85 Space Facts That Will Launch Your Mind

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Transcript

00:00:00 Millions of people around the world go out on the streets and rooftops to look at the

00:00:06 amazing cosmic phenomenon.

00:00:09 Another planet, right next to the Moon, a big red one.

00:00:12 At first, everyone's excited.

00:00:15 Mars showing up out of nowhere is having a strange effect on humanity.

00:00:20 Just as the Moon can affect the psychological and physical state of some people, Mars'

00:00:25 unexpected visit is causing people to behave pretty strangely.

00:00:30 Every night, the sky is lit up by the white light of the Moon and the red glow of Mars.

00:00:35 Many people get a sort of instant insomnia.

00:00:39 Some even stop drinking coffee because they no longer feel sleepy.

00:00:43 Mars brings out energy and a little wildness in people, making them laugh more, and even

00:00:49 drives a few poor people crazy.

00:00:51 They begin to go out of their houses more often and enjoy the unusual night sky.

00:00:57 A few days later, everybody can see what's happening.

00:01:00 Mars is getting bigger.

00:01:03 Scientists announced that the red planet is slowly moving towards Earth.

00:01:07 A collision is inevitable.

00:01:10 Earthlings only have a few years left.

00:01:12 A few months ago, a huge asteroid crashed into the red planet with such force that Mars

00:01:18 simply flew out of its own orbit and went rogue.

00:01:21 The chance that Mars would fly close to Earth was always going to be pretty high.

00:01:26 After about 3 seconds of being announced, the news went viral, and panic set in.

00:01:32 The situation's getting worse and worse.

00:01:35 The closer Mars gets, the more it affects people on a physical level.

00:01:39 Hundreds of videos pop up showing collision simulations of Mars and Earth.

00:01:44 And there's no happy ending.

00:01:46 Wanna see what happens?

00:01:47 One famous blogger asked her followers, "The Earth's almost completely covered with water,

00:01:53 and Mars is all dust, sand, and rocks."

00:01:56 Then she puts a huge watermelon in the middle of her room.

00:01:59 From the far end, she launches a bowling ball at it.

00:02:04 Strike!

00:02:05 Mars looks almost the same size as the Moon now.

00:02:09 It's about to come into the Moon's orbit, and it's affecting the Earth's magnetic field.

00:02:14 Floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, powerful thunderstorms – they go from bad to worse.

00:02:21 Animals go crazy.

00:02:22 Birds no longer migrate south.

00:02:25 The polar northern lights appear in the Caribbean.

00:02:29 The economy isn't handling the news that well.

00:02:32 People stop showing up to work.

00:02:34 Why wouldn't they?

00:02:35 They just want to have fun and be with loved ones.

00:02:38 There are enough resources on the planet to last until the catastrophe, so no one's even

00:02:43 trying to fix the Earth's problems.

00:02:45 Clothing, food, cars, yachts, whatever – everything loses its value and becomes free.

00:02:53 Every day, huge street parties pop up all over the world.

00:02:57 People decide to live their last months in peace and harmony.

00:03:00 The global catastrophe is uniting humanity like never before.

00:03:05 To go out with a bang, Earthlings team up to organize a huge rock concert.

00:03:10 The Red Giant destroying our beautiful blue planet.

00:03:13 Yeah, rock and roll's the perfect soundtrack.

00:03:17 There's just enough time to eat, dance, party, and listen to good music.

00:03:22 Huge stages are built all over the planet.

00:03:24 It's every musician's last concert.

00:03:27 During all that preparation, hope suddenly appears.

00:03:31 Scientists have calculated all the events that'll occur when Mars crashes into Earth,

00:03:36 and they have a simple plan.

00:03:38 Luckily, humans had already planned on moving to Mars, so they already have been building

00:03:43 spaceships for years.

00:03:44 There's no time to get to another planet before the collision, but the good news is

00:03:49 that people can wait out the disaster just outside Earth's orbit.

00:03:54 You get to sit in a space station, munch some popcorn, relax, and enjoy the show.

00:03:59 When the dust settles, it might just be possible to return to Earth, or what's left of it.

00:04:05 After learning about this plan, people start working on finishing the ships night and day.

00:04:11 Everyone in the world pitches in.

00:04:13 There are still 2 years left before the big day.

00:04:16 The huge concert stages are converted into more space stations.

00:04:20 Mars is now giving people more energy, and with epic teamwork, people managed to create

00:04:25 thousands of stations in just a few months.

00:04:28 That's what happens when 7 billion people work together.

00:04:31 Farmers, physical therapists, chefs, engineers, athletes, accountants – all on the same

00:04:38 team.

00:04:39 Mars is now closer to us than the Moon.

00:04:42 The red giant blocks out the Sun, and our planet is plunged into darkness.

00:04:46 There are only a few days left.

00:04:49 People are working like ants in a massive colony, putting the finishing touches on several

00:04:53 hundred thousand space stations.

00:04:55 It takes 4 whole days for everyone to get on board.

00:04:58 Plus, there's the loading of supplies – animals, fish, seeds, plants, vegetables,

00:05:05 fruits, video games, fruit roll-ups.

00:05:08 The red giant is scheduled to enter Earth's orbit in a couple of days.

00:05:12 That's when it'll really pick up speed.

00:05:15 Mars is only a little more than half the size of Earth, but up in the sky, it looks infinitely

00:05:20 huge.

00:05:22 The ships start taking off.

00:05:25 People take a last look around, memorizing every inch.

00:05:29 In a few hours, it'll all change forever.

00:05:32 The stations fly up far enough away to clear any orbits.

00:05:37 Two worlds colliding together should still have a soundtrack, though.

00:05:41 Rock stars on every ship organize an outer space music festival.

00:05:46 To the awesome sound of rock, Mars enters Earth's atmosphere and burns a thin layer

00:05:51 of its own surface.

00:05:53 This releases an incredible amount of energy.

00:05:55 It gets faster and faster and smashes into the Pacific Ocean.

00:06:00 A huge blast wave sweeps across the entire planet.

00:06:05 Everything is lit up by flames, and everyone on the ships has to put on sunglasses to avoid

00:06:10 being blinded.

00:06:12 Our blue planet is turning into a fiery one.

00:06:15 The dust of Mars mixes with the water of Earth.

00:06:18 The force of the impact goes through the Earth's crust into the liquid hot magma.

00:06:23 Hundreds of pieces of Mars, some the size of entire countries, are somehow floating

00:06:28 in the atmosphere.

00:06:30 The collision generates so much energy that all oceans boil and evaporate.

00:06:35 Seas and rivers of molten metal are now spreading all over Earth.

00:06:40 Days, weeks, months pass.

00:06:43 A belt made up of bits of Mars forms around the Earth.

00:06:46 It's like a fiery version of Saturn.

00:06:49 It'll take a long time before it's safe to land back down, but humanity can't stay

00:06:54 alive on the ships all that time.

00:06:56 Food, water, and oxygen will run out after a few years.

00:07:01 But scientists already have a plan.

00:07:03 The ships flip a switch and become huge cryo-chambers.

00:07:08 The ships are equipped with energy panels, and the roasting hot Earth's giving off

00:07:12 a lot of energy.

00:07:14 Enough to keep the ships working while everyone on board takes a few thousand year nap.

00:07:19 As soon as the planet cools down, humans will wake up.

00:07:24 Hundreds of thousands of years pass.

00:07:26 One day, alarms go off simultaneously on all the ships.

00:07:30 People wake up, slowly.

00:07:32 Their bodies are exhausted, but after a few billion cups of coffee, everyone's ready

00:07:37 to go.

00:07:39 Down on Earth, new continents should've formed, and the atmospheres most likely weigh

00:07:43 different.

00:07:44 The planet might've lost its original orbit, so it might be spinning at a different angle.

00:07:49 The seasons as we know them, gone.

00:07:52 All the water on Earth evaporated in the first few hours.

00:07:56 But there were huge glaciers on Mars, which might've melted on impact.

00:08:00 Mars may've shared its water with our planet.

00:08:04 The clouds of dust and dirt should've settled by now, and the ground should be pretty good

00:08:08 for growing stuff on.

00:08:10 All that magma probably spewed up a bunch of useful minerals and chemicals.

00:08:14 It's going to be difficult, but humanity somehow must adapt to the new Earth.

00:08:20 People are ready for anything.

00:08:22 All the Earthlings run to the nearest windows to see what their beloved planet looks like

00:08:27 after all these centuries.

00:08:29 Um, where is it?

00:08:31 People are craning their necks, looking out at the empty spot where the Earth used to

00:08:36 be.

00:08:37 The impact of Mars was so strong that it pushed the Earth out of its orbit around the Sun.

00:08:43 It's gone.

00:08:44 Great.

00:08:45 What are we going to do now?

00:08:47 Some bearded guy grabs a guitar and says, "Let's play!"

00:08:53 It's staring at you, and you're staring at it.

00:08:56 A giant eye that seems to be pulling you into an abyss.

00:09:00 You're hovering over it in your space copter.

00:09:03 But however scared you might be, you still need to do your job.

00:09:07 So you send your copter down to the surface of the Red Planet.

00:09:10 Right, that's where you are, on Mars.

00:09:13 But first things first, you take a moment to remember everything you know about the

00:09:17 fourth planet from the Sun.

00:09:19 It's the last of the inner planets.

00:09:21 Those are the planets that lie within the asteroid belt.

00:09:24 They're also called terrestrial, since they're made up of rocks and metals.

00:09:28 The atmosphere of Mars is much thinner than Earth's.

00:09:31 It contains 95% carbon dioxide and a mere 1% of oxygen.

00:09:36 In other words, don't even think about pulling off your helmet.

00:09:40 Anyway, there's no time to waste.

00:09:42 You land on the surface of the planet and find yourself in a brownish-red world.

00:09:46 That's a good thing you're wearing a spacesuit.

00:09:49 This place is freezing cold.

00:09:51 The thermometer sewn into the sleeve of your suit shows -80°F.

00:09:57 Time to take your first step on the Martian surface.

00:10:00 The planet looks quite colorful, and the hue of a particular area depends on the minerals

00:10:05 that make up the soil.

00:10:07 The ground under your feet is covered in fine dust.

00:10:10 It looks like rust.

00:10:11 The same orange dust is in the air.

00:10:14 Good thing you have your own supply of oxygen and don't need to breathe Martian air.

00:10:18 The layer of this dust covering the surface of Mars can be from 6 to 40 feet thick.

00:10:24 You hope you'll avoid getting swallowed by some Martian quicksand.

00:10:28 You start walking, feeling very light.

00:10:31 Mars is just 15% of our planet's volume and a mere 11% of Earth's mass.

00:10:36 It means that gravity here is much weaker.

00:10:39 Its pull is 38% as strong as the pull of gravity on the surface of Earth.

00:10:44 You jump up and down and then try to run several hundred feet.

00:10:48 You haven't even broken a sweat!

00:10:50 What makes it harder for you to explore the place on foot is that the planet's surface

00:10:55 is rocky, covered with craters and volcanoes, old dry lake beds, and canyons.

00:11:01 You see something huge towering on the horizon, but you try to suppress your curiosity.

00:11:07 You'll have enough time to figure out what it is later.

00:11:10 Suddenly, a massive cloud appears in the distance.

00:11:13 It looks as if a huge herd of horses is approaching you.

00:11:17 In reality, you'd better get back into your copter and fly away as fast as you can.

00:11:22 That's one of Mars' infamous dust storms.

00:11:25 They mostly occur during the summer in the southern hemisphere of the Red Planet.

00:11:29 They can sometimes cover the entire planet, and you see the largest ones from Earth.

00:11:34 You hop into your copter and set a course for the eye that scared you so much.

00:11:39 Winding channels that look like veins run through the eyeball.

00:11:43 But the closer you get, the less it looks like an actual eye.

00:11:47 Then you realize it's a crater, it's giant, almost 19 miles across!

00:11:53 Around the crater, which looks as if it has a pupil, there are other even bigger craters.

00:11:59 They likely formed billions of years ago.

00:12:01 That's when Mars had to withstand multiple attacks of space rocks.

00:12:05 But why is the eye crater darker than the surrounding landscape?

00:12:10 Scientists think that once, there was Martian water in the enormous pit.

00:12:14 Remember those channels?

00:12:15 They were likely carrying that water.

00:12:18 And since the crater was filled with water, it stopped some substances and minerals from

00:12:22 eroding away.

00:12:24 Now, remember that towering something on the horizon?

00:12:27 It's time to go and explore it!

00:12:30 When you come close, you realize it's the largest shield volcano in the entire Solar

00:12:35 System – Olympus Mons.

00:12:37 It's more than 370 miles in diameter, which is almost the same size as the state of Arizona.

00:12:43 You tilt your head.

00:12:45 Wow!

00:12:46 The mountain is 16 miles high.

00:12:49 It's also rimmed by 4-mile-high cliffs.

00:12:52 To picture the sheer size of the volcano, let's make some comparisons.

00:12:56 The largest volcano on Earth is Mauna Loa, towering around 2.5 miles above sea level

00:13:02 and stretching 75 miles across.

00:13:05 Sounds impressive, but the volume of Olympus Mons is around 100 times larger than that

00:13:11 of Mauna Loa.

00:13:12 The Martian giant could swallow the whole chain of Hawaiian islands from Kauai to Hawaii.

00:13:18 But why is this volcano so large?

00:13:21 It might be the result of lower surface gravity and higher eruption rates.

00:13:25 Or the reason might be the Red Planet's crust, which is very different from Earth's.

00:13:30 It's static.

00:13:31 You see, on our planet, the crust is made of 15-20 moving tectonic plates.

00:13:37 As plates move over hot spots, producing lava, new volcanoes form, and the already existing

00:13:43 ones become extinct.

00:13:45 That's why lava can get to the surface through many vents.

00:13:48 But on Mars, the crust isn't broken into the same tectonic plates as on Earth, and

00:13:53 the lava has nothing to do but pile in one very, very large volcano.

00:14:00 So how about getting closer to the enormous mountain?

00:14:03 But once you step out of your copter on Martian soil, the ground under your feet starts shaking.

00:14:09 Well, that's a Marsquake.

00:14:11 But how can it happen if Mars doesn't have any actively shifting tectonic plates?

00:14:16 Specialists from NASA are sure Marsquakes occur when energy inside the planet gets suddenly

00:14:22 released.

00:14:23 It leads to rock fractures and cracks in the planet's crust.

00:14:27 Another powerful jolt, and one of such cracks opens right next to you.

00:14:32 You fall to the ground, afraid to move, but soon, everything calms down.

00:14:37 You wait for a couple of minutes, just to be sure, and get up.

00:14:40 Oh look, here's a perfect opportunity to explore the insides of the Red Planet.

00:14:46 The crack is large enough to send a special research robot.

00:14:50 The planet's crust is thin and consists of volcanic basalt rock.

00:14:55 The mantle that surrounds the core of the planet is made up of thick silicates, oxygen,

00:15:00 and some minerals.

00:15:01 You can probably compare it with soft, rocky toothpaste.

00:15:04 Mars' mantle is also much thinner than Earth's.

00:15:07 It's just 800 to 1100 miles thick.

00:15:11 As for the planet's core, it's made mostly of iron, nickel, and sulfur and is between

00:15:16 900 and 1200 miles wide.

00:15:19 This core doesn't move.

00:15:20 That's why Mars doesn't have a planet-wide magnetic field.

00:15:25 Unfortunately, your drone is now lost in the depths of the Red Planet.

00:15:29 You leave it there and continue your exploration.

00:15:32 Your next destination is Valles Marineris.

00:15:35 It sounds more like an Italian red sauce, but it's actually an enormous canyon, or

00:15:40 rather a canyon system, that runs along Mars' equator.

00:15:44 It's as awe-inspiring as Olympus Mons, more than 2,600 miles long and over 4 miles deep.

00:15:51 The thing is so huge, it could span the entire continental United States from the Pacific

00:15:56 to the Atlantic Ocean.

00:15:58 Now let's make another comparison.

00:16:00 One of the most famous canyons on Earth is the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

00:16:05 But it's 10 times shorter and around 4 times less deep than this canyon on Mars.

00:16:10 Some scientists think that Valles Marineris is the edge of an enormous tectonic plate.

00:16:16 It moves so slowly that almost nothing has happened in that region over millions of years.

00:16:21 And the movement of this plate probably began 3.5 billion years ago.

00:16:26 Anyway, the only thing left on your today's to-do list is to visit Mars' moons.

00:16:31 You know, back in the 1970s, scientists discovered a mysterious gravitational anomaly called

00:16:37 the Great Attractor.

00:16:38 Wait a minute, I had that nickname in high school.

00:16:41 Anyway, it's a place in the sky that draws hundreds of galaxies, including our Milky

00:16:46 Way.

00:16:47 You won't be able to see it because it's on the other side of the Milky Way, 150 million

00:16:52 light-years away.

00:16:54 The Great Attractor actually lies in the direction scientists usually call the "zone of avoidance."

00:17:00 I have one of those too.

00:17:01 It's my closet.

00:17:02 Now, there's so much dust and gas in this region that we can't see what's happening

00:17:07 there.

00:17:08 That area blocks most of the visible light from beyond.

00:17:11 But all that dust and gas don't block X-rays and infrared light.

00:17:15 So as X-ray astronomy developed, researchers could finally start to observe all the objects

00:17:21 within that area, including the mysterious force attracting everything.

00:17:26 But so far, no one has figured out why it's happening.

00:17:30 Our Moon may be 200 million years younger than we previously thought.

00:17:34 Many scientists believe that the Moon formed during a powerful collision between our planet

00:17:39 and an unknown Mars-sized body.

00:17:42 The molten dust and debris got together and formed a new object we know as the Moon.

00:17:47 The lunar crust was probably going through a process of solidifying over a couple of

00:17:52 hundred million years.

00:17:54 Did you know about an early magma ocean on the Moon?

00:17:57 Scientists realized it was a real thing after they had discovered big amounts of the lightweight

00:18:02 mineral called plagioclase.

00:18:04 This material usually crystallizes and floats to the surface of magma.

00:18:08 Anyway, this mineral was 4.36 billion years old, which means it formed 200 million years

00:18:14 after the first solid materials had appeared in our Solar System.

00:18:18 Thus, the theory that the Moon formed during this giant chaotic collision might be true.

00:18:24 If you stand on the Moon one day and leave your footprint on its surface, it can stay

00:18:28 there for a million years.

00:18:30 You'd also see the footprints of other astronauts, even though no one has landed on the lunar

00:18:34 surface for decades now.

00:18:37 The Moon doesn't have a full-fledged atmosphere.

00:18:39 There's no breeze or anything else that can sweep up the dust and erase the footprints.

00:18:45 We see it as a small dot somewhere in the distance.

00:18:48 But in reality, the Sun is so big that if it were an empty ball, you could fill it with

00:18:53 more than a million Earths.

00:18:55 The Sun makes up 99.86% of the mass of our entire Solar System.

00:19:01 Another enormous object in our Solar System is Jupiter.

00:19:04 It's 11 times wider than our planet.

00:19:07 For example, Earth isn't even the size of the Great Red Spot.

00:19:11 This enormous storm has been raging on Jupiter for more than a century.

00:19:15 And no, it's not anchored to anything solid since Jupiter is a gas giant.

00:19:20 It's like a massive hurricane, oval in shape, reddish in color, and wide enough to engulf

00:19:26 our home planet.

00:19:27 Once upon a time, it was three times as wide as our planet.

00:19:31 But over the last few centuries, it's been shrinking as well as growing taller.

00:19:36 As for Jupiter, this gas giant is some sort of vacuum cleaner that keeps our Solar System

00:19:41 safe.

00:19:42 Jupiter has incredibly strong gravity that eats up comets or asteroids that might potentially

00:19:47 harm our home planet.

00:19:49 In some other planetary systems, gas giants similar to Jupiter migrate from the position

00:19:54 where they formed.

00:19:56 They spiral inward and come closer to their parent stars.

00:19:59 And as they travel, they swallow up small rocky planets.

00:20:03 Therefore their strong gravitational force flings these planets out of their star systems.

00:20:08 Luckily for us, Jupiter's gravitational force doesn't work that way.

00:20:13 If Jupiter-like planets stay away from their stars, they keep their planetary systems safe,

00:20:18 protecting those small planets in their inner orbit.

00:20:21 Jupiter, for instance, can change the orbits of small space bodies that come too close

00:20:26 to the inner planets of our Solar System.

00:20:29 That's why this gas giant is a good guardian of our Solar System.

00:20:33 Now there's a supermassive black hole that roams through space at a speed of 3 million

00:20:38 miles per hour and leaves a trail of debris behind.

00:20:42 Hey, I had a little brother who once did that!

00:20:45 It's about a million times as heavy as our Sun and, at the moment, 2 billion light-years

00:20:49 away from Earth.

00:20:51 This black hole started like any other, in its own elliptical galaxy with many stars

00:20:56 surrounding it.

00:20:57 Supermassive black holes often form and remain in the center of galaxies.

00:21:01 But this one got away.

00:21:04 One theory claims that this black hole is different because the galaxy where it formed

00:21:08 may have bumped into another galaxy at one point in the past.

00:21:12 Sometimes galaxies merge into a new one if this happens.

00:21:16 But not this time.

00:21:18 Instead of merging, the black hole's galaxy passed through a way bigger one millions of

00:21:22 years ago.

00:21:23 That giant galaxy already swallowed up some other galaxies along the way.

00:21:28 And since it was so large, the galaxy surrounding our supermassive black hole ended up ripped

00:21:33 apart.

00:21:34 The black hole at its center managed to "run away" with some of the nearby stars.

00:21:39 That's what left a burning trail stretching across the surrounding space.

00:21:44 Solar superstorms are so powerful that they can cause blackouts all over the world.

00:21:50 Random flares coming from the Sun cause solar storms, and they can really happen at any

00:21:55 time.

00:21:56 In 2012, we were lucky because the strongest solar storm in over 150 years passed very

00:22:02 close to us.

00:22:04 It just tore through Earth's orbit.

00:22:06 If it had happened only a week earlier, our planet would've had to deal with tons of

00:22:10 terrible consequences, including power outages all over the globe.

00:22:15 Gamma-ray bursts are strong enough to destroy planets.

00:22:18 We're talking about extremely strong bursts that mostly occur in galaxies very, very far

00:22:23 away.

00:22:24 If these rays are pointed directly at some space object, they can completely wreck it,

00:22:29 even if we're talking about an entire planet.

00:22:32 So Earth is safe for now, and we have nothing to be afraid of.

00:22:36 A gamma-ray burst happens in our galaxy approximately once every 5 million years.

00:22:41 Luckily, it occurs too far away and doesn't affect life on Earth.

00:22:45 That's what I call irrelevant but still scary!

00:22:49 A burning ice is a thing.

00:22:51 It may be hard to picture it here on Earth, but one strange planet called Gliese 436 b

00:22:57 is literally a burning ball of ice.

00:22:59 It's covered with ice, but at the same time, it has temperatures of 822°F. You can't

00:23:06 actually see the planet burn since there's too much water on the planet.

00:23:10 It's because of the strong gravitational force that pulls the water molecules to the

00:23:14 core of the planet and packs them together incredibly densely.

00:23:18 That way, water molecules can't evaporate, which is why the ice on the planet's surface

00:23:23 doesn't melt.

00:23:24 There are stars that can munch on other stars.

00:23:28 These space objects are mostly smaller stars with a lower mass.

00:23:31 They target the closest stars and begin to absorb their hydrogen fuel to boost their

00:23:36 own mass and generally live longer.

00:23:39 A vampire star becomes strikingly blue.

00:23:42 It also gets hotter.

00:23:44 This way, it seems that it's way younger than it actually is.

00:23:48 If a star, or basically any other object, falls into a black hole, it gets stretched

00:23:54 like spaghetti.

00:23:55 This process is even called spaghettification.

00:23:58 Dust storms on Mars can really go crazy.

00:24:00 They hurtle through the Red Planet's southern hemisphere, especially during the summer.

00:24:05 These storms can grow and encompass large areas of the planet, as happened in January

00:24:10 2022.

00:24:11 Then, a dust storm covered almost twice the area of the United States.

00:24:16 Could it be something like this that caused one of the robots we sent to Mars to go missing?

00:24:21 The atmosphere and climate are harsh on Mars.

00:24:24 It's mostly a desert with strong winds and average temperatures of -81 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:24:30 It drops down to -220 at the poles during the winter.

00:24:34 A lander needs to be specifically equipped and very sturdy to withstand such conditions.

00:24:39 But researchers thought the Beagle 2 could handle the difficult trip to the Red Planet.

00:24:44 June 3, 2003.

00:24:46 A team of researchers got one of their pioneering robots they were about to send to space ready.

00:24:51 It was a small and compact lander called the Beagle 2.

00:24:55 Its mission was to touch down on Mars and search for what the world has been actively

00:24:59 looking for for decades now – life on the Red Planet.

00:25:04 The touchdown was due on December 25, but the signal never came.

00:25:09 The team tried to contact the spaceship, but at one point, they had to accept they wouldn't

00:25:14 be able to reach it.

00:25:16 Some thought the landing was too difficult and complex after all, so the lander crashed.

00:25:21 But they couldn't find any technical errors.

00:25:23 Others had a theory that the lander may have become entangled in its own parachute and

00:25:28 fell down to the surface of Mars.

00:25:30 Either way, the Beagle 2 was considered missing.

00:25:33 Until 2015, when NASA took pictures of what could be the remains of the lost lander.

00:25:40 They weren't just smashed debris – the components actually looked to be intact.

00:25:44 The lander's remains were lying with its solar panels partially deployed around 3 miles

00:25:49 away from the site where it was supposed to land.

00:25:52 Apparently, the Beagle 2 managed to land successfully, but its radio antenna got blocked.

00:25:58 That's why researchers couldn't control it from Earth or communicate with it.

00:26:02 But no one knows exactly why it happened.

00:26:06 Have you heard of a "face" on Mars?

00:26:08 In the 1970s, one of NASA's spaceships took the iconic images of the Martian surface that

00:26:14 showed a face-like formation, as you can see in the upper part of the picture.

00:26:19 If you have a rich imagination, you can easily see a nose, two eyes, a mouth, and an unusual

00:26:25 hairdo.

00:26:27 Some even thought it was a monument built on the Red Planet by another civilization.

00:26:32 How about some other unusual things people have found on Mars?

00:26:36 Like Happy Face Crater – you can easily see why it has this nickname.

00:26:40 Or rocks in different shapes – a pancake, brachiosaurus, or a fish.

00:26:46 Mars also has a waffle-shaped island on its surface.

00:26:49 It's a 1.2-mile-wide feature you can see in the area of lava flows.

00:26:54 It might be the result of lava pushing this formation from below.

00:26:58 It seems astronomers have also got some images of Blue Dunes.

00:27:02 It's a sea of stunning dark dunes that strong winds sculpted into long lines.

00:27:07 They surround the planet's northern polar cap and cover a region as large as Texas.

00:27:12 The Red Planet is usually known for its brown, sandy dunes, so these ones certainly came

00:27:17 as a surprise.

00:27:19 In reality, though, they're not really blue.

00:27:22 If you could visit Mars right now just to take a look, you'd see that these dunes

00:27:26 appear brown and orange like the rest.

00:27:29 On the picture is a false color image.

00:27:32 Scientists often use false colors to highlight differences in something.

00:27:35 For example, here it's the difference in depth.

00:27:38 Also, the biggest valley on Mars is so large it could eat our Grand Canyon for breakfast.

00:27:44 It's a fascinating system of canyons 2,500 miles long called Valles Marineris, and it's

00:27:52 over 10 times as long as the Grand Canyon.

00:27:55 If you could stretch this Martian canyon, it would go from coast to coast of the entire

00:28:00 United States.

00:28:02 Since Mars doesn't have any active plate tectonics, no one knows for sure how this

00:28:07 canyon formed.

00:28:09 One theory says a chain of volcanoes located on the other side of Mars, the one that includes

00:28:14 Olympus Mons, bent the crust from the opposite side of the planet.

00:28:18 This powerful force caused cracks in the Martian crust as well as activated enormous amounts

00:28:24 of water lying under the surface.

00:28:26 This water then emerged and carved the rock away.

00:28:29 The force activated glaciers too, and they possibly created new pathways in this gigantic

00:28:35 canyon system.

00:28:37 Volcanoes on the Martian surface could have erupted about 50,000 years ago, although the

00:28:42 most powerful eruptions happened 2-3 billion years ago.

00:28:46 But the planet doesn't have active volcanoes today.

00:28:50 Most of the heat stored in its interior during the planet's formation has been lost.

00:28:54 So now, Mars' outer crust is way too thick for the molten rock to reach the surface.

00:29:00 But a long time ago, eruptions formed giant volcanoes, and these volcanoes most likely

00:29:07 had an important role in melting ice deposits, which released floods of water onto the Martian

00:29:12 surface.

00:29:13 Now, Mars has a thin atmosphere with a volume of gas, mostly carbon dioxide, less than 1%

00:29:19 of Earth's.

00:29:21 But 4 billion years ago, it was way warmer and wetter than now.

00:29:25 Its atmosphere must've been thicker back then too.

00:29:28 That's why it could create a powerful greenhouse effect and trap sunlight.

00:29:33 Mars also has a powerful magnetic field.

00:29:35 Similar to Earth's, it formed because of the currents of molten metals in the planet's

00:29:40 core.

00:29:41 But unlike our home planet, Mars lost its magnetic field after its core had cooled down.

00:29:47 And without it, the planet didn't have any protection from the solar wind, which is a

00:29:51 stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun.

00:29:54 The solar wind pulled away most of Mars' atmosphere in just a couple hundred million years, give

00:29:59 or take.

00:30:00 This is what makes those powerful Martian dust storms even more intense.

00:30:05 Mars has a fascinating history.

00:30:07 Judging by the planet's glaciers, Mars has probably gone through multiple ice ages, just

00:30:12 like Earth.

00:30:13 A team of researchers got images of about 60,000 Martian rocks.

00:30:18 Rocks were different in size and distributed randomly, which means they probably formed

00:30:22 during different ice ages.

00:30:25 Glaciers hide their own stories too.

00:30:26 Who knows what kinds of gases, rocks, or even microbes could be trapped inside?

00:30:32 Now if you could get into a time machine and stop it 4 billion years ago, on Mars of course,

00:30:38 the chances are you'd see spectacular scenes of flooding.

00:30:42 Maybe there would even be some form of life on the planet's surface.

00:30:46 A strong meteorite impact that formed the Red Planet's Gale Crater could be something

00:30:50 that triggered that mega-flood.

00:30:53 After that collision, the temperatures on the planet got insanely hot.

00:30:57 This caused the melting of all that ice that was stored on the Martian surface at that

00:31:01 time.

00:31:02 The flooding was so massive, it changed the geological structure of the planet's surface.

00:31:07 It carved out big ripples as well as waves in the sedimentary rock.

00:31:12 Now speaking of water, vapor has been noticed escaping the atmosphere of Mars.

00:31:17 Also, researchers have found some evidence of water flowing on the planet's surface.

00:31:22 There are dark streaks in the soil.

00:31:24 They seem to get bigger in the summer and shrink over the winter.

00:31:28 There are numerous dried-out valleys and river channels on the planet.

00:31:32 It's possible that liquid water once flowed there.

00:31:35 Now most of it could be locked up in ice caps or even hidden under the surface.

00:31:40 In space, no one can hear you scream.

00:31:43 Or is that, in space, no one can hear ice cream?

00:31:46 Either way, we know that no supernovas, crashing asteroids, and burning planets make a sound

00:31:52 in space.

00:31:53 Or do they?

00:31:55 What if you actually can hear something out there?

00:31:58 Let's see.

00:32:00 Okie dokie, back to middle school.

00:32:03 Sound is a mechanical wave originating from vibration.

00:32:07 What exactly does that mean?

00:32:08 The simplest example is guitar strings.

00:32:11 Let's pluck one of them.

00:32:13 It starts to vibrate.

00:32:14 The atoms inside the metal string begin to push and beat the atoms of the air around

00:32:19 them.

00:32:20 So now, atoms are constantly pushing each other until they reach our ears.

00:32:23 It's like a wave from a pebble thrown into a pond, and it happens very quickly, at a

00:32:28 speed of about 761 mph.

00:32:33 Then our eardrums begin to vibrate at the same frequency.

00:32:37 And the little bones inside our ears transmit this vibration to the brain.

00:32:41 The brain then does its magic, recognizes the pattern, and turns it into sounds.

00:32:48 Great!

00:32:49 Now we know that we need some particles to create sound.

00:32:53 And we can find these particles in gases, liquids, and solid substances.

00:32:58 And what about space?

00:32:59 Nope, it's almost a perfect vacuum.

00:33:02 And you've probably already heard that there's no sound in space because it's a vacuum.

00:33:07 But what does it actually mean?

00:33:09 Well, a vacuum is a perfect void.

00:33:13 It's an area completely devoid of matter.

00:33:15 It means there's nothing there.

00:33:17 Yeah, despite all those celestial bodies in space, there's actually no air in between

00:33:22 them.

00:33:23 No atoms, no particles, nothing.

00:33:25 Nada.

00:33:26 Zippo.

00:33:27 Well, almost.

00:33:28 To be honest, the perfect vacuum doesn't really exist.

00:33:32 We can't get rid of atoms for good.

00:33:34 But space is very close to this notion.

00:33:37 On average, there are 15 to 80 atoms per 1 cubic inch.

00:33:42 This may sound like a big number, but keep in mind that these atoms are tiny, and the

00:33:46 void distance between them is huge.

00:33:49 For comparison, 1 cubic inch of air contains about 16,000 atoms.

00:33:55 So of course, with such a low density, these atoms can't push each other.

00:33:59 Even if the vibration is very strong, like, I don't know, a supernova, they still won't

00:34:04 be able to do that.

00:34:06 So, movies have been lying to us.

00:34:10 All these epic space scenes actually take place in an awkward silence.

00:34:14 Who would've guessed?

00:34:17 But don't get upset.

00:34:19 What if I tell you there are, in fact, some ways to hear sound in space?

00:34:24 First of all, there's still sound on other planets.

00:34:28 If there's an atmosphere on a space body, or at least something like gas, water, or

00:34:32 a solid surface, there will be sound.

00:34:36 In our case, the atmosphere becomes completely silent at about 60 miles above the Earth's

00:34:41 surface.

00:34:42 That's where the sky stops being blue and a black starry veil begins.

00:34:48 In any case, we'd have to land on another planet, or at least get close to its atmosphere

00:34:53 to hear something.

00:34:55 But whatever it is, it would sound very different.

00:34:58 Let's take our favorite Venus as an example.

00:35:01 The atmosphere there is very dense.

00:35:04 Scientists jokingly call it a thick chemical soup.

00:35:07 No thanks.

00:35:08 So, if you somehow manage to stay alive and speak there, your voice would be very different.

00:35:14 It would become much louder, and it would sound deeper.

00:35:19 So if you want a pleasant baritone, you know what to do.

00:35:24 I wonder what would happen if Earth had a denser atmosphere.

00:35:28 What would we hear then?

00:35:29 Well, you can vaguely imagine that if you've ever been in the water.

00:35:35 Water is very dense.

00:35:36 Sound moves there much faster and better compared to the air, at a speed of almost a mile per

00:35:41 second depending on the water temperature.

00:35:45 So if you sit in an empty room with no sound sources, you won't hear much, right?

00:35:51 Now dip your head in the water and check out how the same silence sounds here.

00:35:55 It's not quiet at all.

00:35:57 Even if you ignore the ever-present sounds of the water itself, you'll immediately notice

00:36:02 how well you can hear your own body, how your blood pulsates in the veins, how your heart

00:36:07 works, the slightest movement of your fingers.

00:36:10 Kinda creepy, isn't it?

00:36:12 This gives us an idea of what would happen to us on a planet with a denser atmosphere.

00:36:17 And that's just crazy, we would hear everything.

00:36:21 From scurrying animals to the movement of tectonic plates.

00:36:24 "Ah, come on," you'd probably say.

00:36:26 It's obvious that there's sound on other planets.

00:36:30 But didn't you say we can hear something in open space?

00:36:33 Actually yes.

00:36:34 For example, in a cloud of dust.

00:36:36 You can find space dust almost everywhere in space.

00:36:40 It may be the remains of a star or something else.

00:36:43 And in these places, everything is a bit denser than usual.

00:36:47 This means there are probably dust clouds where particles are very close to each other,

00:36:52 which means they can produce sounds.

00:36:54 Of course, those will be very quiet and transmitted over a very short distance.

00:37:00 But it's better than nothing, right?

00:37:03 Plus, we already have one real space sound recorded.

00:37:07 It came from the Perseus galaxy, which is located 250 million light-years away from

00:37:12 us.

00:37:14 NASA recorded it in 2003.

00:37:17 Those of us music geeks will want to know that it's a B-flat, 57 octaves below middle

00:37:22 C on the piano.

00:37:23 You'd have to add another 660 keys to the left on the keyboard.

00:37:28 But its frequency is so low that the human ear unfortunately can't hear it.

00:37:34 Besides that, we can only hear something inside spaceships.

00:37:38 These are small pockets of air, after all.

00:37:42 In a spacesuit, you would hear sounds very well too, including your breathing or blood

00:37:47 circulation in a spacesuit.

00:37:49 But two astronauts, flying side by side, wouldn't hear each other, even if they got very close

00:37:54 and shouted very loudly.

00:37:56 It's quite funny if you, being an astronaut, bumped into something, it would be very loud

00:38:01 for you, but your friend wouldn't hear anything.

00:38:04 That's why astronauts use radio devices.

00:38:10 Now purely theoretically, if you could somehow crawl out of your spacesuit and survive, you'd

00:38:17 be able to hear the chatter and noises going on inside the spaceship.

00:38:21 But how?

00:38:22 So, look, we have some air inside the spaceship, and it transmits sound.

00:38:27 It reaches the metal casing and gets through it, and then, if you leaned against the ship,

00:38:32 preferably touching it with your elbow or knee, the sound would be transmitted to the

00:38:37 brain directly through your bones, ignoring the ears.

00:38:41 Yes, our bones conduct sound.

00:38:44 That's how, for example, deaf people listen to music.

00:38:47 It's called bone conduction.

00:38:49 It's used in some headphones and some other technologies.

00:38:53 You can do a little experiment.

00:38:55 Hold your fingers over your ears.

00:38:57 Tuck them properly so that you really don't hear much.

00:39:00 Then try to touch a sound source.

00:39:02 It can be anything vibrating.

00:39:04 For example, a speaker playing music with some part of your body where the bone is close

00:39:09 to the skin.

00:39:10 Now watch the miracle happen.

00:39:12 You can hear the sound not through your ears, but directly in your brain.

00:39:16 But please don't repeat this experiment in open space.

00:39:20 You know, ice cream, haha!

00:39:22 Now you've probably heard about things like "the sounds of space" where you can listen,

00:39:27 for example, to the sounds made by the Sun or different planets.

00:39:31 How do we record these ones?

00:39:34 Easily!

00:39:35 There is another way to hear sound in space – electromagnetic waves.

00:39:39 When you look at photos taken from spaceships or the International Space Station that show

00:39:44 sunlit objects like Earth or the Moon, something seems wrong.

00:39:48 Space looks too empty.

00:39:51 No magical scenery of a night time sky full of stars.

00:39:54 It would be incredibly boring to go stargazing in space since the sky is always dark.

00:40:01 During the daytime, the sky on our home planet is blue because of the diffusion of light.

00:40:06 It happens when sunlight goes through the atmosphere.

00:40:09 But if you were on the Moon or somewhere else in space, there would be no atmosphere to

00:40:12 spread this light around.

00:40:14 That's why the sky there would always appear black.

00:40:19 But it doesn't mean less bright out there.

00:40:21 If you were looking out the window of the space station, you'd see just as much direct

00:40:25 sunlight as you would gazing out of your apartment window during a cloudless day.

00:40:30 Maybe even more!

00:40:31 When taking a picture on a sunny day, you'll probably use a short exposure, together with

00:40:36 the narrow aperture setting on your camera.

00:40:39 This way, just a short burst of light will get in.

00:40:42 That's similar to how our pupils contract in sunlight so that they don't have to deal

00:40:46 with too much light.

00:40:48 And since it's just as bright up there in space, the process is the same when you take

00:40:52 pictures of sunlit objects there.

00:40:54 Using short exposure, you can get good, bright pictures of Earth or the surface of the Moon.

00:41:00 But it also means there will be no stars in the picture.

00:41:03 Even up there, stars are relatively dim.

00:41:06 They don't emit enough light to show up in photos taken with such settings.

00:41:11 Our home planet has a blue sky that slowly transforms into a beautiful orange-red palette

00:41:16 at dusk and dawn.

00:41:18 But if you ever get a chance to watch a sunset on Mars, you should expect the opposite, an

00:41:23 orange-brown daytime sky that gets a bluish tint at sunset.

00:41:28 First of all, Mars is farther away from the Sun than our planet.

00:41:32 So when you're looking at the Sun from the Martian surface, of course, it looks fainter

00:41:36 and smaller.

00:41:37 And not just that, the Sun observed from Mars is just a bluish-white dot surrounded by a

00:41:42 blue halo.

00:41:44 The thin atmosphere of the red planet contains large dust particles.

00:41:48 They create an effect called Mie scattering.

00:41:50 It occurs when the diameter of particles in the atmosphere is almost the same as the wavelength

00:41:55 of the scattered light.

00:41:56 This effect filters out the red light from the Sun's rays.

00:42:00 So only the blue light would reach your eyes on Mars.

00:42:05 How come Earth doesn't have rings?

00:42:08 All gas giants in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have such rings,

00:42:14 whereas the rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars don't.

00:42:18 There are two theories about how rings can appear around a planet.

00:42:22 They might be just some material left from the times when the planet was forming.

00:42:26 Or they may be the remains of a moon that got destroyed by a collision with some space

00:42:31 body or torn apart by the strong gravitational pull of its parent planet.

00:42:36 The gas giants formed in the outer regions of our solar system, while all the rocky planets

00:42:40 are in the inner part.

00:42:42 So maybe the inner planets were more protected from potential collisions that could have

00:42:46 formed their rings.

00:42:48 There are also more moons in the outer regions of our solar system, which could be another

00:42:53 reason why the planets there have rings.

00:42:56 Also, bigger planets have stronger gravity.

00:42:59 It means that they can keep their rings stable after they form.

00:43:03 Some experts believe Earth used to have a ring system a long time ago.

00:43:07 A Mars-sized object might have collided with our home planet, which probably created a

00:43:11 dense ring of debris around it.

00:43:14 Some scientists think that this debris formed not a ring, but what we know today as the

00:43:19 moon.

00:43:21 There is probably a giant planet lurking at the edge of the solar system, far beyond Neptune.

00:43:28 Scientists call this mysterious hypothetical world Planet 9.

00:43:32 If it does exist, it's probably similar to Uranus or Neptune, and ten times more massive

00:43:37 than our home planet.

00:43:38 It's likely to circle around the Sun, but in the outer reaches of the solar system,

00:43:43 about 20 times farther than Neptune.

00:43:46 Another interesting theory says that Planet 9 could actually be a black hole the size

00:43:51 of a grapefruit that warps space in a similar way a large planet would.

00:43:58 Even though we once thought it was a rare substance in space, water exists all over

00:44:02 our solar system.

00:44:04 For example, you can often find it in asteroids and comets.

00:44:08 It's also in craters on the moon and Mercury.

00:44:11 We still don't know if there's enough water to support potential human colonies if we

00:44:15 decide to move there, but some amount of water is definitely present there.

00:44:21 Mars has water at its poles, too.

00:44:23 It's mostly hidden in the layers of ice and probably under the planet's dusty surface.

00:44:28 Europa, Jupiter's moon, has some water, too.

00:44:32 This is the most likely candidate we know about to host life outside Earth.

00:44:36 There's probably a whole ocean of liquid water under its frozen surface.

00:44:41 It might actually contain twice as much water as all of Earth's oceans combined.

00:44:47 Neptune is unexpectedly warm, even though it's 30 times as far from the Sun as our planet

00:44:52 and receives less sunlight and heat.

00:44:55 But it still radiates way more heat than it gets.

00:44:58 It also has way more activity in its atmosphere than you'd suspect, especially if you compare

00:45:03 it to its neighbor, Uranus.

00:45:06 Both of these planets emit the same amount of heat, even though Uranus is much closer

00:45:11 to the Sun.

00:45:12 No one knows why.

00:45:14 Neptune has extremely strong winds that can reach a speed of up to 1,500 mph.

00:45:20 Can they produce this heat?

00:45:21 Or maybe it's because of the planet's core or its gravitational force?

00:45:27 There's a monster black hole hurtling through space at a speed of 5 million mph.

00:45:33 Scientists located it with the Hubble Space Telescope.

00:45:36 They believe it weighs as much as a billion suns.

00:45:39 It was supposed to stay put in the center of its home galaxy, but some gravitational

00:45:43 forces are pushing it around.

00:45:46 At one point, this black hole is going to break free from its galaxy and continue roaming

00:45:50 the universe.

00:45:51 Luckily, it's still 8 billion years away from us.

00:45:56 Solar storms are so powerful that they could leave us in complete darkness.

00:46:00 Back in July 2012, the strongest solar storm in over 150 years narrowly missed Earth.

00:46:08 Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are large bubbles of ionized gas.

00:46:14 They tore through our orbit back then.

00:46:16 If they had caught our planet in the crosshairs, we would have literally been in the firing

00:46:21 line.

00:46:22 We'd have faced solar matter hurtling towards Earth, damaging computers and causing power

00:46:26 outages that would have lasted for months.

00:46:30 A surprise solar storm hit us on June 25, 2022.

00:46:34 One photographer even managed to capture stunning bright auroras that flashed across the dawn

00:46:38 sky in Calgary, Canada and lasted for 5 minutes.

00:46:42 They were caused by the storm.

00:46:46 Vampire stars are a real thing.

00:46:48 They're part of a binary star, and they can literally drain the life out of the other

00:46:52 star in the system.

00:46:55 Our Sun is an average-sized star, and still, it could fit 1,300,000 Earths.

00:47:02 The star is also 333,000 times as heavy as our planet.

00:47:07 NASA has translated radio waves created by planets' atmospheres into audible sounds.

00:47:13 That's how astronomers found out that Neptune sounds like ocean waves, Jupiter like being

00:47:19 underwater, and Saturn's voice resembles background music to a horror movie.

00:47:25 And around Earth, it's bebop jazz.

00:47:27 Now I made that up.

00:47:30 The Sun's surface is scorching hot, but a bolt of lightning is 5 times hotter.

00:47:36 Earth gets struck by 100 lightning bolts every second, which results in 8 million lightning

00:47:42 strikes a day and around 3 billion a year.

00:47:46 Ooh, shocking!

00:47:48 If you manage to go to the Moon one day and see fresh footprints, that doesn't mean there's

00:47:52 someone else there with you.

00:47:55 Footprints or similar marks can last for a million years over there.

00:48:00 Because the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere.

00:48:02 There are no winds, not even a breeze, that can slowly erase those footprints.

00:48:09 Astronomers have found the largest hole we've ever seen in the Universe.

00:48:13 It's the giant void that spreads a billion light-years across.

00:48:17 They found it accidentally.

00:48:19 One of the research team members was a little bored and wanted to check how things are going

00:48:23 in the direction of the cold spot.

00:48:26 That's an anomaly in the Cosmic Microwave Background Map, or CMB for short.

00:48:32 It's a faint glow of light that falls on our planet from different directions and fills

00:48:36 the Universe.

00:48:37 It's been streaming through space for almost 14 billion years as the "afterglow" that

00:48:42 occurred after the Big Bang.

00:48:46 So you fall right into the heart of the black hole and prepare for a sad end.

00:48:50 Well, you don't have to.

00:48:53 Falling into a black hole won't necessarily destroy you or your spaceship.

00:48:57 You have to choose a bigger black hole to survive.

00:49:01 If you fall into a small black hole, its event horizon is too narrow, and the gravity increases

00:49:07 every inch down.

00:49:09 So if you extend your arm forward, the gravity on your fingers is much stronger than on your

00:49:13 elbow.

00:49:14 This will make your hand lengthen, and you'll feel some… discomfort.

00:49:19 Rather significant, to be honest.

00:49:21 Things change if you fall into a supermassive black hole, like the ones in the center of

00:49:26 galaxies.

00:49:27 They can be millions of times heavier than the Sun.

00:49:30 Their event horizon is wide, and the gravity doesn't change as quickly.

00:49:34 So the force you'll feel at your heels and at the top of your head will be about the

00:49:39 same, and you can go all the way to the heart of the black hole.

00:49:43 This myth is busted.

00:49:45 If you watch a very touching movie in space and start crying, your tears won't run down.

00:49:52 They will gather around the eyeballs.

00:49:54 Your eyes will get too dry, so you'll feel like they're burning.

00:49:59 Any exposed liquid on your body will vaporize, including the surfaces of your tongue.

00:50:04 Speaking of burning, that's one thing fire can't do in space.

00:50:08 Fire can spread when there's a flow of oxygen, and since there's not any in space… well…

00:50:15 Once they explode, stars aren't supposed to come back to life.

00:50:19 But some of the stars somehow have survived the great supernova explosion.

00:50:24 Such zombie stars are pretty rare.

00:50:27 Scientists found a really big one called LP40365.

00:50:31 It's a partially burnt white dwarf.

00:50:35 A white dwarf is a star that burned up all of the hydrogen, and that hydrogen was previously

00:50:40 its nuclear fuel.

00:50:42 In this case, the final explosion was maybe weaker than it usually is, not powerful enough

00:50:48 to destroy the entire star.

00:50:51 It's like a star wanted to explode but didn't make it, which is why part of the matter still

00:50:56 survived.

00:50:57 If you ever go into space, don't take off your spacesuit unless you're on a spaceship.

00:51:03 Air in your lungs would expand, as well as the oxygen in the rest of your body.

00:51:07 You'd be like a balloon, twice your regular size.

00:51:11 Good news, the skin is elastic enough to hold you together, which means you wouldn't explode.

00:51:17 Small comfort.

00:51:19 When something goes into a black hole, it changes shape and gets stretched out just

00:51:23 like spaghetti.

00:51:25 This happens because gravitational force is trying to stretch an object in one direction,

00:51:30 but at the same time squeeze it into another, like a pasta paradox.

00:51:35 Speaking of, a black hole that's as big as a single atom has the mass of a really big

00:51:41 mountain.

00:51:42 There's one at the center of the Milky Way called Sagittarius A. It has a mass like for

00:51:48 a billion suns, but luckily it's far away from us.

00:51:54 If you made a big boom on an asteroid, you'd never be able to hear its loud sound.

00:51:59 Yes, we often hear the sound of spaceships and battles in space in the movies, but that's

00:52:04 just a myth.

00:52:06 Sound is a wave that spreads because of the vibrations of molecules.

00:52:10 A person claps a few feet away from you, the sound wave begins to push the first air molecule

00:52:15 next to the clap, then the second, third, and so on, until the wave reaches your ear.

00:52:21 So to spread sound, we need molecules, like air or water.

00:52:26 In our atmosphere, sound waves spread out just fine, but space is a vacuum, so it's

00:52:32 nothing here.

00:52:33 You can clap your hands loudly there, but there just won't be any molecules that can

00:52:37 vibrate and carry that sound.

00:52:39 So to carry on a conversation, you'd either need a radio or really good lip-reading skills.

00:52:47 Meteoroids orbit the Sun, while the majority of human-made debris orbits our planet.

00:52:53 For example, we launched almost 9,000 spacecraft around the world from satellites to rocket

00:52:59 ships.

00:53:00 Even the tiniest pieces can damage a spacecraft at such high speeds.

00:53:04 Galaxies, planets, comets, asteroids, stars, space bodies are things we can actually see

00:53:11 in space.

00:53:12 But they make up less than 5% of the total Universe.

00:53:16 Dark matter, one of the biggest mysteries in space, is the name we use for all the mass

00:53:21 in the Universe that's still invisible to us.

00:53:24 And there's a lot of it, it may even make 25% of the Universe.

00:53:29 Dark energy makes the other 70% of the Universe.

00:53:33 That adds up to 100, right?

00:53:36 Now let's look at the Moon.

00:53:38 It always looks at us with one side.

00:53:41 This means the Moon has a dark side, and the Sun's rays never get there.

00:53:45 Well, that's a myth.

00:53:47 The whole point is that the Moon is gravitationally locked to the Earth.

00:53:51 There are days and nights there too.

00:53:53 It's just that this rotation is perfectly aligned with the rotation of the Earth.

00:53:58 So whenever you look at the Moon, you only see one side.

00:54:02 Although there are days when the Sun shines there too, so it's not the dark side, it's

00:54:07 the far side.

00:54:09 And we even have pictures of this place.

00:54:11 And there's one of the biggest craters in our entire solar system, the South Pole-Aitken

00:54:16 Basin.

00:54:17 It's as wide as two states of Texas.

00:54:20 Yeehaw!

00:54:22 One myth that turned out to be untrue is that people have never actually been on the Moon.

00:54:28 This is the original space suit of the first astronauts who were there.

00:54:32 Look at the sole of the shoe.

00:54:34 Some people claim there's no way they could've left footprints like this there.

00:54:38 Actually they could.

00:54:39 On the Moon, the astronauts wore extra boots over their suits, and their soles matched

00:54:44 the footprints on the Moon perfectly.

00:54:47 The astronauts didn't need them when they left the Moon and tossed them when the Moon

00:54:51 walk was over.

00:54:53 They left a lot of stuff there too.

00:54:55 They even tossed the armrests of the seats in the lunar module to reduce the weight.

00:55:00 Now counting all the Apollo lunar missions, the total weight of rubbish on the Moon is

00:55:04 approximately 187 tons, including several lunar rovers, spacecraft debris, 6 lunar modules,

00:55:12 and all the experiments left behind.

00:55:14 That's like 3 Boeing 737s.

00:55:18 Another myth about the Sun is that it's yellow.

00:55:21 Let's send you into space for this one.

00:55:23 You look out the window and… it's white!

00:55:26 The Sun only appears yellow to us through the filter of our atmosphere.

00:55:30 The composition of the air and its thickness just distorts the light of the star.

00:55:35 But stars do come in different colors.

00:55:38 Cooler stars have bright orange and red colors.

00:55:41 You're sitting at a coffee shop on Mars, keeping your head down, trying not to draw

00:55:45 any attention to yourself.

00:55:47 It's crowded and many people are singing, dancing, and talking loudly about life on

00:55:52 Mars.

00:55:53 Your drink arrives and you sip on it.

00:55:55 So far, no one recognizes you.

00:55:57 You're wearing a cloak with a large hoodie to cover your face and disguise yourself from

00:56:01 everyone.

00:56:03 Someone accidentally bumps into you and sees your face.

00:56:06 The music stops and now everyone is staring at you.

00:56:10 You have nowhere to hide or run.

00:56:12 You ignore the leering eyes and keep sipping on your beverage.

00:56:15 An old bearded man sits in front of you, amazed to be in your presence.

00:56:20 "So, it's true.

00:56:22 No one believed you'd make it," he says.

00:56:25 You don't reply and continue with your drink.

00:56:29 Everyone else gathers around you.

00:56:31 Another man speaks.

00:56:32 "Well, are you not going to tell us how you escaped from the clutches of the Space Kraken?"

00:56:38 Everyone gasps in shock.

00:56:40 No one has ever made it to tell the tale of the Kraken, except you.

00:56:45 Your plan was to find your messenger to take you to a spaceship far away from this planet.

00:56:50 But it's too late now that everyone knows you're here.

00:56:54 And the messenger fled, knowing all the attention was on you.

00:56:58 You lay back your hoodie and explain what happened.

00:57:02 Two days ago.

00:57:04 You're in your full gear, ready to make the voyage into deep space.

00:57:08 You have a solo ship that's designed to maneuver through all the obstacles in space.

00:57:13 You prepare the rest of the gear and fuel up.

00:57:16 Everyone is watching you, knowing that you might not make it back.

00:57:20 But the Kraken has been floating in space for too long, disrupting shipping containers

00:57:25 bringing in goods.

00:57:26 A small ship like yours can sneak past its acute sense of smell and vision.

00:57:31 But larger ships will get destroyed.

00:57:34 You made it your mission to find this Kraken and study it.

00:57:37 If you learn its ways and patterns, you can figure out how to get rid of it.

00:57:43 Everyone says their goodbyes, and you lift off.

00:57:46 You know that it'll be a very long way to get there.

00:57:49 Possibly three days in the emptiness of space.

00:57:53 You saw some quick footage of it, but no one knows exactly where it sleeps.

00:57:58 Or if it even does sleep.

00:58:00 You put on some tunes and set your ship for cruise control.

00:58:04 You make some notes and set the camera to document yourself while you prepare everything

00:58:09 you need.

00:58:10 You also have some cameras outside, recording everything that moves.

00:58:14 Even thermal sensors to catch living creatures floating in space.

00:58:19 After a few hours, you exit the safe quarters of Mars and enter into the hostile territory.

00:58:25 There is no place to hide or anyone to help you.

00:58:28 A few little ships like yours pass by now and then.

00:58:32 They watch you going further to the Kraken.

00:58:35 You notice many floating signs powered by machines warning you about the Kraken.

00:58:40 The cameras start recording, and you begin your video journal which is transmitting to

00:58:44 your network at home.

00:58:45 So far, nothing.

00:58:47 It's quiet and dark.

00:58:49 Hours pass, and you're just floating in the middle of nowhere.

00:58:53 You almost feel like you want to turn around.

00:58:55 But then, you pick up something in the sensors.

00:58:58 You see a large live object nearby.

00:59:01 You turn off the lights and slow down your ship.

00:59:04 You resume recording and start talking to yourself, explaining everything.

00:59:09 The object is getting closer and closer.

00:59:12 You move aside to avoid it and latch onto a floating rock.

00:59:16 But you still don't see anything.

00:59:18 Out of nowhere, you see some glowing jellyfish-like creatures flowing together in a cluster.

00:59:24 On your thermal sensors, they appear to be large objects, but in fact, they are just

00:59:29 little creatures.

00:59:31 According to your studies, these creatures are some of the main foods for the Kraken.

00:59:36 So they're probably running away from it.

00:59:39 After a few minutes, the creatures float away, and you launch yourself out and turn the lights

00:59:44 back on.

00:59:45 A few more hours pass, and you still see no Kraken.

00:59:49 Suddenly, a whoosh shakes your ship, and you're thrown slightly off course.

00:59:54 You notice that a large object has spiked your thermal sensors and left.

00:59:59 You keep going and check the playback settings to see if your cameras manage to catch something.

01:00:04 You try to look carefully, but it seems like a gust of wind blew past you, which is weird

01:00:10 because there is no wind in space.

01:00:13 You check the thermal sensors and notice that a large object shaped like the Kraken has

01:00:18 zipped past you.

01:00:19 It's still around, and it has probably caught your scent.

01:00:23 Your system's got some DNA particles and are studying them.

01:00:27 After a while, they show that the Kraken's skin can change colors according to its surrounding.

01:00:33 Its skin is thick and made up of some cosmic fluorescent material that is new to any creature

01:00:38 you've ever come across.

01:00:40 The system continues studying it.

01:00:43 After a while, the Kraken goes off your radar and disappears.

01:00:47 You circle back, trying to find it.

01:00:49 People back on Mars can see the data and already have information about its size and skin quality.

01:00:55 They even see some footage you've managed to catch.

01:00:59 As you continue driving towards it, you open your floodlights, trying to see anything.

01:01:04 Your cameras are still rolling.

01:01:06 Suddenly, the Kraken changes skin color and appears right in front of you!

01:01:11 Its large tentacles flash around, whipping nearby space debris.

01:01:16 Its large eye that's as big as a bus looks right at you.

01:01:20 It opens its mouth, and you see layers of sharp teeth circling like a grinder.

01:01:25 It has a large beak that can break your ship easily.

01:01:29 It starts flashing its colors rapidly as a way to warn you.

01:01:33 It shoots out some liquid to move in a no-gravity space environment.

01:01:37 It's moving towards you until it launches itself.

01:01:40 Your ship has an auto force field for protection, but it can't sustain the powerful bite of

01:01:45 the Kraken.

01:01:46 After only a few seconds, the shield breaks, and your ship spirals down to another planet.

01:01:52 You crash-landed in a swampy land.

01:01:55 Your ship has survived, but it can't take off.

01:01:58 The analysis of the Kraken is ready.

01:02:01 It shows that it doesn't need oxygen to breathe, and its DNA is evolving.

01:02:06 Now that it got a bite of your force field, it can adapt itself to create a bio force

01:02:11 field of a similar nature.

01:02:13 But you crashed on a planet that is foreign to you.

01:02:16 You put on your safety suit and observe the environment.

01:02:19 The atmosphere is filled with nitrogen and sulfur.

01:02:23 You get out and walk around.

01:02:25 It has similar gravity to that of Earth.

01:02:27 As you venture through the swamp, you start seeing little skin particles similar to those

01:02:32 your ship has caught.

01:02:34 The liquid below you is some foreign substance that seems to be deteriorating your suit,

01:02:39 so you opt to hover.

01:02:41 The trees are strange and seem to be living off the atmosphere, but there is no sign of

01:02:46 life anywhere.

01:02:48 Suddenly, you see a huge crater that leads to the center of the planet.

01:02:53 You enter it and see some ships similar to yours.

01:02:56 It seems that the Kraken knocked them off course, and they all crash landed on this

01:03:01 planet.

01:03:02 Many of them seem to be intact, while others are completely obliterated.

01:03:07 Your sensors pick up another reading.

01:03:09 It senses another creature dwelling in the center.

01:03:12 You try to get closer.

01:03:14 You're doing your best to be as gentle as possible, but you feel the ground shaking

01:03:18 below you.

01:03:19 You duck down and try to avoid the rocks falling overhead.

01:03:23 A large tentacle pops out of nowhere, and then another, and another.

01:03:27 It swings itself out and crawls in the open.

01:03:30 You know, back in the 1970s, scientists discovered a mysterious gravitational anomaly called

01:03:36 the Great Attractor.

01:03:37 Wait a minute, I had that nickname in high school.

01:03:40 Anyway, it's a place in the sky that draws hundreds of galaxies, including our Milky

01:03:45 Way.

01:03:46 You'll be able to see it because it's on the other side of the Milky Way, 150 million

01:03:51 light-years away.

01:03:52 The Great Attractor actually lies in the direction scientists usually call the "zone of avoidance."

01:03:58 I have one of those too.

01:04:00 It's my closet.

01:04:01 Now, there's so much dust and gas in this region that we can't see what's happening

01:04:06 there.

01:04:07 That area blocks most of the visible light from beyond.

01:04:10 But all that dust and gas don't block X-rays and infrared light.

01:04:14 So as X-ray astronomy developed, researchers could finally start to observe all the objects

01:04:20 within that area, including the mysterious force attracting everything.

01:04:25 But so far, no one has figured out why it's happening.

01:04:29 Our Moon may be 200 million years younger than we previously thought.

01:04:33 Many scientists believe that the Moon formed during a powerful collision between our planet

01:04:38 and an unknown Mars-sized body.

01:04:40 The molten dust and debris got together and formed a new object we know as the Moon.

01:04:46 The lunar crust was probably going through a process of solidifying over a couple of

01:04:50 hundred million years.

01:04:53 Did you know about an early magma ocean on the Moon?

01:04:56 Scientists realized it was a real thing after they had discovered big amounts of the lightweight

01:05:00 mineral called plagioclase.

01:05:03 This material usually crystallizes and floats to the surface of magma.

01:05:07 Anyway, this mineral was 4.36 billion years old, which means it formed 200 million years

01:05:13 after the first solid materials had appeared in our Solar System.

01:05:17 Thus, the theory that the Moon formed during this giant chaotic collision might be true.

01:05:23 If you stand on the Moon one day and leave your footprint on its surface, it can stay

01:05:27 there for a million years.

01:05:29 You'd also see the footprints of other astronauts, even though no one has landed on the lunar

01:05:33 surface for decades now.

01:05:35 The Moon doesn't have a full-fledged atmosphere.

01:05:38 There's no breeze or anything else that can sweep up the dust and erase the footprints.

01:05:44 We see it as a small dot somewhere in the distance.

01:05:47 But in reality, the Sun is so big that if it were an empty ball, you could fill it with

01:05:52 more than a million Earths.

01:05:54 The Sun makes up 99.86% of the mass of our entire Solar System.

01:06:00 Another enormous object in our Solar System is Jupiter.

01:06:03 It's 11 times wider than our planet.

01:06:05 For example, Earth isn't even the size of the Great Red Spot.

01:06:10 This enormous storm has been raging on Jupiter for more than a century.

01:06:14 And no, it's not anchored to anything solid since Jupiter is a gas giant.

01:06:19 It's like a massive hurricane, oval in shape, reddish in color, and wide enough to engulf

01:06:24 our home planet.

01:06:26 Once upon a time, it was 3 times as wide as our planet.

01:06:30 But over the last few centuries, it's been shrinking as well as growing taller.

01:06:35 As for Jupiter, this gas giant is some sort of vacuum cleaner that keeps our Solar System

01:06:40 safe.

01:06:41 Jupiter has incredibly strong gravity that eats up comets or asteroids that might potentially

01:06:46 harm our home planet.

01:06:48 In some other planetary systems, gas giants similar to Jupiter migrate from the position

01:06:53 where they formed.

01:06:55 They spiral inward and come closer to their parent stars.

01:06:58 And as they travel, they swallow up small rocky planets.

01:07:02 Or their strong gravitational force flings these planets out of their star systems.

01:07:07 Luckily for us, Jupiter's gravitational force doesn't work that way.

01:07:12 If Jupiter-like planets stay away from their stars, they keep their planetary systems safe,

01:07:17 protecting those small planets in their inner orbit.

01:07:20 Jupiter, for instance, can change the orbits of small space bodies that come too close

01:07:25 to the inner planets of our Solar System.

01:07:27 That's why this gas giant is a good guardian of our Solar System.

01:07:31 Now, there's a supermassive black hole that roams through space at a speed of 3 million

01:07:37 miles per hour and leaves a trail of debris behind.

01:07:41 Hey, I had a little brother who once did that!

01:07:44 It's about a million times as heavy as our Sun and, at the moment, 2 billion light-years

01:07:48 away from Earth.

01:07:50 This black hole started like any other, in its own elliptical galaxy with many stars

01:07:54 surrounding it.

01:07:56 Massive black holes often form and remain in the center of galaxies.

01:08:00 But this one got away.

01:08:03 One theory claims that this black hole is different because the galaxy where it formed

01:08:07 may have bumped into another galaxy at one point in the past.

01:08:11 Sometimes, galaxies merge into a new one if this happens.

01:08:15 But not this time.

01:08:17 Instead of merging, the black hole's galaxy passed through a way bigger one millions of

01:08:21 years ago.

01:08:22 That giant galaxy already swallowed up some other galaxies along the way.

01:08:27 And since it was so large, the galaxy surrounding our supermassive black hole ended up ripped

01:08:32 apart.

01:08:33 The black hole at its center managed to "run away" with some of the nearby stars.

01:08:38 That's what left a burning trail stretching across the surrounding space.

01:08:43 Solar superstorms are so powerful that they can cause blackouts all over the world.

01:08:49 Even flares coming from the Sun cause solar storms.

01:08:52 And they can really happen at any time.

01:08:55 Back in 2012, we were lucky because the strongest solar storm in over 150 years passed very

01:09:01 close to us.

01:09:02 It just tore through Earth's orbit.

01:09:05 If it had happened only a week earlier, our planet would've had to deal with tons of

01:09:09 terrible consequences, including power outages all over the globe.

01:09:14 Gamma-ray bursts are strong enough to destroy planets.

01:09:17 We're talking about extremely strong bursts that mostly occur in galaxies very, very far

01:09:22 away.

01:09:23 If these rays are pointed directly at some space object, they can completely wreck it,

01:09:28 even if we're talking about an entire planet.

01:09:31 So Earth is safe for now, and we have nothing to be afraid of.

01:09:34 A gamma-ray burst happens in our galaxy approximately once every 5 million years.

01:09:40 Luckily, it occurs too far away and doesn't affect life on Earth.

01:09:44 That's what I call irrelevant but still scary!

01:09:48 A burning ice is a thing.

01:09:50 It may be hard to picture it here on Earth, but one strange planet called Gliese 436 b

01:09:55 is literally a burning ball of ice.

01:09:58 It's covered with ice, but at the same time, it has temperatures of 822 degrees Fahrenheit.

01:10:04 You can't actually see the planet burn since there's too much water on the planet.

01:10:08 It's because of the strong gravitational force that pulls the water molecules to the

01:10:13 core of the planet and packs them together incredibly densely.

01:10:17 That way, water molecules can't evaporate, which is why the ice on the planet's surface

01:10:22 doesn't melt.

01:10:23 There are stars that can munch on other stars.

01:10:26 These space objects are mostly smaller stars with a lower mass.

01:10:30 They target the closest stars and begin to absorb their hydrogen fuel to boost their

01:10:35 own mass and generally live longer.

01:10:38 A vampire star becomes strikingly blue.

01:10:41 It also gets hotter.

01:10:43 This way, it seems that it's way younger than it actually is.

01:10:47 If a star, or basically any other object, falls into a black hole, it gets stretched

01:10:52 like spaghetti.

01:10:53 This process is even called spaghettification.

01:10:57 In space, no one can hear you scream.

01:11:00 Or is that, in space, no one can hear ice cream?

01:11:03 Well, either way, we know that no supernovas, crashing asteroids, and burning planets make

01:11:08 a sound in space.

01:11:10 Or do they?

01:11:12 What if you actually can hear something out there?

01:11:15 Well, let's see…

01:11:16 Okie dokie, back to middle school.

01:11:20 Sound is a mechanical wave originating from vibration.

01:11:22 Uh, what exactly does that mean?

01:11:25 The simplest example is guitar strings.

01:11:28 Let's pluck one of them.

01:11:29 It starts to vibrate.

01:11:31 The atoms inside the metal string begin to push and beat the atoms of the air around

01:11:35 them.

01:11:36 So now, atoms are constantly pushing each other until they reach our ears.

01:11:40 It's like a wave from a pebble thrown into a pond, and it happens very quickly, at a

01:11:45 speed of about 761 miles per hour.

01:11:50 Then our eardrums begin to vibrate at the same frequency.

01:11:53 And the little bones inside our ears transmit this vibration to the brain.

01:11:58 The brain then does its magic, recognizes the pattern, and turns it into sounds.

01:12:04 Great!

01:12:06 Now we know that we need some particles to create sound.

01:12:09 And we can find these particles in gases, liquids, and solid substances.

01:12:14 And what about space?

01:12:15 Nope, it's almost a perfect vacuum.

01:12:19 And you've probably already heard that there's no sound in space because it's a vacuum.

01:12:24 But what does it actually mean?

01:12:26 Well, a vacuum is a perfect void.

01:12:29 It's an area completely devoid of matter.

01:12:32 It means there's nothing there.

01:12:34 Yeah.

01:12:35 But what about all those celestial bodies in space?

01:12:37 There's actually no air in between them.

01:12:40 No atoms, no particles, nothing.

01:12:42 Nada.

01:12:43 Zippo.

01:12:44 Well, almost.

01:12:45 To be honest, the perfect vacuum doesn't really exist.

01:12:49 We can't get rid of atoms for good.

01:12:51 But space is very close to this notion.

01:12:54 On average, there are 15 to 80 atoms per one cubic inch.

01:12:58 This may sound like a big number, but keep in mind that these atoms are tiny, and the

01:13:03 void distance between them is huge.

01:13:06 For comparison, one cubic inch of air contains about 16,000 atoms.

01:13:11 So of course, with such a low density, these atoms can't push each other.

01:13:16 Even if the vibration is very strong, like, I don't know, a supernova, they still won't

01:13:21 be able to do that.

01:13:23 So, movies have been lying to us.

01:13:26 All these epic space scenes actually take place in an awkward silence.

01:13:30 Who would've guessed?

01:13:34 But don't get upset.

01:13:35 What if I tell you there are, in fact, some ways to hear sound in space?

01:13:41 First of all, there's still sound on other planets.

01:13:44 If there's an atmosphere on a space body, or at least something like gas, water, or

01:13:49 a solid surface, there will be sound.

01:13:52 In our case, the atmosphere becomes completely silent at about 60 miles above the Earth's

01:13:58 surface.

01:13:59 That's where the sky stops being blue, and a black starry veil begins.

01:14:05 In any case, we'd have to land on another planet, or at least get close to its atmosphere

01:14:09 to hear something.

01:14:12 But whatever it is, it would sound very different.

01:14:15 Let's take our favorite Venus as an example.

01:14:18 The atmosphere there is very dense.

01:14:21 Scientists jokingly call it a thick chemical soup.

01:14:24 No thanks.

01:14:25 So, if you somehow managed to stay alive and speak there, your voice would be very different.

01:14:31 It would become much louder, and it would sound deeper.

01:14:35 So, if you want a pleasant baritone, you know what to do.

01:14:41 I wonder what would happen if Earth had a denser atmosphere.

01:14:44 What would we hear then?

01:14:46 Well, you can vaguely imagine that if you've ever been in the water.

01:14:51 Water is very dense, sound moves there much faster and better compared to the air, at

01:14:56 a speed of almost a mile per second, depending on the water temperature.

01:15:02 So if you sit in an empty room with no sound sources, you won't hear much, right?

01:15:07 Now dip your head in the water and check out how the same silence sounds here.

01:15:12 It's not quiet at all.

01:15:14 Even if you ignore the ever-present sounds of the water itself, you'll immediately notice

01:15:18 how well you can hear your own body, how your blood pulsates in the veins, how your heart

01:15:24 works, the slightest movement of your fingers.

01:15:26 Kinda creepy, isn't it?

01:15:29 This gives us an idea of what would happen to us on a planet with a denser atmosphere.

01:15:33 And that's just crazy, we would hear everything.

01:15:37 From scurrying animals to the movement of tectonic plates.

01:15:40 "Ah, come on," you'd probably say.

01:15:43 It's obvious that there's sound on other planets.

01:15:46 But didn't you say we can hear something in open space?

01:15:50 Actually yes.

01:15:51 For example, in a cloud of dust.

01:15:53 You can find space dust almost everywhere in space.

01:15:56 It may be the remains of a star or something else.

01:16:00 And in these places, everything is a bit denser than usual.

01:16:04 This means there are probably dust clouds where particles are very close to each other,

01:16:08 which means they can produce sounds.

01:16:11 Of course, those will be very quiet and transmitted over a very short distance.

01:16:16 But it's better than nothing, right?

01:16:20 Plus, we already have one real space sound recorded.

01:16:24 It came from the Perseus galaxy, which is located 250 million light-years away from

01:16:29 us.

01:16:30 NASA recorded it in 2003.

01:16:33 Those of us music geeks will want to know that it's a B-flat, 57 octaves below middle

01:16:39 C on the piano.

01:16:40 You'd have to add another 660 keys to the left on the keyboard.

01:16:45 But its frequency is so low that the human ear unfortunately can't hear it.

01:16:51 But besides that, we can only hear something inside spaceships.

01:16:55 These are small pockets of air, after all.

01:16:58 In a spacesuit, you would hear sounds very well too, including your breathing or blood

01:17:03 circulation in a spacesuit.

01:17:06 But two astronauts, flying side by side, wouldn't hear each other, even if they got very close

01:17:11 and shouted very loudly.

01:17:12 It's quite funny, if you, being an astronaut, bumped into something, it would be very loud

01:17:18 for you, but your friend wouldn't hear anything.

01:17:20 That's why astronauts use radio devices.

01:17:27 Now purely theoretically, if you could somehow crawl out of your spacesuit and survive, you'd

01:17:34 be able to hear the chatter and noises going on inside the spaceship.

01:17:38 But how?

01:17:39 So, look, we have some air inside the spaceship, and it transmits sound.

01:17:44 It reaches the metal casing and gets through it.

01:17:46 And then, if you leaned against the ship, preferably touching it with your elbow or

01:17:51 knee, the sound would be transmitted to the brain directly through your bones, ignoring

01:17:56 the ears.

01:17:57 Yes, our bones conduct sound.

01:18:00 That's how, for example, deaf people listen to music.

01:18:04 It's called bone conduction.

01:18:05 It's used in some headphones and some other technologies.

01:18:09 You can do a little experiment.

01:18:11 Hold your fingers over your ears.

01:18:13 Shut them properly so that you really don't hear much.

01:18:16 Then try to touch a sound source.

01:18:18 It can be anything vibrating.

01:18:20 For example, a speaker playing music with some part of your body where the bone is close

01:18:25 to the skin.

01:18:26 Now watch the miracle happen.

01:18:29 You can hear the sound not through your ears, but directly in your brain.

01:18:33 But please don't repeat this experiment in open space.

01:18:36 You know, ice cream?

01:18:38 Haha!

01:18:39 Now you've probably heard about things like "the sounds of space," where you can listen,

01:18:44 for example, to the sounds made by the Sun or different planets.

01:18:48 How do we record these ones?

01:18:50 Easily!

01:18:51 There is another way to hear sound in space – electromagnetic waves.

01:18:56 When you look at photos taken from spaceships or the International Space Station that show

01:19:00 sunlit objects like Earth or the Moon, something seems wrong.

01:19:05 Space looks too empty.

01:19:07 No magical scenery of a nighttime sky full of stars.

01:19:11 It would be incredibly boring to go stargazing in space since the sky is always dark.

01:19:17 During the daytime, the sky on our home planet is blue because of the diffusion of light.

01:19:22 It happens when sunlight goes through the atmosphere.

01:19:25 But if you were on the Moon or somewhere else in space, there would be no atmosphere to

01:19:29 spread this light around.

01:19:30 That's why the sky there would always appear black.

01:19:35 But it doesn't mean less bright out there.

01:19:38 If you were looking out the window of the space station, you'd see just as much direct

01:19:42 sunlight as you would gazing out of your apartment window during a cloudless day.

01:19:46 Maybe even more.

01:19:48 When taking a picture on a sunny day, you'll probably use a short exposure, together with

01:19:53 a narrow aperture setting on your camera.

01:19:56 This way, just a short burst of light will get in.

01:19:58 That's similar to how our pupils contract in sunlight so that they don't have to deal

01:20:02 with too much light.

01:20:04 And since it's just as bright up there in space, the process is the same when you take

01:20:08 pictures of sunlit objects there.

01:20:11 Using short exposure, you can get good, bright pictures of Earth or the surface of the Moon.

01:20:16 But it also means there will be no stars in the picture.

01:20:20 Even up there, stars are relatively dim.

01:20:23 They don't emit enough light to show up in photos taken with such settings.

01:20:28 Our home planet has a blue sky that slowly transforms into a beautiful orange-red palette

01:20:33 at dusk and dawn.

01:20:35 But if you ever get a chance to watch a sunset on Mars, you should expect the opposite, an

01:20:40 orange-brown daytime sky that gets a bluish tint at sunset.

01:20:45 First of all, Mars is farther away from the Sun than our planet.

01:20:48 So when you're looking at the Sun from the Martian surface, of course, it looks fainter

01:20:52 and smaller.

01:20:54 And not just that.

01:20:55 The Sun observed from Mars is just a bluish-white dot surrounded by a blue halo.

01:21:00 The thin atmosphere of the red planet contains large dust particles.

01:21:04 They create an effect called "Mye Scattering".

01:21:07 It occurs when the diameter of particles in the atmosphere is almost the same as the wavelength

01:21:11 of the scattered light.

01:21:13 This effect filters out the red light from the Sun's rays.

01:21:16 So only the blue light would reach your eyes on Mars.

01:21:22 How come Earth doesn't have rings?

01:21:24 All gas giants in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have such rings,

01:21:30 whereas the rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars don't.

01:21:35 There are two theories about how rings can appear around a planet.

01:21:39 They might be just some material left from the times when the planet was forming.

01:21:43 Or they may be the remains of a moon that got destroyed by a collision with some space

01:21:47 body or torn apart by the strong gravitational pull of its parent planet.

01:21:53 The gas giants formed in the outer regions of our solar system, while all the rocky planets

01:21:57 are in the inner part.

01:21:59 So maybe the inner planets were more protected from potential collisions that could have

01:22:03 formed their rings.

01:22:05 There are also more moons in the outer regions of our solar system, which could be another

01:22:09 reason why the planets there have rings.

01:22:12 Also, bigger planets have stronger gravity.

01:22:15 That means that they can keep their rings stable after they form.

01:22:19 Some experts believe Earth used to have a ring system a long time ago.

01:22:24 A Mars-sized object might have collided with our home planet, which probably created a

01:22:28 dense ring of debris around it.

01:22:31 Some scientists think that this debris formed not a ring, but what we know today as the

01:22:36 moon.

01:22:38 There is probably a giant planet lurking at the edge of the solar system, far beyond Neptune.

01:22:44 We call this mysterious hypothetical world Planet 9.

01:22:48 If it does exist, it's probably similar to Uranus or Neptune, and 10 times more massive

01:22:53 than our home planet.

01:22:55 It's likely to circle around the Sun, but in the outer reaches of the solar system,

01:22:59 about 20 times farther than Neptune.

01:23:03 Another interesting theory says that Planet 9 could actually be a black hole the size

01:23:08 of a grapefruit that warps space in a similar way a large planet would.

01:23:14 Even though we once thought it was a rare substance in space, water exists all over

01:23:19 our solar system.

01:23:20 For example, you can often find it in asteroids and comets.

01:23:25 It's also in craters on the Moon and Mercury.

01:23:28 We still don't know if there's enough water to support potential human colonies if we

01:23:32 decide to move there, but some amount of water is definitely present there.

01:23:38 Mars has water at its poles too.

01:23:40 It's mostly hidden in the layers of ice and probably under the planet's dusty surface.

01:23:45 Europa, Jupiter's moon, has some water too.

01:23:49 This is the most likely candidate we know about to host life outside Earth.

01:23:53 There's probably a whole ocean of liquid water under its frozen surface.

01:23:57 It might actually contain twice as much water as all of Earth's oceans combined.

01:24:04 Neptune is unexpectedly warm, even though it's 30 times as far from the Sun as our

01:24:08 planet and receives less sunlight and heat.

01:24:11 But it still radiates way more heat than it gets.

01:24:14 It also has way more activity in its atmosphere than you'd suspect, especially if you compare

01:24:20 it to its neighbor, Uranus.

01:24:23 Both of these planets emit the same amount of heat, even though Uranus is much closer

01:24:27 to the Sun.

01:24:28 No one knows why.

01:24:31 Neptune has extremely strong winds that can reach a speed of up to 1,500 mph.

01:24:36 Can they produce this heat?

01:24:38 Or maybe it's because of the planet's core or its gravitational force?

01:24:43 There's a monster black hole hurtling through space at a speed of 5 million mph.

01:24:50 Scientists located it with the Hubble Space Telescope.

01:24:52 They believe it weighs as much as a billion suns.

01:24:56 It was supposed to stay put in the center of its home galaxy, but some gravitational

01:25:00 forces are pushing it around.

01:25:02 At one point, this black hole is going to break free from its galaxy and continue roaming

01:25:07 the universe.

01:25:08 Luckily, it's still 8 billion years away from us.

01:25:12 Solar storms are so powerful that they could leave us in complete darkness.

01:25:17 Back in July 2012, the strongest solar storm in over 150 years narrowly missed Earth.

01:25:25 Massive mass ejections, or CMEs, are large bubbles of ionized gas.

01:25:30 They tore through our orbit back then.

01:25:33 If they had caught our planet in the crosshairs, we would have literally been in the firing

01:25:38 line.

01:25:39 We'd have faced solar matter hurtling towards Earth, damaging computers and causing power

01:25:43 outages that would have lasted for months.

01:25:46 A surprise solar storm hit us on June 25, 2022.

01:25:50 One photographer even managed to capture stunning bright auroras that flashed across the dawn

01:25:55 sky in Calgary, Canada, and lasted for 5 minutes.

01:25:59 They were caused by the storm.

01:26:03 Vampire stars are a real thing.

01:26:04 They're part of a binary star, and they can literally drain the life out of the other

01:26:09 star in the system.

01:26:11 Venus most likely used to be covered with oceans, from 30 to 1,000 feet deep.

01:26:17 Also, some water was locked in the soil of the planet.

01:26:20 On top of that, Venus had stable temperatures of 68 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, which, you

01:26:26 have to admit, was quite pleasant and not that different from the temperatures on Earth

01:26:30 nowadays.

01:26:31 So, what I'm getting at is that for 3 billion years, right until something irrevocable happened

01:26:37 700 million years ago, Venus could have been habitable.

01:26:41 But now, it's not.

01:26:43 The Moon is the second brightest object in our sky.

01:26:47 At the same time, among other astronomical bodies, it's one of the dimmest and least

01:26:51 reflective.

01:26:52 Our natural satellite only seems bright because it's so close to Earth.

01:26:56 For comparison, our planet looks much brighter when you look at it from space.

01:27:01 It's because clouds, ice, and snow reflect way more light than most types of rock.

01:27:06 Triton, Neptune's moon, has all its surface covered with several layers of ice.

01:27:12 If this satellite replaced our current moon, the night sky would get 7 times brighter.

01:27:19 Neutron stars are some of the smallest, yet most massive objects in space.

01:27:23 They're usually about 12 miles in diameter, but are several times heavier than the Sun.

01:27:28 Oh, and they also spin about 600 times per second, far faster than your average figure

01:27:33 skater.

01:27:37 Saturn is the least dense planet in the Solar System.

01:27:40 It has 1/8 the average Earth's density.

01:27:43 And still, because of its large volume, the planet is 95 times more massive than Earth.

01:27:50 A transient lunar phenomenon is one of the most enigmatic things happening on the Moon.

01:27:54 It's a short-lived light, color, or some other change on the satellite's surface.

01:27:59 Most commonly, it's random flashes of light.

01:28:03 Astronomers have been observing this phenomenon since the 1950s.

01:28:06 They've noticed that the flashes occur randomly.

01:28:10 Sometimes they can happen several times a week.

01:28:12 After that, they disappear for several months.

01:28:15 Some of them don't last longer than a couple of minutes, but there have been those that

01:28:19 continued for hours.

01:28:21 The year was 1969, one day before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.

01:28:27 One of the mission participants noticed that one part of the lunar surface was more illuminated

01:28:32 than the surrounding landscape.

01:28:33 It looked as if that area had a kind of fluorescence to it.

01:28:37 Unfortunately, it's still unclear if this phenomenon was connected with the mysterious

01:28:42 lunar flashes.

01:28:44 Trash isn't just a problem in Earth's oceans, cities, and forests.

01:28:47 There is a thing called space junk, which is any human-made object that's been left

01:28:52 in space and now serves no purpose.

01:28:55 There's also natural debris from meteoroids and other cosmic objects.

01:28:59 There are currently over 500,000 pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth at speeds

01:29:04 high enough to cause significant damage if they were to collide with a spacecraft or

01:29:09 satellite.

01:29:10 NASA does its best to track every single object to ensure that missions outside Earth can

01:29:15 reach their destination safely.

01:29:17 Our Sun is insanely massive.

01:29:20 Want some proof?

01:29:22 99.86% of all the mass in the Solar System is the mass of the Sun.

01:29:27 In particular, the hydrogen and helium it's made of.

01:29:31 The remaining 0.14% is mostly the mass of the Solar System's 8 planets.

01:29:37 The Sun's temperature is hotter than the surface of a star.

01:29:40 The surface temperature reaches 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the upper atmosphere heats

01:29:45 up to millions of degrees.

01:29:47 If someone could dig a tunnel straight into the center of the planet and out the opposite

01:29:51 side, and you were adventurous enough to jump into it, it would take you 42 minutes to

01:29:57 fall to the other side.

01:29:59 You'd speed up as you fell, reaching maximum speed by the time you reached Earth's core.

01:30:05 After the halfway point, you would then fall upwards, getting slower and slower.

01:30:10 By the time you reached the opposite surface, your speed would be back to zero.

01:30:14 Unless you managed to climb out of the hole, you'd immediately start falling again, back

01:30:19 down or "up" to the other side of the planet.

01:30:22 This trip would go on forever, all thanks to the weird effects of gravity.

01:30:26 A might be a fun way to spend an afternoon!

01:30:31 There might be more metals, for example, titanium or iron, in lunar craters than astronomers

01:30:37 used to think.

01:30:38 The main problem with this finding?

01:30:40 It contradicts the main theory about how the Moon was formed.

01:30:44 That theory says that Earth's natural satellite was spun off from our planet after a collision

01:30:49 with a massive space object.

01:30:51 But then, why does Earth's metal-poor crust have much less iron oxide than the Moon's?

01:30:57 It might mean the Moon was formed from the material lying much deeper inside our planet.

01:31:03 Or these metals could've appeared when the molten lunar surface was slowly cooling down.

01:31:08 Or maybe, as they've been saying for centuries, it's made of green cheese.

01:31:14 Earth could've been purple before it turned blue and green.

01:31:18 One scientist has a theory that a substance existed in ancient microbes before chlorophyll

01:31:22 – that thing that makes plants green – evolved on Earth.

01:31:26 This substance reflected sunlight in red and violet colors, which combined to make purple.

01:31:31 If true, the young Earth may have been teeming with strange purple-colored critters before

01:31:36 all the green stuff appeared.

01:31:39 The highest mountain in the Solar System is Olympus Mons on Mars.

01:31:43 It's three times as high as Mount Everest, the Earth's highest mountain above sea level.

01:31:48 If you were standing on top of Olympus Mons, you wouldn't understand you were standing

01:31:52 on a mountain.

01:31:54 Its slopes would be hidden by the planet's curvature.

01:31:59 Astronomers have found a massive reservoir of water in space – the largest ever detected.

01:32:04 Too bad it's also the farthest – 12 billion light-years away from us.

01:32:08 The water vapor cloud holds 140 trillion times as much water as all the Earth's oceans

01:32:14 combined.

01:32:15 What are we supposed to do with that information?

01:32:18 Venus spins at its own unhurried pace.

01:32:21 A full rotation takes 243 Earth days, and it takes the planet a bit less than 225 Earth

01:32:27 days to go all the way around the Sun.

01:32:30 It means a day on Venus is longer than a year.

01:32:33 There's very little seismic activity going on inside the Moon.

01:32:38 Yet many moonquakes, caused by our planet's gravitational pull, sometimes happen several

01:32:43 miles below the surface.

01:32:45 After that, tiny cracks and fissures appear in the satellite's surface, and gases escape

01:32:50 through them.

01:32:51 Hey, they sometimes escape from me too!

01:32:55 Mars is the last of the inner planets, which are also called terrestrial since they're

01:33:00 made up of rocks and metals.

01:33:02 The red planet has a core made mostly of iron, nickel, and sulfur.

01:33:06 It's between 900 and 1200 miles across.

01:33:10 The core doesn't move.

01:33:11 That's why Mars lacks a planet-wide magnetic field.

01:33:14 The weak magnetic field it has is just 1/100% of the Earth's.

01:33:21 When the planets in the Solar System were just starting to form, Earth didn't have

01:33:26 a moon for the longest time.

01:33:28 It took 100 million years for our natural satellite to appear.

01:33:32 There are several theories as to how the Moon came into existence, but the prevailing one

01:33:36 is the fission theory.

01:33:40 Somebody went fishing and caught the Moon?

01:33:43 Actually no.

01:33:44 The fission theory proposes that the Moon was formed when an object collided with Earth,

01:33:49 sending particles flying about.

01:33:52 Gravity pulled the particles together, and the Moon was created.

01:33:55 It eventually settled down on the Earth's ecliptic plane, which is the path that the

01:33:59 Moon orbits.

01:34:00 So, looks like the green cheese is off the table now.

01:34:05 The largest single living thing on Earth turns out to be a mushroom in Oregon.

01:34:09 This enormous honey mushroom lives in Malheur National Forest and covers an area of 3.7

01:34:15 square miles.

01:34:16 It could be as much as 8,500 years old.

01:34:20 You could be forgiven for missing it, though, since most of it's hidden underground.

01:34:26 When the roots of individual honey mushrooms meet, they can fuse together to become a single

01:34:31 fungus, which explains how this one got so big.

01:34:34 If you could gather all that mushroomy stuff into one big ball, it could weigh as much

01:34:39 as 35,000 tons.

01:34:42 That's about as heavy as 200 grey whales.

01:34:44 Hey, that's a whale of a mushroom!

01:34:48 The largest asteroid in the Solar System is called Vesta, and it's so big that it's

01:34:53 sometimes even called a dwarf planet.

01:34:56 No one will hear your cry in space.

01:34:59 Or something like that.

01:35:00 We've all heard this famous chilling phrase.

01:35:03 And it's actually true.

01:35:04 Space, for the most part, consists of a giant nothingness.

01:35:07 There's a lot of, you know, space in space.

01:35:11 But this doesn't mean there are no sounds in space.

01:35:14 In fact, there are plenty of them.

01:35:16 And some of them can even make you shiver.

01:35:18 Let's take a look at the scariest space sounds.

01:35:21 First of all, how are cosmic sounds even recorded?

01:35:25 Sound is just the vibration of molecules.

01:35:27 When you scream, you make the molecules push each other furiously until they reach the

01:35:32 ear of the person you're yelling at.

01:35:34 Then these vibrations get transmitted to the brain, and we recognize them as something

01:35:39 that you might need to apologize for.

01:35:42 In other words, to hear something, we need molecules.

01:35:45 And that's where things get complicated.

01:35:47 There aren't any of them in space.

01:35:49 The entire universe almost completely consists of a vacuum.

01:35:52 No, not a Hoover.

01:35:54 Absolute nothingness.

01:35:55 However, the wizards from NASA still record space sounds somehow.

01:36:00 So how do they do it?

01:36:02 The thing is, there are some types of waves that don't care about molecules.

01:36:06 We regular folk can't perceive them without some special devices.

01:36:10 These waves include, for example, radio waves.

01:36:13 We'll need a radio or something like that to recognize them.

01:36:17 And that's exactly what NASA's satellites do.

01:36:19 They catch random radio waves.

01:36:22 Thanks to their heroism, we can find out how different cosmic bodies sound.

01:36:27 These satellites record a variety of waves, fluctuations of plasmas, magnetic fields,

01:36:32 and other, you know, stuff.

01:36:34 And then scientists from NASA transform all this into normal soundtracks.

01:36:39 And some of them sound quite frightening, to put it mildly.

01:36:42 Let's take our magnetic field, for example.

01:36:45 It surrounds our planet like an invisible shield, protecting us from all sorts of nasties,

01:36:50 like radiation and solar winds.

01:36:53 At the same time, we can neither see it, feel it, nor hear.

01:36:57 Oops!

01:36:58 Well, the last one is outdated.

01:37:00 Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark took magnetic waves recorded by the

01:37:04 ESSA Swarm satellite, they converted them into an audio track, and got a pretty creepy

01:37:10 result.

01:37:14 Now to be honest, it sounds more like an eerie entity stalking you in the middle of

01:37:18 the night.

01:37:19 And if you remember the maps of Earth's magnetic field, it starts to feel like a spider

01:37:24 crawling nearby.

01:37:27 And this isn't the first strange sound that we caught on Earth.

01:37:30 Recently, we caught another weird radio emission from space.

01:37:34 Scientists found out that the repeating signal came from somewhere very far away, like billions

01:37:39 of light-years away from us.

01:37:41 Such fast radio bursts usually lasted no longer than a few milliseconds, but this one was

01:37:46 unique.

01:37:47 It lasted about 3 seconds, basically thousands of times longer than usual.

01:37:52 And at the same time, the signal was very precise, so much so that scientists even compared

01:37:57 it to a heartbeat.

01:38:00 Scientists believe that this signal is caused by pulsars, or neutron stars.

01:38:05 One time, Nikola Tesla caught something similar, but unfortunately, at that time, we didn't

01:38:10 know about such things as pulsars.

01:38:12 So Tesla was sure that he had caught a message from some extraterrestrial life.

01:38:18 It's a pity that the truth turned out to be much more boring.

01:38:21 But let's move on from the Earth to the Moon.

01:38:24 In 1969, the astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission, the spacecraft that made the final test flight

01:38:30 to the Moon, flew past its surface.

01:38:32 And then they caught some strange signals coming from the dark side of the Moon.

01:38:37 The side that we never see because the Moon is tidally locked to us.

01:38:41 The sound was so weird that the astronauts weren't even sure whether to report it to

01:38:45 NASA.

01:38:46 They were afraid they wouldn't be taken seriously, and maybe even not allowed to participate

01:38:51 in the next space missions.

01:38:53 Here's what it sounded like.

01:38:58 But according to NASA, it's not some creepy extraterrestrial music at all.

01:39:03 This may just be some radio waves that affected each other because of their proximity.

01:39:08 Although the astronauts who heard it for the first time probably felt a little creeped

01:39:12 out.

01:39:13 Let's move to the other planets.

01:39:15 40 years ago, scientists actively explored the surface of Venus.

01:39:19 They sent as many as 10 probes there, which were supposed to capture audio and video shooting

01:39:24 from the surface.

01:39:26 Now we know what Venus, which could easily destroy us at any attempt to even get close

01:39:30 to it, sounds like.

01:39:34 Horrifying.

01:39:37 And you wouldn't expect anything else from the most dangerous planet in the Solar System.

01:39:41 Unfortunately, Venus is even more toxic than the average Twitter user.

01:39:46 So these probes didn't last too long.

01:39:49 They heroically arrived on a planet and soon broke down.

01:39:53 Next one is Jupiter.

01:39:55 This space giant, which is 11 times larger than the Earth, never fails to scare us.

01:40:00 One of NASA's probes, Juno, flies around Jupiter every few weeks.

01:40:05 The probe is moving at a tremendous speed – 130,000 miles per hour.

01:40:10 One day, Juno caught one of the strongest invisible signals it had ever encountered.

01:40:15 This was the point at which the mad solar wind came into conflict with the magnetic

01:40:20 field of Jupiter.

01:40:21 It kinda sounded like a cosmic boom.

01:40:25 The original sound lasted 2 hours, but it was compressed to a few seconds.

01:40:29 It actually sounds more like a collision of a sea wave and a rock.

01:40:34 But here, in terms of horror, Jupiter surprisingly loses to one of its small moons, Ganymede.

01:40:41 In 2021, the Galileo space probe flew past Ganymede, and during its flight, it received

01:40:47 a rather strange recording.

01:40:54 These sounds are satellite radiation, and it's unclear whether it sounds like a cozy

01:40:58 sunny day in the jungle or like thousands of bats waiting for you in the night.

01:41:04 Next one is Saturn.

01:41:06 This signal was caught by the Cassini-Huygens Automatic Interplanetary Station, which was

01:41:10 launched into space in 1997.

01:41:13 When flying past Saturn, Cassini recorded a pretty scary sound.

01:41:20 This terrifying cry of thousands of souls is actually just some radio waves.

01:41:24 They aren't too different from what the auroras emit on Earth.

01:41:28 A little later, Cassini received another recording – the sounds made by lightning and thunderstorms

01:41:33 on Saturn.

01:41:34 They sound pretty interesting too.

01:41:39 More like popping corn or a Geiger counter, right?

01:41:42 But that's just because these lightning strikes have a crazy frequency.

01:41:47 Moving on from the Solar System to outer space.

01:41:50 The famous Voyager 1 was launched back in 1977, and continues to send us data even 40

01:41:56 years after its launch.

01:41:58 In 2012, it left the Solar System and entered interstellar space.

01:42:03 And then, while abandoning its home, Voyager 1 detected the sound of plasma waves.

01:42:09 The original recording lasted 7 months, but fortunately, scientists felt sorry for us

01:42:14 and reduced it to 12 seconds.

01:42:18 It isn't really eerie, but is still kind of unsettling.

01:42:22 And although it feels like nothing can beat Saturn's horrors, let's end this tournament

01:42:27 with one of the scariest objects in the Universe – a black hole.

01:42:31 This sound was recorded by the Chandra Space Telescope.

01:42:34 While studying a cluster of galaxies in the constellation Perseus, they discovered something

01:42:40 strange.

01:42:41 Some undulating movements appear from the center of the cluster.

01:42:45 They spread out in all directions, like circles on the water.

01:42:50 Scientists have suggested that this was caused by a supermassive black hole.

01:42:54 The thing is, black holes don't always devour space objects entirely.

01:42:59 Sometimes they kind of spit them out.

01:43:01 This causes vibrations of gases, which we can convert into soundtracks.

01:43:06 What's interesting is that the oscillation of each such wave actually lasts about 10

01:43:11 million years.

01:43:12 You're just listening to a very accelerated recording.

01:43:16 Scientists have reduced the delay between oscillations by about 144 quadrillion times.

01:43:22 So let's check it out.

01:43:25 This is probably the eeriest sound from the whole list.

01:43:28 Nothing too loud or wild, but there's something dark and disturbing about it.

01:43:34 Those were the scariest space sounds captured by NASA.

01:43:37 To be fair, most of them sounded creepy simply because they're radio waves, but it's still

01:43:42 fun to get spooked sometimes.

01:43:44 The center of the Milky Way is a story of intense radiation, gravity, and mystery.

01:43:50 A place where the forces of nature are pushed to their limits.

01:43:55 But what if our own planet were to find itself in this cosmic theater?

01:44:00 What would happen if the Earth were located there and somehow managed to survive?

01:44:05 Let's start this journey to the heart of our galaxy and find out!

01:44:10 Picture this.

01:44:11 You're floating in space, surrounded by billions and billions of stars.

01:44:16 Suddenly, you see a bright, swirling mass of gas and dust in the distance.

01:44:22 That my friend, is the Milky Way galaxy, our home in the vast expanse of the universe.

01:44:29 The Milky Way is estimated to contain over 100 billion stars and is about 100,000 light

01:44:36 years across.

01:44:37 In other words, if you were traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 100,000

01:44:42 years to cross the Milky Way from one end to the other.

01:44:46 It's a couple trillions of miles.

01:44:49 But it isn't just a static collection of stars and gas.

01:44:53 It's a dynamic, evolving system.

01:44:56 In fact, the Milky Way is currently hurtling through space at a speed of about 1.3 million

01:45:01 miles per hour.

01:45:04 One of the most fascinating things about our galaxy is its shape.

01:45:08 The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, which means that it kinda looks like a disc with a central

01:45:13 bulge and spiral arms.

01:45:16 The spiral arms are the areas where new stars are born.

01:45:20 It's where the most stars, gas, and dust are concentrated.

01:45:24 And this is where the solar system is located.

01:45:28 Our system is like a tiny speck in the grand cosmic tapestry of the Milky Way.

01:45:34 It's about 26,000 light years away from the center of the galaxy.

01:45:38 A pretty long distance, isn't it?

01:45:41 The solar system is also moving through the Milky Way as it orbits around the galactic

01:45:47 center.

01:45:48 It takes about 230 million years for our system to make one complete orbit around the galaxy.

01:45:55 Just imagine that!

01:45:57 Since the time of the dinosaurs, we've traveled just a quarter of this way.

01:46:02 The position of the solar system in the galaxy affects our life in many ways.

01:46:08 For example, things like the amount of radiation and cosmic rays we're exposed to, and even

01:46:14 the likelihood of asteroid impacts, and so on.

01:46:18 Also, thanks to our location, we can enjoy some pretty amazing views of the universe

01:46:24 around us.

01:46:25 From our vantage point in the Milky Way, we're able to see other galaxies, nebulae, and star

01:46:31 clusters in breathtaking detail.

01:46:34 We're also a part of a pretty happening neighborhood, with lots of other stars and planets nearby.

01:46:40 So we're lucky fellas!

01:46:43 But what would happen if we weren't so lucky?

01:46:45 What if the Earth was located in the center of the Milky Way instead?

01:46:51 The center of the Milky Way is home to a region of space called the Central Bulge, and it's

01:46:56 just packed with stars.

01:46:59 It's like a disco ball, but instead of shiny mirrors, it's covered in stars.

01:47:04 Actually this disco ball is really huge, about 10,000 light years in diameter.

01:47:10 The center of the Milky Way is also home to some extreme environments that would make

01:47:15 even the bravest astronauts shiver.

01:47:18 High energy particles and intense magnetic fields can wreak havoc on electronics and

01:47:24 spacecraft.

01:47:25 Intense radiation fields can fry anything in their path, so it's not exactly a friendly

01:47:30 place for life as we know it.

01:47:34 So if the Earth were located somewhere closer to the center of the Milky Way galaxy, it

01:47:39 would be a very different place.

01:47:42 Let's take a look at some of the potential effects.

01:47:46 First of all, radiation.

01:47:48 As we mentioned earlier, the center of the Milky Way is one of the most radiation-dense

01:47:53 regions in the galaxy.

01:47:55 It would make life on Earth very challenging, if not impossible.

01:48:01 Whenever we have the Earth's magnetic field, it's like a giant shield that protects us

01:48:05 from harmful radiation from outer space.

01:48:08 But could it protect us if we were located in the center of the Milky Way?

01:48:13 Unfortunately, the answer is no.

01:48:15 It's kind of like trying to use a tiny umbrella to protect yourself from a massive storm.

01:48:21 So it would be an easy win for the galaxy.

01:48:25 But it's not all doom and gloom.

01:48:27 There are some brave organisms that are able to adapt to high levels of radiation.

01:48:33 We've seen that life on Earth has evolved to survive anywhere, from the depths of the

01:48:38 ocean to the icy poles of the planet.

01:48:43 So let's imagine what would happen if we somehow evolved to survive in these harsh conditions.

01:48:50 Like picture humans with tough, scaly skin that protects them from radiation, and plants

01:48:55 with unique structures that allow them to thrive in this bright environment.

01:49:00 In that case, radiation could still have some seriously spooky effects on us.

01:49:06 For example, it could damage DNA molecules and cause mutations.

01:49:11 Imagine a world where plants grow with five leaves instead of four, animals have strangely

01:49:16 colored fur, or people have unusual eye colors or other unique features.

01:49:22 And these are just some of the best examples.

01:49:25 Let's not dive into the bad ones.

01:49:27 Also, it could cause us to undergo some metabolic changes.

01:49:32 Maybe our bodies could process food and other resources more quickly, which could lead to

01:49:37 faster growth rates and larger sizes.

01:49:40 Plants could grow tall and thick, and animals would be much larger than usual.

01:49:47 There are also some organisms on Earth that are able to bioluminesce.

01:49:52 Thanks to high levels of radiation, these organisms could potentially glow even brighter

01:49:57 than usual.

01:49:59 Imagine walking through a forest at night and seeing trees, mushrooms, and even insects

01:50:04 glowing with an eerie blue or green light.

01:50:07 Frightening and amazing, isn't it?

01:50:11 But let's move on to the next big change, gravity.

01:50:14 The gravity in the center of the Milky Way is incredibly strong, all thanks to a super

01:50:20 massive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of the Sun.

01:50:26 This black hole is called Sagittarius A. And yep, it's our neighbor now.

01:50:31 Great.

01:50:33 And assuming we don't get swallowed by this black hole or crushed by this incredibly strong

01:50:38 gravity, it still could trigger lots of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

01:50:43 This black hole would be like the gravitational bully pulling and tugging at everything in

01:50:48 its path.

01:50:50 Basically, if we survived this, we'd have an epic surfing competition every single day.

01:50:56 Just add a bit of the thrill of risking your life, and forget about running away from the

01:51:00 planet.

01:51:01 No easy rocket launches anymore.

01:51:04 And physical objects won't be the only ones affected by gravity.

01:51:08 Time would flow very differently for us.

01:51:11 According to Einstein's theory of relativity, time passes more slowly in areas of high gravity.

01:51:18 In other words, earthlings would age more slowly than someone far from the center of

01:51:23 our galaxy.

01:51:24 Also, the center of the Milky Way is a very busy place.

01:51:29 Stars, planets, and other celestial objects moving around at incredibly high speeds there

01:51:34 every day.

01:51:36 The positions of stars and other objects would be constantly changing.

01:51:40 In other words, say goodbye to normal navigation.

01:51:44 The GPS system would likely be unreliable due to the strong gravitational forces and

01:51:49 high radiation.

01:51:50 So, if you accidentally got lost in a glow-in-the-dark forest with some creepy animals, good luck!

01:51:58 But it's not all bad.

01:51:59 The center is also home to molecular clouds.

01:52:03 These are the regions of space where new stars are born.

01:52:07 And the Milky Way in general has some pretty amazing sights to offer.

01:52:11 For example, stunning nebulae like the Orion Nebula and the Eagle Nebula, which are visible

01:52:17 with telescopes or even just a good pair of binoculars.

01:52:21 So if earth were located in the center of the Milky Way, we would have a front row seat

01:52:26 to some of the most spectacular cosmic events.

01:52:30 Wouldn't that be awesome?

01:52:32 Overall, if earth were located in the center of the Milky Way, it would be a very different

01:52:37 place.

01:52:39 Of course, we all understand that our planet wouldn't have survived such a change.

01:52:43 But it's still pretty interesting to imagine how our life would flow if we were there.

01:52:49 And judging by what we just discussed, it wouldn't be pretty.

01:52:53 So let's treasure and appreciate our small, quiet solar system.

01:53:04 One day, with top-notch future technologies, one stop from Neptune to Pluto won't seem

01:53:09 much further than Times Square from Bryant Park today.

01:53:13 There are huge ice mountains on Pluto, valleys that go further than your eyes can see, 160-mile

01:53:19 large craters almost as big as the largest one on Earth, and no life.

01:53:24 The reasons are obvious.

01:53:25 The long distance between Pluto and the sun guarantees freezing temperatures on that dwarf

01:53:30 planet.

01:53:31 It also ensures a trip of a few billion miles.

01:53:34 Plus, it's smaller than the moon, so it would get crowded very soon if people started

01:53:39 dwelling there.

01:53:40 Still, there's one reason which makes life there not that far-fetched.

01:53:45 The sun has a lifespan and cycles within it.

01:53:48 Our solar system used to be nothing but a cloud of gas and dust.

01:53:52 As a result of a gravitational collapse at the center of this cloud, the gas and dust

01:53:56 started gathering in specific, denser places.

01:54:00 Ice pulled more and more matter as time went on, and something called conservation momentum

01:54:05 made the mass start rotating and heating up because of immense pressure.

01:54:10 Later, there appeared a disk similar to what Saturn has, but it was made of entirely different

01:54:16 substances.

01:54:17 And right in the center, there was the ball that eventually became the sun.

01:54:21 A protostar is a young star that's still gathering its mass, and that's exactly what the sun

01:54:27 was before the temperatures and pressures inside of it lighted up its core.

01:54:31 Millions of years later, it became the sun we see every day.

01:54:35 But it won't stay this way forever.

01:54:37 It will heat up even more, and eventually get bigger and denser, turning into a red

01:54:42 giant.

01:54:43 It may one day get big enough to swallow up Venus and Mercury.

01:54:47 Chances are, it might swallow even planet Earth.

01:54:51 Even if it doesn't devour our planet, the sun might get close enough to touch us.

01:54:55 Well, if this happened, life on Earth wouldn't be possible.

01:54:59 But then, in just a few minutes, the sun loses about 40% of its mass and shrinks about 10

01:55:05 times what it used to be.

01:55:07 It's not as bright, and indeed, not as hot as it used to be.

01:55:11 By this moment, Earth will have already been deserted.

01:55:14 People might want to start traveling around space, or settle down on another planet where

01:55:19 life is sustainable, like the exoplanet Kepler-62f, which, by the way, is even bigger than our

01:55:25 planet Earth.

01:55:26 While all of this was happening, Pluto was changing.

01:55:30 Before, every resource was frozen inside of the dwarf planet.

01:55:34 Water, gases like methane, carbon monoxide, you name it.

01:55:38 But as the sun was reaching its peak luminosity, Pluto was slowly warming up and losing a lot

01:55:44 of what it had to the vastness of space.

01:55:46 At the same time, an atmosphere formed up.

01:55:49 If the atmosphere gets thick enough, it would create favorable life conditions.

01:55:54 Then, instead of spaceships, a tiny percentage of us would be able to set up colonies on

01:55:59 the dwarf planet.

01:56:00 The temperature is comfortable there, almost t-shirt weather.

01:56:04 It even resembles Earth a tiny bit.

01:56:06 Canyons filled with water, beautiful endless fields with trees, and lots of space to run

01:56:11 around, and mineral water pockets on the ground good enough to drink.

01:56:16 Pluto's rotations are different than Earth's.

01:56:18 An Earth day is 24 hours, and sometimes it still feels like it never ends.

01:56:23 But on Pluto, a whole rotation around the sun takes 153 hours, because it's pretty far

01:56:29 away from the sun.

01:56:31 After several hours without sleep, we get tired, and our eyes get red.

01:56:35 It means we'd have to take several naps throughout the day on Pluto.

01:56:39 A year on Pluto equals 248 Earth years.

01:56:42 Unless we come up with some sort of technology to get us to live that long, our entire lifespan

01:56:48 would be less than half a year on the dwarf planet.

01:56:51 So, houses on Pluto might need to be equipped with cryo-chambers.

01:56:56 Whenever you feel like dreaming for a long time, you jump in it and wake up 50 Pluto

01:57:01 days later.

01:57:02 On the dwarf planet, there are also seas and beaches.

01:57:05 So it's just like a tiny Earth, far away from the actual Earth.

01:57:10 The food on Pluto could be tastier.

01:57:12 We might find a way to make the ingredients more savory, and even try to grow them faster

01:57:16 during the trip.

01:57:18 You plant a carrot, and two days later, it's ready to be in your salad.

01:57:22 There could also be new ingredients for our salads on Pluto.

01:57:25 Maybe two-meter tall mushrooms we've never seen before.

01:57:29 The animals we would take with us on the trip would get released into their new home forever.

01:57:34 And with time, they would evolve and adapt to their new environments.

01:57:38 The law of the jungle could change a bit, too.

01:57:40 Lions might not be kings anymore.

01:57:43 Deer are.

01:57:44 Deer antlers are twice the size of what they used to be.

01:57:47 But to be fair, so are the deer.

01:57:50 Most of the animals that were already here used to live underwater.

01:57:53 But with time, the amphibians started shifting to the surface, just like Earth at the beginning

01:57:58 of life.

01:57:59 Pluto could only be a temporary home, though.

01:58:02 Once the sun has finally reached its final phase, Pluto would get frozen and lifeless

01:58:07 again.

01:58:08 People instead would need to try to find a planet that stays in the Goldilocks zone of

01:58:12 another galaxy.

01:58:13 The Goldilocks zone is the exact proper distance from the star like the sun, where the temperature

01:58:18 is perfect for the water to stay liquid.

01:58:21 It's the rule scientists search for when looking for other planets that can sustain life.

01:58:26 We can try setting new colonies on one such planet.

01:58:29 Or even try to set up our own artificial home.

01:58:31 Not exactly a planet or a spaceship, but a combination of both.

01:58:35 Something huge built right in space.

01:58:38 Say a wheel with gravity everywhere we go, so we don't fall off.

01:58:42 It would float in space toward the new exoplanet, capable of fitting entire states in.

01:58:47 This whole trip might happen just because the sun first grew too much, and then, having

01:58:52 reached the culmination of its life cycle, it would finally become a white dwarf.

01:58:57 It's gonna be a pretty long journey, and entire generations will be born here.

01:59:01 You'll have a choice.

01:59:02 Sleep your way through the journey until humans finally reach their new exoplanet, or enjoy

01:59:07 the trip in this fantastic spaceship.

01:59:10 There's all you need on board.

01:59:11 Malls bigger than those on Earth, large futuristic cities, even places to farm, fields with rich

01:59:17 soil made artificially, and finally, after a long journey, the exoplanet.

01:59:23 It's even somewhat better than Earth.

01:59:25 The planet is giant and has more continents.

01:59:28 The continent's center isn't as far from oceans, which means there aren't as many desert areas.

01:59:34 Though the sun of this planet is an orange dwarf, it's not as hot as our yellow dwarf

01:59:38 sun today.

01:59:39 It's a bit smaller, but here's the kick.

01:59:42 Orange dwarfs live somewhat longer.

01:59:44 They remain stable for between 15 billion and 45 billion years.

01:59:49 Despite that, this new planet is full of rainforests because the planet itself is warmer.

01:59:55 It means more biodiversity and creatures we've never seen before.

01:59:59 But even if nothing out there is suitable, we could try and terraform this planet instead.

02:00:04 If we take Mars as an example, we could create a greenhouse effect by smashing ice-rich comets

02:00:10 and releasing ammonia in them, making the planet warmer.

02:00:14 We could also start planting trees.

02:00:16 We'd probably need some Earth soil to do that, or we'd have to modify Mars' soil to be similar

02:00:21 to ours.

02:00:22 Sooner rather than later, the atmosphere would be close to the one we have on Earth.

02:00:27 We'd be able to breathe, too, because of the trees.

02:00:30 Then we can melt Mars' polar ice caps and voila, water.

02:00:35 The problem is the solar winds and sun explosions that might strip it of an atmosphere just

02:00:40 as quickly as we can create one, if not faster.

02:00:44 It has no magnetosphere, either, which means it can't protect us from radiation.

02:00:49 So long-term Mars wouldn't be a good choice.

02:00:53 Maybe out there, in the vastness that is space, there is a perfect planet waiting for us.

02:01:00 The infinite vastness of the universe holds endless possibilities and secrets.

02:01:05 And here's one of the intriguing questions.

02:01:07 How life and we as humans would look like on other planets?

02:01:12 Imagine a world where the laws of physics, the environment, and the conditions are vastly

02:01:17 different from what we're used to.

02:01:20 How would we adapt and evolve to survive in these strange new lands?

02:01:25 Let's see.

02:01:26 Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and has a thin atmosphere.

02:01:30 The temperatures there are extreme, with the day side reaching over 800 degrees Fahrenheit

02:01:36 and the night side dropping to negative 290 degrees Fahrenheit.

02:01:41 So what can we do to survive these crazy temperatures and constant solar radiation?

02:01:47 Maybe we can magically turn into metal.

02:01:49 For example, titanium and platinum can perfectly tolerate high temperatures.

02:01:55 But seriously though, there is an option.

02:01:58 We could settle underground, where the temperatures aren't so frenzied.

02:02:01 If we lived underground, we might evolve with large eyes to better capture light.

02:02:06 We might also evolve thicker skin to protect ourselves from the intense radiation.

02:02:12 Basically, we have two options, become metal or become moles.

02:02:17 Let's move on to Venus.

02:02:19 This planet is extremely hostile.

02:02:22 First of all, Venus is known for its thick, more toxic than your ex type of atmosphere.

02:02:27 The whole planet is covered with carbon dioxide and its surface is absolutely dry, making

02:02:33 it incredibly hot.

02:02:35 The average temperature is around 847 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the hottest planets

02:02:41 in our solar system.

02:02:42 Also, don't forget about the crazy pressure.

02:02:46 Standing on Venus would be like standing 3000 feet underwater.

02:02:50 Any particular hardy microbes from Earth could survive in such conditions.

02:02:55 So if you want to live on Venus, you might have to become a microbe.

02:02:59 But unfortunately, since we're not microbes, we have to wear special gear and equipment

02:03:04 to survive there.

02:03:06 Maybe we'd have to develop a heat-resistant exoskeleton to protect ourselves, as well

02:03:11 as get some new lungs that can filter out the toxic elements in the atmosphere.

02:03:16 Let's talk about our favorite red sibling, Mars.

02:03:19 The first noticeable change after a few hundred years would be your new skeleton.

02:03:24 The gravity on Mars is much weaker than on Earth, so your muscles and bones would shrink.

02:03:30 To make up for this difference, you'd have to eat more and probably start going to the

02:03:34 gym.

02:03:35 Also, you'd have to adapt to the low atmospheric pressure and colder temperatures.

02:03:40 You need to retain heat, right?

02:03:42 That means you'd need a thicker layer of body fat.

02:03:45 Sorry folks, but on Mars, we might become fatter.

02:03:49 Another reason to start working out!

02:03:52 Another big change would occur in your skin.

02:03:54 Your skin is like a big barrier that protects you from harmful things such as bacteria,

02:03:59 UV light, looking totally creepy, and so on.

02:04:03 So what would happen to it?

02:04:05 Most likely, you would turn orange, due to the carotenoids.

02:04:10 Carotenoids are a type of nutrient that you get from foods such as carrots, potatoes,

02:04:14 tomatoes, and so on.

02:04:16 They protect very well against ultraviolet radiation on Mars.

02:04:20 They only have one downside.

02:04:22 By eating a lot of pumpkins from the Martian farmer's market, you'll gradually start

02:04:26 to turn orange.

02:04:27 But maybe it's not so bad!

02:04:30 Maybe life on Jupiter would be easier.

02:04:32 Yeah, no.

02:04:33 It has no solid land.

02:04:35 This planet is made up of hydrogen and helium and is referred to as a "gas giant."

02:04:41 You would simply float there, like in a huge cloud.

02:04:44 And even if you managed to land and try to walk, it would be like moving through a super

02:04:48 thick fog.

02:04:50 So how would we evolve there?

02:04:51 Firstly, we might become much larger in size to withstand the immense pressures.

02:04:56 Secondly, the temperature fluctuations on Jupiter are enormous.

02:05:01 The surface is terrifyingly cold and the temperature rises significantly under the outer layers

02:05:07 of the atmosphere.

02:05:08 Thirdly, if you lived on Jupiter, there would be no verbal language.

02:05:12 This gas giant absorbs radio waves, so even if you were speaking, no one would hear you.

02:05:18 There would be no music either, so no parties.

02:05:20 And what's the point then?

02:05:22 Hey, maybe we could communicate with sign language, but that's not so simple either.

02:05:27 Jupiter is full of wild winds and storm clouds, so it's unlikely you would be able to see

02:05:32 anything.

02:05:33 So even if we evolved there in some way, our lives would still not be easy.

02:05:39 Before landing on Saturn, you would probably want to check out its iconic rings.

02:05:43 But you wouldn't be able to do that because Saturn's rings consist of a bunch of ice particles

02:05:48 flying in space, so it would be extremely hard to land.

02:05:52 So let's go straight to Saturn itself.

02:05:55 At first, it may seem that Saturn is not bad for us.

02:05:58 Some layers of this gas giant have quite pleasant temperatures.

02:06:01 If we dive deeper into Saturn, it gets surprisingly warm, up to 26 degrees Fahrenheit in its second

02:06:08 layer.

02:06:09 This is an average temperature in countries like Sweden and Canada.

02:06:13 But unfortunately, this is only one such layer.

02:06:17 The rest of the planet is incredibly cold, so in order to survive on Saturn, we'd have

02:06:21 to do a lot of work.

02:06:24 In addition to the cold, we'd have to deal with the planet's harsh environment, including

02:06:28 its intense storms, strong winds, and radiation.

02:06:32 To protect ourselves from these conditions, we'd need to evolve tough skin, again, find

02:06:37 some insulation, and so on.

02:06:40 Next planet is Uranus.

02:06:42 Uranus has a very different environment from Earth, with much colder temperatures, a lack

02:06:47 of a solid surface, and a much different atmosphere.

02:06:50 It's like another Jupiter, but with blue vibes.

02:06:53 It's not that bad, though.

02:06:54 There's even water on Uranus.

02:06:56 The only problem is, the planet is full of ammonia, that nasty stuff we use for cleaning.

02:07:01 So don't be surprised if you feel the gross smell.

02:07:03 Also, it's incredibly cold out there, almost like a never-ending winter.

02:07:08 So what would it be like to survive in such a dark and harsh environment?

02:07:12 We'd need thicker skin, again, to cope with extreme temperatures.

02:07:16 And again, we'd need larger eyes to see better in all this darkness.

02:07:20 We might even have to develop a new hearing system, like that of dolphins.

02:07:24 Wouldn't that be fun?

02:07:26 Let's move on to Neptune.

02:07:28 If human beings were to evolve on Neptune, they would need to adapt to its harsh conditions.

02:07:33 Neptune, the 8th and farthest planet from our sun, is another gas giant.

02:07:39 The only difference is, this planet may have a solid core.

02:07:43 If we were to live on Neptune, we'd need to float or swim in its methane-rich atmosphere.

02:07:47 We'd also need to develop gills or something like that in order to breathe.

02:07:52 Basically, we'd turn into space reptiles or cosmic fishes.

02:07:57 The gravity on Neptune is slightly stronger than Earth's, but strong winds make it difficult

02:08:01 to stand in one place.

02:08:03 To withstand the wind, we'd need to be much heavier.

02:08:07 Once again, you'd need to eat a lot and pump up some muscles.

02:08:11 Yeah, yeah, technically it's not a planet, but we still love it and can't forget it.

02:08:16 A small, distant and incredibly cold world, Pluto's even smaller than our moon, and because

02:08:22 of that, there's almost no gravity there.

02:08:25 It will be extremely difficult to stand on it.

02:08:27 To avoid accidentally flying into outer space while playing football, we'd need to create

02:08:32 a fake gravity machine.

02:08:34 And if we don't want to feel dizzy, we'd need to evolve a brand new nervous system.

02:08:38 But Pluto isn't all that bad.

02:08:40 For example, there's liquid water under the surface, and even some icy mountains.

02:08:45 Maybe it would be possible to survive there if we had some serious equipment, clothes,

02:08:50 supplies and… nah, too much hassle.

02:08:53 Anyway, from the scorching heat of Mercury to the freezing temperatures of Neptune, each

02:08:57 planet has a unique set of environmental challenges and opportunities for evolution.

02:09:03 While we may never truly know what humans would look like on these other worlds, it's

02:09:07 exciting to consider the endless possibilities.

02:09:10 Never stop looking at the stars and asking these questions!

02:09:15 It was January 7th in 1610 when Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei made an astonishing discovery

02:09:23 using his homemade telescope.

02:09:26 Four moons orbiting the planet Jupiter.

02:09:29 By the way, these days you can make your own version of his telescope using cardboard tubes,

02:09:34 lenses and some superglue.

02:09:36 The main point of this DIY telescope is to place two lenses at the correct distance from

02:09:41 each other.

02:09:42 You'll need two lenses.

02:09:44 One lens should be concave, the other one convex.

02:09:48 So one lens is curved out and the other one is curved in.

02:09:52 Galileo's initial telescope was able to magnify objects approximately eight times.

02:09:58 He continued to improve it until it reached about 20 times the magnifying power.

02:10:04 But let's get back to the main story, shall we?

02:10:07 When he first looked at those four moons of Jupiter, he believed he was simply looking

02:10:11 at a bunch of stars.

02:10:14 But he soon noticed that these space objects seemed to be moving in a regular pattern.

02:10:19 It took him a couple of weeks to figure out that what he was looking at were not stars,

02:10:24 but moons circling Jupiter.

02:10:28 Galileo initially named those moons 1, 2, 3 and 4.

02:10:33 But let's face it, those weren't the most creative names.

02:10:37 As more moons in our galaxy were discovered later, the numerical system for naming them

02:10:41 became confusing and impractical, so it lasted for just a few centuries.

02:10:47 So these days, those four satellites, Jupiter's largest, are named Io, Europa, Ganymede and

02:10:55 Callisto.

02:10:56 They are collectively known as the Galilean moons to honor the man who first noticed them.

02:11:02 Galileo's discovery was crucial for our later understanding of astronomy.

02:11:07 It was initially believed that other objects revolved around the Earth since it was seen

02:11:12 as the center of the universe.

02:11:15 We now know that there are hundreds of moons in our solar system.

02:11:19 However, large moons, like those discovered by Galileo Galilei, are not so commonly stumbled

02:11:25 upon.

02:11:26 A moon is considered large when it's the size of our planet or bigger.

02:11:31 Ganymede, for instance, is bigger than Mercury.

02:11:34 We basically call Ganymede a moon just because it orbits Jupiter.

02:11:39 Otherwise, it has all the other characteristics of a planet.

02:11:42 It's no surprise that Jupiter has the biggest moons in the area.

02:11:46 It beats all the other planets in our solar system in both size and mass.

02:11:51 So no wonder it pulled in a lot of other objects towards it.

02:11:56 Jupiter is believed to have in total almost 80 moons, with only 53 of them being given

02:12:01 official names until today.

02:12:06 The first of those Jupiterian moons to be discovered by Galileo was Io.

02:12:11 What sets it apart is the fact that it has a lot of volcanoes.

02:12:15 Io is the only space object to have active volcanoes in our solar system, apart from

02:12:20 Earth.

02:12:21 It's also nicknamed the "moon of fire and ice" because of its sulfur dioxide snow

02:12:27 fields.

02:12:28 Io's outer layer is splotchy, featuring multiple colors like orange, black, yellow,

02:12:34 white, and red.

02:12:35 That's probably the reason why NASA described it as "a giant pizza" covered with melted

02:12:40 cheese and splotches of tomato and ripe olives.

02:12:45 Because of that sulfur though, Io doesn't smell that appetizing, something similar to

02:12:49 a rotten egg.

02:12:53 There are more than 100 mountains on the surface of this moon.

02:12:56 They are a lot larger than those we see on Earth, some being bigger than Mount Everest.

02:13:02 On average, these mountains are 4 miles tall and 98 miles long.

02:13:09 Because of those active volcanoes and the intense radiation on Io, there's little

02:13:14 chance that life as we know it could exist here.

02:13:16 But hey, who's to say it can't have life the way we don't know it?

02:13:22 Next on the list of Galilean moons is Europa, the smallest of the four.

02:13:27 It's comparable in size to the moon.

02:13:30 Europa has an entirely icy surface, with just a bunch of craters scattered here and there.

02:13:36 Because of that outer layer, Europa is very reflective, making it one of the brightest

02:13:40 moons out there.

02:13:42 As for its age, scientists believe its surface to be somewhere between 20 to 180 million

02:13:48 years old.

02:13:50 Europa is about 4.5 billion years old.

02:13:56 What lies beneath that icy surface is impressive.

02:13:59 It may even hold the secret to life outside Earth.

02:14:03 Ice forms here in two ways.

02:14:05 The first is through congelation, a rather self-explanatory process.

02:14:10 Ice just grows as the surrounding environment gets colder and colder.

02:14:15 The other method, though, is a lot more fascinating.

02:14:18 A layer of supercooled water found under the ice shell reacts when agitated.

02:14:24 It then generates these crystals that make it look like it's snowing in reverse, floating

02:14:29 upwards to the ice sheet they sit under.

02:14:32 You can recreate this environment yourself at home.

02:14:35 Take a bottle of purified water and place it into the freezer.

02:14:40 If you don't have purified water anywhere near, just boil some water a couple of times

02:14:44 to get rid of as many impurities as possible.

02:14:47 Since there won't be any particles inside, once in the freezer, it won't turn solid.

02:14:53 But if you take the bottle out of the freezer and give it a shake, the impact will make

02:14:57 the water rapidly crystallize, transforming it into a slush-like consistency.

02:15:03 There may be water on Europa, but there's little evidence so far that life exists on

02:15:07 this moon.

02:15:08 However, it's one of the highest candidates in the solar system for potential habitability.

02:15:15 Some sort of life forms could adapt to live there in its under-ice ocean.

02:15:19 That environment is most likely similar to what we can find in our planet's hydrothermal

02:15:24 vents hidden deep within our oceans.

02:15:28 The amount of oxygen in Europa's atmosphere is very little, but in 2013, NASA gave away

02:15:34 some cool evidence.

02:15:36 This yet again supports the theory that there's potential for life on this moon.

02:15:41 It seems that Europa might be venting water into space.

02:15:46 If this is confirmed by future observations, it could also mean that Europa is geologically

02:15:51 active.

02:15:52 It could also come in handy if we'd manage to study water sources one day.

02:15:58 The largest of those Galilean moons is Ganymede.

02:16:02 It's also the biggest moon in our solar system altogether.

02:16:06 It's a low-density space object similar to Mercury in size, but having only half of its

02:16:11 mass.

02:16:12 However, Ganymede is the only moon out there to feature its own magnetic field.

02:16:18 It's quite small though, and we can barely notice it from Earth since it's overshadowed

02:16:22 by Jupiter's much more powerful magnetic field.

02:16:26 Another cool aspect of Ganymede is that its atmosphere contains oxygen.

02:16:31 Don't get too excited, it's not nearly enough to support any lifeforms living there.

02:16:37 Back in December 2021, a 50-second audio clip was released, which was previously recorded

02:16:43 by NASA's probe on its Ganymede flyby.

02:16:47 For the inexperienced, the sounds were more similar to those of an old dial-up internet

02:16:52 connection, but because of its quirky tunes, Ganymede was soon nicknamed "Jupiter's singing

02:16:58 moon."

02:17:00 Finishing up the list of Galilean moons is Callisto, or the most heavily cratered object

02:17:05 in our solar system.

02:17:07 What's interesting about this moon is that its landscape has barely changed since it

02:17:12 formed, and scientists are still debating why this is happening.

02:17:17 Most other space objects go through loads of changes throughout their lifetimes because

02:17:21 of events such as collisions with other objects, changes in orientation or speed, or chemical

02:17:28 reactions happening on their surface.

02:17:31 Callisto is also about the size of the planet Mercury, but it has a lower density.

02:17:36 Jupiter's magnetic field has a lesser impact here since Callisto is the furthest from the

02:17:41 giant planet.

02:17:43 Its surface is estimated to be a staggering 4 billion years old.

02:17:49 As opposed to Io, Callisto is not geologically active, but scientists believe there might

02:17:54 be an ocean hiding underneath the moon's surface, which may potentially harbor life.

02:18:00 The fact that it's less impacted by Jupiter's magnetic field means that it features low

02:18:05 levels of radiation.

02:18:08 In this suitable environment, we may one day end up setting a human base for future explorations

02:18:13 here!

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