- 3 hours ago
Scientists have uncovered astonishing revelations, from objects that are neither stars nor planets but are hotter than the Sun, to the Moon's surprising water-rich interior. These groundbreaking findings are reshaping our understanding of the universe and Earth's closest neighbor.
Category
đŸ˜¹
FunTranscript
00:00Okay, it seems scientists have come across a strange object in space, and they're not sure if it's a star
00:06or a planet.
00:07What we do know is that it's located 1,400 light-years away from us, and it makes us question
00:14what we thought we knew about the universe.
00:18Let me explain the dilemma here.
00:20We can tell if something is a star or a planet by considering the object's mass or the amount of
00:26stuff it has.
00:28Stars have a lot of mass, which gives them strong gravity that squeezes them tightly.
00:34Squeezing creates high temperatures inside them, causing them to shine brightly.
00:40Planets have less mass, so their gravity is weaker.
00:43They don't experience the same squeezing or high temperatures as stars.
00:48Instead, planets shine because they reflect the light from their stars, like our beautiful Earth does with our Sun, too.
00:55And this weirdo falls somewhere in between, since we consider it a brown dwarf.
01:01That's a special type of big, gaseous protostars.
01:05Brown dwarfs are usually like Jupiter in terms of their atmosphere.
01:09But they are much larger in size, about 13 to 80 times.
01:14If a brown dwarf has more than 80 times the mass of Jupiter, it can start burning regular hydrogen, just
01:20like a star.
01:21That's what usually makes stars shine brightly.
01:25But normally, brown dwarfs are not as hot as stars.
01:29Their inability to burn hydrogen has even earned them the nickname of failed stars.
01:36They burn at around 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is cooler than most stars.
01:41But this object defies the norm.
01:44Its temperature measures an incredible 13,900 degrees Fahrenheit.
01:49Now let's put that into perspective.
01:51The hottest day in history was reported to happen in Death Valley, California, more than 100 years ago.
01:58With a temperature of 134 degrees Fahrenheit.
02:02People back then must have felt like they were melting along with everything around them.
02:07Now imagine getting closer to the Sun, like taking a trip to Venus.
02:11Venus can reach insane temperatures of 860 degrees.
02:17It's not only about the distance, though.
02:19Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun, but it's still colder than Venus.
02:24Venus is extremely hot due to the greenhouse effect.
02:28Did you know that Venus could have been a delightful place to live a long, long time ago?
02:33Or at least be home to any form of life.
02:35But at some point, it started to trap carbon dioxide and eventually created this thick, smoggy oven that doesn't release
02:43heat.
02:44And that's why it's so hard to explore.
02:47The longest a probe managed to last on Venus was two hours.
02:52But hey, that's longer than I can do at work.
02:55And then I melt.
02:58So yeah, then you get to the Sun.
03:01Its surface burns at an incredible 9,930 degrees Fahrenheit.
03:06And what's fascinating is that this weird brown star we're talking about is hotter than that.
03:12I mean, it's not hotter than the Sun's core, whose temperatures go up to 27 million degrees.
03:17But it's still very impressive and unusual for a brown dwarf to be this hot.
03:22At least, that's what everyone thought until they realized why it was happening.
03:27The brown dwarf is remarkably close to another star that falls into the category of white dwarfs.
03:34They're so close to each other that our mysterious star makes one orbit around its white dwarf friend in just
03:412.3 hours.
03:42Woo!
03:43How old we'd be over there!
03:46Since they're this close, they're tidally locked, like our moon and Earth.
03:50That means one side of this brown dwarf always faces the white dwarf, and the other side is forever in
03:56darkness.
03:57Because of all this, our brown dwarf is superheated on one side only.
04:02So its day side is what got us confused.
04:06Well, the temperature on the night side is what you would expect from a brown dwarf.
04:12But these extreme conditions won't last long.
04:15Such a hot temperature makes the molecules in the dwarf's atmosphere break apart into individual atoms.
04:21And while its molecules are falling apart, this brown dwarf is slowly disappearing.
04:29And if you think this brown dwarf is hot, what would you say about Eta Carinae?
04:34It's a star located about 7,500 light-years away from Earth, and it belongs to an elite group of
04:41stars we call luminous blue variables.
04:45One astronomer first noticed it in the 17th century.
04:49But back then, it was just a regular medium-bright star.
04:54Almost 200 years later, another astronomer was observing it.
04:58But this time, it was a very bright star, one of the brightest ones in the sky.
05:04A few years later, it reached the highest level of brightness in a big event called the Great Eruption.
05:10When it happened, the star could be easily seen in the night sky.
05:14It released so much light, as much as is emitted in a supernova explosion.
05:18It remained like that for a couple of years, which is not what usually happens with exploding stars.
05:25After the party reached its peak, the star decided it was time to leave.
05:29It's still hesitating, though, so it's still alive but dimmer than before.
05:35There's a nebula around Eta Carinae, too.
05:39It is a shell made of gas and dust that formed during the Great Eruption.
05:43It even blocks some of the star's light.
05:46Eta Carinae is a binary star system.
05:48That means there are two stars that orbit around each other.
05:53One component has a temperature of about 26,500 degrees, and the other, 62,500 degrees.
06:02The main star in the Eta Carinae system, which is the more massive of the two, is 100 times heavier
06:08than our Sun.
06:09Because of its enormous mass, scientists predict that this star may eventually explode in a powerful event known as a
06:17supernova.
06:18But not for another several thousand years.
06:24So, by now, you might have already guessed what the hottest thing in the universe is.
06:29Ta-da!
06:30A supernova.
06:32The supernova is what tells us that the life of a star has ended.
06:36We're talking about the most powerful explosions in space.
06:40They happen when a star that's between 8 and 40 times more massive than our Sun flops.
06:47Its core can no longer create enough energy through a process called fusion.
06:51So, the star can't even handle its own gravity.
06:55It's like a stellar burnout.
06:57Too much work a star can't handle, and its core just collapses.
07:00During a supernova, the temperatures in the star's core can get 6,000 times higher than in the core of
07:07the Sun.
07:08Or, sometimes, a specific type of star called a white dwarf suddenly restarts its nuclear fusion, and bam, you get
07:16a supernova again.
07:19Kepler's supernova happened at the beginning of the 17th century.
07:23And it was the last, really big supernova event we directly observed from Earth.
07:29On average, supernovas in our galaxy happen three times every century.
07:34I mean, we got a smaller supernova in 1987, too, when a blue supergiant exploded in one of the Milky
07:41Way's satellite galaxies,
07:43which we know as the Large Magellanic Cloud.
07:48This explosion was so strong, people could even observe it with the unaided eye.
07:53Even though it was incredibly far, 168,000 light-years away from our home planet.
08:00What a topic for summer days, huh?
08:02But check this out.
08:04We can also talk about the hottest thing people have ever created, made in a surprising place, Switzerland.
08:11Nah, we're not talking about a super-hot chocolate.
08:15A group of scientists there created a subatomic soup called a quark-gluon plasma.
08:20In this experiment, the temperature got 250,000 times as hot as the Sun's core.
08:26The purpose of this experiment was to recreate the conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang,
08:32when the universe was still in the state of chaos.
08:36Okay, let's get even more extreme.
08:39In theory, things can get even hotter.
08:42Have you heard of the Planck temperature?
08:44It's an insanely hot temperature with numbers so high we can't even imagine.
08:50A supernova is like tepid tea compared to this madness.
08:54And who even knows what the matter does at these temperatures?
09:07It's so close to us, at least in terms of space, but there's still so much we don't know about
09:12the Moon yet.
09:13For example, Chinese researchers have collected soil samples from the Moon and found out there might be billions of tiny
09:20glass spheres on the lunar surface.
09:23What's really cool is that they might hold enormous amounts of water.
09:29These tiny spheres form when meteorites hit the Moon at crazy speeds, sometimes at hundreds of thousands of miles per
09:37hour.
09:37When that happens, a strong explosion sends bits of the Moon's crust flying into the air like popcorn.
09:45As these chunks of crust cool down, they create little glass beads that look like tiny glittering spheres.
09:52These beads are so small that they're like crumbs sprinkled over the Moon's surface.
09:57Scientists call them impact glass.
10:02And it turns out the soil on the Moon is holding a secret ingredient that can make water, oxygen.
10:09So, these tiny glass balls are like little capsules with oxygen inside.
10:14There's a special type of wind called solar wind, and it's made of protons and electrons.
10:20When protons hit the capsules, they mix with the oxygen inside and finally make water.
10:28But the most amazing part is that some of these glass balls with water inside get hidden under a layer
10:34of the Moon's dust called regolith.
10:37So, if we go on a mission to the Moon, we'll have hidden reservoirs of water underground.
10:43It's as if someone has prepared some canned food for us to survive.
10:48Because you can't drink that water directly from these glass beads, you're supposed to collect them and then boil them
10:53in an oven to extract the water.
10:56When they cool, they release vapor, so you'll have regular liquid water in a bottle.
11:01That way, astronauts on their missions will be able to stay longer up there, considering these secret stashes.
11:08And the coolest thing is that these glass beads are very common on the Moon.
11:13They're spread from the poles to the equator, which means there might be enough water even for generations that might
11:20come to live there one day.
11:24There are other spots where we can find water in space, too.
11:28For example, scientists found an extremely big cloud of water vapor that's 12 billion light years away from us.
11:35Not within reach, of course, but it's still good to know.
11:39And we're talking about something bigger than we can imagine.
11:43It's thought the cloud contains at least 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the oceans and seas
11:50on our home planet.
11:53Imagine swimming or scuba diving there.
11:56It's like taking a dip in a giant water balloon that's traveling through space.
12:00I mean, you wouldn't have a way out, considering the amount of water in there.
12:04But hey, at least the view would be magnificent.
12:09Water is actually everywhere across our solar system.
12:13It's mostly in the shape of atmospheric gas or ice, and sometimes even in its liquid form.
12:19And there are probably many water worlds in our galaxy, too.
12:24Scientists from the University of Copenhagen have discovered exciting new evidence about how planets form in our solar system and
12:31beyond.
12:32Their computer models have confirmed the interesting theory of pebble accretion.
12:37Which means that planets form from tiny pieces of ice and dust.
12:42This theory is based on the observation of disks around young stars that are made up of pebbles that come
12:48in several hundred Earth masses.
12:51As these pebbles collide and clump together, they form protoplanets and, eventually, planets.
12:58What's even more exciting is water could be an important ingredient in this planet's making.
13:04It also means that the water may not have come to Earth by chance.
13:08For instance, via icy comets hitting our home planet.
13:12Instead, maybe it was there from the very beginning.
13:15Perhaps planets in our neighborhood, like Mars and Venus, formed with water as well.
13:22Scientists also say we shouldn't assume we're a special case just because we have water.
13:27There could be many planets all over our Milky Way galaxy as big as Earth that have water, too.
13:34That means there could be many worlds in our galaxy with continents and oceans.
13:39Which could also mean there is a great deal of life out there waiting to be discovered.
13:46But, just because there's water somewhere, it doesn't mean that place would be a good spot for an interstellar summer
13:52vacation for future generations.
13:55Water on many planets is probably embedded in rock or fills underground oceans.
14:02Researchers have checked more than 40 exoplanets we know about.
14:06They're all smaller than Neptune and located around something we call red dwarf stars.
14:12These make up 80% of all stars we're familiar with in our galaxy.
14:17They're cooler than our Sun and also the smallest type of hydrogen-burning stars.
14:24And there could be more planets with enormous amounts of water than we thought.
14:29Plus, this water can take up to half of the total mass of these planets.
14:33Scientists know this because they've been studying the density of these exoplanets.
14:39They have realized they're too light to be made entirely out of rock.
14:45I've mentioned Venus before.
14:48Today, it's a hot, rocky planet a bit smaller than Earth, with a dry atmosphere and only some traces of
14:54water vapor.
14:55It's also very poor in oxygen.
14:58But, in its early stages, the planet may have been a completely different world, with liquid water and even clouds.
15:05Which means, it's possible there used to be life.
15:10What if Venus used to be similar to Earth, with oceans and moderate temperatures?
15:16It would be great if it stayed that way, because these seem like good conditions to develop life.
15:22So, we'd probably be writing letters to some of our space friends from there, or visiting them already.
15:28But, the scenario went in a different direction for Venus, about 700 million years ago or so.
15:35The planet got so hot, it lost all of its oxygen.
15:39That's why it wasn't able to form liquid water on its surface.
15:43Instead, it developed a thick atmosphere, made up of carbon dioxide.
15:48Which, made this world even hotter than Mercury, even though it's twice as far from the Sun.
15:55Even icy comets pelting it couldn't bring water back to its surface.
15:59We can't do it either, in some artificial way.
16:02It would be like trying to grow a delicate flower in a desert.
16:05No matter how much you water it, if the conditions are too dry and harsh, the flower won't survive.
16:13But, some people thought the water in the atmosphere of our close neighbor could be enough for developing life.
16:20Plus, scientists have discovered there is a compound called phosphate,
16:24that's often associated with living organisms on Earth.
16:29Maybe, in the past, this was enough.
16:31Today, the amount of water on Venus is so small,
16:34even our toughest microbes that are extremely tolerant to droughts wouldn't be able to stay alive there.
16:42Phosphine is still a cool discovery worth investigating,
16:45but not something that tells us there could be life on Venus.
16:50Jupiter might be a more likely option for that.
16:53The Galileo probe flew through the atmosphere of this magnificent gas giant
16:57to measure the temperature and water activity.
17:00It found out there was enough water for life to exist in the planet's clouds,
17:05but sadly, there are not enough nutrients there.
17:08Plus, there's too much ultraviolet radiation,
17:11so most organisms wouldn't actually be able to survive there.
17:16And everyone knows Europa, one of Jupiter's moons.
17:20It's that very place in our solar system that has the biggest chances to support life.
17:25Its icy crust probably hides an ocean underneath.
17:28And because of Jupiter's gravity that affects Europa,
17:32the ocean is not frozen, but remains liquid.
17:35The ocean might be warm under that icy crust,
17:38probably thanks to hydrothermal vents.
17:43Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons,
17:45probably has even higher chances to host life than Europa.
17:49And it's one of the best candidates to have a beautiful, warm, and salty ocean beneath the surface.
17:55It has the coolest ice geysers that catapult into space about 1,000 tons of water every hour,
18:02together with salt, organic molecules, and some other materials.
Comments