The Universe: The Strangest Phenomena Ever Seen (S3, E10) | Full Episode | History

in the vast reaches of space  exist objects and phenomena   as bizarre as any science fiction writer's  imagination there are so many extremes in   space that it's really hard for a human being  here on planet earth to imagine a lot of them picture a particle that can pass right through you  a missing planet lurking in our own solar system   and clouds filled with the alcohol we drink   the universe is filled with all sorts of bizarre  things but it's often the case that the strangest   phenomena end up teaching us the most about  the universe they're outlandish unexplainable   and unbelievably peculiar take a journey  to the strange side of our universe from our milky way galaxy to remote  regions billions of light-years away   space is jam-packed with really weird stuff it's  hard to comprehend some of the concepts and things   that we find in outer space because they're so  profoundly different from life on our own planet the more we learn the less we know so  there's a seemingly limitless supply   of strange things about the universe that  remain to be discovered the universe is   filled with objects and all sorts of mysterious  phenomena that we still don't fully understand strange as it may seem astronomers have discovered  interstellar clouds actually filled with the same   kind of alcohol found in beer one of the strangest  clouds is one that's filled with organic molecules   in particular with ethyl alcohol now that of  course is the alcohol we drink and so the idea   that there could be this huge cosmic distillery  is kind of a fun idea but in fact that's correct   giant molecular clouds are  enormous complexes of gas and dust   some of them are up to a thousand times the  size of our own solar system they're dense and   sizeable cores allow for the formation of complex  molecules that can produce a cosmic cocktail in this microbrewery barley water  and yeast are used to produce alcohol   whereas in interstellar molecular clouds  it's dust grains that serve as the key   nucleation site for simpler molecules like  molecular hydrogen water and carbon dioxide   to come together and react chemically to form  more complex molecules like ethyl alcohol   when the dust grains migrate closer to the  center of the molecular cloud they start to   approach the central star that's forming in its  core and this heats them up possibly enough to   evaporate some of the complex molecules like  ethyl alcohol off and into interstellar space thank you cheers so just like this micro  brewery the dust grains in interstellar   molecular clouds serve as meeting places where  lonely molecules can form more complex molecules the first alcohol cloud was detected in 1975.   since then many more of these truly strange  space clouds have been observed the cloud g34.3   which resides in the constellation aquila is one  thousand times the diameter of our solar system in fact in g 34.3 there's enough alpha alcohol  to supply 300 000 pints of beer every day   to every single person on planet  earth for the next billion years   that'd be one heck of a party the only downside  is that it would probably give you a pretty   bad headache because it's also mixed in with  hydrogen cyanide carbon monoxide carbon dioxide   ammonia and some fairly  other not so nice chemicals they may seem like inebriated  clouds drifting aimlessly in space   yet as unbelievable as it may sound these clouds  eventually form multiple star systems planets   and maybe even life in the outer edges of  the cloud these frozen dust grains with   their complex molecules still remain intact  and in fact we know them today as comets   and it's thought that these comets may be  responsible for bringing some of these more   complicated molecules into the inner solar system  in fact they may have seeded our own planet with   these molecules which are the building blocks of  things like amino acids which we need for life our sun and earth were formed  out of an interstellar cloud   much like this cloud and if you've got the  right ingredients the right organic ingredients   you've got the right ingredients for life it may seem really weird that there's this  giant cloud of alcohol floating through space   but one of the things that i love is how common  organic molecules alcohol being one of them is   throughout the galaxy and the universe we find  them everywhere if you pulverize the earth into   powder that's basically what an interstellar  cloud is like all the chemicals that make us up   alcohol-laden clouds may have helped  to sow the seeds of life on earth yet as incredible as it may sound  life itself may actually exist in   other types of truly weird clouds venus the second planet from our sun has a  hot hellish surface yet strangely it's clouds   which hover at an altitude of around 30 miles  bear temperatures that may be habitable for life the temperatures are roughly the same as earth's  surface the atmospheric pressure is about the same   as as earth's surface so you might  say if life can exist here on earth   perhaps it can exist in  similar conditions on venus if life does exist in the clouds of venus  how did it get there in the first place it's thought that the atmosphere of venus is the  product of what's called a runaway greenhouse   effect where the build-up of carbon dioxide  causes the temperature to rise at the surface   which if there were any liquid oceans of water on  venus they would have eventually boiled away and   escaped into space then it may have migrated  up to the upper more hospitable layers of the atmosphere life as we know it needs water   the clouds of venus contain water in  the form of concentrated sulfuric acid here on earth scientists have found  organisms called extremophiles   that thrive in similar acidic liquids such as  the hot springs in yellowstone national park so some have speculated that organisms  could survive in the clouds of venus   and they may have even evolved ways of  making use of available ultraviolet light   much like plants use visible light  for photosynthesis you have a lot of   chemistry going on in the clouds you've got  sulfurs and you've got hydrogen and other   elements that are needed to harbor life and to  sustain life those are abundant at those altitudes   so it's not inconceivable that life could  survive or exist in in the cloud layers of venus   one method to test whether life could exist in  the clouds of venus is to examine the clouds   above earth measurements here on earth for  example capturing particles of cloud and   examining them in the lab have shown that very  small organisms and bacteria can actually survive   just sort of floating through the atmosphere  being caught up on updrafts and just gusts of wind and they can perhaps survive in the  atmosphere for long periods of time   as an analogy the same type of  behavior might be occurring on venus   so if there were life in the venusian atmosphere  it might just be kind of flitting along   for long periods of time nasa may one day send  a mission to venus to find out if there's life   in its clouds but right now scientists are  keenly interested to learn whether another   truly peculiar planet exists in our solar  system a mysterious planet that has yet to be discovered planet x is a hypothetical planet  that may exist beyond neptune planet x is sort of a generic designation for an  unknown planet that's somewhere in the outer solar   system that remains to be discovered astronomers  began to speculate there might be a missing planet   when observing the kuiper belt a repository  for icy rocks beyond the orbit of neptune   the outer edge of the kuiper belt is called  the kuiper cliff because the density of space   rocks drops off steeply here this could  be caused by neptune's gravitational pull   or perhaps by an unknown planet one hypothesis for  the drop-off in kuiper belt objects that we see   after about 50 or 55 astronomical units  is that there's a planet lurking out   there somewhere which could be sort  of hurting them inside of that region scientists have wondered for decades how  many planets our solar system harbors   is there really a planet x originally pluto when  that was discovered was designated as planet x   more recently there have been discoveries of  other kuiper belt objects things like eris and   sedna for example that have been assigned the  designation planet x there still remains to be   the discovery of a very large object in the  deep solar system so there's sort of still this   idea that a planet x or a mysterious hidden  planet is out in the solar system somewhere scientists may soon solve the  mystery of the so-called kuiper cliff   if a planet x really exists these cosmic sleuths  will find it we think that we should be able to   learn whether or not there really is  such a planet relatively soon with a new   generation of large-scale surveys that  are going to detect anything out there planet x may or may not exist but there are other planets that have been  observed far off in space that are truly   out of this world our solar system contains some pretty  unusual planets but we're not alone sophisticated telescopes have now  identified nearly 300 planets that   are located well beyond our solar  system they're known as exoplanets the most peculiar exoplanets are pulsar planets   unlike most that orbit a star like our sun  these planets orbit a fast spinning neutron star   called a pulsar which emits a pulsing  radio emission much like a lighthouse in the 1990s scientists actually  discovered a trio of pulsar planets   about 900 light years away  located in the constellation virgo   if i had my say they'd probably go down  as the weirdest planets in the universe and these planets are all very close  in to the pulsar now that's no place   for a planet to exist nobody expected  to find planets around these things   because a pulsar or a neutron star is  the remnants of a supernova explosion this star has ripped itself  apart in one of the most   violent chaotic explosions known in the universe so what were planets doing there this was a real  surprise there are three of these planets and two   of them are about four times the mass of the  earth and the third planet is about twice the   mass of earth's moon so very small planets indeed  in fact they orbit so close to their neutron star   primary that they could actually fit within  the orbit of mercury so they're very close in the enduring question is how these  planets survive the supernova event at all if the same thing happened to our sun  the planets in the inner solar system   would have been vaporized if those planets that we see were  there at the time of the supernova   and they survived it they  certainly would extinguish any life   that might have been on those  planets there's no hope for that just the power and the energy in the radiation  environment of the supernova would make it pretty   lethal to anything if the three planets weren't  orbiting the star at the time of the supernova   explosion then how did they get there maybe  these weird pulsar planets formed from the debris   surrounding the supernova the exploding star maybe  there was a disk of material that was shot out   but it didn't quite escape and it left a disk of  debris from which planets then formed we don't   really know how these weird pulsar planets  form they challenge all theories so far   pulsar planets shed startling new insight into the  formation of solar systems throughout the universe if the pulsar planets formed after the supernova  explosion then they're important because they   indicate that planet formation can happen  in rather extreme unexpected environments maybe you don't need something quite as orderly  as the gas that formed our own planetary system   so that's really cool but if the planets were there before the explosion   and remained bound to the star that's  an interesting challenge to theory   as well because it shows that somehow  planets can remain bound in some cases pulsar planets are oddities but the neutron or  pulsar stars they orbit are also quite bizarre neutron star material is incredibly dense  it has a very high mass per unit volume   in fact it's as dense as an atomic nucleus so  if i had a shovel full of sand and this were   actually neutron star material it would weigh  as much as mount whitney in the sierra nevada   range in california it would have as much mass as  a mountain and a bucket full of this neutron star   material would weigh as much as mount everest the  biggest mountain on earth now i can lift a bucket   of sand quite easily but if this were actually  neutron star material there's no way i could lift   mount everest that shows how incredibly  dense neutron star material really is there are two types of neutron stars pulsars that spin rapidly  and emit beeping radio pulses   and magnetars that spin slower  and emit energy from magnetism magnetars which are much rarer than pulsars   have the strongest magnetic  fields known in the universe there aren't any places on earth whether  you can find magnetic fields as strong as   you find them in a magnetar but there's  kind of a parallel with this tesla coil the tesla coil is originally experimented with by  nikola tesla who was trying to figure out how to   provide electricity without having to wire holes  but actually provide electricity through the air   the tesla coil has a big voltage difference about  half a million volts between the ball in the   middle and the cage that surrounds it and that gap  is a release of energy that when the electrons fly   through the air it releases a tremendous amount of  energy that you see in those sparks a magnetar is   kind of the same thing it's a release of energy  that you see in gamma rays and x-rays magnetars   can release gigantic bursts of energy not in a  periodic way like a pulsar but rather sort of at   random something happens to the crust like a star  quake and a bunch of magnetic fields come together   and release a tremendous amount of energy which  gets turned into x-rays and gamma rays magnetars   and pulsars are both strange stars but scientists  have discovered something even more bizarre a star that acts like a pulsar and a magnetar nasa's rossi x-ray timing explorer  has observed this unusual star   ejecting five colossal outbursts  of energy in the form of flares   which are characteristic of magnetars they  occurred five times between may and july of 2005   each flare lasted less than a second but released  energy equivalent to tens of thousands of suns there's been one case of a pulsar which went  through several magnetar-like outbursts that   require this much stronger magnetic field and some  sort of a restructuring of the magnetic field that   suddenly releases a lot more energy than a normal  pulsar so we have at least one case of a link or   a missing link between pulsars and magnetars a  pulsar that later showed some magnetar phenomena   the pulsar magnetar combo star is  fairly young less than 900 years old so astronomers think neutron  stars may begin their lives as   magnetars then settle down and become pulsars it could be that many neutron stars  that eventually become normal pulsars   actually go through magnetar-like  outbursts when they're very young just   a few hundred years old or a thousand  years old that could be the critical link   we're seeing this one when it's much  younger than most pulsars that we see some unusual stars exist in the cosmos but there is equally odd small stuff in  space recently scientists have solved   the mystery surrounding one of the most  elusive things in the entire universe   a ghostly particle that passes  through us every second of every day the universe lays claim to infinite  numbers of abnormal planets and stars at the same time there are equally  strange small things in space human beings and most of the universe are  made up of normal matter which primarily   consists of four fundamental particles one  is a ghost-like particle called a neutrino neutrinos would be my vote for some of  the weirdest normal matter in the universe   at this very moment every second there are 50  trillion neutrinos actually coming from the sun   that are passing through my body and there  are other neutrinos from other stars coming   in different directions right through the earth  these things by the trillions are pouring into   me every second but we're completely unaware of  them they don't really interact with us at all there's a funny little particle called a neutrino   italian for little neutral one it has very  little mass very small amount of matter   almost nothing but it has energy and it zips  through space at close to the speed of light these things are so non-interactive but if  you imagine a light-year thickness of lead   and you shined a beam of neutrinos toward it  half of those neutrinos would make it through   that light year thickness  of lead completely unscathed neutrinos are most commonly formed by nuclear  reactions inside stars including our sun   about 60 billion solar neutrinos pass  through our thumbnails every second   but there are other sources that create neutrinos  they are produced by nuclear reactors there's some   being produced by the radioactive decay of  elements in the rock around us all the time   and there are others that are actually produced  when cosmic rays slam into our atmosphere and they hit the atmosphere literally  with the force of a 100 mile an hour fastball vast numbers of neutrinos were released  into the universe immediately after the big bang   along with other particles and light humans  are the descendants of this primordial soup neutrinos are unusual small objects but there  are equally out of the ordinary big things asteroids are the rocky leftovers  from the formation of the solar system these space rocks primarily orbit within  the asteroid belt between jupiter and mars among the billions that inhabit the asteroid  belt there's one asteroid that's truly eccentric   one of the strangest asteroids is one called  tutatus and i guess it catches our attention   a lot because it's odd it's not perfectly  round it's kind of misshapen it sort of   looks like a bowling pin elongated like a  bulge down here and then a narrow neck and   then another bulge some have even said it's  maybe two separate objects loosely connected   it's got a strange rotational  period where it's sort of tumbling   kind of like a badly thrown football it's it's  not spinning along any of its primary axes   it's actually sort of spinning along  all three tumbling through space tutus also has a highly elliptical orbit which  carries it from the asteroid belt to inside the   earth's orbit it's an earth-crossing asteroid and  that puts it in the danger zone as something that   could potentially strike us in september of  2004 toutatus got too close for comfort the   asteroid came within a million miles or about four  times the distance to our moon and that's really   close for an asteroid especially for one that big  and if it were to crash into earth it would not   um slow down one bit by our atmosphere it would  really smack us and be very devastating to earth the next near passage is until  about the 26th century so   hundreds of years away so we're in good shape  with teutotus but we have to keep an eye on it tutatus is an irregular asteroid but there are   much bigger and stranger cosmic  bodies that roam the universe a moon also known as a satellite is a celestial  body that orbits a planet or a smaller object   such as a dwarf planet or asteroid about  240 moons exist in our solar system alone   and yet earth's moon is the only satellite in  the solar system that perfectly eclipses the sun but one of the most curious moons belongs to  a gas giant planet in our outer solar system   miranda one of uranus's moons is really a weird  moon it's very small it's only about 290 miles   across so it tucked neatly in the sort of new  york to washington corridor but it is a completely   you know a mess miranda has been named the frankenstein moon of  our solar system because of its haphazard surface   the surface has all kinds of features  and canyons and flows and cracks and   it looks like it's just been through the  ringer you know that has been through   something even though it's only 290 miles across  it has canyons that are 12 miles deep you know   by comparison the grand canyon is about 280  miles long and is a mile deeper thereabouts   what makes miranda one of the strangest moons  in the solar system is that it looks as though   it were it was assembled from the  leftover bits of other moons and planets it's got a dual nature about the surface you've  got certain regions that appear very flat   and then other locations that are very dynamic miranda puzzles astronomers because they  don't know exactly how it was formed   one theory suggests that billions of years  ago the tiny moon may have been involved   in a cosmic impact so immense that it  broke into many icy and rocky pieces   these pieces could have melded back together in a  hodgepodge of light and dark patterns and shapes but an alternative hypothesis suggests that  miranda's surface is the result of faulting   when enormous stresses build and push  large rock masses beyond their limit it's much like what has happened here on earth basque has rocks here in in southern california  what we see is the result of two plates on   earth's surface that are sort of pushing against  each other imparting a large amount of stress in order to relieve that stress you're  generating folding and buckling of the surface   and that gives us these dramatic  spires that we see all around a similar type of action is occurring on  miranda where you have enormous amounts   of stress on the surface that are causing  buckling and folding of the mirandan surface   generating the peaks and scarps that we see there   miranda is just one of millions of unexplainable  objects that make up our milky way galaxy   yet our galaxy isn't the  strangest one in the universe   there are others that give new  meaning to the word strange galaxies they're celestial neighborhoods  made up of planets stars gas and dust at least 100 billion of them  exist in the observable universe but many astronomers think the most bizarre  galaxies are ultra luminous infrared galaxies   also known as euler's when looking at  them in the infrared light they are 100   times brighter than normal galaxies so they  are among the most luminous in the universe the enormous amounts of energy being put  out by these ultraluminous infrared galaxies   are the result of huge bursts of star formation   in our galaxy about one new star the  size of our sun is born every year but in ulurgs about a hundred  new stars are formed yearly stars are formed out of interstellar gas and  they're surrounded by dust and you can't really   see the stars forming but all of that energy heats  up the dust which in turn glows in infrared light   so you're seeing all of the energy  of all of these generations of stars   being absorbed and re-radiated in infrared from  the dust in these galaxies so it's like there's a   shroud over the galaxies but the shroud  itself is glowing really really brightly ulurgs were first discovered in the early  1980s when the infrared astronomical satellite   known as iras picked up galaxies that are  extremely bright at infrared wavelengths   a trillion times more powerful than our sun one of the most luminous u-lurgs  has been identified as f-15307-3252   it's located seven billion light  years away in the constellation buatis   the numbers in those names refer to the direction  the coordinates in the sky where you can find the   object this one is very bright very relatively  speaking distant and is a very exciting find   because there's just so much star formation going  on it you want to understand why is that the case   how did it happen what triggered this enormous  amount of star formation that we're seeing   one hypothesis has been that these galaxies are  very active because they're the product of either   mergers or near-misses with other galaxies  when one galaxy passes close by another or   actually hits it you can have compression of  a large amount of gas which can set off huge   waves of star formation or can very efficiently  funnel gas into the central black hole causing   a lot of heat to be produced in the surrounding  accretion disk but this is still an active area   of research right now as to exactly why this  process happens to make these unusual galaxies supermassive black holes have been detected in  the centers of ultraluminous infrared galaxies   they're regions of space where gravity is so  strong that nothing can escape it not even light   but there's an even stranger breed  of black holes that may also exist miniature black holes are hypothetical  objects smaller than atomic nuclei unlike their stellar mass and  supermassive black hole cousins   many black holes have never been observed but  many scientists believe that they do exist many black holes are probably nothing unusual  there's probably one right here in front of   my nose right now and one here and one  here we're probably surrounded by them many black holes might be primordial  leftovers from the big bang   the explosion could have squeezed concentrations  of matter to form black holes too small to be   seen with a microscope and the smaller  the black hole the faster it loses mass   so if you had a little tiny black hole  like the mass of a mountain that was   created shortly after the big bang then right  about now 14 billion years later it will have   evaporated so much that the remaining stuff  will evaporate in a colossal explosion just damn scientists may prove many black holes exist by  manufacturing them temporarily here on earth   in switzerland scientists have  built the large hadron collider   it's a particle accelerator hopefully capable  of slamming subatomic particles together   to replicate the energies that existed  less than a second after the big bang   the large hadron collider is going to be able  to shoot particles very fast at each other and for an instance there will be a lot  of mass in a tiny little bit of space and it may actually succeed in  popping off little mini black holes it's an amazing idea we're on the verge of being   able to make artificial tiny  black holes in the laboratory if the large hadron collider really  does produce miniature black holes   it'll also be really exciting because  it'll show that miniature black holes   really do exist or can exist and are not just a  figment of the theoretical imagination the many   black holes that the large hadron collider may  produce will last an instant before disappearing   and if successful the experiment may also  reveal secrets about another puzzling   phenomenon in the universe a matter that's  completely invisible to find this phantom   matter scientists had to look no further than  our own galactic neighborhood the milky way strange as it may seem planets stars  moons and galaxies make up less than 20   of all matter in the universe the rest is made up of dark matter a form  of matter we can't see but exists everywhere dark matter was first inferred in the early 1930s  but very few scientists bought the concept at the   time but in the past two decades the evidence  for this invisible phenomenon has become   overwhelming as people began to map the  milky way galaxy they noticed that the stars   at the very edge were moving so fast they  should have actually flown off the galaxy   but they're not they're being held together  by something invisible something that's   adding more attractive force to the galaxy more  gravity but we have no idea what this could be it's kind of strange that a lot of the universe  we can't even see we detect dark matter because   it interacts gravitationally with mass that  we do see galaxies spin faster than they   should counting up the amount of gravity  that you can see from the matter they have   and if that gravitational attraction weren't there  the hot gas would disperse so we know there's more   gravity than we can account for by the mass that  we see and that is just simply called dark matter one method to measure dark matter  is to look at hot x-ray emitting gas   and how it's contained by  the gravity present in it another way is to look at something called  gravitational lensing gravitational lensing   is caused when we see a very distant galaxy behind  a foreground galaxy and the light from the distant   one is bent as it goes around the nearer galaxy  that's kind of an odd idea light actually bending   in a lens that's really just formed by space  itself gravity makes that distortion in space   so we noticed there were these gravitationally  distorted galaxies that we could see and when we   estimated what the mass in the center should have  been to make those distortions it was gigantic   10 times more than the mass we saw there so  we were observing a collection of dark matter   dark matter may constitute most of the  mass in space but the majority of energy   in the universe comes from yet another  invisible phenomenon called dark energy   it's a theoretical form of energy that exists  everywhere and accounts for seventy percent of   all mass and energy in the universe probably  the weirdest thing being that it's the least   understood thing in the universe is this stuff  called dark energy dark energy for example doesn't   really have all that much to do with dark matter  they're different things the dark really means   we just don't know what's going on dark energy  was first observed in 1998 when measurements of   faraway exploding stars were used to determine  the distances of galaxies those galaxies were   found to be farther away than expected in  a universe that's slowing down with time   the astronomers thus concluded that the universe  is actually expanding more quickly with time and   dark energy may be the culprit the universe  is filled with this repulsive dark energy   it's really weird stuff that's causing the  expansion of the universe to speed up with   time to accelerate so it's going whoosh like  that you know faster and faster and that was   really weird when it was found you know it was not  anticipated it appears at least to us at this time   that even more of the universe is made up of  dark energy which is some substance it's dark it   doesn't shine we can't see it but it acts to speed  up the expansion of the universe it's sort of an   anti-gravity normal matter and energy tend  to slow down the rate at which things are   going away from each other because normal  things pull on one another gravitationally   but dark energy appears to accelerate the rate  at which objects pull away from each other one theory suggests the dark energy will  accelerate the expansion of space to such   an extent that the entire universe will be ripped  to shreds in about 50 billion years if that's the   case then eventually not only will clusters  of galaxies be ripped apart from one another   and then galaxies themselves will get  ripped apart as the stars zip away   from one another and then solar systems  planetary systems will get ripped apart   and then later on even planets will  get ripped apart and humans will get   ripped apart and finally even atoms and  subatomic particles will get ripped apart the universe is full of odd and interesting  things but the most peculiar thing in the   universe may exist in our own backyard by far  and away the strangest thing in my opinion in   the universe is earth and i live here and i know  something about it what a crazy place this is   a rocky planet near a star with all this green  stuff that takes sunlight and turns it into food   that's strange but you know to others there's  nothing particularly peculiar because it's home i'd say the strangest things  in outer space are human beings   we're definitely unusual and we haven't  found any other beings like us yet   in the universe although that's not to say that  they aren't out there but uh we're pretty strange you

Channel: HISTORY

Views: 942,419

Rating: 4.6767573 out of 5

Keywords: history, history channel, history shows, history channel shows, the universe, history the universe, the universe show, the universe full episodes, the universe clips, full episodes, the universe season 3 episode 10, the universe s3 e10, the universe s03 e10, the universe 3X10, watch the universe, Watch the universe full episodes, Season 3, history clips, history channel full episodes, universe, the universe season 3, Episode 10, Strangest Things, stars, galaxies, moons

Id: _kt1imQlwuY

Length: 44min 28sec (2668 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021