The Universe: The Most DANGEROUS Phenomena in Our Solar System *3 Hour Marathon*

the sun is the superpower of our solar system a thermonuclear Blast Furnace erupting with massive explosions it can be the same amount of mass as Mount Everest coming out from the Sun and flying out into space at 93 million miles away it would seem that we're safe from the Sun it matters especially in modern times what the sun is doing from the center of the Sun as it rotates around as the Kill Zone with some experts predicting the most violent outbreak of solar activity in modern history it's never been more important to understand the secrets of the Sun thank you there are billions of stars in the universe but one alone dominates our Cosmic neighborhood the sun it's an infernal sphere of mostly hydrogen and helium superheated into a plasma that burns at millions of degrees its surface rages with violent explosions as it spews out storms of deadly radiation millions of miles into space our sun is a type of star known as a yellow dwarf yellow because of the color of its surface and dwarf because it's small for a star but small is relative within its boundaries you could fit one million Earths in our solar system there's simply no bigger star than the Sun at a million miles across it's a massive Celestial Blockbuster the sun is really pretty huge it dominates our solar system not only is the biggest star in the solar system it's the only star in the solar system it's surrounded by a bunch of smaller stuff that we call planets and comets and moons but the sun is our star our star is an enormous source of heat and energy it has a surface temperature of 10 000 degrees Fahrenheit and generates 380 billion billion megawatts of power this dwarfs anything on the human scale Hoover Dam in Nevada only generates 2080 megawatts [Music] in one second the Sun churns out more energy than has been used in all of human civilization all that power in the blink of an eye incredibly it's been burning this way for billions of years early astronomers didn't quite understand how the Sun could generate so much energy for that long a period of time that was the first mystery was really how the Sun generates its energy in the early 19th century scientists assumed that the sun worked just like any fire on Earth that there was a source of fuel perhaps coal that was slowly burning away but there was a serious problem with this Theory I've got a fire in front of me here if I wanted to keep burning I have to keep adding wood to it this fire will last maybe an hour unless I add some more wood now if I had a pile of wood the size of the whole sun and somehow enough oxygen to burn it it would only take about five or six thousand years to burn out that's a long time but it's not long enough to sustain life on Earth by the early 20th century carbon dating of Earth rocks and fossils had proven that the sun was in existence and at temperatures warm enough to sustain life not for thousands of years but for three billion if you wanted to build a fire that would last that long you would need 72 trillion cords of firewood that twelve thousand chords for each man woman and child on the planet clearly there had to be some other process unknown on Earth that was powering the Sun in the 1920s scientists found the answer to the puzzle in a process that would later be harnessed to fuel the hydrogen bomb nuclear fusion fusion occurs when atoms are smashed together at a high rate of speed and literally fused to get this to happen conditions have to be just right for any interaction to happen these two protons each has a positive electric charge and so they would repel each other so you've got to get them close enough together to do that it's got to be hot which means the particles moving very fast and dense enough that they hit each other and they can get close enough together that they actually fuse the core of the Sun is the perfect cauldron for nuclear fusion it's the hottest place in the solar system at a sweltering 27 million degrees Fahrenheit and it's also incredibly dense it's so dense it's 10 times the density of lead and you would think at that density it should be a solid but it's not because it's so hot that it remains a plasma if you heat a gas to high enough temperatures electrons fall off of the atoms and they float around in the soup and so it has Behavior that's different from what a gas would do is we have a different word for it call it plasma to truly understand what goes on in the core of the Sun you have to find some way to imagine the almost unimaginable in addition to studying the sun I also play pool and the Sun is a place where there are billions of particles colliding and interacting with each other and it's really not unlike a cosmic pool table on an unimaginable scale no matter how hard you hit a ball you would never hit it hard enough to actually fuse that ball together with another ball but there's so much pressure and such high density at the core of the Sun that the two objects impacting each other will actually fuse these objects are hydrogenetics together by immense pressure to form in this Fusion process the resulting atom is slightly less massive than the ones that created it the missing mass is given off as energy each second inside the Sun 600 million tons of hydrogen are fused into 595 million tons of helium that 5 million tons of mass lost in the process is converted into energy equal to 1 billion one Megaton hydrogen bombs that's every second when you look out into the cosmos the process that gives you the highest return of energy for free is what goes on in the centers of stars like the Sun so we now know that the sun is powered by nuclear fusion it's the only fuel that we know that can sustain the burning in the sun long enough to sustain life on Earth billions of years [Music] life that we don't often give it a second thought but how light gets from there to here turns out to be an incredible story [Music] the energy created in the fusion process is carried out of the core by particles of light and heat called photons they are what bring the warming rays of the Sun to Earth to reach our planet these glowing travelers from our nearest star must first take a long Winding Road through all the layers of the sun like Dante journeying through the levels of Hell first a photon enters the 185 000 mile thick radiative Zone the region is so densely packed that the photon constantly bumps into other particles like hydrogen and helium atoms it struggles outward in a chaotic zigzag pattern that scientists call the random walk a photon can't escape without interacting over and over and over and over again getting absorbed by atoms and re-emitted and it can be absorbed and re-emitted millions of times as the density decreases as you get further up in the sun it becomes easier and the collisions and the interactions are less when it finally reaches to within a hundred and thirty thousand miles of the surface the photon enters the convective zone and the pace suddenly quickens it's carried upwards by a kind of boiling riding along in huge Columns of gas at hundreds of miles an hour taking only 10 days to emerge on the solar surface the incredible journey is almost over as the photon lifts off through the wispy gases of the solar atmosphere from there it takes only eight minutes for it to zip across 93 million miles of space to our planet [Music] incredibly by the time sunlight actually reaches Earth it's already been in existence for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years [Music] oh for the sun even a million years is a small blip in time the simple perfect disc of a sunset belies the long violent history of our star it is a ball of fire spawned billions of years ago in a massive explosion known as a supernova after this Titanic explosion where a star much larger than the Sun exploded there would have been a huge cloud of gas many times larger than the solar system and small knots of material would have gradually coalesced in this very large Cloud about 5 billion years ago some 10 billion years after the big bang that scientists believe kick-started our universe This Cloud started to collapse under the pull of gravity our solar system probably arose from one such knot of self-gravitating gas that pulled itself together and gradually spun itself up as it pulled in like a skater pulling her arms in during a spin until the star and the various planets coalesced Around It ultimately when the star was dense enough it would have turned on fusion and started glowing giving off sunlight why do scientists believe the sun was born From the Ashes of a supernova the evidence Lies Beneath our feet complex heavy elements like the uranium we mine from the Earth to fuel our nuclear power plants could not have been forged in the sun there is simply not enough heat in a star that size to create elements any heavier than iron heavy elements like uranium can only be created in a catastrophic cosmic explosion Earth and the other planets in the solar system formed out of the same knot of gas that produced the sun in this process the sun hoarded 99 of the mass this means it's the biggest object in our Celestial neighborhood with the strongest gravitational pull that's why everything else revolves around it of all the planets Earth earned a privileged place in relation to the sun if we were closer in our oceans would boil away and the ground would be hot enough to melt lead if we were farther out our planet would be a frozen Wasteland sort of like Goldilocks and the Three Bears not too hot not too cold it's just right here we are at about 93 million miles away from the Sun and we're happy to be here we're lucky to be here and in some sense we're here because it's the right circumstance for us to be here Earth may be in just the right place in the solar system but we're also close enough to the Sun to be a target of its Fury thousands of Mammoth explosions Rock our Sun every year you might expect this explosive force to come from nuclear reactions in the core but in reality what drives all-out bursts of solar violence is magnetism since Earth rotates as a solid our magnetic field is simple we have two poles North and South this is what makes a compass so useful for finding your way around the planet but imagine if instead of two poles you had one to ten million this is what happens on the Sun the sun's magnetic field is a tangled web because even though it's held together by gravity the plasma doesn't rotate evenly plasma at the equator rotates once every 25 Earth days while plasma at the poles takes roughly 35 days to Circle once the sun has what we call differential rotation you have all this plasma that is really turning and churning and that causes magnetic field lines to become twisted and intertwined and mixed up although magnetic field lines are invisible we know they exist on the Sun by looking at features called coronal loops and prominences rising up into the solar atmosphere [Music] just as metal shavings line up in the presence of a simple magnet these Loops of plasma perfectly outline the magnetic structures that support them from Below these plasma arches are so tall and wide that you could slide a planet as big as Jupiter right through them sometimes magnetic fields can twist Plasma in the sun's atmosphere into Majestic helical shapes called flux ropes magnetic Flex rope is sort of like a slinky the magnetic field line is wrapped around many times in a helical structure and when you have highly Twisted magnetic field lines it carries a lot of stored free magnetic energy and sometimes it will even kink in on itself which gives it even more stored magnetic free energy plasma prominences eventually the lead is he released and the mass is flung off into space [Music] where the sun's magnetic field is at its most twisted and complex heat bubbling up from below is capped and the material is cooled by as much as a thousand degrees what results are relatively dark blemishes on the solar surface called sunspots sunspots are only dark in relation to the bright material around them if you could somehow suspend one alone up in space it would shine ten times brighter than the full moon these apparently tiny blemishes are actually plasma craters the size of the entire Earth Galileo was one of the first modern scientists to observe sunspots using a telescope he projected an image of the sun onto paper and traced it he realized that the blemishes were moving across the face of the star which was the first indication that the sun rotated not only does the Sun rotate but sunspots themselves can actually spin like hurricanes on the solar surface and when they do their magnetic field lines become extremely twisted Twisted magnetic field lines mean more energy and more energy means the potential for huge eruptions think of a rubber band as a magnetic field line if you twist it and you twist it enough it's going to have all that energy and when you let it go it's going to release [Music] if you just take an untwisted rubber band and release it it's not going to fly Sunspot unleashes its magnetic energy what results are the most colossal explosions in the solar system solar flares a single flare releases as much as a billion megatons of energy the combined power of a million volcanic eruptions on Earth they appear as these very bright regions and they're so bright because the temperature is so high on the order of 10 million degrees and they can last for hours but the energy is massive the whole explosion is equivalent to millions of nuclear bombs leaving the surface of the Sun all at once solar flares don't just explode out into space they also funnel high energy particles down to a layer of the sun called the chromosphere where they quickly transfer their energy like a cue ball striking the wreck in a game of Billiards so the cue ball acts like one of these very high energy particles coming from the flare region cue ball smacked very quickly into the a ball rack and once it impacts that head ball it's going to transfer that energy to the balls behind it and then they will all fly out because the energy is transferred to all of them a large flare shoots enough high energy particles at once strange things start to happen this is actual footage of a sun quake in 1998 there was a solar flare up in the corona that was so powerful that the material flying down toward the surface of the Sun actually slapped the surface and caused ripples to spread out from there while they may look like ripples on a pond these are actually waves two miles high traveling at a maximum velocity of 250 000 miles per hour the 1998 sunquake would have measured in 11.3 on the Richter Scale more than one million times stronger than the 1989 earthquake That Shook San Francisco in order to shake the surface of the Sun that much the solar flare had to release a colossal amount of energy it turns out it's almost the same amount of energy as if you covered the entire land mass of the Earth with dynamite about a yard thick and set it all off at once so these explosions are not small earthquakes aren't the only natural disasters with equivalence on the Sun flare can also kick off a solar tsunami as waves of plasma and the sun's atmosphere rock it out at 700 000 miles per hour spreading around the entire face of the star in a matter of hours [Music] while Sun Quakes and solar tsunamis pose no danger to Earth the violent action of a flare frequently triggers dangerous eruptions called coronal mass ejections or CMEs in a CME energy from a flare flings a blob of Highly charged radioactive plasma out of the solar atmosphere subjections range in speeds but they can occur as quick as 800 900 miles per second which is extremely fast and they expel a massive amount of material it can be the same amount of mass the same Mount Everest coming out from the Sun and flying out into space where does this blob of superheated radioactive plasma go when it leaves the sun sometimes it sails out harmlessly into space other times it may head closer to home coronal mass ejections from the Sun are perhaps the most dangerous threat you've never heard of also known as solar storms they hear a large masses of supercharged particles across 93 million miles of space most take several days to travel from the Sun to the Earth but some rock it across the solar system at up to 6 million miles an hour reaching our planet in less than 16 hours these storms can induce currents in the outer atmosphere knocking out satellites and cross-country power grids and carry the potential to reach just as much havoc on our infrastructure as a hurricane or tornado but who on Earth is keeping an eye on these potentially hazardous Cosmic blasts this is the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration home to the U.S government's National Weather Service their daily forecasts watches and warnings are essential information for everyday life on our planet but there's a lesser-known group of forecasters working here in a special division called the space environment Center our primary job is to monitor the Sun and to put out the alerts and watches and warnings for solar activity good morning Welcome to our 10 briefing we had one long duration sea Flare from East limb as possible CMA we have not had protons but we have had electrons one thing to note is that this region produced all the activity in December so things might be picking up here in the next couple of weeks these space forecasters are on high alert for solar storms that might disrupt life on Earth solar storm clouds are made up of charged particles so they're initially diverted around the planet by our magnetic field just like waves breaking around the bow of a boat that turns out to be very important because if it impacted the outer atmosphere directly it would knock little bits of the atmosphere off into space one reason why Mars doesn't have an atmosphere is that it doesn't have a strong internal magnetic field and so gradually over millions or maybe billions of years the atmosphere was gradually knocked off into space by the influence of the solar wind and by CMEs that came past the planet but our magnetic field is not the perfect force field of sci-fi movies some particles can penetrate it charging up the upper atmosphere solar storms will even bend and break the magnetic field lines on the far side of the earth allowing charged particles to zip back down the field lines toward the North and South Poles extremely powerful storms distort the magnetic field even further inducing electric currents that span the continents when this happens technology like long-distance power lines can become overloaded can cause damage to Transformers at either end of the line in fact in 1989 most of the Canadian province of Quebec blacked out because a Transformer was blown out by a solar event if we have that storm that hits our communication system it hits our power companies and all these things that we depend on there's all kinds of chaos that can lay out there if power operators have time to react they can reduce the current being sent over their wires and avert disaster satellite operators can also prepare for the onslaught with proper warning when there's a big space storm coming they'll actually put some of their satellites to sleep so that the storm doesn't cause an electrical short or otherwise somehow knock out the satellite so the more warning time they have the better we wouldn't go sailing unless we knew what the weather was going to be similarly when we have a large system like a power system or a telephone grid that can be affected by the weather in space we need to know what the weather is going to be so that we can try and mitigate it solar storms can also disrupt high frequency radio communications used by aircraft in the 1980s Air Force One was transporting President Reagan on a trip to China when a solar storm struck all Communications were lost for several hours effectively severing the head of the United States government the urgency is just like our Earth's weather when we have a tornado warning we know the urgency to get that out to the public to let people know that this is happening the same thing is with space weather users of this information need to know it and they need to know it now just a few hours back we experienced the coronal mass ejection we want to see where this blast is going out and and then we can measure that and see how long it might take from that to reach the Earth from the Sun we're seeing a very huge explosion of material that's coming out and if you look at this small image here here's the sun that's covered up and look at the mass that's being thrown out into space so it's huge very huge because magnetic field lines emanate from the North and South Poles energy from solar storms has easy access to those regions for that reason experts worry that airplane passengers flying over the poles during a powerful storm might be exposed to harmful levels of radiation perhaps a dose equal to a hundred chest x-rays it's not something that we want to mess around with because we never know when that radiation might all of a sudden become a lot more intense while there's an airplane in the sky the threat from solar radiation is just one more reason scientists keep a close watch on our sun it matters especially in modern times what the sun is doing Earth is not an island we are participant in the activities of the solar system sunspots are the triggers for most severe solar storms so forecasters track them carefully as they rotate across the surface of the Sun location location location we see coronal mass ejections all the time from the Sun a lot of them are as the sun is rotated around or from the back side of the Sun that would not be faced toward the Earth so that would be less of a concern as the sun rotates around and that active region gets more into the center of the disc looking at us then that's when we would be concerned with from the center of the Sun as it rotates around as the Kill Zone as the Sunspot rotates around and begins to face directly at Earth that's when we really have to worry about a storm if a big storm lifts off then it can aim directly at Earth and the full force of the storm slams into the planet foreign it's like a shotgun aiming at a Target the more dead on the shot the more likely serious damage will be inflicted great danger also comes astonishing Beauty solar storms generate Majestic planetary light shows the shimmering curtains of color called the Aurora auroras work like neon signs on an enormous scale in a neon sign electricity introduces charged particles into a gas-filled tube the particles in the gas are excited and start to Glow if the tube has only neon inside it will glow red by adding other gases like Argon a whole range of colors can be produced the neon sign is driven by the electric field inside the tube whereas the Aurora is actually driven by the magnetic field and energy from the Sun as the energetic particles in a solar storm stream along Earth's magnetic field towards the poles they excite elements in our atmosphere causing them to Glow oxygen molecules emit a green or red color and nitrogen emits pinks blues and violets while these ghostly lights are usually confined to the poles extremely strong solar storms can drive them closer to the Equator in 1859 a geomagnetic storm ignited by a huge solar flare created auroras as far south as Rome the 1859 storm was an unusually powerful event that some have called the perfect solar storm the 1859 storm taught us a little something about what the sun can do the storm was so intense and the alignment was so perfect that it simply overwhelmed Earth's natural defenses a huge solar flare erupts on the surface of the Sun less than a day later and 93 million miles away the wires that carry Communications across the earth begin to spark business grinds to a halt worldwide as wildfires are ignited by the smoldering lines at the same time colorful auroras light up the Skies of cities around the globe Earth has just been visited by the perfect solar storm the sun kicked up this just incredible solar flare and a massive amount of energy headed towards Earth Not only was this storm one of the two most powerful on record it was also one of the fastest ejecting from a sunspot aimed directly at Earth it raced from the Sun to our planet in less than 18 hours now it takes a really fast rocket ship years to get to the sun this storm this cloud of electrified particles managed to get here in less than a day that's incredibly fast perfect solar storm took place in 1859 when the only technology vulnerable to the onslaught was the telegraphs since the era in which we have become dependent on high technology we've yet to see another perfect solar storm the question remains could it happen again what if we have another one like that can we have another Perfect Storm I'd say yes we can there's no doubt about that the effects that would be on us today compared to 1859 could be devastating [Music] foreign the effects on Earth and on our communication systems we don't exactly know that's the scary part it's likely that our modern Technologies would be battered like beachfront houses during a hurricane if we lost all the satellites that relay cell phone calls television signals and Bank transactions and what if at the same time the failure of power grids cascaded whole regions Into Darkness for hours or weeks if these essential Services couldn't be restored quickly chaos wouldn't be far behind it would definitely be a ripple effect upon society and every man and woman and child that lives on this Earth solar storms can be as hard to predict as hurricanes while forecasters lack the technology to foretell the next Perfect Storm they do know that one would be more likely to hit at the peak of the sun's 11-year sunspot cycle what happens is the sun reverses the direction of its magnetic field every 11 years so in 22 years it reverses and comes back to where it was as we near the reversal every 11 years the number of sunspots increases and there's a spike in solar activity we call that period solar maximum and those periods are interspersed about five years apart from periods we call solar minimum so you have this 11-year back and forth between the sun being sometimes very ferocious and it goes crazy and it's like the Fourth of July with fireworks all the time and then it starts to ramp down and for a few years it gets quieter until we get to a low point where there's a firecracker now and then but not a lot going on just like hurricane Seasons solar maximums vary in intensity some produce many more powerful storms than others although we're currently at solar minimum scientists are watching carefully to see what Mayhem the next solar Max might unleash the last solar maximum was in about 2001 and so the next one ought to be about 2012 but there are different predictions the whole field of solar physicists is basically waiting with baited breath to see what actually happens there are some wildly Divergent opinions on what's going to happen one group is suggesting that this next solar cycle could be the strongest in modern times if those predictions are correct Earth could be in for a wild ride we might have to worry about a repeat of the 1859 event if that were to happen today it would wreak Untold damage we're going to learn a whole lot about what can happen to modern technology when the sun Blows Its Top violence in the sun erupts here in the hellish outer atmosphere known as the corona this region has long held one of the great solar Mysteries because even though it's half a million miles from the heat generating core it burns at millions of degrees this seems to violate the very laws of physics that's very strange we have a thermometer here if I hold the thermometer close to the fire it reads a very high reading where the probe is right now it's over 200 degrees now if I pull the probe out a little farther from the fire okay it drops down to about 90 degrees now the farther I get from the center the cooler it gets in the atmosphere the corona of the Sun the temperature soars hot as the court that's as if I were to say well way off behind me there the heat from the fire is as hot as the fire itself even though it's very far from the fire what force could possibly cause the superheating of the corona the answer will rock you the hellish solar Corona rages at millions of degrees for centuries scientists have been baffled how anything so far from the sun's core could still burn so hot recently as improved satellites offered a closer view of the solar surface Clues began to emerge below the corona the sun's surface is literally boiling the reason is that the entire surface of the Sun is covered with convection cells hot material from the inside of the Sun that rises up through reaches the surface cools off by glowing giving off sunlight and then sinks back down each bubble of material that comes up is about the size of Texas it spreads out across the surface cools off and sinks down in five minutes so that's a tremendously violent process that's happening in literally almost a million places over the entire surface of the Sun All the Time Around the Clock 24 7. this boiling isn't only violent it's also Extremely Loud [Music] sun is a tremendously loud place you could imagine covering the entire surface of the Sun with speakers being driven as hard as the loudest Rock concert you've ever been to that would be comparable to how loud it really is on the surface of the Sun the sun's churning surface creates enough sound energy to super heat the corona to millions of degrees scientists believe that a combination of these sound waves and energy from the sun's magnetic field is responsible for the extreme temperatures found in the corona the only time you can actually see the corona from Earth is that the climax of one of the most dazzling displays in the solar system a total solar eclipse before scientists understood them these awe-inspiring events instilled only fear the ancient Chinese believed that a dragon was devouring the Sun so what's really happening in a solar eclipse in simplest terms it's when the moon blocks our view of the Sun imagine that you're sitting in the movies watching very happily something going on on the screen and then somebody in the row in front of you comes across and blocks your view in the movie theater you might not want that person to come across in front of you but at an eclipse we're very lucky to have the moon come across the Sun and we're lucky to have it come right across the middle we're also lucky that the moon although it's 400 times smaller than the sun is also 400 times closer to us this Cosmic coincidence means that the two objects just happen to be the same apparent size in our Sky which allows for one to completely block out the other [Music] This Magnificent Cosmic event only happens when the path of the Moon intersects the line between the Earth and the Sun the moon's orbit is tilted slightly about five degrees if it wasn't we would have an eclipse every month and then we'd be bored but we're not bored because most months the moon goes above or below the place where the line goes from the Earth to the Sun so instead of one every month we get a total eclipse somewhere on Earth about once every year and a half as the moon slides in front of the sun it casts a shadow onto the Earth the outer part where the shadow is fainter is called the penumbra you're standing within the swath traced by the penumbra as it moves along the Earth's surface then you'll see only a partial eclipse but travel to a spot within the path of the Dark Inner Shadow called the Umbra and you'll experience the Majesty of a total eclipse [Music] there's another option if you can't travel to the path of totality wait in one place long enough and a total eclipse will pass right over your head about once every 300 years the Sun that shining star of our solar system is capable of both astonishing Beauty and ferocious violence It seems impossible to believe but it won't be around forever eventually even the sun Must Die the sun has a fixed amount of fuel in its core it is undergoing Fusion at a rate that you can calculate you say here's the rate that's using its fuel here's how much fuel you have so it's a simple calculation to show when the sun will die and that's in about five billion years well unfortunately the sun will not go out with a bang it is too small to erupt in supernova however Stars Do A peculiar thing they're one of the few things around that get hotter as they cool off as it exhausts its hydrogen fuel our nearest star will cool and gradually collapse under the force of gravity energy from this collapse will start heating up the core again to hundreds of millions of degrees hot enough to start burning helium under the extra heat of the helium burning the star will expand into a monstrous orb called a red giant it gets so big it will engulf the entire Orphans of Mercury Venus and Earth you don't want to be around for that you want to be Planet hopping your way to safety long before this happens the Earth is likely to change its orbit slightly as the scar expands so that it won't be engulfed still talk about global warming you wouldn't want to be there outer layers of our sun will eventually become so unstable that they will fly off into space leaving behind a small core about the size of the Earth so remember we've shrunk most of the sun which is a million miles across to the size of the Earth which is more like 6 000 miles across our once great star reduced to a slowly cooling center and Life as We Know It On Earth will cease to exist and that is the death of the Sun all of this is bad news for the human race but look on the bright side we've got five billion years to prepare for This Disaster for now Humanity basks in the glow of a sun in the prime of its life science has uncovered many of the secrets of our nearest star but we remain awed by its beauty and ever more wary of its Wrath foreign [Music] it takes its name from the Roman God of War a distant Rusty orb in the night sky a source of rampant speculation for centuries rival civilization is there really a face on its surface this intriguing planetary neighbor still captivates and as both a potential base for future colonization and the keeper of four billion year old biological secrets Mars the red planet May hold the keys to both our future and our past [Music] [Applause] foreign if human beings ever inhabit another world in our solar system this is the most likely candidate the red planet Mars to a visitor from Earth a tour of Mars might be very reminiscent of places back home places like Southern California's Mojave Desert GEO an astrobiologist Ken Nielsen finds this desert area so much like Mars he comes here to try to better understand conditions on the red planet you travel around here in the dune buggy and you see features that look just like the Dune features on Mars if you go further and look in the background and see all of these Red Hills full of iron oxides that we see on Mars Mars is filled with iron and it's oxidized iron basically rust turns into dust particles and in addition to the beautiful Dunes you have this red atmosphere sometimes red all over the surface of the planet huge dust storms they don't call it the red planet for nothing but while much of the Martian terrain is similar to Earth some geological features dwarf any of their kind on our home planet a mountain named Olympus Mons Latin for Mount Olympus is the tallest known peak in the solar system it's a now dormant volcano that rises 15 miles above the Martian surface if you draw a picture of Olympus Mons and put it next to Mount Everest and and the big island of Hawaii even taken all the way down to the base of the ocean they look like mole Hills compared with Olympus Mons on Mars that mountain is so large you could be on its slopes and you would not know that you're on the slope of a volcano because the base is so huge before you get to its Summit foreign yet as awe-inspiring as the Martian surface appears it is a brutal inhospitable zone for human beings sex green board five four three two one engine start and liftoff of the Delta II rocket carrying the spirit from Earth to planet Mars it's cold it's dry it's desolate [Music] thank you there are dust storms that can darken the skies for weeks or even months at a time it goes down to a hundred degrees below zero at night every night is an atmosphere with no oxygen Martian air and even occasional cloud formations are made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide so it's not a nice place you wouldn't enjoy it if you went there [Music] Mars is small relative to the Earth only about half the size of our planet and its distance from us is never less than 34 million miles it appears as nothing more than a tiny Red Orb in our night sky even so Mars has captivated humankind for centuries the planet takes its name from the Roman God of War the Romans Associated this distant world with hostility and unrest because of its bloodlike color and because of its distinctive movement in the sky Mars wanders it doesn't do what the stars do the red planet occasionally appears to be moving backward across the sky a behavior that confounded observers for centuries but in 1514 close study of this planetary movement LED polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus to a revolutionary understanding of the solar system for much of recorded history people thought that Earth was at the center of the universe so Along Comes Copernicus and he says no maybe the Earth isn't at the center of the universe maybe the explanation for all this is that things are going around the Sun all the planets are going around the Sun then we can explain why as Earth passes Mars in the orbit Mars begins to wander in our sky it looks like it's going this way and then it starts to go this way by the time of copernicus's observations Mars and the Earth had been passing each other in their respective Orbits for some 4.5 billion years time enough for the two planets to have evolved into very different worlds one warm wet and oxygen rich [Music] other cold dry and oxygen depleted [Music] yet it's now believed that the differences weren't always so Stark scientists today think that Mars was once warm enough for large amounts of liquid water to flow across its surface when we look at Mars today in our best satellite images they tell us the same message we heard with the first missions to Mars and that is that there's no liquid water on the planet today but there's virtually incontrovertible evidence that there was water there in the past everybody knows that when water flows through any sort of dirt there are characteristic structures that are a function of that water running through and when we look at the pictures of Mars the satellite images we see very similar structures leading us to the absolute conclusion that Mars was once far warmer and wetter than it is now Mars of course is a harsh desert today so what could have happened what Cosmic processes could have brought about such a dramatic transformation of the fourth planet from the Sun Story begins with the origin of the solar system somewhere in the range of 4.5 billion years ago our solar system sprang from a supernova a Stellar explosion emitting a swirling mass of molecular particles and gases this swirling mass or nebula began to cool and as it did it condensed and separated into rings of particles these particles began to accrete or gradually Clump together to form planets accretion process creates heat and heavier particles sink to the center of the accumulating Mass so Mars eventually formed a molten iron core this churning molten core generated a powerful magnetic field the field projected outward surrounding Mars like a protective shield blocking harmful emissions from the Sun [Music] you have this constant pressure from the sun which we call the solar wind the solar winds made out of protons electrons cosmic rays all of these kinds of charged particles that could ionize the atmosphere as we call sputter it away but eventually Mars lost its protective shield and most of its atmosphere the moment the accretion process ended the planet began to cool the iron core was no longer able to generate this magnetic field and then the solar wind started pounding the surface of Mars that's a scenario that a lot of people believe shut up the loss of atmosphere stripped the Martian surface of warmth and pressure and since water needs both warmth and pressure to remain in liquid form water is no longer stable on the Martian surface you put a pan of water out on Mars it's going to evaporate very fast and try to freeze at the same time one or the other will win out but you won't have a nice liquid pan of water that's not to say however that there is no water on the planet at all while liquid water is no longer stable on Mars frozen water ice is a different story and evidence suggests that still today tons of water ice might lie just below the Martian polar caps [Music] lock within that ice might just be the Holy Grail of space exploration foreign they are visible through simple telescopes on Earth and they are unquestionably the first planetary features noticeable during an approach to Mars through space the Martian polar caps mysterious Snowy White Ice swirls sheathing the top and bottom of the red planet so actually it's what we call dry ice frozen carbon dioxide the atmosphere is very thin and it's nearly all carbon dioxide so when it gets very cold what condenses out yes carbon dioxide snow carbon dioxide ice but while the White Caps are certainly a colorful planetary feature it's not the Frozen concentrations of CO2 themselves that are of most interest to scientists it's what's thought to be hidden beneath the polar caps that could have massive significance lurking just below the topsoil may be millions of tons of Frozen water water ice hidden from view appears to radiate out hundreds of miles in all directions from the poles and leading scientists think it could be the residue of once vast oceans likely the water is now Frozen in a kind of permafrost beneath the surface but maybe their pressures and temperatures in various areas of Mars that have liquefied the ice and created perhaps aquifers we can see craters you know an impact has happened asteroid has hit Mars blown out a lot of stuff it doesn't blow out dry powder like on the moon and make rays and and Rubble it throws out kind of a muddy slurry of stuff so the conclusion is that you're actually impacting into ice like Northern Canada former Frost layers Tundra kind of stuff orbiting spacecraft have picked up strong indicators for the existence of water ice at the Martian poles remote measurements of soil composition have detected high levels of hydrogen water of course is one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen so the possibility of ice hiding below the surface in those areas is overwhelming but while strong evidence of ice at the Martian poles may be relatively new speculation that water existed there became common more than a century ago and its implication that intelligent life could also exist on the red planet elicited widespread anxiety on Earth for much of the first half of the 20th century astronomers pointed the first telescopes toward Mars in 1610. as Spyglass technology steadily improved the Blurred image of the red planet Drew ever closer to the eyes of Earthly observers by 1877 telescopes could enlarge the image of the distant planet so that it appeared roughly the size of a dime held at arm's length certainly not impressive by modern standards but it was enough for the director of the Milan Observatory Giovanni chaparelli to attempt to sketch the Martian surface and name its geological features chaparelli appeared at the hazy shifting Visage night after night for months and he sees what he thinks are crisscrossed lines on the surface of Mars turns out later what he saw isn't exactly what's up there but still through his crude telescope that's what he could see the respected Italian astronomers sketched these lines and gave them a name chaparelli interpreted these lines as channels of some sort he didn't really know well the Italian word that he applied to them was Canali that word translated to English should have been translated as channels but instead it got mistranslated as canals since straight lines do not normally appear in nature chaparrali sketches gave birth to the idea that some form of intelligent life must exist on Mars it was an arresting notion widely debated among astronomers of the day later in 1894 a wealthy Bostonian named Percival Lowell was so intrigued by this possibility that he paid to have a large telescope constructed on a Mountainside in Flagstaff Arizona he spent the next two decades observing sketching and speculating about the red planet he convinced himself that he was seeing networks of straight lines on Mars which he thought were canals what was the big news of the day the Panama Canal that's what great planetary civilizations do they built canals [Music] so this was canals to bring the water down from the polar ice caps and Mars was cold and far from the Sun and dry and so he knew that and so he thought well they have to move the water to to live on Mars well that idea just electrified everybody is that there's a civilization on Mars against this backdrop on Halloween night 1938 a young actor named Orson Welles broadcasted a dramatization of War of the Worlds a novella by British author H.G Wells in which Sinister martians land on Earth and wreak havoc we now return you to Carl Phillips at Grover's Mill there you go here I am something's happening there's a gender flame spring in the mirror and at least [Music] thousands of citizens believe the invasion was real you're deeply shocked and deeply regretful the misunderstanding was short-lived but even so the broadcast only served to fuel public speculation about potential intelligent life on Mars yeah Mars it had intrigued humankind for thousands of years and in the mid-20th century humans finally got a closer look at the mysterious planet in 1964 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA launched a small exploration spacecraft toward the red planet foreign its name was Mariner IV it had a television camera and its mission was to fly past Mars and send back pictures it could only make one pass [Music] scientists were filled with anxious excitement at the prospect of what they might see is it going to see cities is it going to see canals is it going to see forests and while what it saw was craters it sent back pictures which just were very fuzzy and showed craters like on the moon it was a huge letdown the Mariner 4 images revealed a dry cratered desert-like and seemingly Dead Planet sort of like the moon with a little air to blow the dust around but the enthusiasm for exploring Mars was only tempered [Applause] and six years later in 1971 NASA sent another spacecraft to the red planet Mariner 9. but this time rather than just making a single pass by Mars Mariner 9 was engineered to orbit the planet for weeks and do a complete mapping the effort paid off [Music] after waiting out a planet-wide dust storm Mariner 9 started returning spectacular images it discovered the tharsus Bulge the sort of Potbelly of the planet near the equator the Bulge is a result of concentrated and massive volcanic activity the dominant feature of the tharsis Bulge is the monster volcano Olympus Mons Olympus Mons is about the size of Missouri if you put it in the middle of the U.S it would dominate that picture if it had a major eruption volcano of that size would probably fill up one state on every side of Missouri so my hometown in Iowa would be under lava interestingly it's composed of we think three separate volcanoes or at least it's erupted in three different ways if you fly over the top you see three separate calderas so it isn't just three times larger this is a monster geological event but in fact if you were on the edge the slope is so gradual and the peak is more than 100 miles away that you would know that it was a volcano it's that massive and Olympus Mons is not alone a few hundred miles Southeast of the mountain stands a diagonal row of three other evenly spaced enormous volcanoes each larger than any of its type on Earth yet as magnificent as it is the tharsus region isn't the only spectacular geological feature discovered by Mariner 9. at the Eastern edge of the Bulge is a colossal tear in the crust of the red planet it's called phallus marineris nariner Valley in honor of the Mariner 9 Orbiter itself you look at this thing it is like the width of the United States it's this cleaved Valley you know the Grand Canyon in the United States Pump It Up Put it on steroids make it the size of the United States itself you've got Mariner Valley magical mechanism that caused this immense rupture in the Martian surface is yet a mystery scientists can only speculate one mechanism which I like is that there's a place called the tharsus bulbs not far away in which so much lava and other things have accumulated that is spelled it could put a giant torque on the surface of Mars and pull this apart like a zipper well who knows if that's true but one needs a mechanism different from anything that we know to explain the existence of that [Music] the stunning success of Mariner 9 the next logical step for NASA was to land a spacecraft on the actual surface of Mars scientists were eager to test Rock and soil samples for signs of life foreign 1976 the Viking Mission reached the planet to do just that it had both an Orbiter and a landing component equipped with robotic test instruments and we get right down on the surface and we scoop up some soil and we don't find a thing Mars looks like a cold dry dead place but while the Viking Lander toiled away on the ground failing to make headlines high above the Martian surface the Viking Orbiter managed to capture a mystifying image while flying over a region of Mars called Sedonia the Orbiter snapped an image of a land formation under cross lighting startlingly the formation resembled a human face as a joke NASA scientists showed the photo to the Press remarking about the face they'd found on Mars for more even lighting conditions of course the Martian terrain feature does not look like a face at all just a jumble of Hills but in certain circles the story of the face on Mars and its NASA cover-up persisted for several years true Mars enthusiasts on the other hand faced a more sober reality following the Viking mission with no definitive evidence of biology resulting from the Viking experiments interest in returning to the red planet quieted for several years then in 1984 a young scientist on an expedition in Antarctica made a discovery that ultimately infused new energy and hope into the quest to uncover Life on Mars in December 1984 NASA geologists on a meteorite Gathering expedition in Antarctica found an odd specimen a meteorite with an unusual color sort of green Hue most are gray or brown back at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston where such rocks are stored it was labeled alh 84001 despite its odd color the scientists assumed that it was a piece of an asteroid so the rock with pigeonholed into a group of meteorites and it stayed there for six or eight years misclassified then in the early 1990s an analyst researching asteroids placed a piece of alh 84001 under an electron microscope he soon realized he was not looking at a normal meteorite he was looking at a piece of Mars The Rock had characteristics that matched another Martian meteorite found in 1979 thank you more scientists began studying this sample and they were astonished when they eventually found what looked like carbon globules carbon at least on Earth is the primary building block of life senior scientist David McKay headed up the research group my imagination was ignited by the carbonates and I said hey these carbonates are really strange looking how do they form let's look at those closer scrutiny of the rock sample brought even more startling discoveries the kind of chemistry that went on in those globules is associated with life on Earth at least one scanning electron microscope image revealed a structure that looked suspiciously organic almost like a worm could it be a trace of primitive Martian biology I think that worm is is biologic whether it's a complete fossil of bacterium is problematical it could be a part of a bacterium it could be a section of one but it's biologic in my view foreign I'd like to welcome everybody here today it's an unbelievable day it's very very exciting for me finally in 1996 after more than two years of study in which they had built four independent lines of evidence the team was ready they announced their hypothesis alh 84001 contained possible evidence of past life on Mars we conclude that this is evidence for early life on Mars NASA held a major press conference but not everyone was convinced Labs across the globe requested samples of the rock to conduct their own analyzes in the end after months of at times acrimonious debate the consensus was that there was no consensus papers were published in support of the claim but many more were published debunking the idea if I could have the first slide please the features that you see may be any number of things for example they could many researchers are convinced that the formations in the rock that appear to be signs of Martian life were actually caused by mineral activity the majority of people would say that there is no Relic biogenic activity in this meteorite from Mars Dave's initial hypothesis was incorrect I would say at this point that that's two simple a hypothesis to take I don't think the work has been completed to a satisfactory endpoint to say either way work on the meteorite is continuing but even if researchers never confirmed that the rock contains signs of Martian life the alh 84001 episode has already completely reinvigorated interest in The Quest For Life on the red planet ironically the new push to find Life on Mars has often LED scientists yet again to the continent of Antarctica conditions in this part of the world are analogous in many ways to conditions on Mars speaking out life forms that manage to thrive in extreme circumstances here might shed light on how and where primitive life could have once taken hold on the red planet one environment astrobiologist Dale Anderson focuses on is at the bottom of lakes covered year round with thick layers of ice most people said that because of the thick ice covers you would find nothing but rocks there would be very little to nothing on the bottom the ice layer sealing off many of these Lakes is up to 15 feet thick but rather than trying to blast or drill through it and disturbing the ecosystem below Anderson and team have found a much less damaging approach they let a massive coil of copper tubing make an opening then you just pass a hot liquid through it throw it out on the ice and let it melt its way down it takes about 24 hours it melts Through The Eyes then we put this very nice clean hole to dive through divers enter the water wearing full body dry suits [Music] what they find at the bottom of nearly every Antarctica lake bed is a testament to the stubborn tenacity of life mats of microbial organisms are thriving in frigid environments that receive virtually no sunlight most people thought that if you had less than about one percent of the surface light you wouldn't have any photosynthesis taking place down the bottom they wouldn't be able to use enough light to live it's turned out that they can photosynthesize with light levels down to one tenth of one percent for Anderson and his team the pristine mats are truly a window to the past there are no higher organisms no fish no insects no animals creeping through it so these microbial communities have the opportunity to grow by themselves without interference from other animals or plants and that gives them the opportunity to grow in very special ways possible that a similar form of microbial life could still reside somewhere beneath the Frozen surface of Mars especially at the hydrogen-rich poles Anderson and scientists lichen believe it is worth investigating T-minus 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 engine ignition and liftoff of the Delta II rocket with the Mars exploration Rover summer of 2003 NASA's jet propulsion laboratory delivered two exploration spacecraft to the surface of Mars missions to the red planet are only feasible once every two years during a specific short window of time the launch must be timed so that the spacecraft and Mars arrive at a specific point in the planet's orbit at the same time program response is good the journey across the 34 million mile distance can take up to seven months and the trajectory must be perfect the accuracy required to go from Earth to Mars and to hit the spot you want to be at on Mars is equivalent to shooting a basketball from Los Angeles to New York and have it go through without hitting the rim nothing but net all systems are gold for currently 6 landing at the goshep crater in the southern hemisphere Mars current velocity 1 356 miles per hour expected parachute deploy in five seconds [Applause] the spacecraft were actually Rovers robotic Vehicles capable of traveling across the Martian surface and poking around the rovers are robot geologists their job is to be our eyes our feet our hands on the Martian surface we experience Mars through them they can reach out and they can touch rocks there's this device called the rat rat The Rock abrasion tool which is a diamond tip grinding tool that we can use to grind into the interior of a rock and so we can actually get a window inside the Rock they have sensors on the end of that arm like there's a microscope for telling us in detail what they look like so we've got a whole bunch of tools similar to what a geologist would want if they were actually physically there on the scene The Rovers were named spirit and opportunity and they are still exploring regions of Mars today at locations on the planet hundreds of miles from each other Spirit landed in an area dubbed goosev crater the crater is believed to be a dried up lake bed so if the water it once held contained biology Spirit might uncover signs of it [Applause] opportunity touched down in a region called meridiani planum the area is intriguing because it contains an ancient layer of hematite an iron oxide that on Earth usually forms in a spot that held liquid water so far neither Rover has found Signs of Life but both spirit and opportunity have uncovered ample proof that liquid water was once plentiful on the surface of the red planet we've seen places where water soaked the Rocks beneath the surface we've seen places where water came to the surface and flowed over the Martian surface creating little ripples that are still preserved in the Rocks billions of years later but neither Rover is close enough to the tundra-like Martian poles to uncover actual Frozen H2O that is the primary goal of a new Mission to Mars launched in the summer of 2007. this mission is dubbed Phoenix and its plan is to place a stationary Lander in the region of the Martian North Pole the Lander has a sturdy robotic arm equipped with a scoop Phoenix will excavate the polar soil Dr Peter Smith of the University of Arizona heads up the project our entire scientific mission is about understanding the properties of the soil and its interaction with the ice and the properties of the ice and the ice interaction with the atmosphere we have only one way to study it and that's by using our robotic arm as our backhoe if you like that's going to dig a little trench and provide samples of both soil and hopefully wet soil if we can find it and ice and we will analyze those samples with instruments on the deck of our spacecraft the lender will beam signals back from the Martian surface reporting the results of the remote soil and Ice analyzes but before Phoenix has even had a chance to make it off the launch pad a new Wrinkle In The Saga of water on Mars has revealed itself images beamed back from a spacecraft currently orbiting the red planet show evidence of a very unexpected event it appears that a liquid flow of some sort has occurred within the last few years in a small Gully at the edge of a deep Martian ravine in 2001 the Orbiter took photos of the exact same spot but nothing of Interest showed up in those shots the new photos on the other hand showed a white residue in the Gully a residue seemingly left behind by a flow of liquid possibly where water spurted from the ground and flowed for several hundred yards before transforming into vapor and Vanishing scientists do not yet understand what might have caused such a flow but many suspect that it's a result of some form of internal heat the planet must still contain clearly it's a planet that's been volcanically active and all of us are very hopeful that some places on Mars we could find hydrothermal vents and not just because we want liquid water but because the liquid water implies that this might be an environment that life could develop or be maintained it is of course all about the search for life [Music] when all is said and done the end the end driving all of the astonishing scientific effort to explore the red planet is the burning desire of humankind to know if life exists elsewhere in the vast reaches of space I think humans have since the dawn of Consciousness wondered why they're here and wondered what's up there and wondered if there's more and answering that question will sort of put us in some kind of perspective it'll tell us what our place is in the universe to some extent finding Life on Mars could also help us understand the origins of Life on our own planet and there could actually be in the case of Mars and Earth a significant connection you know if Mars developed life itself maybe the conditions were right on Mars but they weren't right on Earth but yet Mars seated our planet perhaps through meteoritic collisions pieces of Mars arrived on Earth foreign with cells of life and that actually grew here maybe we could all be martians or perhaps it was the reverse you know perhaps life originated on this planet and moved to Mars [Music] we find evidence for life on Mars and we know there's life on Earth of course and there's probably life all over the place the universe is probably teeming with life and if it didn't then it makes us feel I think a little bit more special [Music] [Applause] [Music] Earth the only life-sustaining planet in our solar system throughout its history has been a planetary punching bag anything that crosses the orbit of Earth one day slim into the Earth at this very moment violent Celestial heavyweights roamed the universe and threatened to deal the earth a knockout blow the power it would be like setting off the whole world's Armament at one time it would be like standing next to Hiroshima all over the world everything in us would get ripped apart and if your body would fly off to Infinity former astronauts are not willing to go down without a fight they're racing to track down these Cosmic killers before they trigger Armageddon [Applause] Earth shimmers like a sapphire Jewel in our solar system we go about our days unaware that in the far reaches of space trouble could be headed our way [Music] [Music] our solar system is a lot like an amusement park Earth and most of the other objects carve predictable paths around the Sun normally everything is calm and smooth but at times things get chaotic and violent Earth can be slammed by space rocks Zapped by deadly space weather jolted jostled and threatened by the object's energy and forces of the cosmos one that often often stream Danger when you're moving fast and on a predetermined path you hope nothing crosses it because there's nothing you can do Nicaraguan border was right down along former astronaut Rusty schweiger knows firsthand how dangerous celestial objects can be in 1969 he piloted the lunar module during the Apollo 9 mission now Schweikert is ready for more than a cruise through the cosmos he's sounding alarms about the dangers of one particular asteroid named Apophis which got too close for comfort in 2004. it immediately got everybody's attention because the probability of impact was quite high in fact it was higher than any impact probability that we had ever seen up until that time and Schweikert has a terrifying real-life example of just how damaging an impact from an asteroid even smaller than Apophis could be June 30th 1908 7 15 A.M [Music] an object half the size of a football field plunged down from space at around 34 000 miles per hour and produced a stream of fiery gas behind it within minutes the fireball entered our atmosphere and violently exploded above siberia's tunguska Forest foreign became the largest explosion on Earth in modern human history the blast sparked heat waves which torched 80 million trees in an area over half the size of Rhode Island fortunately no one died as a direct result of the explosion because it was in a thinly populated area if that asteroid hit just a few hours later it would not have hit Siberia it would have hit over Europe and if that had exploded midair over any of the major cities of Europe a million people would have died like that for the last hundred years the tunguska explosion has been shrouded in controversy today many scientists agree an asteroid caused the blast incredibly it never even impacted the ground rather it exploded five miles above siberia's frozen ground a small Stony asteroid can't survive the plunge through Earth's atmosphere when it smacks into the lower atmosphere doing about 50 000 miles an hour it's like an egg smashing onto concrete foreign the blast over Siberia released energy equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT a thousand times greater than Hiroshima if this were to happen over a large city it would annihilate it [Music] scientists call these trespassers near Earth objects or NEOS their asteroids and comets which are leftovers from the formation of the planets comets move in the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt which is beyond the planet Neptune asteroids travel in a band between Jupiter and Mars but their orbital trip isn't always routine most of the asteroids orbit in a neat belt between Mars and Jupiter and we don't worry much about those but when one gets away and all that mass and energy is headed towards Earth that's when the astronomers start to worry [Music] oftentimes these Cosmic remnants get bumped out of their orbit and head on a collision course with Earth our planet's thick atmosphere vaporizes the vast majority of it but a larger object can knock through our atmosphere and actually impact the ground if you want to turn to the cosmos and look at the forces that would have us dead asteroid striking are real and they're bad it's happened before it will happen again five million years ago asteroid the size of a small City plummeted down from the sky it exploded in the Yucatan Peninsula near the present-day Mexican Village of chicksalu with the force 100 million megatons of TNT it hits the Earth cast no billions of tons of Earth crust into the atmosphere cloaking Earth blocking out sunlight knocking out the base of the food chain and sending a wave of Extinction across the Tree of Life It is believed the Ferocious impact contributed to the mass extinction of the dinosaur we can think of asteroids as being bad things but were it not for an asteroid we wouldn't be here today our mammal ancestors were running underfoot trying to avoid being hors d'oeuvres for T-Rex [Music] T-Rex gets taken out well this opened up an ecological niche that allowed our mammal ancestors to evolve to something more ambitious than a rodent and out comes the primates and among the primates we have people [Music] the very kind of cosmic Boulder that paved the way for humans to exist May one day wipe us off the planet in 1998 Congress urged NASA to detect all the near-earth objects over a half mile in diameter or more and what they found was unsettling over 850 NEOS in our vicinity these asteroids are our closest and most dangerous Neighbors in the solar system Donald Yeomans heads the Neo program at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory he and his Cosmic bounty hunters search for potential Killers lurking in our solar system and put them on their most wanted list finding these nearest objects is somewhat akin to tracking hurricanes as you track it day after day you get a better idea of its orbit You can predict where it's going you have a better idea of how large it is and if it should hit the Earth with what sort of velocity by using telescopic Technologies NASA's spaceguard survey has detected over 90 percent of all NEOS deemed harmful its frightening objects could strike the Earth with the energy greater than all the nuclear weapons on our planet today such an impact could trigger mass extinction you wouldn't expect one to hit but every several hundred thousand or millions of years but if one did hit it could wipe out a fair fraction of of the population so there are very low probability events but High consequence events if they hit the earth they would have Global effects I mean not only would you wipe out a continent with really heavy shock waves but the objective would be thrown up in the air and come down all around the planet the atmosphere itself would get to a thousand degrees or so and all the vegetation all over the world where that happened would flash into flames cataclysms could also occur with smaller objects so Congress now asks NASA to locate all NEOS 500 feet in diameter as wide as the Roman Coliseum an object that big could decimate a metropolitan area or even a small state and what worries scientists most is not the asteroids they've discovered but the ones they have not yet found but at any given time there's about two dozen objects for which we can yet rule out an Earth impact former astronaut Schweikert has taken the threat of Neos one step further he's appeared before Congress to request a special government agency be responsible for protecting the public from space rocks today we have the technology to stop near-earth objects from impacting the Earth for the rest of History I mean we can literally now begin to reshape the local solar system so that our survival is enhanced the question is will we or will we go the way of the dinosaurs [Music] but Schweikert isn't waiting for NASA or Congress to solve the problem he has his own plans to save the planet from the next asteroid impact it's hard to believe the Earth has survived over 4.5 billion years because since its infancy the planet has taken a beating like a boxer our world is under constant assault from asteroids that enter our orbit each year but in the future Earth could be knocked out former Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty schweiker refuses to be bullied by asteroids and now he's ready to defend Earth against these harmful rocks we've discovered that there are these near-earth objects flying by us all the time and we've gotten more and more capability to modify our environment to enhance our survival Schweikert is particularly concerned about an asteroid named 2004 mn4 better known as Apophis this pockmarked rock approximately 750 feet in diameter swept near Earth in 2004. now it's scheduled to pass dangerously close to our planet again on Friday the 13th in April 2029 so in 2029 Apophis will come closer to us than our own communication satellites orbiting the Earth it will be so close that people who are in the right place will be able to see Apophis go by the Earth with your naked eye you won't even have to have binoculars that's how close that asteroid is going to come Apophis has an over 99 chance of missing the Earth in 2029 but if Apophis passes the Earth at a distance of exactly 18 893 miles it may pass through a gravitational Keyhole a narrow region in space a half mile wide if this happens the Earth's gravity could upset Apophis and change its trajectory it could cause it to return and hit Earth seven years later on April 13 2036 the gravitational effect of the earth will cause it to bend cause the Apophis orbit to enlarge to precisely the size which seven years later it will come around and hit the Earth at the present time Apophis has a 1 in 45 000 chance of delivering a deadly blow in 2036 but even these odds have scientists placing bets it's one thing to know that there's maybe one chance in forty five thousand that it's going to hit the Earth but what you'd like to know is there one chance in the hundred is there one chance in ten is it can he is a probability one that's going to hit the Earth foreign believes we must regard Apophis as we would any natural disaster he's even mapped out where Apophis might strike you have the date and the impact the time of the impact the orbital inclination and you can make a map and what that map shows is what I have called a path of risk that goes all the way across the planet and I look at this and I see a high probability of impact and I say whoa you know where might it hit along this path of risk it begins in Western Siberia cuts across and down the Pacific Ocean near California then it traverses Central America and finishes in Western Africa schweiker proposes a chilling scenario of where Apophis might strike the asteroid could land in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California with a force of over 1 million megatons of TNT such an impact would create a five mile wide nine thousand foot deep crater in the water which would unleash tsunamis Relentless 50-foot waves would pound the coastline resulting in unimaginable human loss an asteroid that's a thousand feet in diameter having a hit in the ocean is not a good deal hundreds of billions of dollars of damage something like that scientists are presently working on Technologies to preempt such a cosmic strike [Music] one idea involves blowing up an asteroid some feel this could compound the problem sending several chunks of the asteroid in our Direction instead of just one consequently schweikert's new mission is to change the orbit of asteroids that could impact Earth what you want to do is basically change the asteroid's orbit very very slightly in he changes velocity by a ten thousandth of a mile per hour so that it will miss the Earth instead of hitting it Rusty's colleagues have drafted conceptual designs of spacecraft that could deflect asteroids particularly Apophis one would toe harmful asteroids away from Earth but instead of lassoing The Rock like a bull in a rodeo the tractor will hover in front of it and use gravity as a tow line if you park in front of an asteroid for a long enough period of time and you stay close enough to it but not touching it you're going to increase its velocity or if you park behind it while it's moving along you're going to slow it down very slightly we can change the orbit of an asteroid if we know about it far enough ahead of time although a space probe has landed on an asteroid in the past the most challenging idea is launching a manned mission once landing on the Rock astronauts could mount a radio transponder to track its whereabouts you can just use a robotic mission to go to an asteroid and land grab a sample and bring it back that's not that difficult what you gain by a manned mission is they can react to interesting areas on the asteroid surface they could go here there there and they wouldn't have to rely on remote navigation Nicaraguan border Schweikert insists we should remain on high alert regarding asteroid Apophis and his cause hasn't gone unheard now the United Nations plans to draft a treaty which will include who will be responsible for deflecting killer asteroids that would be a real crime if we are so irresponsible knowing that this is going to happen that we continue to do nothing about it but asteroids and comets are not the only deep space threats Earth has had its ups and Earth has had its Downs never know what's going to be around the next corner and a lot of it is bad these are at work itching to end life on the planet as we know it three times daily a strange flash pulsates across our sky it's hundreds of times more powerful than the world's total nuclear Armament but it's not man-made and if one happens close enough to Earth could end life on our planet [Music] most earthlings are unaware of the potential hazards in space but the list is long and growing Imagine This within our own galaxy The Milky Way a massive star explodes ending a lethal burst of energy rocketing toward our planet this is a gamma-ray burst biggest explosion to rock the universe since the Big Bang in the cities and Countryside below there's no warning of what's about to happen [Music] then strikes it would be equivalent to standing one mile away from Hiroshima any place on the Earth radiation Cooks the upper atmosphere our ozone layer roasts across the hemisphere human beings burned to death from radiation a hundred times the Fatal dose The Disappearing ozone layer causes increased temperatures around the world triggering Cyclones tsunamis and hurricanes most life on the surfaces of land and water and sit and sit this may seem like science fiction but it could happen if a gamma-ray burst hit Earth from 100 light years away [Music] gamma-ray bursts are the brightest explosions in the universe because they're so far away and yet still so brilliant they must involve an enormous amount of power as much energy as the sun will emit in its entire 10 billion year lifetime [Music] as a young student Stan woosley always liked experiments that go boom now the work of this astrophysicist is more than Child's Play he's one of the galactic detectives trying to uncover the Mysteries behind gamma ray bursts we know there are many planets and many stars throughout the cosmos so there may have been countless civilizations that were destroyed by gamma-ray verse of radiation were first spotted in the 1960s first most astronomers believe these gamma ray bursts must exist in our own galaxy The Milky Way because they're so bright there were reasons for that one was that if they were outside the Galaxy the energy was almost unbelievable foreign but at the time even the most powerful telescopes couldn't determine their location and distance because the bursts lasted for a few seconds then disappeared but then astronomers wondered what about their Afterglow Cosmic explosions typically leave behind some luminous residue that sometimes lasts for days or weeks in the late 1990s satellites used upgraded Optics and x-ray detectors to finally capture a gamma ray bursts Afterglow it became clear that gamma reverse actually were cosmological coming from very far outside of our galaxy from millions and billions of light years away and that meant their energy had to truly be astronomical get some idea of how incredibly bright a gamma-ray burst is we could represent the brightness of our sun by this relatively dim LED and we could represent the brightness of the Camry burst by the very very intense Searchlight that's behind me isn't that incredibly bright unfortunately with this comparison the Searchlight is not nearly bright enough to represent fully the gamma-ray burst and in fact we would need 100 billion such searchlights to have an adequate comparison the gamma-ray burst is equivalent to the brightness of a million trillion songs these massive bursts could decimate Earth but what causes them we are quite convinced that the common gamma-ray burst comes from the death of a massive star at least 10 times the mass of the sun and such stars are quite rare by the way we masterminded a groundbreaking model of how gamma ray bursts may be created when an extremely massive star dies it collapses into a black hole black holes are created when a collection of matter collapses to such a high density that light itself cannot Escape but woosley proposes that some of the star resists getting sucked into the center of the black hole as a result a high-speed spinning disc of matter forms around it within seconds Jets of plasma shoot out from its rotational poles these beams of energy unleash dangerous gamma rays into space if you can imagine just trying to squeeze a fruit or some kind of sphere of some object into a very small space things are going to squirt out and in this case the squeezing is done very rapidly and you're talking about a huge amount of mass at the same time the gamma-ray bursts are rejected the collapsing star explodes or goes Supernova to the extreme one of the reasons gamma-ray bursts are so incredibly bright is that they take an enormous amount of power and then they focus that power into a very small portion of the sky for every 300 gamma-ray bursts that go off only one is pointed in our Direction and so we only see one of those 300. even if a gamma ray burst were to occur not 100 but 1 000 light years away the Earth could still face apocalyptic destruction if a gamma-ray burst happened within one thousand light years of the earth then it would be approximately 500 times brighter than the Sun and emitting gamma rays the energy delivered to the Earth's upper atmosphere would be like a hundred thousand megatons of nuclear explosions the ozone would be depleted we'd have acid rain but we'd also have flash Burns incineration of vegetation perhaps something resembling nuclear winter so there could be a global Extinction of many species The Far Side of the Earth would be a special place to be because gamma rays don't go through the Earth and if you were on the other side you wouldn't get flash burned but the effects of depleting the ozone and changing the composition of the atmosphere would eventually come to the other side and there the effects are unknown statistically this ghastly scenario has a one percent chance of happening once in the earth's entire lifetime but even these odds aren't reassuring if you're living on the planet at that very moment if you're caught in the beam that's a bad day for you if one of these happens in your Galaxy and that beam is coming your way go hide in a cave because this is very high energy radiation it's the kind of energy that will decompose your molecules and you just don't want to be be around when that's happening there currently are no defense measures to Shield us from gamma-ray bursts if they happen close to Earth they travel at the speed of light 186 000 miles per second by the time we detect them they will have already struck our planet gamma-ray bursts could pose a hazard to the Earth or to anything living that came within their bore sight but as we've seen they're very infrequent and there are other things in the heavens and on the earth that are much more dangerous cataclysms routinely erupt in some corner of the universe and one day something will snuff out Earth most of the time our ride around the Sun is gentle and uneventful like this ferris wheel and as long as nothing gets in our way we could go on like this for millions of years but sooner or later we know that this smooth ride will come to an end we just don't know when sadly our planet's ultimate demise will probably come from the very thing that provides us life Earth maintains a cozy lifestyle being Third Rock From the Sun for over 4 billion years the sun has been an ally warming and feeding our planet but in time our solar heater will become our enemy [Music] the Sun and the Earth have a unique relationship to each other the Earth has a particular temperature it's a particular size it has life on it and oceans and those things depend on the Sun the sun is at the root of the existence of life on the Earth and the Sun will be at the root of its demise as well Earth's relationship with the sun will become dysfunctional when our solar mother really turns up the heat the sun gets hotter because it's burning hydrogen into helium four hydrogen atoms become one helium atom that means there are fewer particles bouncing around inside the Sun and that process basically means that the sun has to get hotter and brighter to hold itself up [Music] as the sun's core gets hotter its outer parts will swell in size and turn red if you have a bonfire you have all this wood there you build it up and at some point enough logs get burnt and the thing collapses and you get this huge burst of Sparks and it gets much brighter in a sense it's like that because the sun is right now burning hydrogens into helium and the helium is the ash of that if you like and then as the sun collapses enough the Ash relights and the helium burns into carbon and that's when things get really hot at this point the sun will expand into a red giant and incinerate most complex life on Earth when the sun becomes a red giant it will grow to 30 times its size so the surface of the sun will actually be out beyond the orbit of mercury the Luminosity of the sun will go up by like a thousand times that's going to make the Earth so hot that the outer crust the the Rocks the solid part of the earth will melt the whole planet would be a glowing ball of lava fry the inner planets and even though the sun will become red and cooler the Earth will be much hotter just leave the earth a burnt Cinder like a charcoal briquette so that would be bad for life on Earth and the Earth's hellish fate isn't over as a red giant the sun will fluctuate in size before collapsing into a white dwarf son that was huge suddenly becomes the sun that's very small and extremely dense it's only about the size of the Earth sitting down there at the center of our solar system very much fainter than it used to be and then everything cools off and then that object is no longer generating energy either so it begins to cool as well so the final fate of the solar system will be to cool off and freeze humans will probably have relocated to another planet or become extinct before the sun turns Earth into a snowball the Sun May dry up our world much sooner the sun doesn't get us at the time of the red giant phase it may well get us earlier by just becoming bright enough to cause the oceans to evaporate water is an essential component for all life and so if the Earth actually loses all its water then that's another reason why life might disappear from the earth and it would again be the sun's fault there may be ways for Earth to win a stay of execution as the sun is swelling it also begins to lose Mass much more rapidly than it's losing it now and of course if it's getting less massive it has less of a hold on the earth the earth will move further out into a larger orbit and so it's kind of a race between the growing sun and the growing heat from the Sun and the Earth actually moving you know a little bit away from that fire that's getting too hot if our planet somehow manages to avoid getting fried or Frozen by the Sun future remains increasingly bleak [Music] this place is full of Adventure rides that put your stomach up into your throat things that Collide scary stuff it's a lot like riding around the sun on planet Earth but when Earth gets smacked or when things start to come apart the ride could really be over I don't know what that means for the universe to end because I like time I live in it so it's hard to imagine time ending scientists contemplate our inevitable fate in the distant future the earth and the entire universe may face the ultimate Cosmic monster no one suspects that Earth's most lethal enemy lurks amongst the Stars but in the future and without prior warning Cosmic Grim Reaper will unleash the ultimate Armageddon the dark villain will stretch apart the universe galaxies themselves will split apart stars and planets will tear to shreds the ultimate apocalyptic event is being called the big rib and when it begins it won't stop until every atom and nuclei in the universe are minced the big rip it really is the end of the universe it's not like we're the last ones at the party wondering what's going on and we can go do something else it's really like you've turned off all the lights and the universe just ends Innovative physicists Robert Caldwell and Mark kamienkowski proposed the notion of the Big Rip a grim hypothesis about the final fate of the universe we used to think that the Universe which is currently expanding could reach a point of Maximum expansion the Big Rip is the idea that the expansion will not only continue and accelerate but rip everything apart as it does so Caldwell and camionkowski calculated that the universe is expanding at an alarming and increasing pace and that something is sucking everything outward like a vacuum acting like a galactic vice squad these young scientists hunt for the cosmic killer they believe a mysterious phenomenon called Dark Energy may be the culprit figuring out what dark energy is is probably the number one goal of cosmologists today dark energy is dark so you can't see it we can feel what it is we feel it through its effects on the gravitational behavior of the universe there could be some dark energy in this room under the chair it's only when you look at its properties on really big cosmological length scales billions of light years across that you start to see the cumulative effects of the dark energy it causes things to be pushed farther away from each other and and contributes to the expansion of the universe in a quickening pace Edwin Hubble whom the Hubble telescope is named after first discovered the universe is expanding back in the 1920s but it wasn't until 1998 when a crack team of scientists measured that this expansion is moving like a runaway train a nice analogy is to imagine that the Universe are three-dimensional space is like the surface of a rubber balloon that I'm blowing up okay I'm gonna blow up the balloon as a demonstration of the effects of the expansion of the universe the balloon gets bigger that's the depiction of the expansion of galaxies Galaxy another one where's our galaxy okay we'll live there okay that's our home as the universe expands every other Galaxy gets farther away from us an ordinary expansion each Galaxy stays the same size but if you have super accelerated expansion then the galaxies themselves can each expand which is sort of what's happened here if I could blow it up fast enough to depict a big rip then the balloon would explode that's like space time not being able to take it and coming to an end so instead we'll just pop a hole in the balloon that's the Big Rip according to Caldwell and camionkowski the universe has no hope of surviving the Big Rip they've even come up with a countdown to this apocalyptic event the Big Rip kind of rolls up its sleeves and progressively takes apart the universe layer by layer working from the outside in going from the largest scales to the smallest scales a billion years to pull apart clusters of galaxies then hundreds of millions of years to pull apart galaxies themselves and then down to the size of a solar system we're talking hundreds of thousands of years and then to tear apart the Earth itself would take less than an hour it's kind of interesting to think about what that would look like if I'm in my protective capsule watching things happen I would see this wall of Darkness that starts coming towards us I would no longer at that point be able to see any stars the earth layer by a layer will be peeled off ejected away everything in us the molecules that hold us together would get ripped apart and every atom that makes up your body would get would get the would fly off to Infinity a very short period of time fortunately mankind doesn't need to lose sleep over the big rib Caldwell and kamienkowski estimate that it will climax 50 billion years from now when the universe is over three times its current age what's really fun for us is to try to figure out whether this is actually what's going to happen the paint the science fiction scenario of what might happen and to think what might happen to us deep space threats are real some could harm us tomorrow others in the far future but one thing certain something will terminate Earth and probably the entire universe once and for all it's only a matter of time it's useful to sometimes think about how fragile our life is here on Earth that maybe we aren't going to be here for eternity [Music] maybe there's a hope but uh the way it looks the universe just ends and that's it [Music] [Applause] [Music] 400 million miles from Earth exists on many solar system of over 60 moons rotating around a powerful planet of gas its flowing colors in spots hold strange Beauty but contain violent storms and jet streams could this big bright ball of weather have been the Star of Bethlehem could one of its moons Harbor life beneath its icy crust we expect that branches of life will exist on Europa just simply because water is the key feature I want to go ice fishing on Europa cut a hole put a submersible look around see if anything anything swims up to the camera lens and licks the camera that's what I want to do and does our own Planet oh its survival to this massive Cosmic magnet giant planet [Music] Jupiter is half a billion miles from the Sun a giant sphere of intrigue this churning ball of gas may look like an artist's rendering but it's the real thing Jupiter has the most exotic weather patterns we've ever seen in the solar system but there is 84 hydrogen and almost 14 percent helium the two lightest and most abundant elements in the universe rolled into a mammoth Mass this thing has 11 times the diameter of Earth and you could take a thousand Earths and stuff them inside Jupiter comfortably Jupiter really is the lord of the solar system you know about 70 percent of the mass and all the planets is in Jupiter if you're talking about planets Jupiter is the big big boy in the block and it really does rule the roost Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system visible to the naked eye a day is only 9.9 hours long and it takes 11.86 years to orbit the Sun a 150 pound person would weigh 350 pounds on Jupiter there are thunder clouds made of ammonia sulfur and water it exploring Jupiter would be NASA's Most Daring mission to date it's a hostile place with temperature extremes from frigid to fiery its electromagnetic radiation is intense it could kill a traveler to the planet in an instant we would need heavy lead protection and that's very difficult to lift off the ground so we have some difficult engineering challenges to actually bring human beings to the planet Jupiter a landing on Jupiter is not going to happen Jupiter itself is a very gassy Planet it's made of gas so you would not have a solid surface on which to land and walk around you would just keep descending through the clouds and then be eventually crushed by the pressure of Jupiter's atmosphere that make a human trip to Jupiter quite a challenge foreign Dr Andrew Ingersoll is an authority on the planet he takes us for a ride you need a special kind of balloon because the Jupiter's atmosphere is hydrogen hydrogen is the lightest gas a helium balloon would sink so the only thing that'll float in a cold hydrogen atmosphere is hot hydrogen and so you need a hot air hydrogen balloon [Music] NASA has been developing Ultra long duration balloons robotic exploration and as we all know heating hydrogen is a tricky thing but just how this Behemoth was born is a puzzle the formation of Jupiter is the greatest mystery associated with the planet some believe Jupiter may have been a failed star like the sun it had the right ingredients hydrogen and helium but not enough Mass to create the internal pressure and temperature necessary to have nuclear fusion so it became a planet instead the thought is that there was this cloud in the Galaxy that had the same composition as the sun and it collapsed under its own gravity and some stuff was left behind and that stuff became the planet and the majority of that stuff became Jupiter and the rest of it of course went into the Sun and then there were a couple little tiny leftovers like Earth Jupiter's spinning gases attracted like elements and over time grew bigger and bigger in the process layers around a grain of sand to make a pearl what gases and solids Jupiter didn't ingest it spat out into space the Jupiter is like your big brother in the schoolyard protecting you from bullies that might wreak havoc on your existence I tend to think of it as more of the cosmic frisbee guy [Music] it's grabbing things out of space and it's also tossing them back out it ends up keeping those objects from the inner solar system where Earth and Mars and Venus are by cleaning some of the debris up kicking some of it out shooting some of it into the sun would be lost forever Jupiter cleaned out a path that the other planets could exist in some sort of peace so dominant is this frisbee phenomenon Earth May owe its very existence to Jupiter it influences the courses of comets and even some meteors and asteroids so that over the eons the fact that Jupiter is there helps dictate what happens in the inner soul system so really the presence of Jupiter may be one reason why we have life on Earth and habitability and be able to have the earth a nice environment instead of getting pummeled by so many comments there is no greater proof of Jupiter's power play than what happened during a seven day period in July of 1994. a comet called Shoemaker Levy 9. Barrel toward Jupiter once under Jupiter's influence there was no going back a missile was on a crash course with a ball of gas Jupiter's gravitational pull was so great that it broke the comet into small pieces that came in one at a time pieces assaulted the planet at a speed of 37 miles per second when you have a missile going at supersonic speeds you get a shock clouds of material being jetted up from beneath where it landed one of the Fireballs generated by the collision with Jupiter's atmosphere flared 1800 miles into space [Music] had Earth been in the projectile sites the effects of such a smash-up would have been catastrophic to say the least similar to the event that wiped out the Dinosaurs the energies that were released in those fragments hitting was larger than on the order of 10 or 20 times more powerful than the entire world arsenal of bombs take Jupiter out of the picture bring this giant Comet into the inner solar system where would it have gone we have no idea might have crashed into Earth if that comment had crashed into Earth things would be a lot different around here [Music] the experts believe that Comet strikes on Jupiter may be 8 000 times more frequent than those on Earth thanks to the Frisbee effect but it cuts both ways because Jupiter has no value system when it sees an errant Comet it may Attract it and swallow it up but where it flings it is anyone's guess and so Aaron comets can be flung in towards the Earth they can be flung into the Sun and they can be flung out of the solar system there's a reason the planet rejects some of the space junk heading its way Jupiter being the biggest object in the solar system has the most gravity and so other objects little flees that have their own trajectory flying by are bent from where it would be towards Jupiter and usually with an acceleration and that acceleration can cause it sometimes to just be ejected completely no earthly Frisbee throw at Jupiter's it is much faster than any bullet ever known it rejects things at a rate of 30 miles per second [Music] Jupiter's wonders are hard to fathom they've captivated man for centuries prehistoric humans realized that it was moving Among the Stars and it was one of the planets that they appreciated Jupiter was the king of the Gods after all in Roman mythology and there may be a Biblical reference to Jupiter ever since I was like five years old I remember people oh that was the start of Bethlehem and whether or not it really was obviously we we have no way of knowing but it's not clear whether the star that was talked about is a single star or whether they meant an astronomical alignment of objects in the sky we don't really know it's known as conjunction in scientific terms according to researchers Jupiter and Venus did appear as one large star-like object in August 3 BC and would have been visible in the Eastern night sky was Galileo the father of modern astronomy who made the first recorded sighting of the Jupiter system in the early days of 1610 only about 18 months after the telescope was invented he got his own telescope and he looked at Jupiter in 1665 Jupiter's Most Fascinating feature was discovered its giant red eye was actually the eye of an enormous storm unlike any experienced on Earth this one has raged for at least 300 years this weather disturbance is a meteorologist Jupiter's Great Red Spot is truly huge you could take Earth and Flay it out and it wouldn't even really cover the spot the storm is the hugest storm in the solar system just to give you a feeling about it it's about 12 000 miles and the Earth is only 8 000 miles wide and the winds blow quite fast around the edge but it's calm in the center it's uh it's not like a hurricane which has an eye and very fast turbulent winds in the center red spot is rather calm if you're in a balloon it might be a pleasant ride as long as you avoided the the small scale stuff like the thunderstorms and the the turbulent places even though you'll be going very fast it might be quite calm fast as in 350 miles an hour the fastest wind ever recorded here on Earth was 231 miles an hour foreign but is it an Earth-like storm it's a giant collection of clouds roiling around lightning going on so we can only model and imagine what kind of precipitation but condensation in the form of condensed vapor of various gases red spot is a high pressure system that can take 10 days to complete a rotation it's really a backwards hurricane it's called an anti-cyclone that's the name for it so it goes backwards from the direction of a typical hurricane that's not the only curious thing hurricanes as we know them need water in order to form there's no water engine in the red spot this never-ending weather system is on something else but what Jupiter's Great Red Spot is something like a Non-Stop hurricane it's a colossal storm complete with violent wind and lightning storm chasers would love to go running after it Dr Tim Dowling of the University of Louisville is in the hunt for similar phenomena here on Earth the red spot is think of it as a huge extra lens or egg shape of mass it's just enormous thing it's sort of quiets down the fluid it presses it down into the hotter interior so you don't get thunderstorms but if you go on the edge of the red spot especially Northwest you get some of the most horrific thunderstorms you're going to find on the Jupiter the spot doesn't have an eye and it isn't fueled by water there's no ocean over which it forms what then keeps it going and going I've always likened it in my own view as like as like a mini volcano in inside of inside of Jupiter actually an atmospheric volcano Dr Baines believes that warmer gases rise from heat deep within the planet while trying to escape they create a vortex so for some reason I believe there's extra energy right there but it's just a Theory science is left without answers to that question and others current theories cannot quite explain why the spot is so well formed and why it stays in one place the plot thickened over the years as scientists learned even more it became a deeper mystery because instead of everything just sort of smoothly going around the red spot we saw this turbulence and there were smaller scale structures that would come and go every day that it was chaotic and turquoise and yet the red spot just existed and sailed on Jupiter's storms aren't limited to the Great Red Spot Cloud decks three layers thick hover and cover the planet if you were inside the atmosphere of Jupiter you would hear very loud thunder in fact yet Thunder actually travels four times faster on Jupiter than it does on Earth it's about three thousand miles an hour so rain falls twice as fast on Jupiter the charge separation that pulls the positive charge to the top of the clouds the negative charge to the bottom of the clouds is twice as efficient on Jupiter for that reason alone because the rain is falling so much faster towers of cumulus convection that you see on Jupiter are three times taller they go up 30 miles whereas on Earth they go up six or seven miles foreign it would be impossible to survive within the Great Red Spot with its 350 mile an hour winds by comparison Hurricane Wilma which had the highest recorded Winds of any Earthly storm slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula in 2005 with barely a breath 175 mile an hour blasts our weather is simple Jupiter's is complex now in Jupiter you just basically have one storm system sort of stacked on another stacked on another with lots and lots of room basically these are the storms in their natural state these storms move relentlessly within Jupiter's other distinct feature streams of fierce jets that continually Circle the planet scientists are only beginning to understand what they are and where they come from there's a massive Eastward flow of material and that means materials flowing more than one and a half football fields per second that's really moving where you don't want to be in that 29 other belts and zones of varying widths extend outward from there they are what give Jupiter its characteristic appearance they move in alternating directions some Eastward some Westward they're much smaller scale the high latitude Jets than the equatorial one as far as in comparison to Earth these are massive super fast high-speed wins and yet they're just going back and forth planet's rotation rate has something to do with it Jupiter generates a lot of energy because it really moves so the very nature of the spinning causes Jupiter to not just have one jet stream but many jet streams going in opposite directions along the planet and so you can see these zones so what you have is an exaggerated version of Earth's basic weather pattern the spectacular swirls are created in surface clouds where the zones meet it's believed that the energy ultimately powering this belt phenomenon comes from intense heat deep within it's not unlike something we see every day boil pot of water on the stove it'll start bubbling and Bubbles come up on the bottom and try to get out trying to circulate that water that currents around so same thing inside Jupiter we have gases and liquids down there that are trying to get the heat out there are basic questions basic pieces of physics to go after to explain massive Jets shouldn't we be able to explain that Earth has just one primary jet stream it moves Eastward and another major flow that blows Westward the trade winds triple that power and you've got the jet streams of Jupiter totally different from Earth and yet I should be careful not totally different from Earth just Earth on steroids and you ask yourself wow if I understood what's going on on Jupiter Earth would be just a piece of cake [Music] Jupiter's Mysteries aren't limited to the planet itself some of its most intriguing elements are circling around it Jupiter's got several dozen moons that are big enough to be seen it's probably got a lot more that that are too small to be seen with current technology and no doubt in coming years more will be discovered some of the moon's almost the size of some planets so really Jupiter is its own little solar system thanks to its incredible gravitational pull it's sucked in asteroids along with other space debris for the most part there is order but there are some erratic moons in orbit around Jupiter it's managed chaos you can imagine a bunch of runners in a track in their lanes that each Runner stays in they won't Collide it's kind of how Celestial mechanics Moon holds its own fascination four of Jupiter's prominent moons were discovered by Galileo he first observed that they revolved around the planet they are named for Jupiter the gods lovers the first major Moon you come to is is IO which is this very active place but with lots of volcanoes it's almost all the time going off shooting out magma 200 miles into space IO is a Wonder pot marked with over a hundred volcanoes some the size of California which seem to turn themselves on and off Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system five times the size of Earth's moon Callisto is the most heavily cratered it has clearly taken a beating in its lifetime then there's Europa the ice queen to Jupiter's King no one knows its makeup for sure it looks like a cracked egg it really looks like the whole thing had liquid water on it at some time it froze and it cracked and we believe that these patterns are due to Tidal forces that crack it as alien as Europa seems it is smooth and glassy in some spots hilly and others in fact it is remarkably similar to one of Earth's Frozen wonderlands there is a lake in Antarctica called Lake vostok that scientists think is an analogy to what we see in Europa Antarctica has a huge thick ice crust and underneath there is this liquid Lake and we think that this may be very similar to the water ice underneath the surface that we see on Europa go down through that cross to go through the to the ice and enough you'll get a liquid water and river and we are very convinced that there's a liquid water down there it's the only place that we know besides the Earth which has liquid water in large bodies that have been there we believe for more than a million to two million years and where there's water could there be life Jupiter's moon Europa is bursting with secrets it may even have warm thermal vents deep below its frozen crust in fact I'm an immense ocean the bigger than the Pacific Ocean worth of liquid water down there that's just sitting there for things to happen to foreign the presence of water means one thing we may not be alone I want to go ice fishing on Europa cut a hole put a submersible look around see if anything anything swims up to the camera lens and licks the camera that's what I want to do [Music] one scientist is planning just such a fishing trip foreign at this outdoor lab near Austin Texas hopes are hanging on a little robot this is designed for exploration in unknown territory completely unknown territory and the search for biological life [Music] it's proving ground right now is a local Quarry and there are big plans for its future if everything went according to plan you would launch around 2016 it would be at Europa by 2018 and by 2019 for certain we know whether there's life off Earth that's the game depth X is the brainchild of engineer Bill Stone he and a team of scientists have staked their reputations on it they've spent six years developing the concept and building the Prototype it's part of an ambitious project that would see it carried into space sent through six miles of ice and into europa's ocean to divide it down into all the various Vehicles you have a a parent vehicle which takes you to orbit around the the moon Europa there will be a Lander it'll land on the ice then there's a second stage of the Lander which melts its way through three to five kilometers of ice cap and then at that point you kick out the third stage [Music] you need a fast moving device that would be sort of torpedo shaped most likely nuclear propelled and that would drive for thousands of kilometers around the Central Ocean of Europa is that really feasible NASA thinks so the space agency is on board with money and its blessing an investment in the search for life [Music] if life exists on Jupiter's moon Europa could it walk talk or fly it would be little viruses or you know maybe at best bacteria we would expect only to see primitive life forms but they might be similar to things that we see on on the Earth but we just don't know scientists are encouraged by the discovery of strange and Hearty life forms found in the most inhospitable places on Earth two worms for example survive and thrive in total darkness extreme pressure isn't a problem the creatures were discovered in 1977 several miles below the surface of the Galapagos Rift they exist in water near superheated thermal vents it's believed that these very conditions Darkness high pressure and hydrothermal vents are present on Europa you could have hydrothermal vents kicking up warmth and nutrients down near the core of Europa and that organisms would have fed off of that material just like they might have in the early Earth and while two worms might not be lurking beneath europa's icy shell something else could be [Music] its microbial life is the bulk of life on Earth we expect that branches of that type of life will exist on Europa just simply because water is the key feature finding it consumes scientist Bill Stone his death acts May answer a question that excites Seekers of knowledge [Music] can we have the robot Behavior look for signs of life and then try to collect a sample based on what it's sensing Stone's baby is in its infancy at the same time it is futuristic and advanced it's a high-tech toy like no other that might show our world what another is all about [Music] our first contact with extraterrestrial life may be on Jupiter's moon Europa the depthx robot or more accurately hydrobot is being designed to ultimately think move and explore without help from man [Music] that is all to be done by the robot itself we're not going to be guiding it to do that that's going to be a big step forward in what we would call robot science autonomy it's a real life hell the star of a new space odyssey where it literally hit a button and let it dive below the surface and we won't see it again until it tells us what's down there depth X will be able to extract and analyze samples on its own as it navigates the ocean this little tube you see down here people are pulling water samples and store them in one liter bags we have five of them on board but before it does that it actually Powers through a series of micro pumps over here on the left and brings it into an onboard microscope and that microscope will take images of what's in the water down to about five microns so we can see most of the typical types of microbial life from 5 to 200 microns on screen the robot will use that to discriminate to determine if there's life and then grab a sample depth X and its systems must be made smaller to work in space and it still must pass trials Under Ice flows we are testing this in Antarctica to make sure it all works totally under ice the question of life on Europa is probably the big you know unknown because that would change our whole view of the universe basically I mean if this little Moon sitting out there in this hostile environment of Jupiter that can have life form on it that means that that probably tells us that you know life is almost everywhere the science is there I mean I think searching for life is one of the most compelling things that we can do as as not only a scientist but as a race as human beings it's a giant leap and not just for mankind no for robot kind [Music] of all Jupiter's imposing features none is more impressive than the one you cannot see it bigger by far than the Great Red Spot more Dynamic than the bands of jet streams and as lethal as any killer known to man you have one of the most powerful radiation environments in the solar system aside from the Sun the medic field of Jupiter is the largest entity I believe in the solar system is a bubble 450 million miles long but electrically charged particles its Jupiter's magnetosphere [Music] the sun's sitting here putting out the solar wind and the solar wind is charged particles of protons and electrons particles flow along at one million miles an hour and Jupiter basically captures these protons electrons all these charged particles like electrical currents and it has it then in the space circling around Jupiter no word in the English language accurately conveys the enormity of this phenomenon the magnetosphere of Jupiter is the biggest object in the solar system it's a lot bigger than the Sun [Music] comparisons are the best measure of this Mega Mighty Wonder if it were visible in the night sky it would be many many times bigger than the moon it's enormous even though it's five times as far away from Earth as the sun is it still would look immense in the night sky if visible it would take a familiar form a windsock there's a rounded section facing away from the planet in One Direction tail flowing out the other this windsock reaches the outer orbit of Saturn Tower plant Jupiter generates up to 10 million amps of electrical current the biggest plant in in the solar system can conduct electricity all the way through and around it [Music] this conductivity creates a phenomenon we can see when the excited charged particles Escape Jupiter has auroras because when those particles leak in and crash into the upper atmosphere it glows and just as Birth has Aurora [Music] it's ghostly auroras are a thousand times more powerful than Earth's northern and southern lights they measure up to 1200 miles across few could stand under them they'd fill the entire Sky moving at lightning speed 10 000 miles an hour Jupiter's magnetic field is a monster and it Roars in fact it's speaking to us right now Jupiter the giant of the solar system has something to say if you're listening we can hear what we call lion roars because it has this roaring sound we can hear Whistler modes we can hear hiss and whistles that are going and these are all indications of Dynamics things that are happening in the magnetosphere now if you find yourself driving on a dark desert highway your AM radio might just tune in to the strange sounds of Jupiter's magnetosphere [Music] the bursts are as short as a few seconds and as long as a couple of minutes they come and go every hour or two most of it sounds like static but every once in a while you pick up something that sounds like a rising tone or a falling tone thank you some listeners have described audio spasms that sound like woodpeckers or waves crashing on the beach the noise is disturbing but just why the planet was talking remained a mystery until Voyager 2 passed through the outer magnetosphere in 1979 nobody really understood for a long time how those signals were generated so that was one of the things that was on my mind when I got interested in Jupiter what in the world was going on with these radio emissions it is one of the few Secrets Finally surrendered by Jupiter foreign [Music] and that answered some questions but it raised new ones and I think that's the way it should be if you don't have questions it gets kind of boring and dull so uh I think that the fact that the planets don't give up their secrets easily or the universe doesn't that's part of the game it's what makes it interesting Jupiter keeps astounding founding scientists one surprise came in 1979 when it was discovered that Jupiter has a ring it's nothing on the order of Saturn's still it's another feature that fascinates all of the giant planets have rings probably left over from when the planets formed and the moons coagulated out of the gas that was there and then it could be a failed Moon so Jupiter's ring comes from Material being knocked off of one of the Interior moons so it's a dust that's collected from Material that's coming in from outside moons the ring is slowly growing as new material flows into it and there's a whole other side to the planet that remains a mystery why do these storm spots keep forming there's the dark spot for example glimpses of it were first spied in 1997 it appeared to be a huge ominous Cloud twice the size of Earth hovering above Jupiter's North Pole there's a host of other spots too there are other sort of smaller cousins that have come and gone there were three ovals about half or third the size of the red spot and they sort of occupied the same latitude band in the Southern Hemisphere and they'd been around since the 1930s and amateur astronomers saw them form and they were around till the late 90s and they two of them merged with each other and then the remaining two merged and now there's one and it keeps transforming the turned red about six months ago and is now we're calling it the little red spot because it turned color now why did it turn color is a big is a big question so there's chemistry going on or some type of extra Dynamics that's going on that just kicked in and we need to start studying that foreign Jupiter is a hostile and Restless Planet its giant gaseous body of violent storms make it one of the most alien environments in the solar system even though it is half a billion miles from us we may have more in common with our cousin planet than we think [Music] I think the lesson to learn from Jupiter here is whatever's going on in our climate and our weather patterns here on Earth Jupiter has more of it but Earth is not an island and there are better examples of what's going on on Earth than even Earth itself for scientists Jupiter is the king of many questions concerning our solar system and could possibly hold the answers [Music]

Channel: HISTORY

Views: 11,912,958

Keywords: history, history channel, history shows, history channel shows, the history channel, documentary history channel, history documentary, documentary, history channel full episodes, documentaries, history channel documentaries, the universe, history the universe, the universe show, the universe full episodes, the universe clips, full episodes, watch the universe, the universe episode clips, the universe episodes, planets, stars, history and science, the solar system, solar system

Id: udzaNR8o-48

Length: 176min 52sec (10612 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023