns into liquid metallic hydrogen methane in the atmosphere decomposes and as the bonds holding methane's four hydrogen atoms dissolve the carbon atoms left over bind to one another under extreme pressure to form diamonds at its core neptune reaches temperatures of up to 7273 kelvin which is comparable to the sun while the core of uranus heats up to 9000 degrees fahrenheit yes it could actually be raining diamonds closer to each planet's core but not only that it's also possible that there are oceans of liquid diamonds beneath the surface of the two ice giants research was done by taking detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond when diamond is melted it behaves like water during freezing and melting with solid forms floating atop liquid forms obviously diamond is a very hard material making it really hard to melt and measuring the melting point of a diamond is also very difficult because when it's heated to very high temperatures diamond changes to graphite but it's diamond that turns into a liquid not graphite so what scientists did to get around this problem is expose the diamond to extremely high pressures by blasting it with lasers diamond is liquefied it pressures 40 million times greater than found at earth sea level when the pressure is lowered to 11 million times greater than the earth's sea level chunks of diamonds start to appear but something happened that scientists didn't expect the chunks of diamond didn't sink but floated on top of the liquid diamond layer creating diamond icebergs these are the same ultra high temperatures and ultra high pressures found on both uranus and neptune both planets are estimated to be made up of 10 carbon so a large ocean of liquid diamond could deflect or tilt the magnetic field out of alignment with the rotation of the planet which could explain the strange magnetic field behavior is it possible that both planets rain diamonds and have vast oceans of liquid diamond only by sending a spacecraft there will be find out now researchers and scientists are trying to get nasa to send a spacecraft to these two worlds in order to study them but the planets will be closest to the earth soon and astronomers say that a spacecraft would need to be launched by 2030 in order to take advantage of jupiter's gravity and slingshot the spacecraft towards these ice giants to arrive in the mid-2040s in april 2021 astronomers spotted x-rays coming from uranus using the chandra x-ray observatory this revealed some unknown dimension of the colorful ice planet this means that x-ray emissions have been detected on every planet in our solar system now except for neptune in case you're wondering there are three ways a planet can produce x-rays fluorescence scattering of solar x-rays and emissions from auroras uranus is scattering the sun's x-rays and x-rays are also being created by energetic electrons or protons which collide with the rings causing them to glow in x-rays it's pretty much the same thing that causes earth's beautiful and amazing auroras [Music] we've landed probes and astronauts on the moon many times and it seems like there wasn't much left to discover but it seems the moon has a few surprises for us and while we've studied our solar system and considered interstellar journeys it looks like we've overlooked a lot of valuable data concerning our next door neighbor in space it turns out we don't know as much about the moon as we thought who would have thought our moon is like a disco ball that's right scientists are trying to figure out the source of some strange lights spotted by the earth's telescopes are aliens building a base there and sending us signals or is there something even more bizarre happening up there you're about to find out even though the moon is about 4.4 billion years old and shows no signs of life it's not completely dead in fact the moon is still active in some sense throughout the last two centuries people have been noticing a kind of peculiar flickering on its surface this occurrence was named the transient lunar phenomenon or tlps for short this weird flashing on the moon was first scientifically confirmed in 1958 according to observers these optical flashes come in different colors like red blue violet and different shades tlps usually last around a second or two until they fade away there's also data showing long-term light bursts some of them were discovered to last from several minutes to a few hours but the duration of these light events isn't the only thing that intrigues many observers this size is another interesting aspect some tlps can range from a few miles to a couple of hundred miles in diameter this fact significantly deepens the mystery around the source of these optical flashes and they're not a rare occurrence either in fact the data collected by uk based researcher revealed around 3 000 tlp reports but many of these reports might have been sent in by inexperienced astronomers [Music] as the years passed by modern astronomers equipped with advanced telescopes kept noticing the blinking on the moon later the european space agency decided to study this phenomenon the agency's neliota telescope showed something surprising there's a lot more tlp events going on there another intriguing fact is that these sparkles have been spotted in different places across the moon's surface but often occur in places like the aristarchus crater so what do scientists think is causing these mysterious flashes of light is it aliens well there's no single explanation and because there could be multiple reasons for why they happen understanding the true origin behind tlps becomes challenging the simplest explanation for this phenomenon is meteorite strikes that generate bright flashes as they collide with the moon lunar outgassing is yet another reason now outgassing simply means gas is leaking from the interior of the moon and this process can be caused by different events much like how the moon's gravity causes tides on the earth our planet does something similar in return the earth weighs 81 times more than the moon and that means it has a greater gravitational pull because of this tidal forces can raise the lunar surface as much as 49 inches and cause rocks on the moon to fracture and as the surface of the moon moves gases from inside escape and form clouds that reflect sunlight but since satellites airplanes and atmospheric phenomena such as light pillars and halos created when light is reflected or refracted by ice crystals in the atmosphere can also be seen by earth-based telescopes these can be confused with the moon blinking and it only adds to the mystery that's why scientists plan on studying these luminous events more closely recently astronomers came up with an idea to use a new telescope system that will consist of two telescope tubes on a single mount and both of these tubes will be equipped with cameras operated by two different computers so as these telescopes watch the moon and record any tlps the computers powered by artificial intelligence will analyze the information received given massive amounts of data the software will learn to differentiate tlps from any other objects getting in the way of the telescope's lenses it seems the earth and the moon have some things in common and some of these things are more similar than you could ever imagine while we're all familiar with earthquakes most of us have never heard about moonquakes and they're a real thing see as the moon's interior continues to cool down after its formation its surface shrinks as a result the moon gets wrinkles but since its surface is so fragile it breaks creating fault scarps an offset or step caused by the fault slipping this is somewhat similar to the way a grape turns into a raisin in fact over the course of a few hundred million years our moon became roughly 150 feet skinnier this whole process often leads to moonquakes according to scientists moonquakes caused by these faults can be quite strong up to 5.5 on the richter scale an earthquake of such magnitude is capable of damaging old buildings and other weak structures but while earthquakes usually last about a minute or less moonquakes can last 20 times longer [Music] there are quite a few phenomena on the moon that can threaten anyone who visits it and because nasa still wants to send astronauts there and even colonize the moon we have to learn more about its environment before doing that one of the challenges would be creating a habitat with super flexible materials able to withstand the recurring shaking despite many dangerous phenomena the moon is also known to produce some harmless occurrences and this one's actually quite interesting to observe we all know what rainbows are but what if we told you the moon can create rainbows just like the sun moonbows are rarely occurring nighttime phenomena that can be seen on earth the mechanism is identical to that of a rainbow formation but instead of sunlight it's the moonlight that bends and reflects off of the water and as the light bends for the second time the white light splits into shorter blue and violet and longer red wavelengths simply put it's the angle of the light that makes rainbows colorful but since moonlight is less intense about 400 thousand times darker than sunlight moonbow's colours are much dimmer they're often too dim to be detected by human eyes and if you should spot a moonbow you'd see it in a more whitish palette of colors that being said lunar rainbows are quite difficult to spot and there are a few reasons for this they can only be generated if the moon is quite low in the sky almost near the horizon plus the moon has to be full and the sky needs to be clear and pretty dark also you've got to be facing a waterfall or mist while standing with your back to the moon still if you ever decide to try and observe this phenomenon california's yosemite national park cumberland falls and victoria falls would be some of the best places to capture this now moonbows are quite spectacular if you get lucky and see one but there's another similar eye-grabbing phenomenon called luna halos and you don't have to go anywhere to witness them also known as a moon ring a circle around the moon is formed in cirrus clouds what's interesting about these clouds is their high concentration of hexagon-shaped ice crystals that moonlight goes through and refracts off but unlike these easily observable events the moon's got other secrets that are much harder to detect it wasn't long ago that scientists discovered a massive object buried under the moon's surface the moon's south pole aitken is the largest known impact basin in the entire solar system and when researchers studied the basin's crust they noticed an underground mass that shouldn't have been there it was a huge blob with a metallic core found at a depth of about 180 miles once scientists did their math they concluded that this thing's mass was roughly 4.8 quint trillion pounds which is the same as 6 billion empire state buildings and it made the craters floor sink about half a mile so where did that blob come from well the most common answer is the moon had a big collision with an asteroid and since the crater's diameter is a little more than 1 500 miles you can imagine how big that asteroid was other scientists believe the blob was formed during the cooling phase when there was still liquid magma on the moon's surface the basin has long been grabbing the attention of the scientific community and the curiosity is growing there are already several missions planned to the crater and the nearby south pole as the latter is known to be rich in valuable resources one of them is access to sunlight that allows for solar power usage another one is water frozen water to be precise all this represents precious room for experiments once we get there it looks like space is an abandoned empty place without the slightest sign of another civilization like us but does this mean the universe is absolutely silent and nobody except us is trying to explore it scientists recent discoveries may prove otherwise the farthest space probe voyager 1 has been traveling for almost 44 years now and still sends back data to earth and one day scientists heard a shockingly strange cosmic hum even though the probe has already sent similar recordings in the past the newly discovered signal was significantly different for the first time in human history we got the chance to explore what's hiding outside our solar system the signal was found more than 14 billion miles from earth it was a sound that remained steady at three kilohertz for almost three years in a row this has become the most stable and long-lasting hum ever detected by voyager 1 and scientists were only able to discover it once the spacecraft got far enough but where did this mystical sound come from most scientists believe the hum is a result of the plasma waves traveling somewhere in the depths of the universe now plasma is a sort of major building material that nearly all cosmic objects consist of and emit what's truly mind-blowing is that this sound stayed nearly the same even after the probe flew for another billion miles such a level of consistency prompted other scientists to think there may be some sort of energy causing this hum that we don't know about yet but how is that possible if there's no sound in space well it's true that sound fades away too fast in the vacuum of space since there aren't enough particles there for it to travel through even such sounds as black hole collisions or massive explosions of supernovas don't stand a chance here's a quick experiment put a tiny bell into a plastic bottle and screw the cap on now shake the bottle and listen to the bell now take off the lid put two burning matches inside and quickly put the lid back on so they burn out once the air in the bottle cools shake it again notice how the sound is quieter or is not there at all nevertheless there are different electromagnetic waves that travel through a vacuum without problems and radio waves are one of them although our human ears cannot spot such signals scientists found a way to convert them into sounds and now we can hear the message voyager 1 sent us [Music] so how did voyager 1 manage to gather such faint signals and send this data to earth well the spacecraft was designed with two hyper-sensitive antennas designed to detect plasma variations in space and record them but even using radio signals for communication that travel at the speed of light more than 20 hours have to pass to cover such a distance the sad truth is that soon we won't receive any signal from voyager 1. according to scientists it's currently running out of power so the probe's crucial instrument may function for three or four more years voyager has already done more than we've ever expected and it could still surprise us with more life-changing discoveries throughout the following years even though the latest probes finding is kind of a big deal nasa has previously discovered some other weird sounds that puzzled scientists in 2007 researchers unexpectedly came across something bizarre stored in a few years old data what they revealed were so-called frbs fast radio bursts these are so quick that each burst only lasts about a millisecond from this point researchers have started searching for other possible frbs and they found tons of them this is how these radio bursts sound so far it seems the more we find out about the universe the more questions there arise could it be an attempt of an intelligent alien civilization reaching out to us or maybe this wasn't intended for our eyes and ears who knows the majority of astrophysicists think these frbs either come from black holes or massive neutron stars probably the smallest yet some of the heaviest and densest stars out there other professors had a more thrilling idea of what was actually happening their theory is that these were powerful misaimed alien radio signals that were intended to charge their light-driven cosmic ships at huge distances what both sides do agree on is that these frbs must come from an unimaginably distant source somewhere billions and billions of light years away from our galaxy and while our technologies are limited to look that far we seem to have harnessed our own solar system quite well compared to interstellar space and nasa occasionally notices spooky sounds way closer within our planetary system let's take a look at jupiter's moon ganymede here's the disturbing sound it makes the reality is that these sounds are as a result of chorus waves coherent electromagnetic waves now these waves frequently cause auras or polar light and the earth is not the only place you can see those this breathtaking phenomenon happens on saturn jupiter and ganymede as well so what you've just listened to could be basically a converted sound of polar lights on ganymede what about mars though we've been studying it for quite a bit already and nasa's perseverance rover has just come across something fascinating the first actual sound of the rover driving over mars has been recorded but what's interesting about it well along with the noise of the metal wheels rolling on a rocky planet surface perseverance has captured an unidentified high-pitched scratching sound here's the actual recording sent by perseverance nobody knows what the cause of this scratching noise is and while nasa's scientists try to get a clue the mystery remains unsolved and leaves room for imagination scientific and technological progress do not stand still in 2030 a prospective interstellar probe mission may take place scientists say this could be just as revolutionary as the very first attempt to land on the moon just imagine the largest rocket flying the highest possible speed to get 10 times farther than voyager 1 got at the bare minimum an expected lifespan for such a spacecraft is 50 plus years but given voyager's success and today's advanced technologies everybody hopes to see this number rise this would be humanity's first significant step into the realm of stars the mission's primary objective is to capture our entire solar system from a huge distance and continue with the exploration of interstellar space once done we will finally get closer to defining our place in the universe and unraveling the mystery of deep space [Music] our solar system isn't silent it's full of an unearthly cacophony of noises such as planets plasma waves electromagnetic disturbances and charged particle fluxes if you've ever wondered what the sun or other objects in our system might sound like then get ready to go on a ride and listen to the eerie real-life sounds of the solar system what you just heard is the heartbeat of the sun captured by nasa's solar heliospheric observatory 20 years worth of data reveal a low pulsing hum and this sample has many frequencies of low vibrations mixed together it's an eerie sound but it might be sound recorded by the parker solar probe orbiting the sun that are the spookiest that was the sound of plasma within the solar wind from the sun [Applause] right now there's a spacecraft out there named beppy colombo which is on a mission to explore the scorched rocky planet closest to the sun and as it swooped past the planet it picked up magnetic and accelerometer data and converted that into sounds you just heard the faint sound you just heard is coming from the solar wind interacting with venus and was also recorded by the spacecraft befi columbo as it whizzed by on its way to mercury you can hear the sudden bow shock crossing towards the end of the sample very clearly but it's not the only sounds we have from venus on march the 5th 1982 the soviet union landed a probe on the surface of venus and it was equipped with microphones and this is what it sounds like on the surface of the planet we all know what it sounds like on the surface of earth but what does our planet sound like from space that was the sound of the earth's magnetic field as recorded by the italian spring accelerometer on board the bepi colombo spacecraft in 2021 the recorded accelerations measured by the spacecraft were translated into a frequency that's audible to the human ear the european space agency's cluster mission spacecraft recorded what the earth's magnetic field sounds like when a solar storm hits it [Applause] but that's not all this is what lightning sounds like on earth from space as detected by spacecraft above earth's ionosphere they're called whistlers [Applause] [Music] what you just heard is an actual gust of wind on the surface of mars in february 2021 nasa's perseverance rover recorded this very first sound from the surface of the planet and nasa's insight spacecraft recorded vibrations translated to sound that could be a mars quake perseverance just recorded the ingenuity mars helicopter in flight the rover's microphones picked up the low rumble of wind blowing across mars's jezero crater just before ingenuity lifted off and you can hear the helicopter's blades spinning producing a higher hum [Music] the incredibly eerie sound you just heard was the juno spacecraft entering jupiter's magnetosphere and crossing the gas planet's bow shock and beware the weird radio emissions the galileo spacecraft picked up from jupiter's largest moon ganymede voyager 2 also recorded the strong electromagnetic pulse from lightning on jupiter and now get ready to listen to the eerie sounds of jupiter's auroras [Music] these are the haunting sounds as recorded by the cassini spacecraft showing a surprisingly powerful interaction of plasma waves moving from saturn to its moon enceladus but that's not all the spacecraft also picked up intense radio emissions closely related to the auroras near the poles of saturn and this is another sample of ghostly radio emissions from the planet [Music] this is the sound of the electromagnetic waves coming from the gas giant uranus as recorded by the voyager 2 spacecraft's plasma wave antenna this is the real-life raw untouched sound of plasma waves as recorded by voyager 2 during the flyby of neptune voyager 2 has since left our solar system but before it left it recorded interstellar plasma sounds we now have spacecraft out in space that are listening to everything ancient people only knew as much about our sun as they could see with the naked eye today we have telescopes and other technology that help us make better observations but what if we could investigate our sun up close recently scientists have designed and launched a probe on its first in human history journey to the sun so how close did the spacecraft get what did it find and why didn't it melt get ready to discover this and some other mysteries of our neighboring star without the sun no life on earth would be possible but this gigantic ball of hot plasma can also threaten us its bursts of radiation also known as solar flares and its explosive ejections of plasma called coronal mass ejections accompanied by intense magnetic fields can be frightening even though the sun's activity causes spectacular auroras on earth spacecraft satellites high-flying airplanes and even astronauts can be in danger because of solar storms our telecommunications navigation systems and power grids can fail to properly operate we haven't been able to understand the sun and how it works or when it's going to throw a massive ball of fiery plasma our way this is why scientists have long dreamed of studying our star from a close distance we know that the solar wind is a constant stream of charged particles that gains enough speed to escape the sun's outermost layer the corona but we don't know how energy and heat move through the corona and what accelerates solar energetic particles astronomers have been seeking the answers to these questions for 50 years but to no avail finding answers meant sending a spacecraft through the corona that reaches about 1.1 million degrees celsius and it seemed impossible to accomplish until recently this is what the parker solar probe was made for and it's truly a marvel of human technology in 2018 nasa has successfully launched the parker solar probe to revolutionize our understanding of the sun and space weather the parker solar probe was designed to become the first spacecraft to enter the sun's atmosphere it's the size of a small car and it weighs 685 kilograms the spacecraft has several important instruments on board the solar wind electrons alphas and protons investigation or sweep will sample particles in the solar wind the instrument has four sensors that calculate the abundance of particles the wide field imager for solar probe plus or whisper is a telescope that can take 3d images of our stars corona and any structures that pass by the probe another tool that parker is equipped with is called integrated science investigation of the sun it's made of two separate instruments each having a different energy range the instrument can weigh highly energetic heavy ions electrons and protons moving through the sun's atmosphere lastly made of magnetometers and electric field antennas the parker solar probe will use electromagnetic fields investigation tool to analyze magnetic fields radio emissions and density of the sun's corona but how can the parker solar probe get so close to our star without melting to study the sun under such extreme conditions the probe and its instruments are equipped with a super reflective coating and a shield that measures 2.3 meters in diameter facing the sun the shield called the thermal protection system is made of 11.5 centimeters of thick carbon composite this makes the parker solar probe capable of withstanding temperatures outside the spacecraft that reach roughly 1370 degrees celsius and even though that might not seem like enough protection the density of the sun's corona isn't high and not many particles actually hit the probe the spacecraft and its instruments are also strategically placed in the center of the shadow that's coming from the shield the parker solar probe also has sensors to let it know that the heat shield has been adjusted when needed another level of protection is located on the inside of the probe parker has a dual array of solar panels and a smart cooling system the cooling system circulates water behind the solar cells where it gets heated then this same water is pushed down into the radiators where it's cooled all this makes the parker probe resistant to heat and radiation like no other space probe before it and even with that level of protection and low density of the corona parker can only stay in this layer of the sun for a few hours but how in the world is it possible to even send a probe towards the sun it's 150 million kilometers away and would take forever to get there reaching the sun isn't that simple when a spacecraft is launched into space whatever velocity rockets give it will be superimposed on top of earth's orbital velocity meaning that we can either cause the spacecraft to have more or less orbital energy than the earth does we can either boost it to a higher less tightly bound orbit with respect to the sun or de-boost it to a lower more tightly bound orbit most of our space probe missions use planetary gravity to accelerate spacecraft and give them more orbital energy but with parker scientists needed to do the opposite make it lose orbital energy the parker solar probe has used multiple slingshot orbits using earth mercury and mostly venus to enable it to get this close to the sun and each time it goes around the sun the pro picks up an insane amount of speed astronomers call it gravity assist and it helps parker narrow its orbit around the sun and bring its perihelion about 6.4 kilometers closer so did it actually touch the sun unlike earth and some other planets the sun doesn't have a solid surface but it still has a boundary the point where the sun's gravity and its magnetic forces keep in the solar material is called the alvain critical surface according to astronomers calculations it should be anywhere between 10 to 20 solar radii from the surface of the sun which is roughly 7 to 13.8 million kilometers and scientists believe that it marks our star's boundary with every gravitational maneuver the spacecraft narrowed its distance to the sun and as it did so astronomers searched for signs that the parker solar probe had reached the critical surface so what happened when nasa's spacecraft arrived at its destination as the probe passed through a pseudo-streamer or a loop-like structure in the corona of the star the whirlwind of particles started moving much slower limiting the impact on the probe this meant that the magnetic fields were dominant in that region so that no particles could escape it it was the proof that the parker was inside the alvin critical surface the spacecraft then recorded a video of coronal streamers moving past it it was the first time scientists were able to see these mysterious objects from up close the data collected from the probe shows that switchbacks or zigzag structures in the solar wind are quite abundant close to our star before astronomers thought these zigzag structures were rather an abnormality occurring near the sun's poles only but the spacecraft helped scientists conclude that these structures originate in the solar surface and are quite common parker has also discovered that the critical surface was 18.8 solar radii from the solar surface and it took eight flybys and over three years to finally get there but this wasn't the only discovery made by parker that fascinated scientists multiple flybys near venus have opened more opportunities to study this hot world until recently astronomers didn't know exactly what the planet's surface looked like usually it's covered with thick clouds so a big part of the visible light coming from the surface of venus is shrouded from sight parker didn't only manage to record the atmosphere of our sun but it also captured venus's surface from space during its flybys parker used its wide field camera to take images of the entire night side in wavelengths of the visible spectrum for the first time scientists were seeing venus's surface invisible wavelengths from space even on the night side the surface of the planet is roughly 475 degrees celsius it's so hot that you could see its rocky surface glowing so far the spacecraft has approached the sun at a distance of 8.5 million kilometers from its surface the previous record was set by the helios 2 spacecraft in 1976 and the distance was only about 43.5 million kilometers aside from that parker is also breaking space speed records during one of its approaches it was moving at about 700 000 kilometers per hour at that speed it would take parker about one second to get from philadelphia to washington dc or less than a minute from new york to tokyo this makes it the fastest human object ever made scientists haven't found answers to all their questions yet but as the spacecraft enters the sun's atmosphere again and again we'll find more clues the sun has an 11-year activity cycle during which its stormy behavior intensifies and then settles back down to a minimum and because it currently ramps up its corona will expand giving the parker probe even more opportunities to enter it again and stay in there for a bit longer eventually the spacecraft will get as close as 6.1 million kilometers from the sun's surface this is just within the orbit of mercury which is roughly seven times closer than any spacecraft has ever approached the sun before the parker solar probe hasn't finished its mission yet nasa wants to send the spacecraft deeper into the solar atmosphere to collect more data about how our neighboring star works it'll help better understand the phenomena happening inside and around the sun the sun is the only star we can study from such a close distance and the only one known to us that can support life so if we understand it well enough we can succeed at searching for life outside our solar system eventually the probe and its instruments will start failing and the spacecraft will melt into a charred piece of metal that'll keep orbiting the big glowing ball of hot plasma its journey will come to an end but until then it could surprise us with more fascinating discoveries [Music] the earth was formed from a solar nebula about 4.5 billion years ago weighs 5972 yotograms and its radius is 6371 kilometers the numbers are so impressive that it seems that scientists have studied absolutely everything about our planet but this is far from the case we know a lot about what is on the surface of the earth but what is under the crust only raises questions and to find answers to them scientists go to any methods what ancient planet is hidden inside ours what sounds of scientists heard under the earth's crust and why did the deepest journey into the earth stop so first things first our earth consists of three main layers the very first is the crust this is the outermost layer of the planet its depth ranges from 5 to 75 kilometers the thickest layers of the crust are on the continents and the thinnest at the bottom of the oceans the earth's crust is made up of plates that constantly move at the rate at which our fingernails grow this movement is due to the mantle the next layer of the earth the depth of the mantle is about 2890 kilometers this layer consists of silicate rocks heated to temperatures of 900 degrees celsius near the crust and up to 4000 at a depth when this incandescent substance bursts upward volcanic eruptions occur the last layer of the planet is the most mysterious this is the core the heart of our earth the radius of the core is about 2180 kilometers the inner core is solid and presumably composed of iron the outer is liquid and consists of an alloy of nickel and iron also the inner core rotates at a different speed than our planet to study the secrets of the inner layers of our planet scientists regularly take various measurements during one such seismic tomography of our planet scientists discovered something strange namely the mysterious lumps floating inside the earth's mantle some of these lumps combine to form large-scale regions the two of the largest are located under africa and under the pacific ocean but something else is interesting they don't just float harmlessly in the mantle of the planet but create a unique anomaly in particular we're talking about the south african anomaly which weakens the magnetic field of our planet serious changes in the magnetic field can lead to catastrophic consequences up to a change in the poles but the discovered anomaly fortunately is not so strong yet however what is the nature of its occurrence and what are these mysterious clots that give rise to it the mysterious substances are called llsvps stands for large low shear velocity provinces they've existed for a huge amount of time long before life appeared on earth and many scientists suggest that these are the remains of another ancient planet which the earth once collided with according to this hypothesis the planet thea which was similar in size to mars moved in a spiral trajectory through the solar system it's impossible to calculate how fast the ancient proto-planet moved however our earth became its final stop if fear hit the earth at a right angle or too sharp an angle it would be a disaster which most likely would entail the destruction of our planet however thea hit the target perfectly at a 45 degree angle thanks to this our planet withstood and just a piece broke off from it thea plunged deeply into our planet and as a result its core merged with the core of the earth after this collision our planet received a sharp increase in rotation speed one revolution in five hours and a noticeable tilt of the rotation axis thanks to this we got a change of seasons and a 24-hour day a powerful split of the earth's surface occurred provoking a chemical exchange this allowed the emergence and development of life on our planet in new conditions that is it is quite possible that it was thanks to the collision with thea that humanity eventually emerged in return of this gift thea chipped off a piece of earth and took its place but where did this mass thrown out of the planet go if you look out the window in the middle of the night you'll see the answer many scientists are confident that the moon was part of our planet in the past and separated after the collision of earth with thea the theory is supported by another amazing discovery that humanity made several decades ago for this let's go back in time to the late 1960s the soviet union was not the only country that was first to send a person into space but also the first to travel into the interior of the planet for this a large-scale project was created to drill the deepest well on earth it was named the kola super deep borehole sg3 the initiator of the project was david guberman who devoted most of his life to the project the drilling work progressed with great enthusiasm it was possible to drill up to four meters per day depending on the density of the rocks eight hours was spent on the lowering of the drilling tool another eight on the drilling process itself and the remaining eight for extraction of the rocks drilling proceeded relatively calmly down to seven thousand meters scientists did not encounter any difficulties and the drill went through homogenous solid granites however after a depth of seven thousand meters the drill head entered the less durable bedrock regular accidents began to occur however scientists continued to work and by 1983 the mark of 12 066 meters was reached the project was put on a short pause immediately after the resumption of work a terrible accident happened the drill string broke off scientists were thrown back five years and continued to work from a depth of seven thousand kilometers this mark turned out to be fatal for the project whenever scientists approached a depth of 12 kilometers strange accidents occurred and they had to start again from a depth of 7000 according to scientists it was almost impossible to work at a depth of 12 kilometers the temperature rose above 200 degrees and the resources of the equipment at that time were not enough the deepest mark that scientists have been able to descend was 12 262 meters in 1994 after another accident the well was closed the scientists who directed the experiment consider it to be incomplete after all the main goal was to reach the mark of 15 kilometers it was assumed that after this depth the drilling rig would be able to get to the earth's mantle if this project was completed these discoveries could literally flip over all ideas about the structure of our planet but they couldn't get through the last three kilometers the soviet union collapsed the project was no longer funded and now the well is sealed with a strong iron hatch according to david guberman himself so that curious stalkers do not throw stones into the well however it cannot be said that the experiment really failed during their work scientists managed to obtain a huge number of samples of the earth from different depths to confirm several theories about the hydrodynamic zonal model of the earth's crust and also to make two amazing discoveries that are especially interesting to us the first was overgrown with legends even before it actually happened the kohler experiment was widely reported in the press and one day a finnish newspaper published the news on april the first that the purpose of the well was to find the entrance to hell this humorous news was immediately picked up by american newspapers which began to talk about it in all seriousness as a result a legend has spread over the planet that when the well was drilled to a depth of 14.5 kilometers they suddenly came out into some huge empty space the temperature in this space reached 1100 degrees having lowered the microphone to this depth the scientists recorded heart-rending human screams american newspapers called it the screams of sinners tortured in the underworld and years later a supposedly real recording captured by microphones from that depth spread across the network in fact the story is the purest invention of a finnish journalist which the american media trustingly fell for but we would not talk about this case if not for another mysterious situation that's associated with sounds here is a direct quote from academician guberman himself who supervised the experiment when i'm asked about this mysterious story i don't know what to answer on the one hand the stories about the demon are rubbish on the other hand as an honest scientist i cannot say that i know exactly what happened here indeed a very strange noise was recorded then there was an explosion a few days later nothing of the kind was found at the same depth but another discovery has amazed the scientific part of society as already mentioned soil materials were regularly lifted from the depth of the well of particular interest were the samples raised from the depth of about three kilometers after a thorough study of these materials it turned out that they almost completely coincide with the materials of the soil brought by the american cosmonauts from the moon thus the theory that the moon is part of the earth which broke away after a collision with thea became even more likely to be true and these are far from all the discoveries that were made thanks to the cola well an analysis of the methods of its ultra deep drilling helped several years ago to discover the real ocean of the archaean period by russian french and german scientists at a depth of 410 to 660 kilometers below the earth a huge body of water is located under the earth's crust and was formed under conditions of high pressure and temperatures of 1530 degrees celsius the water in it is enclosed in the crystalline structure of minerals and now we cannot even guess whether these minerals contain any living organisms inside them in order to find the answer to this question you'll have to take another trip to the center of the earth but unfortunately even if such a project is planned there's no data on it yet therefore for now we can only find more and more questions to which there are no answers but make sure to stay tuned here and we'll let you know when we find more answers to this and other incredible mysteries of our planet and the universe around us in 1977 voyager 1 and voyager 2 launched from cape canaveral less than a month apart by the way voyager 2 launched earlier but since it had a different flight path it flew to the edge of our solar system second six years after its colleague both devices found a very strange anomaly as you move away from the sun the density of space increases interstellar space is usually considered a vacuum but this is not entirely true the density of matter is extremely low but it still exists in the solar system the solar wind has an average density of protons and electrons of 3 to 10 particles per cubic centimeter but it's lower the farther from the sun the smallest density of space is at the edge of the solar system this boundary is called the heliopause on it the speed of the solar wind the flow of charged particles emitted by the sun or in other words solar plasma drops to zero the area between the sun and the heliopause is called the heliosphere this is a kind of bubble in which all the planets of the solar system are immersed at this boundary the density of protons and electrons is 0.002 particles per cubic centimeter according to calculations the density of particles behind the heliopause that is in interstellar space should be 0.037 particles per cubic centimeter the voyager 2 instrument showed that the density outside the solar system at a distance of 119.7 astronomical units or 17.9 billion kilometers from the sun was 0.039 particles per cubic centimeter this almost coincided with the calculations but then the strangeness began at a distance of 124.2 astronomical units or 18.5 billion kilometers the density was 0.12 particles per cubic centimeter why is the density increasing we'll definitely talk about this a little later but for now let's talk about another bubble much larger than the heliosphere so that you'll appreciate all the thoughtfulness of the cosmos that packed us into two bubbles at once and understand the relationship between them when you look at the pictures of deep space you get the impression that it's filled with clouds of interstellar dust and luminous gas but back in the 70s and 80s of the last century astronomers began to pay attention to the fact that the galactic space around the sun differs from this picture the solar system seemed to hang in an almost absolute void this year scientists at the harvard smithsonian center for astrophysics cfa proved that yes we really are in a kind of void they conducted the most complex computer simulations creating a three-dimensional reconstruction of space and time the study showed that the sun and earth are located almost in the center of a giant bubble with a diameter of 1 000 light years which they called the local bubble according to calculations it began to form about 14 million years ago for this it's necessary that about 15 supernovae explode over several million years this series of explosions pushed the interstellar gas outward with the pressure of light creating a bubble-like structure with a dense surface at the boundary and now the bubble continues to grow in size when the bubble first formed it was expanding at about 60 miles per second according to data collected by the european space agency's gaia space observatory at present the bubble is still expanding at four miles per second on its surface seven star formation regions were detected dense molecular clouds where stars are formed the process of star formation occurs everywhere on the surface of the local bubble and there are many such bubbles in the galaxy therefore it's possible that there are other stars even with planets which like us are also in their local bubbles interestingly the sun was not at the center of our universe at first when these catastrophic explosions occurred the sun was far away from the scene about one thousand light years away but as joao alves an astrophysicist at the university of vienna explained about 5 million years ago as it orbited the center of the galaxy the sun got almost right at the center of the bubble this is consistent with estimates of radioactive iron isotope deposits from a supernova in the earth's crust from other studies the researchers suggest that there are probably more star formation bubbles in the milky way research author and astronomer of cfa alisa goodman who founded glue explains in her statement that statistically the sun would not be near the middle of a huge bubble if they weren't spread all over the place the local bubble is exactly the bubble we're in right now she said we think the sun has probably gone through a lot of super bubbles in its history the scientists compared the cosmos with swiss cheese the holes in the cosmos are punched out by supernova explosions and new stars are being formed on the edge of the holes created by dying stars the research team plans to map more cosmic bubbles to get a full 3d representation of their shape location and size by charting out where the bubbles lie across the vast expanse of space astronomers can piece together how these bubbles act as nurseries for stars how the bubbles interact with each other and how galaxies like the milky way have evolved over time with the opening of the local bubble the structure of the solar system looks like this at its center is the sun around which eight planets revolve the last one is neptune at a distance of about 4.45 billion kilometers or 30 astronomical units that is 30 times farther from the sun than the earth behind neptune is the kuiper belt a collection of small celestial bodies the most famous of which is pluto which has long been considered a planet the kuiper belt stretches out to about 55 astronomical units further at a distance of 125 to 135 astronomical units there is a heliopause which we've already described let us now explain why the density begins to increase at its boundary it's because solar plasma collides with interstellar plasma here imagine two streams colliding head-on at cosmic speeds of course at the point of collision the density increases it's like a traffic jam a chaos of particles and behind this jam at a distance of 0.75 to 1.5 light years the earth cloud spreads a spherical cloud of ice objects up to a trillion which serves as a source of long period comets the interstellar wind already dominates here but the sun is still holding bodies in its gravitational field with its last strength of course many of our viewers may ask the question well we're in a bubble that's huge by earthly standards even in a double bubble local and heliosphere well so what how does this affect our lives about that small bubble the heliosphere we can say unambiguously that thanks to it thanks to the traffic jam that formed on its border the earth is reliably protected from high-energy cosmic particles rushing from the center of the galaxy now for the local bubble scientists have long found out that our galaxy the milky way has the shape of a spiral disc several spirals diverge from its center which astronomers call arms right now our sun is almost halfway between the sagittarius arm and the perseus arm and our sun revolves around the center of the galaxy it makes one revolution in 200 million years we call this a galactic year only zero 0.0008 of this year has passed since the appearance of man in its path the sun with all its planets crossed not only bubbles but also accumulations of interstellar gas when the density of matter in space jumped hundreds of times astrophysicist miroslav philippovich using the latest model of the milky way checked what happened on earth when the sun crossed the galactic arms in which the density of interstellar space is much higher a relationship has been found between the time the sun crossed the spiral arms and five known mass extinction events 415 322 300 145 and 33 million years ago so we can assume that now the sun is in a quiet harbor favorable for all living things and we can say that humanity is very lucky that we appeared on earth as a species when the sun flew into the local bubble before that or maybe these two events are somehow connected the appearance of man and the presence of the sun in a safe haven the local bubble science has no information about it at least not yet but we can definitely say that we observe such a colorful sky above our heads only due to the fact that we're practically in a void the local bubble if the space around us was denser many stars would be invisible and who knows if we would know about space and about the structure of the universe as much as now if we were literally in the dark and we can say that the local bubble is just a gift to humanity which has entered the space age and is already trying to jump to the stars for an interstellar craft moving at subliminal speeds the greatest threat is dust particles which will simply grind the ship to powder during collisions even hypothetical concepts such as ships imply a frontal shield but now it turns out that the cosmos seems to have taken care of us it removed the dust in the vicinity of the sun and as it were says forward guys the path to alpha centauri and tau seti is open scientists have been studying planets for a long time now and it's not that difficult to get samples of our planet the moon and even mars but how do you get information about what a planet's made of that you can't reach to find out what a celestial body is made of scientists use many techniques they combine the information about a planet's density seismic activity magnetic field and so on but one method is specifically interesting it's called remote sensing or spectroscopy and it involves using light [Music] the process includes using instruments with a grating that spreads out the light from an object by wavelength the thing is each element has its own peculiar fingerprint scientists then identify this fingerprint in the spectrum of a certain object and can tell what it's made of [Music] so what have we learned about our solar system so far [Music] as of now we know for sure what our sun is made of including its chemical composition and its internal structure that consists of layers it all begins at the core of the sun or its central part the place where all the thermonuclear processes happen the radius of the sun's core is more than 150 000 kilometers and it's extremely hot over 15 million degrees celsius by comparison it's only about 5 500 degrees celsius on the surface of the sun so most of the energy and heat that keeps our solar system warm is generated within that core but what is it made of scientists think that it consists of 64 helium 35 hydrogen but if we take the sun in general roughly 91 percent of it is helium more than 8 is hydrogen and the remaining elements a pure iron silicon oxygen and nitrogen sulfur and magnesium and some others the core of the sun is surrounded by the radiative zone it's called this because of the way in which the energy of the sun radiates to its surface this region starts about 25 percent of the distance to the surface and stretches up to approximately 70 percent into the depth of the star [Music] this is surrounded by the convection zone or the last layer of the solar interior this thick layer of the sun is about two hundred thousand kilometers deep its main function is to transport energy to the surface of the sun hot plasma inside this region churns vigorously similar to hot lava from a volcano when it finally reaches the surface it gives off heat cools down and goes back to the bottom of the convection zone but that's just the internal structure of the sun our yellow dwarf also has a solar atmosphere and outer layers the photosphere chromosphere transition region and corona the photosphere is the visible part of the sun and it's about 200 kilometers thick it's this layer that sends the sun's rays into space looking deeper you'll find the chromosphere which is much larger up to two thousand kilometers thick in the chromosphere there's a constant movement of gases this is where filaments which are large regions of very dense cool gas held in place by magnetic fields can leap off the surface of the sun sometimes these filaments travel beyond the surface of the sun up to 250 000 kilometers and sometimes even overcome solar gravity and break off into space [Music] the next layer is just a few tens of kilometers thick called the transition region this is where our sun becomes very hot the last outermost part of our star's atmosphere is the corona from earth this layer looks like a radiant halo surrounding the solar disk the gas here is heated to more than 1 million degrees celsius at this temperature the most common chemical elements hydrogen and helium are completely ionized in other words they lose all their electrons and stop producing spectral lines of radiation and therefore in the visible range of the spectrum of the solar corona completely different elements begin to dominate such as highly ionized atoms of iron and calcium not so long ago nasa's parker probe entered our sun's outer layer becoming the first human spacecraft to touch the sun if you want to see video of how it managed to do this and not melt tell us in the comments [Music] mercury let's move to the closest planet to the sun mercury at the center of the planet is a core of liquid iron and nickel the core of mercury makes up roughly 85 percent of the planet's radius however unlike the earth's core mercury doesn't create a powerful magnetic field mercury's magnetic field at the surface is only one percent of the earth's around the core of mercury is a rocky layer called the mantle this is approximately 400 kilometers of rock which mainly consists of silicates the mantle is surrounded by its thin outer layer of crust astronomers believe that mercury's crust is just about 26 kilometers thick one interesting fact about mercury is that it's the fastest planet in our solar system traveling at about 47 kilometers per second that's because the closer a planet is to a star the faster it will travel venus next up is the planet venus the study of the surface of venus became possible with the development of advanced radar techniques the most detailed map of the surface of venus was made by the american spacecraft magellan which photographed 98 of the planet's surface according to one theory the structure of venus consists of three layers in the middle lies an iron core the mass of which is about a quarter of the entire planet's mass since the planet doesn't have its own magnetic field it follows that there is no movement of charged particles in the iron core thus there is nothing that would cause a magnetic field and because there's no movement of matter in the core it should have a solid state then there's a mantle which extends to a depth of about three thousand three hundred kilometers and consists of silicate rocks above it is the third layer a crust about 50 kilometers thick which also consists of silicate rocks [Music] [Music] earth up next is the third rock from the sun the structure of earth has been studied for decades in the heart of earth there is a core its radius is about three and a half thousand kilometers the inner core is solid and is made of iron the outer core however is liquid and consists of a mix of nickel and iron interestingly the inner core rotates at a different speed than our planet called super rotation the next layer is the mantle its thickness is about 2 900 kilometers the mantle makes up an astonishing 84 of our planet's total volume this layer consists of silicate rocks heated to roughly 1000 degrees celsius near the crust and up to 3 700 degrees celsius at its depth whenever this red hot substance bursts upward volcanic eruptions occur the third and last layer is the crust the outer layer of our planet its depth extends for 5 to 70 kilometers the thickest layer of the crust can be found on the continents while the thinnest ones are at the bottom of the oceans [Music] [Music] mars moving farther away from the sun you'll find the red planet which has attracted the attention of scientists since ancient times not so long ago scientists were able to collect precise data about the planet's structure thanks to the probe insight the probe measured about seven hundred and thirty three mars quakes and used the information from thirty five of them to form a picture of the martian crust mantle and core scientists discovered that mars consists of three layers the deepest is the core it occupies about half the radius of mars about 1 800 kilometers the total radius of mars is roughly 3 400 kilometers research data shows that the core is liquid although its large size indicates that it's less dense than previously thought this means that the core likely contains lighter elements such as sulfur oxygen carbon and hydrogen in addition to iron and nickel the next layer of mars is the mantle it has an upper middle and possibly lower part the mantle of mars consists of a single layer of rock with a solid lithosphere extending for 700 to 800 kilometers to compare the earth's lithosphere is only about 100 kilometers thick however both lithospheres likely have a lower region where material begins to melt and move slowly the existence of the lower mantle has not been reliably established yet similar to our planet the outer layer of mars is the crust the thickness of the red planet's crust is 24 to 72 kilometers it's also approximately 4.4 percent of the total mars volume surprisingly the crust also consists of two layers the uppermost layer turned out to be unexpectedly porous and the crust was thin this points to a high proportion of radioactive elements in the planet's crust [Music] jupiter let's move on to the largest planet in the solar system jupiter its dimensions are colossal the equatorial diameter is roughly 140 000 kilometers the polar one is somewhat smaller about 130 000 kilometers you could fit 1 300 earths inside jupiter but at the same time the actual mass of jupiter is only 318 earth masses the difference in the volumes and masses of jupiter and the earth means they differ in average density and differ in internal structure low density indicates that the planet consists mainly of light components hydrogen and helium scientists think that heavy elements in the interior of jupiter account for about 20 earth masses or six percent of the total mass of jupiter probe galileo showed that the structure of the upper atmosphere of the planet consists of 75 percent of hydrogen and 24 percent of helium and the other components are just one percent as of now researchers believe that the planet has a solid metal silicate core one theory is that the core could be surrounded by a shell of hot water methane and ammonia in the gas liquid state under enormous pressure of about 38 million bar the very same diameter of the core of jupiter together with the shell is 32 000 kilometers after the core is a layer of metallic hydrogen the thickness of this layer is approximately forty thousand kilometers at enormous pressures and temperatures the electrons in hydrogen atoms break away from the nuclei the same happens with metals in which electrons move freely that's why the layer is called metal after that comes the lower layer consisting of hydrogen helium and mixes of ammonia ammonium hydrosulfide and water which forms three layers of clouds the lower layer is water ice and possibly liquid water its temperature is approximately minus 130 degrees celsius above that there are clouds of crystals of ammonium hydrosulfide and the top one is filled with clouds of icy ammonia but that's not all even higher there's the middle layer of jupiter made of 90 hydrogen and 10 percent helium and the last outer layer is made of hydrogen only this is why scientists see jupiter as a compact solid metal silicate core surrounded by a gas liquid and gaseous hydrogen helium shell which can be called the planet's atmosphere and jupiter doesn't have a solid surface gases transform to liquid state and from liquid to solid state gradually over the gigantic radius of the planet exceeding seventy thousand kilometers but jupiter is also famous for one other interesting thing because of the extreme pressures and temperatures in its atmosphere hydrogen gas compresses into a liquid so the planet has the largest ocean in the entire solar system but filled with hydrogen instead of water [Music] saturn [Music] the structure of saturn is very similar to the structure of its neighbor however there are still some differences at the center of the planet is a massive core of solid and heavy materials silicates metals and possibly ice the mass of the core is about 17 earth masses the core temperature reaches at least 24 000 degrees celsius this is hotter than the surface of our star what's even more interesting is that the energy that saturn's core radiates into space is two and a half times the energy that it receives from the sun saturn is the least dense of all the planets in our solar system its density is less than that of water what this means is that if space was filled with water saturn would float [Music] on the cosmic scale the rings of saturn are very thin about 1.5 kilometers and their diameter is approximately 250 000 kilometers despite their impressive appearance they're very few substances in these rings if they were compressed into one body they would be no more than 100 kilometers in diameter the particles of these rings are composed of water ice which in its turn consists of solid rock particles frozen into the ice uranus the next planet after saturn is uranus similar to its neighbor this planet also has a solid core which consists mainly of silicate rocks however the core of uranus is larger than that of saturn or jupiter the temperature in the centre of uranus can reach at least 9000 degrees celsius the core is surrounded by a shell of rocks and ice above that there's a thousand kilometer layer of liquid nitrogen gradually turning into gaseous molecular hydrogen but some scientists think that uranus does not have a solid core and at a distance of about a third of its radius from the center there's metallic hydrogen the rotation of this planet creates flows of hydrogen that give rise to an electric current this is where the planet gets its magnetic field from uranus has a faint ring system made up of very dark particles ranging in diameter from micrometers to fractions of a meter these rings consist mainly of micro particles and a small amount of dust neptune the last planet in the solar system is neptune neptune is the fourth largest planet by diameter and the third largest by mass its mass is 17 times greater than that of the earth while its diameter is almost four times greater than our planet neptune structure is similar to uranuses its core is made of iron nickel and silicate rocks the pressure in the planet's center reaches seven megabars which is about seven million times more than on the surface of the earth above neptune's core there's the planet's mantle the mantle of neptune is rich in water ammonia methane and other compounds and although this matter is called icy it's actually a hot and very dense liquid the farther you get from the core the more neptune's surface develops into a darker and hotter atmosphere it makes up approximately five to ten percent of the total mass of the planet the temperature on neptune in the upper atmosphere is close to minus 200 degrees celsius at first sight neptune is quite bland compared to the breathtaking saturn or mighty jupiter but there's something about this planet that makes it stand out beneath the outer layer of neptune hides a constant rain of diamonds because of the temperatures and high pressure of the planet methane molecules break apart and release carbon which forms into chains and it is these chains that squeeze together harden and form patterns of crystal structure resembling diamonds and because the outermost layers of the mantle are way cooler than the lower layers as those diamond stones fall they start heating up and turn into liquid then the entire cycle repeats we told you about the internal structure of the main objects of the solar system but what did we miss tell us in the comments and subscribe to the channel to stay updated on exciting videos about space

Channel: Destiny

Views: 1,806,639

Keywords: space, outer space, nasa, space physics, facts about space, science, nasa space, physics, starship, earth, universe, elon musk, galaxy, facts about space and the universe, space is so cool, sounds from outer space, black holes, space paradoxes that science can’t explain, james webb, voyager 2, telescope, space bubble, space paradoxes, neptune, mars, astrum, einsteinian physics, the universe, Solar System, An In-Depth Exploration Of Our Solar System, destiny, Secrets Of The Solar System

Id: 0csgGGVKQ_w

Length: 124min 52sec (7492 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022