NASA Discovers Mysterious Structure In The Universe - Best Video From Destiny 2021

[Music] hold on right there this isn't just another black hole video we all know nothing can escape it we get it already but is it possible for something to escape a black hole and if you fell into one what would really happen the answer is probably going to surprise you and it's not what you think also new research shows that what we thought was a black hole in the middle of the milky way galaxy might not even be a black hole at all so what is it a tesseract full of bookshelves or maybe the home of cthulhu or perhaps it's something far more mysterious [Music] it's pretty safe to say that we have no idea what a black hole is what's going on inside or if it's something else completely it's not like we can directly image one but at least we can now get images of their huge shadows in space in 2019 astronomers grabbed the first ever image of a black hole and a new polarized image shows powerful magnetic fields wrapping around a huge black hole shadow this supermassive black hole is some 55 million light years away from us and is bigger than the entire solar system we're going to use this massive black hole for a simulation that involves you and a friend but we'll get to that in a bit you know the whole thing about nothing being able to escape a black hole well is this really true when a black hole eats up a star or a bunch of gas they generate a powerful flow of high energy particles close to the event horizon the ring of fire called hawking radiation at the edge and if a black hole is really chewing on something like a massive star powerful x-ray jets shoot out and the black hole becomes a quasar the brightest objects in the universe who says light can't escape it well now we have another argument about nothing being able to escape a hungry black hole this is because astronomers captured a neutron star in an elliptical orbit around a black hole that survived being swallowed completely however the dead star didn't get away from the black hole unscathed astronomers captured images of massive x-ray flares being belched out by the black hole as it was eating the star's material the star is trapped on a nine-hour elliptical orbit around the black hole and at its closest orbit the black hole rips off more of the star's material and becomes bigger it will try hard to get away but there's no escape as the black hole will eat it more and more until there's nothing left so now we all understand how powerful a black hole can be even swallowing each other now you might be wondering what the closest one to earth is and if we're in any danger of a black hole eating us sometime soon just recently scientists discovered one of the smallest black holes ever found and it just so happens it's also the closest to earth astronomers have named it the unicorn because so far it's the only one of its kind and it's in the constellation monasteris the unicorn it's about three times the mass of our sun which is tiny for a black hole and it's about 1500 light years from earth which means you don't need to worry it's not gonna come and swallow us up anytime soon that's because black holes don't usually move and sit in one place eating up everything that gets too close to them but that doesn't mean they can't move and here's a scary thought in 2021 researchers got a big surprise when they discovered a supermassive black hole racing across the universe at 177 000 kilometers per hour the big mystery is that astronomers don't know why the black hole which is three million times heavier than our sun is speeding through the center of the galaxy about 230 million light years away now that sounds crazy and it sounds fast but in 2017 scientists clocked another supermassive black hole hurtling through space at 7.2 million kilometers per hour an enormous force would have to be responsible to get these things moving through space that fast maybe what we are seeing is the result of two black holes colliding the massive collision sending the other flying wildly through space so now we've all learned what happens when something gets too close and is sucked into a black hole so what happens to a person and could you survive the trip now we've all heard that if you somehow get sucked into a black hole you would be stretched out or spaghettified maybe even crushed or well you get the idea now this might be true if the black hole was small enough but a black hole let's say 30 to 100 times more massive than the sun that's where reality becomes really strange the moment you entered a black hole reality would split you in two or clone you in one of these realities you would be incinerated and in the other you would plunge into the black hole and fall through it without being harmed how is this possible you ask well a black hole is a place where the laws of physics break down einstein said that gravity warps space itself causing it to curve and space-time can become so warped that it twists in on itself yes we know that's a lot for the mind to wrap around so it's time for thought experiment in the beginning we said we were going to run a simulation involving you and a friend let's say that you both signed up to go on an adventure to the nearest black hole one of you will go in and the other will be an observer you flip the coin your friend is going to watch you in horror as you plunge toward the black hole while they remain floating away at a safe distance now this is where it gets weird as you accelerate towards the event horizon your friend sees you stretch and contort as if they were looking at you through a giant magnifying glass but as you get closer to the horizon you appear to move in slow motion and as you reach the horizon you remain there motionless stretched across the surface of the horizon and the heat begins to engulf you your friend sees you slowly obliterated by the stretching of space and the ring of fire called hawking radiation before you get a chance to cross over into the darkness of the black hole you are reduced to ash game over but don't plan your funeral just yet we need to view this scene from your point of view because something even stranger happens nothing that's right from your perspective you would sail straight into the ominous black hole without so much as a scratch no slow stretching and no scolding hawking radiation either the reason is that you are in a free-for-all and therefore you feel no gravity if the black hole was smaller you'd have a problem because the force of gravity would be stronger at your feet than your head and stretch you out like spaghetti but something way more massive than our sun the forces would be small enough you wouldn't notice them but the sad and lonely part about this adventure is that you would live out the rest of your life pretty normally until you reached the singularity but what's wrong with your friend and why are they telling everyone that you've been barbecued to a crisp by radiation outside of the horizon while you're chilling inside the black hole actually you really were burned to a crisp at the horizon and you are inside the black hole at the same time this is because the laws of nature require that you remain outside the black hole as seen from your friend's perspective and quantum physics demands that information can never be lost and all information that accounts for your existence has to remain on the outside of the horizon however the laws of physics also require that you sail through the horizon without being fried by hot particles otherwise you would be in violation of einstein's theory of general relativity now some of you are going to say no way and you have to admit it's a conclusion that seems nonsensical how can a black hole clone me you're asking physicists called this mind-bending conundrum that black hole information paradox but in reality there's no paradox because no one ever sees your clone your friend only sees one of you and you only see yourself neither one of you can compare notes and no one really knows what happens and it doesn't matter if we tried to send someone or some spacecraft inside of a black hole to relay back some data once inside there will be no way for a signal to get out and you'd be lost forever but what an awesome trip it would be so what about the mystery of the black hole in the middle of the milky way galaxy for years it was widely accepted that sagittarius a is a black hole in the middle of the milky way galaxy however some astrophysicists from italy now say the object which is as big as four million suns might not be a black hole after all the reason is that a huge gas cloud came close to the black hole the gravitational forces of sagittarius a should have eaten the cloud but the cloud of cass survived with an issue could it be the home of cthulhu well while we love to joke about this the answer might just be as mysterious some scientists say that the center could be a big bundle of that incredibly elusive stuff they call dark matter which is invisible and thought to account for 80 percent of the total matter in the universe but cannot be detected because it doesn't interact with light now scientists have proposed that black holes themselves could be formed out of dark matter which would explain why they conform so quickly before the galaxies around them and one day that might be proven to be true we're starting to find out more every day and tomorrow we might find out everything we thought we knew is wrong so make sure you stay tuned here so we can discover the universe together one of the most cataclysmic events in the universe when a massive star bigger than our sun reaches the end of its life it creates a supernova a powerful explosion destructive on a scale almost beyond human imagining and sometimes so powerful they can be seen by the naked eye from earth they understood this phenomenon but recent discoveries have revealed not one but two new kinds of supernova but just how powerful is a supernova and could the earth one day be destroyed by the blast from one get ready to be surprised by the answers to this and more stars like our sun shine because of thermonuclear fusion by fusing light atoms in their cores to make heavier atoms eventually all stars run out of the raw materials needed for fusion if this happens and the star is big enough it'll explode as a supernova supernovae were first discovered in 185 a.d when chinese astronomers suddenly saw a strange guest star appear in the night sky and it stayed visible in the sky for the next eight months it was the first known observation of a supernova in human history but there have been other sightings from here on earth in the year 1006 a.d a staggeringly bright star exploded in the constellation lupus and could be seen brightly in earth's skies current astronomers say it would have been 16 times brighter than venus the brightest object in our night skies beside the moon in fact this supernova became so bright that it was visible in the skies during the day the most recent supernova visible to the eye was supernova 1987a in the year 1987. but are we going to get to see another one we'll get to that in a moment if you want an idea of what these might have looked like the hubble telescope recorded a supernova in the spiral galaxy ngc 2525 which is 70 million light years away hubble began observing the star from february 2018 to 2019. the supernova first appears as a blazing star located on the galaxy's outer edge and outshines even the brightest stars before fading this star exploded 70 million years ago when the dinosaurs still round the earth yet it took all this time to see it as the light from the massive explosion finally reached us since their discovery there were thought to be only two different types of supernova a type 1a thermonuclear and type 2 iron core collapse a thermonuclear supernova or type 1a is the result of an explosion of a white dwarf star in a binary system at least eight times the mass of the sun after it becomes too massive to support itself after siphoning material from a nearby companion star mata piles up on the white dwarf surface and once it reaches a certain mass limit a runaway thermonuclear explosion rips the white dwarf apart the iron core collapse variety of supernovae are the ones that most people are familiar with this happens when a massive star one at least 10 times the mass of the sun runs out of nuclear fuel as molecules fuse inside the star it can no longer support its own weight and gravity causes its iron core to collapse leaving behind either a black hole or a neutron star astronomers thought these were the only two ways a supernova could happen but now a worldwide team of scientists from uc santa barbara have discovered a new type of supernova 31 million light years away in the galaxy ngc 2146 using the las cumbres observatory this new type of stellar explosion is called an electron capture supernova in an electron capture supernova some of the electrons in the oxygen neon magnesium core get smashed into their atomic nuclei or electron capture this removal of electrons causes the core of the star to buckle under its own weight and collapse resulting in a massive explosion but recently another new kind of supernova was discovered a team of astronomers were going over data from the very large array sky survey from 2017 when they were surprised to learn that a black hole had caused a supernova the explosion was triggered when a dead star companion either a black hole or neutron star plunged into a nearby star's core this black hole or neutron star slammed into the massive star and as it traveled through the star ejected a spiral of material from the star's atmosphere as it reached the core of the star material rapidly fell onto the stellar corpse that launched a pair of x-ray jets at nearly the speed of light and set off the explosion this is the first time a collision triggered supernova has ever been recorded and if you're curious how fast the particles from one of these explosions can travel nasa's chandra x-ray observatory has tracked the debris from a supernova explosion witnessed by johannes kepler in 1604 when a dying star 20 000 light years from earth tore itself apart now more than 400 years later the nasa probe found debris still racing through space at more than 32 million kilometers per hour that's about 25 000 times faster than the speed of sound now since you know a little about these powerful stellar explosions one might wonder what would happen if the earth was ever caught in the path of a supernova explosion if our sun exploded as a supernova the shock wave might not destroy the whole earth but the side of the planet facing the sun at the time of the explosion would burn and boil away the entire planet would increase in temperature 15 times hotter than the surface of the sun not only this but the earth would not stay in its orbit because of the sudden decrease in the sun's mass and our planet would wander off into space fortunately our sun is far too small and doesn't have enough mass to go supernova but let's consider the explosion of a star besides our sun one that is close enough to create some big problems here on earth astronomers say that a star within 30 to 50 light years away could be devastating to the planet if a star went supernova close enough to us x-rays and more energetic gamma rays from the explosion would destroy the ozone layer that protects us from solar ultraviolet rays it's possible that it could also ionize nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere which would form huge amounts of smog-like nitrous oxide phytoplankton and coral reefs would be affected and most organisms would be killed off by the radiation and severely deplete the base of the ocean food chain it's possible the supernova might leave surface and ocean life relatively intact however the planet would be showered with gamma rays and other high energy radiation which could cause mutations in earthly life so has the planet earth ever been hit by the waves of a supernova it turns out scientists have found clues on our planet that show our entire solar system has actually flown through the debris fields of a supernova in its ancient past in fact the whole solar system has been flying through the debris field of a supernova for the last 33 000 years in fact the supernova carved out the local bubble as it's called that the entire solar system rests in aside from the holes that supernovae have blasted out of the milky way they also left traces on our planet on the ocean floor in the form of iron 60 a radioactive isotope of iron which we know can only be created by an exploding star but no supernova has been known to happen at this close distance in the history of mankind so what are the chances of you seeing a milky way supernova in the skies from earth in the next 50 years for those people in the southern hemisphere where more of the galaxy can be seen in the night sky there is a 20 to 50 chance of seeing a blast from a supernova with the unaided eye one star which could go supernova any day now is beetlejuice in the constellation orion the hunter beetlejuice is one of the largest stars known and is a bright red dot marking orion's shoulder this star is a dying red supergiant with a diameter roughly 950 times larger than our sun and either today tomorrow or 100 000 years from now it's going to explode giving humanity a celestial fireworks show in 2019 beetlejuice started to dim dramatically giving way to the idea the star could have reached the end of its life astronomers aren't 100 sure how the supernova will play out but they all agree that there will be an intense light in the sky that would rival a full moon and cast shadows at night and yes you would be able to see the supernova in the sky during the day it sounds a little scary to say you'll see the massive explosion but there's no need to worry about this supernova wiping out life on earth because beetlejuice is far outside the supernova kill range of 30 to 50 light years and sits roughly 724 light years away only animals that use the moon for navigation would be confused since adding another light in the sky as bright as the moon could be disruptive to them but if beetlejuice doesn't explode within our lifetimes you still have a chance of witnessing a supernova with the naked eye and it'll be the first naked eye nova in decades there's a double star just off the left wing tip in the constellation of cygnus the swan astronomers are seeing the orbits of these two stars speeding up which means they're getting closer and will merge together sometime around the year 2022 which is just around the corner this star system lies 1800 light years away but it should be visible with the naked eye and its brightness will be second magnitude matching the brightness of the stars of the big dipper and if you have a telescope then you're really going to see something cool [Music] it's a space race and not just between countries two of the world's top billionaires have been in a 15 plus year feud with each other elon musk has spacex and amazon billionaire jeff bezos runs blue origin and both have been in a race to get people to the edge of space and beyond but it turns out it's not just these guys trying to get to the karman line first and it looks like another billionaire is about to beat them to it and where is nasa in all this rocket rivalry let's find out jeff bezos is currently the wealthiest person in the world and runs amazon and aerospace company blue origin which has the goal of sending people to the moon elon musk is the dual ceo running both tesla and spacex over the years a hated rivalry between these two has resulted in some bitter name calling and twitter spats but now bezos is passing musk in a major way or is he jeff bezos recently made the announcement that he will fly to the edge of space soon on his new shepard rocket to prove that it's completely safe for space tourists elon musk on the other hand has no set plans to go into space as of yet but expressed interest in joining japanese billionaire usako mezawa in his trip around the moon in the new starship super heavy rocket that's scheduled to launch in 2023 musk has also said he wants to move to mars and live out his life there but is bezos better than elon and how did this rivalry between these guys start by 2004 both blue origin and spacex were still in their early stages and neither had completed any launches yet however bezos and musk had met each other to discuss their reusable rocket ambitions and let's just say it didn't go well musk said that he tried to give bezos some advice but bezos largely ignored musk from that time onward musk and bezos kept to themselves but the rivalry heated up again in 2013 when both companies tried to lease the same launch pad from nasa spacex wanted exclusive use of the nasa launch pad and blue origin filed a formal protest with the government to prevent spacex from using the pad bezel suggested that it should be converted into a commercial spaceport for all launch companies must call this a phony blocking tactic and took a swipe at blue origin saying the company hasn't created a reliable orbital spacecraft even though they've spent over 10 years to build one however musk said that if blue origin somehow designed a vehicle qualified to nasa's human rating standards that can dock with the space station spacex would gladly accommodate their needs but then musk said frankly i think we're more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct by the way spacex won the right to take over the launch pad and that isn't all the misfortune that blue origin has suffered they also recently lost a contract with nasa to spacex to build the lunar lander that will deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon in 2024 bezos was not happy about the decision and filed a protest accusing nasa of moving the goal posts for contract bidders at the last moment this was a huge blow for blue origin of course musk fired back at bezos and his 50-page protest with a tweet that said can't get it up to orbit long that's elon musk for you but we told you in the beginning that there's another billionaire that looks like he's about to beat both musk and bezos at their own game virgin galactic and its founder richard branson have also been working for the last 20 years getting the vss unity rocket plane riding to the limit of the earth's atmosphere he says that elon musk is fixated on mars and it's his life mission while he and bezos want to use space to better the earth this rocket plane is really something else to see it's carried in the middle by a big mothership jet named eve and when at the correct altitude spaceship two unity is released and its rocket pushes the craft to three times the speed of sound it then makes a sharp climb upwards until it reaches the edge of space in the spacecraft's test flight it performed a slow backflip by rotating its wings vss unity then returns from the edge of space and lands on a runway much like the space shuttle but even the vss unity had a problem and the previous flight attempt was called off because of an electronic interference issue where the spacecraft's rocket shut off early before it glided safely back to earth however virgin galactic says they got the problem fixed and have unveiled the spaceship 3 and it looks incredibly awesome now there are probably a lot of elon musk haters out there but it looks like spacex is beating everyone in the space race think about it spacex has built and designed the falcon 9 and falcon heavy launch vehicles but that's not all the company also builds its own rocket engines the merlin one and kesron plus they've been talking about building a new much bigger high level engine the merlin 2. but it's always the goal of spacex to be able to reuse the first stage of a rocket and in december 2015 spacex landed its falcon 9 rocket for the first time spacex also pulled off the first rocket landing at sea on a drone ship in april 2016 and in 2019 spacex wowed the world again with a triple booster landing and two of the boosters landing on the ground in perfect tandem while the main core landed on a drone ship in the ocean what about spacex getting people to the edge of space like blue origin or virgin galactic let's face it the goals of spacex are different from the competitors and the main focus is putting people on the surface of the moon and mars and this is where the spacex starship comes in it's a fully reusable two-stage to orbit super heavy lift launch vehicle that can take 100 people into space the starship has seen some real fast development since 2019 beginning with the star hopper that was successful in launching and landing and looking real cool doing it spacex then built starship sn5 it looked like a giant grain ceilo and it was surreal watching this thing take off hover and then land successfully but not all spacex starships have landed in one piece starship sn9 crashed on landing and exploded in a fireball sn10 landed but exploded shortly after an sn11 successfully soared to a 10 kilometer altitude but exploded shortly after that's three starship failures in a row however elon musk was quoted as saying we expect it to explode it's weird if it doesn't explode frankly now the u.s federal aviation administration has stepped in and they don't believe these failures are intended and are looking closer at spacex's starship [Music] so what are the new plans for our billionaire spacemen bezos is set to go into space in his new shepherd vehicle on july 20th 2021 with his brother mark and a very rich anonymous online bidder who put down 4.8 million dollars to go for a ride the capsule on the top can carry up to six people and reaches an altitude of more than 100 kilometers called suborbital space the flight lasts about 10 to 15 minutes enough time for passengers to float in complete weightlessness let's see if it all plays out as planned because we all know that anything can change at any moment the question on everyone's mind is is it risky to be sending these billionaires into space the big news is that while we're making this video virgin galactic got their first official okay from the federal aviation administration to fly passengers to the edge of space that's right even you could grab a ticket on a rocket to the edge of space right now if you have the money and no word yet on how much the tickets will go for but you can bet they'll be expensive spacex is really busy trying to get their futuristic bullet shaped starship ready to take people to mars and the latest starship sn15 just performed a near perfect soft landing and it didn't explode when it comes to human space flight spacex is still at the top on april 23 2021 spacex's crew 2 mission sent four more astronauts to the international space station aboard the company's crew dragon spacecraft making it the third successful manned launch before astronauts had to hitch a ride on russian spacecraft and while branson and bezos are both on a mission to convince and assure people that a rocket ride is fun and safe by going up first themselves let's keep in mind that even spacecraft that have undergone years of testing could end up failing or crashing take the failure of the space shuttle challenger in 1986 when it broke apart just 73 seconds into its flight or the shuttle columbia when it disintegrated in earth's atmosphere on february the 1st 2003 that said if you want to see a video about the most devastating spacecraft failures let us know in the comments and speaking of nasa spacecraft where do they sit in the space race because of all this competition nasa looks like it's falling behind a little however they're still in the race with their huge rocket the space launch system it's the most powerful launch vehicle built since the 1960s it stands 98 meters tall has four engines that produce 8.8 million pounds of thrust that insane amount of power can put 27 tonnes of cargo into space that's 11 large sport utility vehicles and yes these are the same rs-25 engines that were used in this space shuttle program and this is the rocket that nasa will use for their artemis program but is this rocket ready to do the job of sending astronauts to the moon and is nasa falling behind in rocket technology for now the space launch system is still being assembled and the artemis project is still set to get us back to the moon by 2024. spacex is now helping out on the lunar lander and jeff bezos is not happy about that and while we're on the subject we recently made a video about how china is trying to overtake nasa in space programs however it's already becoming more difficult for a state corporation to stay in this market since they're responsible to taxpayers for their failures unlike private companies you can check out that here if you missed it private companies have endured hundreds of failures rocket crashes and huge financial losses but now they've conquered space and the future of space exploration looks bright [Music] everyone knows that jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system it's 318 times as massive as earth and 2.5 times bigger than all the other planets combined it's a gas giant and for a long time scientists haven't exactly known what lies beyond the violent swirling clouds in the atmosphere but now scientists have discovered what the inside of jupiter really looks like what have they found and has jupiter really saved the earth from total annihilation because of its incredible size our solar system began as a disk of dust and gas some 4.6 billion years ago the first planets to form were the gas giants neptune uranus saturn and jupiter jupiter took shape about the same time as the rest of the solar system forming around 4.5 billion years ago its strong gravity pulling in massive amounts of gas and dust from the disk before all the other planets formed it was the first and the largest jupiter is mostly made up of hydrogen and helium about 90 hydrogen and about 10 percent helium almost the same composition as our sun which is about 70 hydrogen and 28 percent helium some astronomers call jupiter a failed star however the gas giant only has a massive 1 000th that of the sun jupiter just isn't massive enough for gravity to trigger nuclear fusion the beautiful whirling clouds and storms that you see in images the layer resting on the surface known as the troposphere are about 31 miles thick and are made up of ammonia ammonium hydrosulfite and water which form the distinctive red and white bands when you look at jupiter you probably think that it must have a solid surface the fact is that jupiter doesn't have a true surface it's mostly swirling gases and liquids and if you sent a spacecraft there it would have nowhere to land but just because the spacecraft wouldn't have a place to land doesn't mean it would fly right through jupiter's atmosphere and come out unharmed through the other side this is because extreme pressures and temperatures deep inside the planet would crush melt and vaporize any spacecraft trying to fly into the planet but we've sent spacecraft to orbit and explore the planet the one billion dollar juno probe the farthest space probe ever to be powered by solar arrays was launched towards jupiter on august 5th 2011 and arrived in orbit around the planet on july the 4th 2016 and what we've discovered and learned about jupiter is incredible the newest discovery using data collected from the juno spacecraft found that the colorful stripes of swirling gas and dust you see in jupiter's atmosphere were found to run 1800 miles deep and hold so much gas that the mass is about three times that of the entire earth these belts of wind flow at speeds of 223 miles per hour and disrupt how masses spread across the planet it was also discovered that jupiter's atmosphere is rotating differently with zones and bands rotating at speeds that are different by up to 328 feet per second those bands on different colors you see are actually traveling in opposite directions lighter bands move in the direction of jupiter's rotation circling the planet faster than it spins and the dark coloured bands move slower in the opposite direction and take longer to move around the planet so how does a giant ball of gas floating around in space stay together and form a planet the jovian magnetosphere is the cavity created in the solar wind by jupiter's powerful magnetic field ballooning six hundred thousand to two million miles and tapers into a tadpole-shaped tail extending more than 600 miles behind jupiter this magnetosphere is the largest and most powerful of any planetary magnetosphere in the solar system jupiter's magnetic field is generated by electrical currents in the planet's outer core which is composed of liquid metallic hydrogen this magnetic field was found to be almost 20 thousand times as powerful as earth and rotates with the planets sweeping up particles that have an electric charge the electromagnetic storms they generate are so strong that they can be heard by amateur radio operators on earth beamed towards us by plasmas and magnetic field lines these signals are sometimes even more powerful than radio signals from the sun this magnetic field traps swarms of charged particles and accelerates them to very high energies and creates intense radiation that bombards the innermost of its 67 confirmed and named moons and would destroy anything that got close speaking of jupiter's moons scientists have recently discovered an fm signal emanating from one of jupiter's moons ganymede if you want to see a video about this mysterious signal and jupiter's giant moons let us know in the comments by now you may be wondering does jupiter have a solid inner core studies have found the planet's interior moves as a single body and behaves as if it were a rigid solid despite its fluid nature for now we simply do not know if jupiter has a solid core or not but the juno spacecraft should be able to help discover this and what the mass and makeup of this solid core is if it exists we do know that at jupiter's core whatever it's made of the pressure is about 100 000 times the pressure on earth the great red spot is one of the most iconic features of the planet it's a massive storm the size of the earth that's been raging since it was first sighted in 1831 trapped between two jet streams it's called an anti-cyclone that swirls about a center of high atmosphere pressure and rotates in the opposite direction that hurricanes do on earth it's the largest storm in the solar system with wind measured around 400 miles per hour compare that to the fastest wind speed ever recorded on earth of 231 miles per hour one day this great red spot could end up disappearing completely and scientists say that it's been shrinking since the 1800s and many and may only last another 20 years nasa's juno spacecraft was able to snap incredible images of the planet as it passed at 5 600 miles above the giant red spot clouds in july 2017. one of the amazing things that was discovered is that deep in the atmosphere pressure and temperature increase greatly and compress the hydrogen gas into a liquid this gives jupiter the largest ocean in the solar system which is made of hydrogen instead of water juno also grabbed some spectacular images of the gas giant poles discovering another incredible wonder of the planet at the north pole of jupiter a huge persistent cyclone is visible and encircled by smaller cyclones ranging in size from 2500 to 2900 miles on jupiter's south pole the same thing was discovered as juno did a flyby and using infrared cameras imaged a cyclone the size of the entire usa with five other cyclones swirling around it in a geometric pattern which also rotate counterclockwise the nasa galileo spacecraft was likely the first to discover these hotspots when it accidentally flew through one on its way to a planned demise to the surface of jupiter when the spacecraft was almost out of fuel nasa deliberately sent the craft on a no return plunge into jupiter on september 21st 2003 this was done to protect the moon europa which some say has a subsurface ocean that could contain life it's worth mentioning that we probably should be thankful for the planet jupiter's size and the powerful magnetic field that it generates because it's possible that jupiter has saved the planet earth from certain doom people were laughing at the prospect of an asteroid or comet hitting the earth in the late 80s and early 1990s but then something happened that would quiet that laughter the comet shoemaker levy 9 was discovered by carolyn and jean shoemaker and david levy on march 18 1993 using the schmidt telescope at mount palomar scientists calculated the comet was originally 1 to 1.2 miles wide however tidal forces from jupiter's powerful gravity had broken the comet into more than 20 pieces as it made its close approach to the planet sometime in 1992 but the biggest revelation was scientists saw that the fragments were going to smash into jupiter and luckily for nasa its galileo orbiter was still on its way to the gas giant many earth-based telescopes and orbiting spacecraft such as the hubble telescope all were focused on the incredible event that was about to happen the fragments of the comet were lined up like a freight train and collided with jupiter's atmosphere unleashing the force of 300 million atomic bombs the fragments created huge dark spots in the clouds that measured 1200 to 1900 miles and heated the gas giant's atmosphere to temperatures as hot as 53 000 to 71 000 degrees fahrenheit if a comet of this magnitude hit the planet earth the results would be devastating with impact sending dust and debris into the sky which would cool the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and envelop the entire planet in darkness this historic jupiter comet impact is what led to planetary defense but fear not this type of collision was very rare and scientists say probably only occur every few centuries or do they on august 7 an amateur astronomer was looking at jupiter through his telescope when he captured an asteroid colliding with the atmosphere of jupiter creating a white flash visible in the clouds some scientists say these impacts are inevitable with the amount of objects floating around in space and jupiter's massive gravity tugging on anything that gets close to it we could say that jupiter is like earth's big brother and likely protecting us from asteroid impacts we've learned some new things about jupiter and how its layers of atmosphere are made up and we've also been able to image the planet in striking detail piecing together images captured at the perfect moment for clarity called lucky imaging the highest resolution image of jupiter ever seen has been created in thermal infrared light in the photos you can see the familiar banding bright regions are clear air where heat from inside the planet can leak out and darker regions are where the thick clouds block the heat from escaping this proves that the interior of jupiter is very hot heat left over from its formation billions of years ago when taking a look at jupiter through the hubble telescope what you see is sunlight reflecting off the cloud tops with these amazing images we're learning more and more about jupiter every day and we're not done yet juno is still on its mission and only about one third through it planned mapping of the planet and there are still reasons to believe that jupiter may have a rocky center that's enveloped in a layer of metallic hydrogen we're definitely going to get more incredible images of jupiter coming soon and we're about to unlock the mysteries of the biggest planet in the solar system so make sure to stay tuned here to see the latest stunning images of jupiter there's hardly anything more bizarre in space than black holes they're invisible and always hungry space phenomena some of them come in unimaginably large sizes in fact black holes can eat up so much matter that they keep growing nearly infinitely so how are black holes different from what we imagine what's the largest one that we've ever discovered and how much bigger can they grow to understand how black holes work you need to understand gravity to throw a ball to some height you need to apply a certain amount of force the same with rockets only they weigh a lot more than a ball does a rocket speed has to be greater than the gravitational attraction of the earth and this speed to gravity ratio is known as the escape velocity the minimum speed needed for a rocket to escape our planet's gravity is at least 11.2 kilometers per second or about 6.9 miles per second but what is the escape velocity of a black hole it's either the same as the speed of light or even greater and since nothing can move faster than the speed of light you can't escape a black hole once you're past its event horizon the boundary of no return surrounding a black hole but if black holes don't let any visible light out how can we see them although black holes may seem like empty regions of space they're anything but that the fact that we can't see a black hole itself but rather its influence on the surrounding matter doesn't mean there's nothing inside one this is due to its strong gravitational field anything inside a black hole is tightly packed and cannot get away as a black hole's gravity attracts gas and matter it creates a swirling area around it called an accretion disk and because these different particles around a black hole move extremely fast they start to heat up and emit x-rays and gamma rays so using scientific telescopes and satellites we can actually detect those rays and assume there's a black hole out there another way to spot a black hole is to notice the weird motion of interstellar material and stars that might point to a strong gravitational field beside them in fact any object can become a black hole but you need two major ingredients to make that happen mass and high density to make a black hole out of our sun you'd have to compress it to a radius of just three kilometers and to make a black hole out of the earth you'd need to squish its mass into a sphere the size of a small p or less than nine millimeters in radius but do such tiny black holes even exist in theory there could be one atom large black holes and even smaller ones they're usually referred to as quantum black holes or primordial black holes meaning the smallest of them could be born just after the big bang but if these tiny black holes existed they would have been harmless evaporating instantly after their creation as they'd be much hotter than our sun some scientists speculate that primordial black holes could be one of the components of dark matter but let's leave hypothetical primordial black holes behind and get down to the type of black holes we've been able to observe we know that stellar black holes exist for sure and they're usually formed when a massive star explodes with such power that it shines brighter than an entire galaxy of stars the phenomenon is called a supernova now similar to how we measure distance in space which is the distance from earth to the sun scientists use solar mass as a unit to measure the most massive objects in space including black holes and the massive and ordinary stellar black hole is about three to ten solar masses cygnus x1 is just an example of a stellar black hole and the first one we've discovered cygnus x1 is located in our galaxy roughly 7000 light years away from earth but what's interesting about it is that it spins nearly at its maximum rate which is 800 times per second even though cygnus x1 has 21 solar masses it's still quite a small representative of black holes next come intermediate mass black holes and their name speaks for themselves for a long time intermediate mass black holes were a missing gap for understanding black hole evolution but soon everything might change this type of black hole is already larger by a lot as it can have a mass that's hundreds to thousands of times bigger than that of our sun in 2006 astronomers stumbled across powerful x-rays and as you already know it's one way to detect black holes hiding from our view these x-rays were tracked to a dense star cluster in another galaxy and based on the luminosity of the received signal a black hole is estimated to be about fifty 000 solar masses while scientists still don't know if it's an intermediate mass black hole for sure lots of signs are there 50 000 solar masses may look like a big number but that's almost nothing on a scale of supermassive black holes one of those as with most galaxies sits right in the middle of the milky way sagittarius a star has a mind-boggling 4.6 million times more mass than the sun but it's only 17 times larger in fact it's not that big it could actually sit within mercury's orbit sagittarius a star is still located about 26 000 light years away from us so there's no threat to our planet or our solar system in the meantime there are supermassive black holes in some distant galaxies that act weird spotted and captured by nasa's hubble telescope this abnormally bright quasar named 3c186 is in a galaxy that sits 8 billion light years away from earth now we already know that the central parts of most galaxies contain a supermassive black hole but what astronomers found out about this black hole is it's not quite in the middle in fact it's located approximately 35 000 light years away from the center of its galaxy and that's further than our sun is from the center of the milky way so what could possibly move a black hole that weighs more than one billion suns scientists believe that about one to two billion years ago there was a collision of two galaxies as they collided the central black holes of the two galaxies started to circle each other and eventually merged into one creating powerful gravitational waves as a result a newly formed black hole was harshly kicked out in the direction opposite from the strongest gravitational waves the power of such a kick was so immense it could be compared to 100 million supernovae exploding all at once 3c186 still keeps moving away at the speed of 7.5 million kilometers per hour at this speed it could travel from our planet to the moon in roughly three minutes the new black hole that was born should be much larger than one billion suns but so far we have no idea how massive it could be to grow that big black holes need to feed on tons of stars but don't misinterpret that they're not space vacuum cleaners if our sun was suddenly replaced with a black hole having the exact same mass there would be no change in the earth's orbit and we wouldn't be swallowed up by it since its radius would be just three kilometers so we'd have to be much closer to it than we currently are supermassive black holes are already hard to comprehend but they're miniature compared to ultra massive black holes one of the largest and most massive black holes ever discovered in this category would make sagittarius a star look like a small asteroid placed next to our sun within the huge galaxy home 15a home to roughly 2 trillion solar masses lies a black hole 40 billion times more massive than our sun to compare it's more than half of the stars in our galaxy put together home 15a sits 700 million light years away from us and a black hole in the heart of this galaxy equals the size of our entire solar system until recently scientists believed that the upper limit for the massive aluminus black hole was about 50 billion solar masses little did they know a new discovery would change this you may not know this but the brightest objects in the universe aren't stars or galaxies quasars are not so long ago a quasar with the brightness of 140 trillion suns named ton 618 was discovered it's so bright that it outshines the entire galaxy it's located in and the ultra massive black hole powering it is a real monster at 66 billion solar masses which makes it even more massive than all the stars combined in the milky way ton 618 has a diameter of 389.8 billion kilometers the quasar is located in a distant constellation canes venatici some 10.4 billion light years from us because ton 618 is so far away its light takes more than 10 billion years to reach us so we only see how big it was when the universe was just a few billion years old and by this time it could have grown a lot bigger one idea is that for such a monstrous black hole to grow there should have been a different black hole that served as a seed to feed a bigger one by merging with it but computer simulations show this isn't what happened with ton 618 a more probable scenario would be multiple black holes merging together into one over time still we don't know if that describes the story of how ton 618 formed but it remains the most massive black hole we've discovered up to this date so far we keep finding new black holes that appear to be larger and larger each time and scientists have even started suggesting there could be a new class of black holes named stupendously large black holes these black holes could have a mass above 100 billion solar masses and even a lot more than that all of this begs the question if black holes constantly grow does this mean they're eternal well on a scale of human life the lifespan of our planet our sun and even our solar system yes black holes slowly evaporate and lose a tiny bit of mass through a process called hawking radiation but the thing is it's a very slow process it'll take about the age of our universe for a black hole with a massive 100 million tons to only lose 50 percent of its mass and the bigger they are the more this process slows down once all the stars fade out or explode black holes will still be there for a very long time by the way if you'd like to see a video about this and how the universe will little by little freeze and die let us know in the comments the observable universe is roughly 46 billion light years in radius so there's a lot more out there to surprise us one day we'll hopefully find something that could shed light on the dark mysterious patches scattered out there in the skies so far it's like trying to guess what's behind a door while only knowing what size the room could be and its temperature siberia is huge making up 77 percent of russia but it's only 23 populated in these places completely uninhabited strange things have been discovered and many mysterious and unexplained things have happened like the tung husker event but scientists discovered something astonishing not long ago a prehistoric virus that's been sleeping beneath the ice for millions of years and even stranger massive craters are now mysteriously appearing across the frozen siberian tundra what have scientists found and should we be worried about these new discoveries siberia has many different regions but the largest is the west siberian plain it has one of the world's largest stretches of continuous flat land that lies in central russia this large region is mostly flat and swampy but the northern portions of the plains are dominated by permafrost that gradually formed over millions of years in 2014 a team of french microbiologists from the university of ex marseille were studying ice cores taken from 100 feet deep in the permafrost when they found something astonishing frozen deep within the ice for thirty thousand years an ancient strainer virus was found entombed along with other frozen organisms it belongs to a giant class of viruses found 10 years ago and is named pithovirus siberism until this discovery no surviving or successfully living sample of the virus had ever been found french researchers added bits of ice core samples to colonies of amoeba to see if the viruses in the permafrost could infect them soon after the single celled organisms began to die off a sign that something in the permafrost was fatal to them when the scientists examined the amoeba colonies they discovered the giant virus measured one thousand of a millimeter in length and were multiplying inside the amoeba more familiar viruses such as the influenza virus have 13 genes and are about 100 nanometers across but in comparison giant viruses like pithavirus can be 1 000 times bigger and have more than 2 500 genes but is it something we should be worried about thankfully this particular virus does not infect humans or other animals as far as we know but its ability to survive after being frozen for millennia has raised concerns that global climate change and siberian drilling operations could release previously undiscovered and potentially dangerous viruses into our atmosphere a similar scenario of this happening became reality in 2016 when an anthrax outbreak happened in the yamalo nenets region of northern siberia a heat wave during the summer months raised the temperature of the region to over 95 degrees fahrenheit the permafrost melted and exposed the frozen remains of an anthrax infected reindeer the anthrax spores were released into the air eight people were infected and over two thousand reindeer were infected and perished people living in the area were evacuated 40 miles away from the outbreak and the russian government sent in troops trained in biological warfare to deal with the emergency bacteria was contained but there is no telling when this could happen again the idea of an ancient deadly virus being awoken is a scary thought and the rapidly changing climate is a real concern in siberia researchers say the entire northern siberian region is warming at a rate two and a half times faster than the rest of the planet since the 1970s the permafrost has retreated and has reduced in thickness with temperatures increasing from 2 to 4 degrees over the last 30 years could we see another prehistoric virus emerge from the permafrost only time will tell but there is something else incredibly bizarre happening in siberia and the discovery could endanger the whole planet over the past several years mysterious craters have been found in the yamal peninsula region of northwest siberia and scientists aren't exactly sure what could have created them in july 2014 the first crater was found when russian helicopter pilots spotted the mysterious hull in the permafrost which seemed to appear out of nowhere this crater ripped out of the frozen ground was 65 feet in diameter and more than half a football field deep blocks of ice and dirt were flung hundreds of feet from the center of the crater it appeared the open hole quickly filled with water forming a lake something very powerful had to create such a big explosion and leave such a huge hole in the ground no one's actually seen an explosion or caught one on camera but in 2017 a reindeer herder reported a loud blast and smoke rising from the ground later a crater with a 25 foot diameter and 65 feet deep was discovered surrounded by big blocks of ice and chunks of soil despite what you might think the explosions coming from these are nothing like you would see from a volcano ice volcanoes are up much different these holes are likely created from the explosive combination of methane gas ice water and mud but they don't really explode as much as eject the material such as a volcano erupts with lava a mound begins to grow called a pingo when the pressure inside becomes too great they burst open gas pockets under the mounds come from the permafrost melting very quickly and even small temperature changes of sediments produce huge amounts of methane gas a major source of methane is organic matter made of dead plants and animals that have been frozen deep in the permafrost for thousands of years as the organic matter decays it gets eaten and digested by bacteria that produces either carbon dioxide or methane as waste if the ground thaws then it releases carbon dioxide or methane into the atmosphere and this is the big problem for the planet because methane gas can very efficiently absorb heat in the earth's atmosphere and is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide considering how big some of the holes are it would likely be dangerous if someone were close enough where gas could erupt but since this land isn't occupied then it's not a big threat to people russian scientists say there are many thousands of these mounds and some of them appear to be growing ready to explode into craters the latest of these craters was found in september 2020 when a bubble of methane gas that had been swelling under the melting permafrost burst open to form a big 164-foot deep crater so far there have been around 20 of these craters discovered but these are not the only craters to have been found there's something even bigger and more ominous massive slumps are also starting to form and the biggest of these is bataga crater known to locals as the gateway to the underworld batagaker is the biggest permafrost crater in the world and lies in the east siberian teger eco region the land here began to sink after forests around the sea were cleared causing a thawing of permafrost in the 1960s without the cooling effects of the trees the frozen soil started to melt causing it to collapse and slump now this yawning pit is more than half a mile wide and 328 feet deep the crater is always alive and growing at an alarming rate about 30 to 100 feet per year when the weather is warm researchers can hear the constant crackling of melting ice and hear groans as big slabs of permafrost some as big as cars break and fall off the head wall like the smaller craters buttage crater is also releasing previously trapped carbon dioxide and methane gases into the atmosphere accelerating climate change researchers have been taking samples from the crater and the bottom layers of permafrost are dated to 650 000 years old the oldest permafrost in the world remnants of ancient forests can be found here preserved for eons in the permafrost and researchers say sediment layers in the crater could reveal thousands of years of the earth's history as the crater expands scientists are discovering well-preserved remains of plants and animals that have been extinct since the ice age with all these craters being found scientists are warning that siberia's melting permafrost could become a major environmental disaster and now scientists have found a startling number of 7 thousand mounds or pingos which could be gas-filled bubbles ready to explode at any time now work is being done to try and figure out which of these are dangerous or not scientists believe they understand these craters how they're formed and what problems they pose for the environment but there is another mysterious crater in siberia and no one's exactly sure how it was created and where it came from the ptomsky crater was discovered in the urkus region in southeastern siberia in 1945 by a geologist named vadim kolpakov named after the potomsky river local residents called it the nest of the fire eagle the cone of this crater has a very strange shape with a small mound in the center which is 130 feet tall and 100 meters across at the base by counting three rings growing on the crater scientists calculated the crater to be around 250 years old but the strange thing is that the trees around the crater show accelerated growth similar to growth seen in forests around chernobyl after the nuclear disaster in 1986 since the crater was discovered many have tried to figure out what created it some researchers have tried to link it to the tunguska meteorite which still has not been discovered some believe it's the remnants of some type of volcano but no volcanic material has ever been found in fact the entire structure consists of broken grey limestone modern geomorphologists believe the potomsky crater could be a very rare gas volcano event for vast stores of underground gases but the mystery still continues and there's no solid evidence as to how it was created perhaps one day we'll have the answers to this and more so make sure to stay tuned here for more exciting and incredible things happening on the planet 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 has tried 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 [Music] 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's 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 life span for such a spacecraft is 50 plus years but given voyages 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 the planet earth isn't going to be habitable forever if the human race is going to survive one day we'll have to pack up our things and move to another planet it sounds easy until you realize the vastness of space and even how big our solar system is no matter where we're going in space we need to travel fast and not just at the speed of light either we're talking about ludicrous speed but some researchers have designed an impossible engine that violates the laws of physics and another group of scientists are now saying a warp drive is possible is nasa really working on this technology and what does the future hold for space travel consider this for a moment our closest neighbor alpha centauri is 4.367 light years away so even if we traveled in a ship at 100 light speed it would still take you 4.367 years to get there we could use rockets to get ourselves around in space but the big problem with them is the amount of fuel we would need to carry to get anywhere but even rockets have their limits including how fast they can push a spacecraft we're going to need something that can generate some serious thrust and be able to do so without carrying a large amount of fuel because in space there are no gas stations but there is an engine out there that reportedly can push a spacecraft around without the need for fuel and this engine produces no exhaust either you just plug it in fire it up and go it's called the em drive or impossible engine because it claims it can do the impossible so how does this em drive work at first glance it actually does look a bit like a rocket engine from the side however there are no openings in the device and it works by bouncing around microwaves inside a closed chamber that bouncing around of microwaves in the chamber is supposed to create a push so to speak this is a big deal because all forms of rocketry require some conservation of momentum in order to put a spacecraft in motion you've got to push off something for example if you jump your feet push off the ground an airplane pushes off the air and rockets use exhaust gas to push them and whatever they're carrying forward but the em drive doesn't push off anything basically it's a container with microwaves bouncing around inside it and it can supposedly move itself now you understand why this is called an impossible engine the explanations for how this thing works goes past our current understanding of physics nobody really knows how it's supposed to work it could turn out that our understanding of physics is broken or perhaps the testing of this device will give us some brand new physics the em drive concept came to life in 2001 and there have been some research groups that claim they've measured a net force coming from their devices however what they're measuring is an incredibly small effect so small it couldn't move a piece of paper so what we have after nearly 20 years is a bunch of experiments that haven't delivered something worth talking about or any explanation of how they work some experts say that this drive will never work and all projects will likely be a waste of time and money it's possible that our understanding of physics or new physics not yet discovered could make this thing work [Music] but there are other space engines out there that people said would never work and they sprang to life we're talking about the ion drive something that was only thought possible in science fiction when this was first imagined and when people first heard about a real ion drive they also thought it would never produce enough power to move a small spacecraft but the ion drive really does work and in 2016 nasa awarded the california-based company aerojet rocketdyne 67 million dollars to design build and test an advanced and super efficient solar electric propulsion system or scp for short they also call this driver hall effect thruster that uses propellant accelerated by an electric field the ion drive works first by converting solar power to electricity that electricity is used to accelerate ions out of a nozzle which in turn generates thrust it turns out that engineers have been developing scp technology for more than half a century and there are ion thrusters on multiple spacecraft including nasa's dawn probe which is now orbiting the dwarf planet series there are plans to use the scp drive for missions to mars but the issue with the ion drive is that it transfers a very small amount of momentum to the spacecraft but while ion drives are slow they're among the most fuel-efficient of all spacecraft propulsion methods right now nasa is using a high-power electric propulsion system for the lunar gateway an outpost that will orbit the moon in april 2021 nasa fired up the iron thruster system which is about thirty percent more powerful than previous designs but nasa started to look at another means of getting spacecraft quickly to their destination nuclear pulse propulsion around the same time that nuclear jet engines were being developed for bombers there's been some interest in using nuclear reactors to power spacecraft one thing is that they can survive the cold dark regions of space without requiring any sunlight and there also reliable the zeus reactor is designed to last 10 to 12 years and it could propel spacecraft to other planets in less time but there are some problems with this propulsion system too only fuel like highly enriched uranium can withstand a nuclear reactors extremely high temperatures and that doesn't make them safe to use but there is another blow to this type of propulsion system because the us recently prohibited the use of highly enriched uranium to propel objects in space if another safe means was possible right now russia is planning to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft that will travel from the moon venus and then to jupiter roscosmos said that its space tug will launch in 2030. the energy module that will power this spacecraft is called zeus basically a mobile nuclear power plant and is designed to produce enough power to push heavy cargo through space right now it would take more than three years to make a round-trip visit to mars but nasa figures that a nuclear-powered spacecraft can cut a year off that time now nasa wants to integrate a 10 kilowatt nuclear power plant with a lunar lander and put it on the moon as early as 2027 the usa has never put a nuclear reactor into space but russia has put more than 30 reactors in space so far and zeus will use a 500 kilowatt nuclear reactor to jump from planet to planet advances in nuclear technology such as nuclear fusion may well change everything but some say we're still far away and propellant-powered rockets are the best we have at the moment propulsion of any spacecraft usually requires some sort of propellant but there are other methods that use only the sun itself solar sails have been in development for many years now but now that technology is advancing spacecraft powered by the sun are fast becoming a reality in 2019 spacex launched the lightsail 2 using the spacex falcon heavy the 7 million light sail 2 is 344 square feet in size and has sails made of tear-resistant mylar when radiation pressure from the sun hits this material it creates pressure which moves the spacecraft so how fast can it go that depends on how much sunlight is hitting the sails and if the craft is far away from a star it's going to move much slower but what about warp drive technology just because you've heard that warp drive would be impossible to design and create doesn't mean it won't happen in fact scientists have just recently announced that a physical warp drive is now possible yes seriously in the new paper researchers say that they've nailed down a physical model for a warp drive many have said the technology is impossible because it would require a huge amount of exotic negative forces we all know the term warp drive comes from the famous science fiction series star trek the federation's faster than lightspeed warp drive works by colliding mata and antimatter which produces explosive power but what about warp drives in reality our current understanding of the warp drive comes from the now iconic theoretical physicist named miguel alsubia this drive conforms to einstein's theory of general relativity to achieve super luminal travel by a local expansion of space-time behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it but the aldsubia drive would need a ton of energy probably more than what's available in the entire universe in order to contract and twist space-time in front of it and create a bubble if you were an astronaut inside that spaceship with the bubble around it you wouldn't feel any acceleration nasa has actually been trying to build a physical warp drive for the last decade but hasn't made much progress yet but this brings us to the new study scientists at the advanced propulsion laboratory at applied physics unveiled the world's first model for a physical warp drive where the existing model uses negative energy or exotic matter that doesn't exist or is impossible to generate with our current understanding of physics this new concept uses floating bubbles of space-time rather than floating ships in space-time in fact this new physical model uses almost none of the negative energy needed in the previous model and capitalizes on the idea that space-time bubbles can behave any way they want to alsubia even endorsed this new model however this is just a concept for now and the mass requirements needed are still enormous but while a physical drive may not be a reality today or even a century from now with this exciting new model warp speed travel is a lot closer than we previously thought it's been long thought that there are objects out in space moving around between stars and sometimes they can pass through our solar system and not long ago something from deep space made a surprise visit some say this visitor was a comet or maybe an asteroid but another astronomer strongly believes it's something completely different was it the splinted remains of an exoplanet or was this interstellar visitor some kind of alien spacecraft in disguise and why do some believe this on october the 19th 2017 the very first known interstellar object to enter our solar system was detected by astronomers using the pan stars observatory in maui hawaii a big telescope equipped with one of the world's largest digital cameras with almost 1.4 billion pixels what they saw was a small point of light flashing through our solar system like a beacon from a lighthouse not typical of an asteroid or a comet in fact it was something no one had ever seen before astronomers named it which means a messenger from afar arriving first and at the time they believed it was some kind of elongated cigar-shaped object tumbling through space because of the way changed brightness it was estimated to be bigger than the eiffel tower some 1 312 feet long and 130 feet thick it wasn't discovered until it was on its way out of our solar system 40 days after passing the closest point to the sun on september the 9th 2017 and it was moving incredibly fast about 196 000 miles per hour and the way it was whipping around the sun told scientists that this object had to have come from somewhere beyond our solar system the object flew past the earth so fast that its speed couldn't be from gravity of the sun alone in fact the sun had nearly no influence on this unknown object as it hurtled through our solar system the strange thing about a muammua is it's not an asteroid and it doesn't look anything like your ordinary comet however it behaves like a comet comets are small icy bodies that develop tails made of volatile materials seen vaporizing off the comet's body from the heat of the sun it just so happens that the second interstellar object discovered in our region of space in 2019 comet 2i borisov behaved and acted like a normal comet did and this made a muammar look even stranger astronomers were unable to explain amumu's movements through space by the force of gravity alone some researchers believed that a muammar was jetting out gas from the sun-lit side that would push the object like a rocket however the problem with this is there was no detectable escaping gas no tail like you would see from a typical comet not only that the push seen from mamuamua was stronger than what scientists would have expected to see from any other ordinary comet and it was a continuous push if cometary outgassing is ruled out and then inferred excess force is real then only one possibility remains and we'll get to that in a moment the way in which the object accelerated had many believing it was an alien spacecraft perhaps some kind of extraterrestrial probe powered by some internal power source the other strange thing is that no one had a clue to what solar system it came from or how old the interstellar visitor is because it was traveling so fast that no telescope could grab a decent enough image to give us an idea of what it really looked like or what it was made out of this greatly added to the mystery some researchers have come to exotic conclusions to what this first interstellar visitor could have been and where it might have come from a harvard professor of astronomy by the name of avilab said that umua is indeed an alien spacecraft which is powered by a light sail the method of propelling a spacecraft using radiation pressure given off by the sun or huge mirrors the only way to make sense of a moomoo's strange acceleration without resorting to some sort of undetectable outgassing is to assume that the object was propelled by solar radiation by photons bouncing off its surface and the only way the object could be propelled by solar radiation is if it were no thicker than a millimeter and have a very low density with a large surface area this object could function as a sail powered by light rather than by wind such an object could be produced by nature leaving the only other explanation that a muammar must have been designed built and launched by an extraterrestrial intelligence he further explained that the non-gravitational acceleration is a sign of deliberate maneuvering and amuemua has no comet tail showing any outgassing there's no way of proving or disproving this theory and a claim like this one from an experienced and well-respected astronomer is very unusual but another theory has now surfaced that might explain what a muammar really is it's now believed the object could be like a pancake or a giant cookie-shaped piece of debris a piece of shrapnel from an exoplanet like pluto in 2021 two arizona state researchers published a pair of papers arguing that the object could be a hydrogen iceberg these researchers think that some space object hit the planet where muammar originated from and the violent collision sent the chunk of planet careering towards our solar system around 400 to 500 million years ago in the beginning of discovery researchers thought it might be a long thin cigar-shaped object tumbling end over end and something unknown appeared to be making a muammar move faster as if something was pushing on it but now researchers think they understand this strange visitor and it is neither an asteroid or a comet no one is certain what a muamua is made of so scientists calculated the different kinds of ice that would change from solid to gas at a rate that accounted for a muammur's rocket effect and concluded that the object must be made of nitrogen ice the same stuff you'd find on the surface of pluto or neptune's moon triton and here's a big surprise our first interstellar visitor actually entered the solar system way back in 1995 as it got closer to our solar system and therefore the sun the chunk of planet started losing layers of frozen nitrogen by the time we discovered it the object had already lost 95 percent of its mass melting into the small chunk that was detected so maybe after all it isn't some type of alien technology but the idea of a piece of an exoplanet flying through our solar system is still exciting if not downright scary depending on where it's headed right now the object is leaving our solar system and we'll leave our solar system and enter interstellar space in the late 2030s never to return again but there is something called project lyra which develops concepts for reaching interstellar objects like a muammur the goal of the project is to see if it's possible to send tiny spacecraft to intercept and study interstellar objects but the challenge to catch a muammura is formidable this is because it's moving at 5.5 astronomical units per year that's 465 million miles and it will be beyond saturn's orbit very soon this is much faster than anything we've ever sent into space and the challenge of sending a spacecraft to catch a muammar pushes the current envelope of space exploration to the limit despite this a mission is possible and a tiny light sail spacecraft could be launched in 2030 to 2033 and richemont by 2047 and 2049. we've already built the lightsail 2 spacecraft which has a sail the size of a boxing ring made from a sheet of mylar this same kind of solar technology could be used to send tiny probes quickly through space just by bouncing a high-powered laser off their tiny sails and perhaps one that could catch a moammua and finally tell us exactly what it is the observable universe spreads across and expands so big that it warps the imagination and although there is a cosmic boundary we can see many astronomers believe there could be much more out there in the darkness billions and billions of light years away and it seems there is something strange and mysterious out there with an immense gravity pulling on everything space is expanding at an accelerated rate and giant space structures farther than we can see could be out there tearing space apart and we may have found one of these in our own universe [Music] the universe is larger than we can comprehend currently we know there are at least 100 to 200 billion galaxies out there that we can now see but it's a good chance there could be two trillion galaxies or more in our observable sphere alone we just can't see them we all know that the observable universe is estimated to be approximately 13.7 billion years old this is defined by the speed that light travels and astronomers came up with the age of the universe by measuring light that has reached us from the oldest and most distant stars we define observable space by the light that has reached the earth and can be seen cosmologists estimate the oldest photons we can currently see have traveled a distance of 45 to 47 billion light years since the hotly debated big bang theory this means that our sphere of observable universe is around 93 billion light years across to give you an idea how big that really is one light here which is the unit of astronomical distance that light travels in one year is 9.46 trillion kilometers with that in mind the big question is how can the universe be 93 billion light years across if it's only 13.7 billion years old this means that the universe could be older much more than 14 billion years [Music] we know that anything further away from the light that we see from the beginning of the universe or the cosmic big bang hasn't had enough time to reach us thus we can't see what's out there it's pitch black but does this mean the edge that we can see is all there is the truth is there could be a lot more out there ever since the big bang the cosmos has been growing at an increasing rate it was edwin hubble that discovered that the universe is expanding and that all galaxies are moving away from the milky way not only are these galaxies moving away from us but the farther away they are the faster they're flying away from us in fact hubble found that for each additional mega parsec of distance galaxies receded 500 kilometers per second faster this became known as the hubble constant and the area of our observable universe is called the hubble volume one thing we need to understand is that the word observable in this sense doesn't refer to the capability of our current modern technology to detect light or other information from an object or even if there is anything to be detected observable here in this case refers to the physical limit of the speed of light itself which is its maximum speed when talking about the distance of anything in space we're also talking about time looking up into the night sky is a little bit like time travelling all those glittering stars in the night are only snapshots of what those stars looked like in the past just think about it some stars and other objects in the cosmos are so far away that their light can take thousands to millions of years to reach planet earth and if there is something beyond the edge of the observable universe that we can't currently see it means that these objects are so far away from us that their light still hasn't reached us the cosmic horizon is the measure of the distance from which we can retrieve information but is there something out there past what we can see it's really tough to answer this however to get some idea if there is something out there we need to take into consideration the curvature of the observable universe the thing is that astronomers aren't really sure if the universe is infinitely big or just vastly huge in order to measure the universe astronomers look at its geometric curve on large scales which tells us about its overall shape if the universe is perfectly geometrically flat then it can be infinite but if it's curved like earth's surface or is like a bubble then it has finite volume current observations and measurements of the curvature of the universe show that it's almost perfectly flat like a sheet of paper that would indicate that it must go on forever we know with some certainty that there is more universe out there beyond the boundary that we can see astronomers believe that space could be infinite with more of what we already see and it's probably distributed the same way as it is here in the observable part now here is one of the mind-blowing things to think about if the universe is infinite if this were to be true then you wouldn't just find stars different planets and galaxies you would eventually find every possible thing think about that for just a moment you would find everything if you went far enough you would find a solar system identical to ours in every way including a planet earth and your twin except that a copy of you might have eaten cereal this morning instead of a version of you that skipped breakfast altogether it's a fact that some cosmologists think if you go far enough you would eventually find another hubble volume that is identical to ours with a version of yourself mirroring your every action now while that might sound impossible to what our minds can grasp and understand there is something else very strange and unexpected that was discovered by astronomers in 2008 they found that galactic clusters were all streaming in the same direction at over three million two hundred and eighteen thousand six hundred and eighty eight kilometers per hour it's a phenomenon called dark flow this movement of galaxies defies all predictions about the distribution of mass throughout the universe after the big bang so what is the mysterious gravitational pull on all these galaxies one possible cause could be massive structures that are outside of the hubble volume that are exerting a massive gravitational influence in simpler terms massive objects with a huge gravitational force pulling everything towards them if true this would mean that the structure of the infinite universe beyond our view is not uniform no one knows what these structures could be it's possible that aggregations of matter and energy on scales we can barely fathom or they could be gravitational forces of other universes speaking of massive structures there is one in our universe that's so big that it shouldn't even exist in fact it's the biggest structure in the observable universe it's called the hercules corona borealis great wall and it measures 10 billion light years across it's so big that it makes up eleven percent of the observable universe to put this further into perspective if you were traveling at the speed of light it would take you ten billion years to get from one end to the other so why shouldn't it exist the problem is that astronomers have no idea how this great wall formed only a few billion years after the big bang and could have grown so big in such a short time this means there could be giant structures like these out there pulling on everything including space one day it could very well rip apart the fabric of space-time itself and speaking of gravitational forces from other universes some astronomers believe that the post-big bang expansion of the universe created bubbles that formed in the structure of space and each of these bubbles is an area that stops stretching along with the rest of space and formed its own universe with its own physical laws in this scenario not only is space infinite but each bubble is also infinite because it can store an infinite number of infinities inside a single infinity to make that seem a little more clear even if you could reach the boundary of our bubble the space in between bubbles is still expanding so in the reality of space time you could never get to the next bubble no matter how fast you travel but will we one day have the technology to see what is beyond the edge of the universe we can now see the sad reality is that light from any object outside the hubble volume will never reach us because there's space between us and it's expanding too quickly for example we may never see what a galaxy looked like 10 billion years after the big bang this doesn't have anything to do with our limited technology but instead the physical limits of the speed of light itself this means that any light emitted by objects at a distance of 19 billion parsecs will never reach the earth as time goes on more and more points in space will have time for their light to reach us which means that the observable universe is still increasing in size and that also means that the age of the universe will increase that said you might think that one day if humanity is around long enough the entire universe would become observable to us but since space in the universe is continually expanding the distance between us and everything else becomes farther and farther each second however the james webb space telescope will be able to look farther into space we'll look backward in time and just may give us more answers to what else exists out there in a sense it's a time machine and we'll be able to see further into the past if humanity wants to explore the universe we'll have to learn how to colonize and terraform other worlds but what exactly would it take to terraform a planet and do we have the technology to make a planet like mars comfortable for us discover what stands in our way of terraforming which places in our solar system are the best for human colonies to be built and find out how we just created oxygen for the first time on another planet planet earth is the only place where humans can exist for now it's a scary thought that if our planet suddenly started to become uninhabitable we'd have no place to go mars is one planet in our solar system that could be colonized nasa wants to put humans there sometime in the 2030s but when we send humans to mars they'll need a way to return to earth safely and those astronauts will also need oxygen to breathe mars is a cold and desolate world with a thin atmosphere that's made up of 96 carbon dioxide nasa already has several rovers running around on the martian surface checking it out looking for signs of ancient life and seeing how habitable the planet might be the perseverance rover recently landed there and it brought with it a very important experiment called moxie the mars oxygen in situ resource utilization experiment it's a small toaster sized box that has three main components on april 20th 2021 moxie became the first instrument to create oxygen on another planet by separating oxygen atoms from carbon dioxide molecules while using high levels of heat for the conversion during the first run of moxie it produced about 5 grams of oxygen that's about 10 minutes worth of breathable oxygen for an astronaut but this small car battery sized units can only generate 10 grams an hour but now that moxie has proven it can produce oxygen nasa plans to build a much larger unit about 100 times larger another big achievement of moxie is that it's the first kind of technology that just used elements of another world's environment and turned it into a usable resource nasa calls it in-situ resource utilization oxygen is also needed for rockets and to get off mars a ship or rocket would need about 33 to 55 tons of fuel that's where liquid oxygen comes in mars made liquid oxygen could supply more than three quarters of the fuel needed to explore the red planet and could also fuel other missions to nearby planets and moons and if you mix hydrogen and oxygen together you either produce water or hydrogen peroxide and water is another important resource that we're going to need three billion years ago an ocean covered one third of the martian surface but now 99 of mars water is ice it should be possible to melt this ice and filter it so that it can be used when it comes to colonizing the planet mars we could build big domes and pressurize those with a breathable atmosphere using a moxie system but building domes and living inside them is no easy task and we need to be sure we're up for that challenge take for instance the biosphere project which was a compound built in arizona to see if we humans are able to build and live in self-sustaining colonies in outer space we have a more in-depth video on the biosphere project you can check out thanks to this project we now probably understand exactly what we need to build these domes out of and how we might be able to survive inside of them technology has come a long way since then and elon musk says that we would live in big domes made of glass at first and then we'd eventually terraform the planet over time colonizing mars definitely seems possible but is it really possible to terraform the planet for those who don't know terraforming is the process of taking a barren or desolate planet like mars and turning it into an earth-like or somewhat habitable environment it sounds good in science fiction stories but mars has big problems that our current technology cannot overcome not as of yet mars has a very low atmospheric pressure currently less than one percent of the earth that pressure would have to be increased a lot to sustain an atmosphere elon musk joked about an idea to nuke the polar ice caps on mars and minerals and soil could also provide a source of co2 but even if we use nuclear weapons and processed all those sources we would only increase atmospheric pressure to about seven percent of the earth which is one thousand and thirteen point two five millibars or about fourteen point seven pounds per square inch that means that any liquid water on the surface of mars would freeze or evaporate quickly and using nuclear weapons might only put the planet into a nuclear winter it's still possible that there is enough carbon bearing materials buried deep in the martian crust that might hold enough co2 to reach the pressure needed but no one knows this for certain yet but it's not the only problem mars is missing a magnetosphere which means it will be difficult to maintain an atmosphere and ozone layer protecting the planet from solar radiation and because the planet lacks any plate tectonics it makes it incredibly difficult to introduce and isolate the proper amount of greenhouse gases life needs to survive mars also has lower gravity now you might think it wouldn't be a problem but lower gravity poses high health risks like bone demineralization muscle atrophy and weaker immune systems as seen in some of our astronauts at the international space station mars is a cold and desolate place but why fly to another planet if we want to try terraforming a cold and frozen wasteland it seems the ussr wanted to do something similar where palm trees could grow in siberia and the cold sea shores would turn into sunny sandy beaches full of tourists in the 1960s there was a proposed plan by a russian engineer named petra borisov who wanted to build a dam across the bering strait the reason is that 80 million years ago at the boundary between the mesozoic and cenozoic the earth was in one of its most favorable states the latitudes of siberia and alaska were in the subtropical zone and the arctic islands and antarctica were covered with forest all that's needed to return the area to this state is to restore the cenozoic water exchange between the polar basin and the equatorial seas but building a dam like this would take an incredible amount of resources the width of the strait in the narrowest part is 45 miles and the maximum depth is 193 feet it was proposed to build the dam from large reinforced concrete blocks delivered by the sea the width of the pontoon blocks would have to be 131 feet by 820 feet long with a height of 65 to 196 feet the dam itself would have been 55 miles long the result would have been an increased flow of heat to the arctic and gradually the arctic ocean would lose all its ice and temperatures in the northern part of eurasia will increase of course this project never took place and we can already see the warming of siberia now but what about something not on earth but right next door it turns out that the moon has long been considered a potential site for terraforming one of the reasons it would be easier is because it's a lot closer to us than mars and transporting people and equipment will take a lot less time because it's close any resources or products made on the moon could be shuttled to earth in much less time and a tourist industry would definitely pop up with people wanting to go to the moon for their vacation but the moon has a really thin atmosphere if any at all and the volatile elements needed for life don't exist there or are in short supply in an impossible task of creating an atmosphere you'd need to bombard the surface of the moon with comets that contain water ice that would release gases and water vapor the presence of water ice in the lunar soil and large patches around the southern polar region could be used to create surface water once a greenhouse effect was triggered getting the moon to start to rotate again by crashing asteroids into it since it's tidally locked to earth would also have to be achieved all this sounds really impossible but there's another idea to terraform a place on the moon called shackleton crater where scientists have already found evidence of water ice by using solar mirrors and building a dome over the 13 mile long and 2.6 mile deep crater a microclimate could be created where plants could be grown and a breathable atmosphere created once again we lack the technology to pull any of this off but it still might be possible to see some type of subsurface installation built on the moon for future human explorers another surprising place that we might be able to terraform one day is venus venus is considered earth's twin because they're almost the same size in mass and are rocky terrestrial planets venus also orbits the sun in the habitable zone and it's close making it easier to transport explorers and supplies the gravity of venus is about 90 percent of what we experience here on earth venus doesn't have a problem with a thin atmosphere in fact it's the opposite and is 90 times thicker than the earth's the surface of the planet is also hot enough to melt lead and the air is a toxic combination of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid it definitely doesn't sound like a place you want to visit anytime soon but despite this being a hellish world scientists think it's a better candidate for terraforming than mars reducing the heat in the atmosphere would be the first thing on the list but this would require a huge amount of energy and resources using advanced materials which likely don't exist yet a huge orbital shade large enough to cool the atmosphere enough could be built however we're talking about a structure that would need to be four times as big as venus itself and it would have to be assembled in space which would require a massive fleet of robot assemblers increasing the speed of venus's rotation would also have to be done and this would require a huge amount of energy such as directing several asteroids into the planet using large fleets of spaceships equipped with advanced drive systems but thousands of impactors would be needed but there is even another world out there that scientists say could be terraformed the saturn moon titan is appealing as a place to terraform because of its vast reservoir of resources its hydrocarbon reserves such as petroleum are several hundred times greater than all known reserves on earth it's covered in a wide variety of organic compounds mostly methane and ammonia and it has a lot of water its atmosphere is primarily nitrogen resembling that of early earth together all this stuff has the main ingredients for a perfect place to terraform when we have the technology to change the atmosphere one idea is to position huge mirrors in orbit to direct sunlight onto the moon's icy surface which is ice and contains many greenhouse gases this could warm the place up considerably and at the same time release water vapor which would in turn oxygenate the atmosphere titan also orbits most of the time with saturn's magnetosphere which would protect it from the solar wind despite all the major technological challenges we face most of humanity believes that we need to find a second home in our solar system the big question is which one should it be and when will it happen let us know what you think and make sure to stay tuned here for more amazing videos of our planet and the universe we live in the kepler telescope was built for one purpose to look at a certain patch in the milky way in search of exoplanets the exoplanet hunter observed over hundreds of thousands of stars and discovered thousands of exoplanets during its lifetime [Music] liftoff of the delta ii rocket launched in 2009 as part of nasa's discovery program kepler's job was to constantly scan a fixed patch of sky within our milky way galaxy to find planetary systems at the time of the launch it had the largest primary mirror ever sent into space and it also had a 96 megapixel camera to process the light astronomers were interested in finding out just how many stars of planets orbiting around them and how many of these extra solar planets or exoplanets have conditions that are suitable for life to develop in its nine years in space kepler observed 530 536 stars and confirmed the existence of 2662 new exoplanets these exoplanets are unlike anything we've ever seen in our solar system before most of them are significantly bigger than earth and orbiting so close to their stars that they complete one revolution every several days and there are some very strange worlds some have star-facing sides with temperatures that can melt iron and have entire hemispheres covered with oceans of liquid molten rock other exoplanets the size of jupiter orbit not one but two stars if you're standing on the surface of one of these planets you'll be able to see a binary sunset but kepler's legacy is that it's successfully found earth-sized worlds orbiting at a safe distance from their host stars inside what's known as a habitable zone or goldilocks zone this is where the temperatures are warm enough for water to condense on their surfaces but not so cold that it will just freeze up entirely although being in this zone doesn't guarantee the existence of life the presence of water is significant and the foundation of life as we know it one such exoplanet discovered by kepler that has recently generated excitement among researchers is called k218b in september 2019 two scientific teams independently announced that they found signs of liquid water in the planet's atmosphere situated 124 light years away from earth k218b is about eight times the mass of earth and three times as big it orbits a main sequence red dwarf star called k218 a red dwarf star is the smallest coolest star and by far the most common type of star in the milky way according to kepler's data astronomers estimate that six percent of red dwarf stars have an earth-sized planet in the goldilocks zone at least in our neighborhood to find water on the surface of one such planet is a landmark discovery in the search for potentially habitable alien worlds k218b is also the first planet with water out of all of the exoplanets discovered by kepler in the habitable zone of stars kepler first discovered the planet in 2015 and since then its composition has been studied using other telescopes like the spitzer and hubble space telescope kepler mainly used what's known as the transit method for exoplanet hunting it essentially means that if a planet passes in front of a star the light from the star dims slightly and that's how we can tell that there's a planet there the level of dimming and how long it lasts gives us important information about the size and orbit of the planet however detecting the transit of an extrasolar planet is very challenging for example the diameter of earth is only 1 109 of that of the sun so for an outside observer of the solar system the passage of earth would dim the output of the sun by only 0.008 percent kepler's cameras had to be sensitive enough to detect this minute change in the luminosity using the same method way back in 2014 kepler first found a potentially habitable exoplanet kepler-186f ignited the imaginations of space nerds everywhere when nasa announced its discovery now a new study indicates the exoplanet 500 light years away may also have seasons and a climate similar to our own new research out of georgia tech university has analyzed the planet's spin and axial tilt and found that its tilt is stable like earth's which makes it likely that kepler-186f also has regular seasons and a stable climate similar research on the massive kepler database is going on in research universities all across the world in fact in recent years previous kepler findings that were rejected as potential earth-sized exoplanets due to algorithmic error are getting rediscovered these false positives are now slowly being re-analyzed in conjunction with data from other telescopes one such planet is kepler-1649c in mid-2020 while combing through old kepler data and matching it against new data from the transiting exoplanet survey satellite or tess astronomers confirmed the existence of another exoplanet with very favorable conditions for life kepler-1649c located 300 light-years from earth is very similar to earth in size and estimated temperature this newly revealed world is only 1.06 times larger than our own planet also the amount of starlight it receives from its host star which is also a red dwarf is 75 of the amount of light earth receives from our sun meaning the exoplanet's temperature may be similar to our planets as well kepler-1649c provides yet another example of an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star but before we get ahead of ourselves it's important to note that out of the 2662 exoplanets identified by kepler only 16 of them lie inside the goldilocks zone and out of these 16 some of these planets are tidally locked with their parent stars meaning that only one hemisphere of the planet faces the star and this is not ideal for life others are more like a smaller version of neptune than a larger version of earth and planets similar to neptune are expected to have a significant envelope of hydrogen surrounding any layer of water on the surface with a planetary core of rock and iron if the hydrogen envelope is too thick the temperature and pressure of the water layer beneath would be far too great to support life on top of all this despite being cooler red dwarf stars tend to be more active than sun-like stars thus the planets may be exposed to higher quantities of damaging ultraviolet radiation than what we're used to here on earth because of this surface temperatures can range between minus 100 and 116 degrees fahrenheit or minus 73 to 47 degrees celsius that means the surface could on average be colder than antarctica or hotter than earth's most blistering deserts unfortunately we just don't have the technological know-how to study the composition and atmospheres of these alien worlds and comprehensively answer all these questions yet but don't despair based on the statistical analysis of all the kepler observations astronomers now estimate that one in five stars like the sun have planets about the size of earth and a surface temperature conducive to life given that about 20 percent of stars are sun-like in our galaxy that amounts to several billions of potential habitable earth-like planets just in our milky way alone kepler not only focused its efforts in finding potentially habitable planets in fact a bulk of its discoveries were strange worlds not suitable for life but fascinating nonetheless like the gas giants planets composed mostly of gases such as hydrogen and helium with a relatively small rocky core also known as hot jupiters these planets orbit extremely close to their parent stars and are abundant in kepler's data one such fascinating example of a gas giant is koi 5ab astronomers first flagged koi 5ab as a potential planet way back in 2009 at the time this elusive alien world was only the second planet ever found by kepler it slipped through the cracks a decade ago firstly due to the enormous amount of data that kepler generated and secondly because astronomers noticed that the main koi 5a star had another companion star making analysis very difficult for them indeed the koi 5 system was even more complicated than researchers realized at the time by 2014 scientists had determined that the koi 5 system actually harbors 3 stars and it still wasn't clear if the planet koi 5 a b actually existed or if the 2009 signal was generated by one of the companion stars but thanks to additional data from the test satellite scientists were able to confirm the existence of koi 5ab planetary bodies on stable orbits in a multi-star system is quite a rare find and the discovery of koi 5ab is expected to add a lot to our understanding of planetary formation other exoplanet types identified by kepler include super earths they're more massive than earth yet lighter than ice giants like neptune and uranus and can be made of gas rock or a combination of both lava planets a super dense larger than earth worlds in close hot orbits around their parent stars some of them known as chithonian planets are likely the remnant cause of evaporated hot jupiters and finally trojan planets planets of various size found in strange locations and sometimes even as companions to larger planets though none have been certainly identified yet kepler was finally retired on the 30th of october 2018 as it ran out of fuel the telescope was deactivated with a good night command sent from mission control the next month coincidentally kepler's retirement fell on the 338th anniversary of johann kepler's death after whom it's named although not operational anymore these incredible discoveries predict a near future in which astronomers will use new and advanced telescopes on the ground and in space to more deeply understand kepler's numerous finds one such telescope is already slated to go up into space in 2021 the james webb telescope will take a much closer look at some of these kepler objects of interest and hopefully will bring us closer to answering the question are we alone in the universe before modern telescopes humans could only imagine what the surface of the sun and the planets look like now advanced technology has made it possible to get in close and take images of the sun and the planets deep in our solar system now get ready to see the solar system as you've never seen it before and see images that were so good they shocked astronomers burning with the energy of a trillion nuclear bombs per second the sun is the largest body in our solar system accounting for 99.86 of the total mass one of the most dramatic images of the sun was captured by the solar dynamics observatory on august 31 2012 when a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere erupted into outer space this beautiful but deadly coronal mass ejection cme traveled at over 900 miles per second the planet closest to the sun orbiting at an average distance of 36 million miles mercury has been studied by many spacecraft throughout the years but nasa's messenger spacecraft was the first to orbit the planet images showed the surface covered in craters in all sizes and massive asteroid impact sites like the van ick crater which is 168 miles in diameter and the caloris basin which is 960 miles in diameter with mountains at the outer rim 1.2 miles high these are images with spectral surface measurements that were taken on april the 29th 2015. messenger snapped more than 200 000 images of mercury before ending its mission in 2015 with an intentional crash into the planet's surface the probe's demise was inevitable as messenger had been orbiting mercury since march 2011 and had run out of fuel right before impact it sent back its final image the highest resolution photo of mercury ever captured you'd think that mercury would be the hottest planet because it's the closest to the sun but our next planet is actually the hottest in the solar system the second planet from the sun and also earth's closest neighboring planet venus has a thick atmosphere made up mostly of carbon dioxide sulfur dioxide and nitrogen gas which traps the heat of the sun making it a hellish world venera 13 was a probe built in the soviet union for the venera program to explore venus it was the first lander to transmit color images from the surface of venus venus is a hot world with surface temperatures as high as 880 degrees fahrenheit the probe was designed to only last 30 minutes but it must have been built like a tank because it continued to transmit data and images for more than two hours after landing on march the 1st 1982 nasa then sent the magalan spacecraft to venus in 1990 to image and map the entire surface it sent back images of the planet surface showing evidence of volcanism tectonic plate movement turbulent surface winds and miles of lava channels including one measuring 5 550 miles long another incredible image of the volcano matt mons that rises three miles once magellan was finished mapping the entire surface it also ended its mission and crashed into the fiery planet the third rock from the sun the earth is very unique and the only place known to have life in the solar system there have been lots of amazing images taken of the planet we live on but modern satellite photos are probably the most breathtaking like this image from nasa of the earth as it looks right now this amazing true color image was taken by nasa's moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer from 22 000 miles above the earth and shows north and south america as they appear from orbit the moon also making a guest appearance in the background and on december the 14th 2020 nasa captured a total solar eclipse with the goes 16 that's quite amazing but here is something you may not have seen in march 2011 a russian satellite named electro l captured incredibly detailed images of the earth that appear to rival nasa images many claimed that they are more accurate and show different things but nasa say they're not accurate we're not sure but which images do you think are the best and by the way remember the messenger spacecraft it snapped a photo of the earth and of the moon and sent as a postcard before speeding towards mercury mars has always been of great interest to humans the fourth planet from the sun the red martian planet has been studied heavily the viking orbiter 1 took stunning snapshots of mars in 1979 like this photo of the valles marineris and the viking 2 orbiter snapped an image showing the southern polar planes and polar ice cap in 2013 the mars european space agency's mars express took highly detailed images of hebbis khasma the northernmost part of valles marineris as seen in this movie created from the images but since then four rovers have already been on the planet's surface studying and snapping photos the images from the mars curiosity rover including a selfie were the most incredible images from the surface of an alien world this is a 1.8 billion paranamic view made up of over 1200 images of mars as seen by curiosity which is still operational the largest planet in our solar system the gas giant jupiter has the most unique look of all the planets with its giant great red spot a storm on the planet that's been raging for 350 years and is so large it could swallow the earth whole on july 10 2017 the juno spacecraft flew just 5 600 miles above the great red spot and nabbed the closest image of the massive storm ever taken this image a bit farther away is a little bit truer in color to what we would see if we were orbiting jupiter but juno also captured unbelievable images of polar regions which cannot be seen from earth and what surprised astronomers was that jupiter's north pole has eight storms swirling at its center and they're laid out in a precise geometric pattern the storms appearing as stable fixtures in jupiter's atmosphere and not normal weather but more incredible photos would come and on november the 13th 2018 a new image from juno was created using data from the juno cam imager that's nothing short of breathtaking and on june 27 2019 the hubble telescope captured the planet's trademark great red spot which researchers say is shrinking we got an awesome video coming up on jupiter so make sure not to miss it as the number one contender for the most beautiful celestial body in the solar system saturn is hard to beat with its iconic rings and probably the best images of saturn to date come from the cassini higgins spacecraft on october 21st 2002 the spacecraft was 177 million miles away from saturn when it snapped this photo and on march the 27th 2004 as it got closer took this natural color image as it neared its arrival into saturn's orbit now here's a mind-blowing image of saturn you may never have seen before this is saturn backlit by the sun and with that added light cassini was able to image the ring system in a way not possible from earth and the result is stunning but in 2004 the hubble telescope was also in on the action and snapped an amazing photo of an aura in 2016 the cassini spacecraft sent back images of saturn's northern hemisphere what scientists were surprised to see was a hexagonal vortex storms they've been studied but no one's sure how this forms on september 15 2017 the spacecraft made its final approach towards the gas giant and before sending this final image burned up in saturn's atmosphere like a meteor known as the sideways planet because it rotates on its side the seventh planet from the sun one of the best images taken voyager 2 made a flyby of the planet in 1999 and this image was taken using three colour filters and on july the 11th and 12th 2004 a composite image of uranus obtained by the keck telescope was published showing the icy cold world and its rings those bright spots that you see on the surface of the planet are auras in november of 2011 the hubble telescope snapped an awesome image of uranus and a colorized photo shows an icy blue sphere with red rings and in 2017 the hubble telescope captured auras again on uranus neptune is the eighth planet in our solar system and the farthest away from the sun the only spacecraft that's being close to neptune is voyager 2. one image taken by the spacecraft shows a giant storm raging on the surface of the planet neptune's great dark spot before voyager 2 would complete its mission and head towards interstellar space it made a close approach and snapped this image showing bright cloud streaks in neptune's atmosphere the hubble telescope has taken a recent image of neptune and in december 2020 snapped this image with the great dark spot because it's so far away from us the best images we have of neptune from earth so far was taken by the european southern observatory's very large telescope using a special narrow field adaptive optics mode of the multi-unit spectroscopic explorer instrument many argue whether pluto is a planet or not but you're here to see some photos one of the clearest images of pluto that you'll ever see was taken by the long range reconnaissance imager which is aboard nasa's new horizons spacecraft on july the 13th 2015 but it wasn't done yet and on the next day this image was put together by combining blue red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft the new horizon spacecraft continued to take crystal clear images of the planet pluto also has a moon called charon as seen in this composite of enhanced colour images and this image is the most striking showing mountains across an icy plain humanity has achieved great results getting new images from planets in our solar system and making incredible discoveries we're still too far away to get close images of proxima centrai the next planetary system to ours and current spacecraft headed in that direction will take thousands of years to get there but there are plans to create a wafer thin nano probe called breakthrough star shot that has thin sails to capture energy from a powerful earth-based laser this would accelerate the probe at 134 million miles per hour meaning the tiny probes could reach proxima center eye in 20-25 years just think of the images it could take if that happens sometime soon you'll see it here

Channel: Destiny

Views: 1,429,360

Keywords: universe, space, science, scientists, galaxy, star, sun, earth, destiny, spacex, nasa, black hole, cosmos, moon Scientists Discovered, Scientists Are Worried, Should We Worry, Worry, Discovered, Just Discovered, Something Strange, Found, Scientists Can’t Explain, What’s Hidden Under, Elon Musk, NASA, james webb space telescope, Exoplanet, Kepler, Real Images, Paradoxes, size comparison

Id: BaPztf__NnE

Length: 137min 37sec (8257 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021