Scientists Found a New Planet, but It Suddenly Vanished

the hubble telescope orbits our planet looking out at the big unknown universe since it's out of our atmosphere the hubble can see way further than telescopes on land no clouds up there this guy helped us confirm the theory about supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies it also discovered a whole bunch of new galaxies including the world's oldest one which is about 8 billion years older than our own but let's travel 25 light years away to another special star fomo halt it's one of the brightest stars in the night sky and it's in the constellation southern fish it's almost twice as big and heavy as the sun if you look at it from far away you can see a bright yellow disk around it it's a debris disk full of bits of space rock and it's huge its width is about 25 times the distance from the earth to the sun scientists were curious about it was all this space dust gonna get smushed together and become a planet one day but then they saw something else right there through all that debris was a massive mysterious object a large yellow dot orbiting the star it looked like it was skating around a cosmic ice rink so in 2008 scientists announced they had discovered an exoplanet called fomalhaut b it was the first planet outside of our solar system that we could actually see with our own eyes it's hard to know how heavy it is probably like a couple of mars is put together and it lives pretty far from its host star about four times the distance from the sun to neptune one year on the planet would be the same as 1700 earth years we'd all be babies over there so one question does the planet even really exist scientists said around arguing about it then in 2012 the trustee hubble telescope came up with some new data it was real all along if it was a gas giant like jupiter or saturn that would make it incredibly young 10 times younger than earth and all that dust around it seems to shine non-stop you'd have to wear sunglasses 24 7. but now it's disappeared again nothing but a donut of debris so maybe it was destroyed by a giant asteroid like the one that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the earth or it may have been crushed by a rogue planet these are planets that fly around the galaxy without a clear orbit maybe the dust is all that's left from a head-on collision or maybe something went crazy in the planet's core and it exploded from within scientists now believe that fomalhaut b was never actually a planet in the first place it was just the leftovers of two big rocks smashing together from far away that kind of massive collision would actually just look like a yellow dot these two colliding space rocks must have been at least 125 miles wide that's like dc to philadelphia-wide but this isn't the first time a plan is just up and disappeared from view scientists thought they'd found an earth-sized planet orbiting our neighbor alpha centauri they called it alpha centauri bb not exactly flashy plus in the end it turned out it didn't exist oops scientists make mistakes just like the rest of us not long ago they thought there might be life on venus they found traces of a special gas phosphate which can be a sign of life it was the top story for a month but then someone decided to double check the data there was some phosphine floating around but not nearly as much as they thought travel back in time a couple hundred years and you can find even sillier mistakes back then people believe that the sun revolved around the earth and then our planet was the center of the whole universe that's because they didn't have fancy equipment to measure stuff people saw the sun rise in the east and set in the west that was enough to say that the sun revolved around us so what happened to that planet basically the hubble took a photo of the whole star system but since it's so far away the photo came out kind of blurry scientists just saw a large yellow dot and assumed it was a planet scientists don't usually get photos of far-off planets they normally have to use math to find them space objects are in a constant dance with one another the dance gives off a lot of energy like gravitational energy and light energy it's like this say your friend is hiding behind a corner you can't see him but you can see his shadow on the floor it's kind of like what scientists do when they look out into the stars searching for planets so big deal a planet vanished billions of miles from here but what if our perfectly balanced solar system were to lose one of its planets you better believe it would affect our lives mercury is up first good news is too small to have a gravitational effect on our planet so we wouldn't even notice if it went missing next in line is venus this hot planet is sometimes called earth's twin sister it's completely uninhabited of course other than that venus is one of the brightest spots in our night sky pull it out of the solar system and whoa it's much darker at night but still not exactly a big deal mars life without mars might even be good for the earth there's an asteroid belt between mars and jupiter mars gravity can grab an asteroid from the belt spin it around and catapult it toward us without mars the asteroids would stay in place thanks to jupiter's gravity jupiter's heavier than all the planets in our solar system combine it holds back the asteroid belt and its gravity is actually strong enough to affect the earth a couple of thousand years after it disappears we'd notice big changes we'd move closer to the sun which means a couple of things one we'd have much hotter weather all year round and two our days weeks and years would be shorter saturn uranus and neptune are all too far away for us to notice if they go missing that just leaves one no not pluto what if the moon disappeared basically chaos the earth would tilt even more than it already does and the weather worldwide would go crazy even crazier than now it might even lead to a new ice age the earth would start spinning a lot faster so instead of 24 hours in a day we might have anywhere between 6 to 12 and even though nights would be a whole lot shorter they'd also be darker than ever when we see the moon we're actually seeing the sun reflecting its light off the moon and even a new moon is usually the brightest object in the night sky if the sun were to disappear from our sky it would be pretty much game over this star is the center of our whole solar system without it the orbits of all the planets would collapse and we'd move around in complete chaos the earth the moon and all the other neighboring planets would just shoot out into the universe heading for well we just don't know daytime would be a thing of the past we'd need the sun for that so it would be nighttime forever we'd probably never see the moon again we'd probably never see anything again the earth would get colder and colder and all the water on the planet would gradually freeze but what if the sun turned into a black hole we might still orbit around it hopefully we're far enough away from it to stay safe mercury and venus might be swallowed up but we might get lucky so we'd stay where we are but we wouldn't have the sun to warm us if it happened slowly enough we might be able to adapt we'd need a new power source a new light source and plants would have to adapt to get their energy from somewhere else we'd probably need to build a huge tent like thing over every city forest ocean or we might just jump ship and move to another planet

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

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Id: ka-HlOVtXFA

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021