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Transcript
00:00:00It all started with a minor change on our planet.
00:00:03At first, people noticed the moon had become brighter and a little bigger.
00:00:07But nobody paid attention to this.
00:00:10The moon affected tides all over the world.
00:00:13The water flooded the beaches.
00:00:15But it wasn't a tragedy.
00:00:17A lot of fish came close to the shores.
00:00:19People found giant squid, anglerfish, and other creatures next to the coast.
00:00:24Although they usually live in the dark depths.
00:00:27New, stranger things happen every day.
00:00:30Birds no longer fly to the south in winter.
00:00:33They gather in huge groups, flying around cities with no purpose.
00:00:37The moon used to help them navigate in nature.
00:00:40So they can't figure out which way to fly anymore.
00:00:43In the boundless waters of the world's oceans,
00:00:46ship captains notice that compasses are now unstable.
00:00:50The arrow is pointing in different directions,
00:00:52since the Earth's magnetic poles have changed.
00:00:56People realize the moon has started to approach Earth for an unknown reason.
00:01:01The moon's gravity affects the gravity of our planet.
00:01:04This entails changes in the climate,
00:01:06the behavior of all living beings, and the magnetic field.
00:01:10Now, it rains in the driest places and gets hot in the coldest lands.
00:01:16It's knocking down ecosystems all over the planet.
00:01:20People living near forests hear wolves howling all the time.
00:01:24The moon drives these animals mad.
00:01:27The Earth's natural satellite is growing in size and lights up the night much brighter.
00:01:32Nothing critical has happened yet.
00:01:34People don't panic because they don't want to believe the end is coming.
00:01:38But then, one day, the moon reaches a critical point.
00:01:43You're walking down the street, listening to music.
00:01:46And at that moment, someone pushes you.
00:01:49Okay, maybe that guy is late for work.
00:01:52You keep walking, and a girl coming by hits your shoulder.
00:01:55I'm sorry, she says and goes away.
00:01:58You've noticed the fear in her eyes.
00:02:01You look ahead and see people running towards you.
00:02:04You take off your headphones and hear screams and sirens.
00:02:08People leave their cars and run away.
00:02:10Hundreds of seagulls are flying in the sky.
00:02:13You hear a strange noise among all the sounds of chaos.
00:02:17It seems to be water.
00:02:20How is this possible?
00:02:21You're in the city center, a few miles from the shore.
00:02:24But there's no time to think.
00:02:26You notice a huge wave flooding the streets and heading straight to you.
00:02:31You run into a building and go up to the 10th floor.
00:02:35From here, you're watching the water filling the city.
00:02:38The strong stream blows all cars, one-story buildings, and trees off the road.
00:02:44You notice a shark and other fish in the water.
00:02:47People are hiding in houses and on the roofs.
00:02:50The whole city is quickly plunging into a catastrophe.
00:02:54The TV is working in the building where you're hiding.
00:02:57You learn that floods are occurring all over the world.
00:03:00Massive tsunamis cover coastal cities.
00:03:03In some places, waves reach the height of a 30-story building.
00:03:08Many towns have been washed off the face of the Earth.
00:03:11The moon is too close to Earth, and massive floods are just the beginning.
00:03:16The moon flies around Earth and helps to keep our home on its axis.
00:03:20The moon provides climate stability and helps living organisms develop.
00:03:25But now, this balance is broken.
00:03:28The moon is approaching and changing our planet's gravity.
00:03:31Earth can tilt slightly to the side and provoke massive floods around the world.
00:03:36Imagine that you're holding a round glass of water.
00:03:39Tilt it a little.
00:03:40See how the liquid moves from one side to another?
00:03:43The same thing is happening now with the oceans.
00:03:47But the moon is not just approaching us.
00:03:50It's flying around the planet and getting closer with each circle.
00:03:54It causes natural disasters in different locations on Earth all the time.
00:03:59Now the ocean floods one side, and a few hours later, another.
00:04:04So you see all the water going back from the streets to the shore.
00:04:08The oceans may return to the city again by the end of the day.
00:04:12Wait a minute.
00:04:13It seems the end of the day has already come.
00:04:16You notice that the sky has become dark.
00:04:18It's weird because it's only 3 p.m.
00:04:22The moon changes Earth's rotation speed and makes the day go faster.
00:04:27The moon covers almost the entire sky and brightly illuminates our planet.
00:04:32You see huge lunar craters.
00:04:34It's so close that you can still see it even when the sun shines.
00:04:38In some places, the passing moon obscures the sun.
00:04:43The water is leaving the streets, and everyone goes outside.
00:04:46At this moment, an earthquake begins.
00:04:49The road is cracking, and the houses are collapsing.
00:04:53There are landslides on the street.
00:04:55Tectonic plates are shifting all over the planet.
00:04:58Imagine two magnetic balls that are approaching each other.
00:05:01So one ball is the moon, and the second one is Earth's core.
00:05:06What do you think will happen to what's above the core?
00:05:09That's hundreds of thousands of miles of the Earth's crust.
00:05:13And now it's all moving.
00:05:15Destructive cracks are emerging all over the world.
00:05:18The planet's highest mountains break down and turn into a pile of stones.
00:05:23The seabed cracks and releases magma from the underground depths.
00:05:28Volcanoes wake up and erupt magma.
00:05:31Clouds of volcanic ash cover the sky from the sun and the glowing moon.
00:05:36But the scariest thing is still ahead.
00:05:38A collision is inevitable.
00:05:41The moon flies around the planet like a ball in a round glass with a hole in the center.
00:05:46This force drives clouds all over the planet.
00:05:50Now there's a thunderstorm, but in five minutes, it will be snowing.
00:05:54Then the night comes, and it starts raining.
00:05:57Water droplets consist of mud and volcanic ash.
00:06:00It's difficult for people to breathe without gas masks.
00:06:04Atmospheric pressure is constantly changing.
00:06:07Some people experience severe migraines, and some have sore joints.
00:06:11But there's no time to think about your health.
00:06:13Humanity needs to figure out how to save itself from the collision.
00:06:17A new gravitational order will come when the moon crashes into Earth.
00:06:22Continents will change their shape.
00:06:24They will combine into one giant piece of land or split into a hundred smaller ones.
00:06:29The energy of the collision can burn all the oxygen in the atmosphere
00:06:34and make the planet unsuitable for life.
00:06:36Hiding underground also makes no sense because of deep earthquakes.
00:06:41People decide to spend their last hours with loved ones and their families.
00:06:45The moon is getting closer.
00:06:47It's now at the same distance as the International Space Station.
00:06:51The moon covers the sky.
00:06:53Many cities are in the shadows because of the waves.
00:06:56Tsunamis several miles in height crash down on the ground.
00:07:01Millions of tons of magma collide with the ocean.
00:07:05Billions of gallons of water just evaporate.
00:07:08Moisture rises into the air, mixes with ash, and floods the land in the form of giant cumulus clouds.
00:07:16You've accepted the complete destruction of the planet.
00:07:19But something strange happens to the moon at this moment.
00:07:22You notice giant cracks appear on it.
00:07:25The moon slowly begins to divide into two parts.
00:07:29Both halves crumble into hundreds of large pieces.
00:07:33It's just falling apart.
00:07:35The Earth doesn't have a natural satellite anymore.
00:07:38It's just a pile of giant space rocks.
00:07:41But why is this happening?
00:07:43There's a space around our planet called the Roche Limit.
00:07:47In this place, the gravity of Earth is stronger than that of the moon.
00:07:52This means that the forces holding the moon together are weaker than those that tear it apart.
00:07:58People are cheering.
00:07:59The Roche Limit has saved the planet.
00:08:02The moon won't hit us.
00:08:03It breaks up into millions of fragments and forms a circle around our globe.
00:08:08Now, Earth looks like Saturn.
00:08:10A belt of moonstones surrounds us.
00:08:13Huge chunks destroy everything in their path.
00:08:16All the space debris.
00:08:18The satellites are no longer working.
00:08:20Humanity loses its means of communication and navigation.
00:08:24People will have to use paper maps again.
00:08:26The moon held our planet's orbit at a certain angle before these events.
00:08:31Now the axis is tilted differently.
00:08:33One hemisphere becomes closer to the sun, and the other plunges into shadow.
00:08:38The North Pole and the Arctic may turn into hot deserts.
00:08:41And the equator of the planet may be covered with ice.
00:08:45Winter and summer can last for years.
00:08:47The moon's remnants fly around Earth, but some of them fall on our planet.
00:08:52Lunar meteor showers destroy cities and create giant craters.
00:08:57All these events lead to the massive destruction of life on Earth.
00:09:01It will take hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to the new world.
00:09:06No one will hear your cry in space.
00:09:08Or something like that.
00:09:10We've all heard this famous chilling phrase.
00:09:12And it's actually true.
00:09:14Space, for the most part, consists of a giant nothingness.
00:09:17There's a lot of, you know, space in space.
00:09:20But this doesn't mean there are no sounds in space.
00:09:23In fact, there are plenty of them.
00:09:25And some of them can even make you shiver.
00:09:27Let's take a look at the scariest space sounds.
00:09:31First of all, how are cosmic sounds even recorded?
00:09:34Sound is just the vibration of molecules.
00:09:36When you scream, you make the molecules push each other furiously until they reach the ear
00:09:42of the person you're yelling at.
00:09:43Then these vibrations get transmitted to the brain,
00:09:46and we recognize them as something that you might need to apologize for.
00:09:51In other words, to hear something, we need molecules.
00:09:54And that's where things get complicated.
00:09:56There aren't any of them in space.
00:09:58The entire universe almost completely consists of a vacuum.
00:10:02No, not a hoover.
00:10:04Absolute nothingness.
00:10:05However, the wizards from NASA still record space sounds somehow.
00:10:10So how do they do it?
00:10:11The thing is, there are some types of waves that don't care about molecules.
00:10:15We regular folk can't perceive them without some special devices.
00:10:20These waves include, for example, radio waves.
00:10:23We'll need a radio or something like that to recognize them.
00:10:26And that's exactly what NASA's satellites do.
00:10:29They catch random radio waves.
00:10:31Thanks to their heroism, we can find out how different cosmic bodies sound.
00:10:36These satellites record a variety of waves.
00:10:38Fluctuations of plasmas, magnetic fields, and other, you know, stuff.
00:10:43And then scientists from NASA transform all this into normal soundtracks.
00:10:48And some of them sound quite frightening, to put it mildly.
00:10:52Let's take our magnetic field, for example.
00:10:55It surrounds our planet like an invisible shield,
00:10:57protecting us from all sorts of nasties, like radiation and solar winds.
00:11:02At the same time, we can neither see it, feel it, nor hear.
00:11:06Oops!
00:11:07Well, the last one is outdated.
00:11:09Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark
00:11:12took magnetic waves recorded by the ESSA swarm satellite,
00:11:15they converted them into an audio track, and got a pretty creepy result.
00:11:24Now, to be honest, it sounds more like an eerie entity stalking you in the middle of the night.
00:11:29And if you remember the maps of Earth's magnetic field,
00:11:32it starts to feel like a spider crawling nearby.
00:11:35Eww.
00:11:36And this isn't the first strange sound that we caught on Earth.
00:11:39Recently, we caught another weird radio emission from space.
00:11:43Scientists found out that the repeating signal came from somewhere very far away,
00:11:48like billions of light-years away from us.
00:11:50Such fast radio bursts usually lasted no longer than a few milliseconds,
00:11:54but this one was unique.
00:11:56It lasted about 3 seconds, basically thousands of times longer than usual.
00:12:01And at the same time, the signal was very precise,
00:12:05so much so that scientists even compared it to a heartbeat.
00:12:09Scientists believe that this signal is caused by pulsars, or neutron stars.
00:12:14One time, Nikola Tesla caught something similar.
00:12:17But unfortunately, at that time, we didn't know about such things as pulsars.
00:12:22So, Tesla was sure that he had caught a message from some extraterrestrial life.
00:12:27It's a pity that the truth turned out to be much more boring.
00:12:30But let's move on from the Earth to the Moon.
00:12:33In 1969, the astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission,
00:12:37the spacecraft that made the final test flight to the Moon, flew past its surface.
00:12:42And then they caught some strange signals coming from the dark side of the Moon,
00:12:46the side that we never see because the Moon is tidally locked to us.
00:12:51The sound was so weird that the astronauts weren't even sure whether to report it to NASA.
00:12:56They were afraid they wouldn't be taken seriously,
00:12:58and maybe even not allowed to participate in the next space missions.
00:13:02Here's what it sounded like.
00:13:07But according to NASA, it's not some creepy extraterrestrial music at all.
00:13:12These may just be some radio waves that affected each other because of their proximity.
00:13:18Although the astronauts who heard it for the first time probably felt a little creeped out.
00:13:23Let's move to the other planets.
00:13:25Now, 40 years ago, scientists actively explored the surface of Venus.
00:13:29They sent as many as 10 probes there,
00:13:31which were supposed to capture audio and video shooting from the surface.
00:13:35Now we know what Venus,
00:13:37which could easily destroy us at any attempt to even get close to it, sounds like.
00:13:45Horrifying.
00:13:46And you wouldn't expect anything else from the most dangerous planet in the Solar System.
00:13:51Unfortunately, Venus is even more toxic than the average Twitter user.
00:13:56So, these probes didn't last too long.
00:13:58They heroically arrived on a planet and soon broke down.
00:14:02Next one is Jupiter.
00:14:04This space giant, which is 11 times larger than the Earth, never fails to scare us.
00:14:10One of NASA's probes, Juno, flies around Jupiter every few weeks.
00:14:14The probe is moving at a tremendous speed – 130,000 miles per hour!
00:14:19One day, Juno caught one of the strongest invisible signals it had ever encountered.
00:14:25This was the point at which the mad solar wind came into conflict
00:14:28with the magnetic field of Jupiter.
00:14:31It kind of sounded like a cosmic boom.
00:14:34The original sound lasted 2 hours, but it was compressed to a few seconds.
00:14:39It actually sounds more like a collision of a sea wave and a rock.
00:14:43But here, in terms of horror, Jupiter surprisingly loses to one of its small moons, Ganymede.
00:14:50In 2021, the Galileo space probe flew past Ganymede.
00:14:55During its flight, it received a rather strange recording.
00:15:03These sounds are satellite radiation.
00:15:05And it's unclear whether it sounds like a cozy sunny day in the jungle
00:15:09or like thousands of bats waiting for you in the night.
00:15:14Next one is Saturn.
00:15:15This signal was caught by the Cassini-Huygens Automatic Interplanetary Station,
00:15:20which was launched into space in 1997.
00:15:23When flying past Saturn, Cassini recorded a pretty scary sound.
00:15:29This terrifying cry of thousands of souls is actually just some radio waves.
00:15:34They aren't too different from what the auroras emit on Earth.
00:15:37A little later, Cassini received another recording.
00:15:40The sounds made by lightning and thunderstorms on Saturn.
00:15:44They sound pretty interesting too.
00:15:49More like popping corn or a Geiger counter, right?
00:15:51But that's just because these lightning strikes have a crazy frequency.
00:15:56Moving on from the Solar System to outer space.
00:15:59The famous Voyager 1 was launched back in 1977,
00:16:03and continues to send us data even 40 years after its launch.
00:16:07In 2012, it left the Solar System and entered interstellar space.
00:16:13And then, while abandoning its home, Voyager 1 detected the sound of plasma waves.
00:16:18The original recording lasted 7 months.
00:16:21But fortunately, scientists felt sorry for us and reduced it to 12 seconds.
00:16:27It isn't really eerie, but it's still kind of unsettling.
00:16:31And although it feels like nothing can beat Saturn's horrors,
00:16:35let's end this tournament with one of the scariest objects in the Universe – a black hole.
00:16:40This sound was recorded by the Chandra Space Telescope.
00:16:44While studying a cluster of galaxies in the constellation Perseus,
00:16:48they discovered something strange.
00:16:50Some undulating movements appear from the center of the cluster.
00:16:54They spread out in all directions, like circles on the water.
00:16:59Scientists have suggested that this was caused by a supermassive black hole.
00:17:03The thing is, black holes don't always devour space objects entirely.
00:17:08Sometimes, they kind of spit them out.
00:17:11This causes vibrations of gases, which we can convert into soundtracks.
00:17:16What's interesting is that the oscillation of each such wave actually lasts about 10 million years.
00:17:22You're just listening to a very accelerated recording.
00:17:25Scientists have reduced the delay between oscillations by about 144 quadrillion times.
00:17:32So, let's check it out.
00:17:34This is probably the eeriest sound from the whole list.
00:17:38Nothing too loud or wild, but there's something dark and disturbing about it.
00:17:43Now, those were the scariest space sounds captured by NASA.
00:17:46To be fair, most of them sounded creepy simply because they're radio waves.
00:17:51But it's still fun to get spooked sometimes.
00:18:04On August 20, 1977, the most ambitious space mission took off from Earth.
00:18:10The main goal of Voyager 2 was to study the outer solar system up close.
00:18:15It became possible because of a rare alignment of planets.
00:18:19Voyager 2 was supposed to study all the gas giants of the solar system – Jupiter,
00:18:23Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
00:18:26Astronomers also hoped it would be able to find and explore the edge of the solar system.
00:18:31Since Voyager 2 was built for interstellar travel,
00:18:34the probe was equipped with a large 12-foot-wide antenna.
00:18:37It allowed the spaceship to send the data it gathered back to Earth.
00:18:41During its journey, the space probe discovered a 14th moon of Jupiter.
00:18:45Voyager 2 was the only spaceship to study all 4 giant planets from up close.
00:18:50It was the first human-made object to fly past Uranus,
00:18:54where it found 2 new rings and 10 new moons.
00:18:57Voyager 2 also flew by Neptune and noticed its great dark spot.
00:19:02That's a colossal spinning storm in the planet's southern hemisphere.
00:19:05The storm is the size of Earth and moves at a speed of 1,500 miles per hour.
00:19:11These winds are the strongest ever recorded on any planet of the solar system.
00:19:15In the history of space exploration,
00:19:17only 5 spacecraft have managed to leave the gravitational pull of the solar system.
00:19:22Those were Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and New Horizons.
00:19:28People launch thousands of objects into space.
00:19:31These objects easily overcome Earth's gravity.
00:19:34But the Sun is around 300,000 times as massive as our home planet.
00:19:38That's why its gravitational pull is way more difficult to find.
00:19:42Even more impressively, Voyager 2 is the second human-made object in history
00:19:47to reach the space between stars after passing through the heliosphere.
00:19:52That's a bubble of magnetic fields and particles produced by the Sun
00:19:55and protecting the solar system.
00:19:58Two years after its launch, Voyager 2 started transmitting the first images of Jupiter.
00:20:03The space probe provided scientists with much-needed information about EO and Europa,
00:20:08some of the largest of Jupiter's moons.
00:20:10Then the space mission passed by the gas giant itself.
00:20:14The distance between the spacecraft and the planet was around 400,000 miles.
00:20:18That's when the probe noticed some changes in the shape and color of the great red spot.
00:20:23It's an enormous, long-lived storm system, like a hurricane on Earth, but much, much larger.
00:20:29Two years later, Voyager 2 reached Saturn.
00:20:32It discovered spokes and kinks in some of the planet's rings.
00:20:36While the spacecraft was flying behind and up past the gas giant,
00:20:40it passed through the plane of Saturn's rings.
00:20:42At that time, Voyager's speed was around 8 miles per second.
00:20:46For several minutes, the probe was hit by thousands of micron-sized grains of dust.
00:20:51This kept shifting the probe's direction,
00:20:53and its control jets had to fire many times to stabilize the vehicle.
00:20:58After Voyager 2 explored Uranus and Neptune, it headed out of the solar system.
00:21:03Its instruments were put in low power to save energy.
00:21:06In August 2007, the spacecraft passed the terminal shock.
00:21:11It's the boundary marking the outer limit of the Sun's influence.
00:21:14Here, the solar wind slows down.
00:21:18In the summer of 2013, the probe reached interstellar space.
00:21:22Now, when it comes to sending and receiving signals in space,
00:21:26there are three factors you should keep in mind.
00:21:29Distance, power, and time.
00:21:32The farther away a spacecraft is, the farther a signal has to travel before it reaches it,
00:21:37and the longer it takes for this signal to catch up with the spacecraft.
00:21:41And when it finally gets there, it's extremely weak.
00:21:44Another problem is that once the spacecraft is launched, it can't be upgraded.
00:21:48It's literally stuck with the technology it was outfitted with.
00:21:52Plus, such spaceships as Voyager 2 are powered by radioactive fuel.
00:21:57When special material radioactively decays,
00:22:00it releases heat that gets converted into electricity.
00:22:03Unfortunately, the more material decays away,
00:22:06the less power the spacecraft has for receiving and transmitting radio signals.
00:22:12Despite this issue, we haven't lost the connection with Voyager 1 and 2.
00:22:16That's because new and more powerful technologies appear on Earth.
00:22:20Signals people send can reach much farther than before.
00:22:23That's why it was possible to stay in touch with Voyager 2,
00:22:26which entered interstellar space in 2018
00:22:29and has already traveled almost 12 billion miles away from Earth.
00:22:33But in March 2020, the main piece of equipment that allowed
00:22:37scientists to exchange signals with the spaceship was switched off.
00:22:41After the communication with the spacecraft stopped,
00:22:44NASA spent around 11 months upgrading its deep space network and installing new hardware.
00:22:50The DSN is an international array of huge radio antennas
00:22:54that help astronomers on Earth communicate with interplanetary missions.
00:22:58These antennas are located in California, Madrid, and Canberra.
00:23:02The one used to keep in touch with Voyager 2 is a 230-foot-wide dish in Canberra.
00:23:07This is the only equipment that can send commands that can reach the probe.
00:23:11This antenna, known as DSS-43, started operating in 1972,
00:23:17five years before Voyager 2 and 1 were launched.
00:23:20At that time, it was only 210 feet across.
00:23:23Since then, the dish has received a lot of repairs and upgrades,
00:23:27but these 11 months were the longest the antenna was offline.
00:23:31In October 2020, the antenna was finally ready for a trial after all the upgrades and repairs.
00:23:37The mission operators sent a set of commands to Voyager 2,
00:23:41and after many months of radio silence, the spacecraft returned the signal.
00:23:45The probe confirmed it had heard the call.
00:23:48After that, the spacecraft carried out the commands.
00:23:52While the dish was offline, the mission operators could actually receive
00:23:56scientific data and health updates from Voyager 2.
00:23:59Astronomers kept getting data from interstellar space,
00:24:02the region outside the Sun's heliosphere,
00:24:05but they couldn't send any commands to the probe since it had traveled too far away from Earth.
00:24:10The upgraded antenna received two new radio transmitters, and it was done just in time.
00:24:16One of the transmitters, that was used to communicate with Voyager 2,
00:24:19hadn't been replaced in almost 50 years.
00:24:22The antenna also got new cooling and heating equipment
00:24:25and other electronics necessary to support the advanced transmitters.
00:24:30Now, a curious thing about the Deep Space Network
00:24:32is that its radio antennas are positioned in a very precise way.
00:24:36They're spaced equally around the globe.
00:24:39This way, almost any spacecraft can stay in touch with at least one facility at all times.
00:24:44But Voyager 2 is an exception.
00:24:47In 1989, it made a close flyby of Triton, Neptune's moon.
00:24:52It was the only close encounter people had with the 8th planet of the Solar System and its moon.
00:24:57By the way, Triton is the largest known object that is believed to be born in the Kuiper Belt.
00:25:02That's a donut-shaped ring around the Sun full of icy objects.
00:25:06Voyager 2 discovered Neptune's ring system and its tiny inner moons.
00:25:11The probe also gathered a lot of amazing information about Triton.
00:25:15For example, it became clear that the moon is covered in cryovolcanoes.
00:25:20Instead of spewing molten rock, these volcanoes spit ice consisting of water, ammonia, and methane.
00:25:26When the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto more than 25 years later,
00:25:31it discovered the same phenomenon on the dwarf planet.
00:25:35Anyway, to make this detour, Voyager 2 had to travel over the gas giant's North Pole.
00:25:41But this changed the probe's trajectory, deflecting it southward relative to the planes of the planets.
00:25:46Since then, Voyager 2 has been moving in that direction.
00:25:50And now, the spacecraft is so far away that it's out of reach of the radio antennas in the Northern Hemisphere,
00:25:56those in Madrid and California.
00:25:58This makes DSS-43, which is located in the Southern Hemisphere,
00:26:02the only dish powerful enough in broadcasting just the right frequency to send commands to Voyager 2.
00:26:09Voyager 1, the probe's faster-traveling twin, didn't change its trajectory.
00:26:14After passing by Saturn, it took a different path.
00:26:17That's why now it can easily communicate with the two facilities in the Northern Hemisphere.
00:26:22The upgrade the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex has gone through
00:26:27can also benefit other space missions.
00:26:29For example, the Mars Perseverance rover that landed on the Red Planet on February 18, 2021.
00:26:36The dish will also be crucial for exploring other planets and the Moon.
00:26:43When you look at photos taken from spaceships or the International Space Station
00:26:48that show sunlit objects like Earth or the Moon, something seems wrong.
00:26:52Space looks too empty.
00:26:55No magical scenery of a nighttime sky full of stars.
00:26:58It would be incredibly boring to go stargazing in space since the sky is always dark.
00:27:05During the daytime, the sky on our home planet is blue because of the diffusion of light.
00:27:10It happens when sunlight goes through the atmosphere.
00:27:13But if you were on the Moon or somewhere else in space,
00:27:15there would be no atmosphere to spread this light around.
00:27:18That's why the sky there would always appear black.
00:27:23But it doesn't mean less bright out there.
00:27:25If you were looking out the window of the space station,
00:27:28you'd see just as much direct sunlight as you would
00:27:30gazing out of your apartment window during a cloudless day.
00:27:34Maybe even more.
00:27:36When taking a picture on a sunny day, you'll probably use a short exposure,
00:27:40together with the narrow aperture setting on your camera.
00:27:43This way, just a short burst of light will get in.
00:27:46That's similar to how our pupils contract in sunlight
00:27:49so that they don't have to deal with too much light.
00:27:52And since it's just as bright up there in space,
00:27:54the process is the same when you take pictures of sunlit objects there.
00:27:58Using short exposure, you can get good, bright pictures of Earth
00:28:02or the surface of the Moon.
00:28:04But it also means there will be no stars in the picture.
00:28:07Even up there, stars are relatively dim.
00:28:10They don't emit enough light to show up in photos taken with such settings.
00:28:15Our home planet has a blue sky that slowly transforms
00:28:18into a beautiful orange-red palette at dusk and dawn.
00:28:22But if you ever get a chance to watch a sunset on Mars,
00:28:25you should expect the opposite,
00:28:27an orange-brown daytime sky that gets a bluish tint at sunset.
00:28:32First of all, Mars is farther away from the Sun than our planet.
00:28:36So, when you're looking at the Sun from the Martian surface,
00:28:39of course, it looks fainter and smaller.
00:28:41And not just that.
00:28:42The Sun observed from Mars is just a bluish-white dot surrounded by a blue halo.
00:28:48The thin atmosphere of the red planet contains large dust particles.
00:28:52They create an effect called Mie scattering.
00:28:54It occurs when the diameter of particles in the atmosphere
00:28:57is almost the same as the wavelength of the scattered light.
00:29:00This effect filters out the red light from the Sun's rays.
00:29:04So, only the blue light would reach your eyes on Mars.
00:29:09How come Earth doesn't have rings?
00:29:12All gas giants in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune,
00:29:16have such rings.
00:29:18Whereas the rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars don't.
00:29:23There are two theories about how rings can appear around a planet.
00:29:26They might be just some material left from the times when the planet was forming.
00:29:31Or they may be the remains of a moon that got destroyed by a collision with some space body,
00:29:36or torn apart by the strong gravitational pull of its parent planet.
00:29:40The gas giants formed in the outer regions of our solar system,
00:29:43while all the rocky planets are in the inner part.
00:29:46So maybe the inner planets were more protected from potential collisions
00:29:50that could have formed their rings.
00:29:52There are also more moons in the outer regions of our solar system,
00:29:56which could be another reason why the planets there have rings.
00:30:00Also, bigger planets have stronger gravity.
00:30:03It means that they can keep their rings stable after they form.
00:30:07Some experts believe Earth used to have a ring system a long time ago.
00:30:11A Mars-sized object might have collided with our home planet,
00:30:14which probably created a dense ring of debris around it.
00:30:19Some scientists think that this debris formed not a ring,
00:30:22but what we know today as the moon.
00:30:25There's probably a giant planet lurking at the edge of the solar system, far beyond Neptune.
00:30:31Scientists call this mysterious hypothetical world Planet 9.
00:30:36If it does exist, it's probably similar to Uranus or Neptune,
00:30:40and 10 times more massive than our home planet.
00:30:43It's likely to circle around the Sun,
00:30:45but in the outer reaches of the solar system, about 20 times farther than Neptune.
00:30:50Another interesting theory says that Planet 9 could actually be a black hole
00:30:55the size of a grapefruit that warps space in a similar way a large planet would.
00:31:02Even though we once thought it was a rare substance in space,
00:31:05water exists all over our solar system.
00:31:08For example, you can often find it in asteroids and comets.
00:31:12It's also in craters on the Moon and Mercury.
00:31:16We still don't know if there's enough water to support potential human colonies
00:31:19if we decide to move there, but some amount of water is definitely present there.
00:31:25Mars has water at its poles, too.
00:31:28It's mostly hidden in the layers of ice and probably under the planet's dusty surface.
00:31:33Europa, Jupiter's moon, has some water, too.
00:31:36This is the most likely candidate we know about to host life outside Earth.
00:31:40There's probably a whole ocean of liquid water under its frozen surface.
00:31:45It might actually contain twice as much water as all of Earth's oceans combined.
00:31:51Neptune is unexpectedly warm,
00:31:54even though it's 30 times as far from the Sun as our planet and receives less sunlight and heat.
00:31:59But it still radiates way more heat than it gets.
00:32:02It also has way more activity in its atmosphere than you'd suspect,
00:32:06especially if you compare it to its neighbor, Uranus.
00:32:09Both of these planets emit the same amount of heat,
00:32:12even though Uranus is much closer to the Sun.
00:32:15No one knows why.
00:32:17Neptune has extremely strong winds that can reach a speed of up to 1,500 miles per hour.
00:32:23Can they produce this heat?
00:32:25Or maybe it's because of the planet's core or its gravitational force?
00:32:30There's a monster black hole hurtling through space at a speed of 5 million miles per hour.
00:32:35Scientists located it with the Hubble Space Telescope.
00:32:38They believe it weighs as much as a billion suns.
00:32:42It was supposed to stay put in the center of its home galaxy,
00:32:45but some gravitational forces are pushing it around.
00:32:49At one point, this black hole is going to break free from its galaxy
00:32:52and continue roaming the universe.
00:32:54Luckily, it's still 8 billion years away from us.
00:32:58Solar storms are so powerful that they could leave us in complete darkness.
00:33:03Back in July 2012, the strongest solar storm in over 150 years narrowly missed Earth.
00:33:10Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are large bubbles of ionized gas.
00:33:16They tore through our orbit back then.
00:33:19If they had caught our planet in the crosshairs,
00:33:21we would have literally been in the firing line.
00:33:24We'd have faced solar matter hurtling towards Earth,
00:33:27damaging computers and causing power outages that would have lasted for months.
00:33:31A surprise solar storm hit us on June 25, 2022.
00:33:35One photographer even managed to capture stunning bright auroras
00:33:38that flashed across the dawn sky in Calgary, Canada, and lasted for 5 minutes.
00:33:44They were caused by the storm.
00:33:47Vampire stars are a real thing.
00:33:50They're part of a binary star,
00:33:52and they can literally drain the life out of the other star in the system.
00:33:56They do it to keep burning for a longer time.
00:33:58They do it to keep burning for a longer time.
00:34:01It works like this.
00:34:02A smaller star with a lower mass steals its sibling's hydrogen fuel to increase its own mass.
00:34:08This vampire star then becomes hotter.
00:34:11Plus, its color changes to striking blue.
00:34:14This way, it looks much younger.
00:34:16How sneaky.
00:34:18The color of the universe is dubbed Cosmic Latte.
00:34:22The light coming from our galaxies and stars within them,
00:34:25as well as clouds of gas and dust in the observable universe, have a specific color.
00:34:30It's an ivory tint, pretty close to white.
00:34:34The universe is beige because there are a bit more areas that produce green,
00:34:39yellow, and red light than those that emit blue.
00:34:44Now, did you know that there's an astronomical object
00:34:47in which space and time actually swap places?
00:34:50How does that work?
00:34:52And what exactly does swapping space and time mean?
00:34:55Let's figure it out.
00:34:57Imagine that you're on a spacecraft.
00:34:59The vehicle can only move straight.
00:35:01Your path leads to some inevitable point, and you have no idea what lies ahead.
00:35:06You can only hope that it won't be too bad.
00:35:10Meanwhile, everything around you is complete madness.
00:35:13A chaotic collage of many historical events.
00:35:16What do you see?
00:35:17Ancient humans and dinosaurs?
00:35:19The birth of the universe?
00:35:21A future?
00:35:22Who knows?
00:35:23That's what the universe would look like if we swapped time and space.
00:35:28And, theoretically, this is what you would see if you fell into a black hole
00:35:32and somehow were able to survive.
00:35:34But how is something like this even possible?
00:35:38First of all, let's discuss time and space.
00:35:41Imagine drawing a light bulb on a sheet of paper.
00:35:44Then grab one more sheet and draw how it lit up.
00:35:48Right now, it's just a small circle of light.
00:35:50Another sheet, the circle of light is growing.
00:35:53It gets bigger and bigger in size, until finally, it turns into a giant circle.
00:35:59In real life, the bulb lights up in the blink of an eye.
00:36:02That's because the speed of light is the fastest in the universe.
00:36:06But here, on our drawings, we captured the propagation of light frame by frame.
00:36:11We see how, over time, the light has grown from a small dot to a large circle.
00:36:16But if you connect these circles, doesn't it remind you of some shape?
00:36:21For example, a cone?
00:36:23Yes, exactly.
00:36:25This is called a light cone.
00:36:27And time is the central axis of this cone.
00:36:30Why?
00:36:31Because light turns from a small dot into a large circle over time.
00:36:36To remember it, let's draw a time vector, an arrow inside the cone.
00:36:40It goes from the past to the future.
00:36:43Meanwhile, the circles are space.
00:36:45In space, we can move however we want, in any direction.
00:36:49We can move up or down, in zigzags and so on.
00:36:53But no matter what zigzags we draw, along the timeline, we're always moving forward.
00:36:58We can't turn back in time, and we can't stop it.
00:37:01This helps us define time and space.
00:37:05Time is the direction in which the light cone is oriented.
00:37:08This is the direction where all our paths lead, and where our future inevitably lies.
00:37:13And space is the whole variety of directions perpendicular to the timeline.
00:37:19This is a straightforward graph.
00:37:21If it could be applied to the entire universe, then time would flow the same everywhere.
00:37:26However, if you've watched at least some popular sci-fi movies, you know that this isn't the case.
00:37:32In reality, time can be crazy.
00:37:35For example, if you're chilling near a black hole, what will be two hours for you
00:37:40may turn out to be 20 years for your friend on Earth.
00:37:43But why?
00:37:44Well, take a deep breath.
00:37:46Now gravity comes into play.
00:37:48Oh, I know about gravity.
00:37:50It's that thing that helps me to stand on the ground, you may think.
00:37:53But it's much, much more complicated than that.
00:37:57Gravity is one of the basic physical forces in our world, and it's incredibly powerful.
00:38:02In fact, she's such a girl boss that she can distort space and time.
00:38:07She can literally influence the speed of time like an almighty wizard.
00:38:11How?
00:38:12Well, let's take something slightly bigger than a light bulb.
00:38:15For example, a supernova.
00:38:18Somewhere in the universe, a star has just made a boom.
00:38:22How do we know about it?
00:38:24Well, nothing in the universe, no sound, no radio waves, nothing, travels faster than light.
00:38:30So we'll know about the birth of a supernova only when we see it.
00:38:34And this will happen only when its light cone grows enough and reaches our planet.
00:38:39So the light cone grows and grows.
00:38:42So far, everything is fine.
00:38:44And finally, it reaches our planet.
00:38:46But there's a catch.
00:38:48You see, our planet is very massive.
00:38:50Very massive.
00:38:51And it has pretty strong gravity.
00:38:53What happens then?
00:38:55Gravity changes the direction of the light cone.
00:38:58It begins to attract the cone to the center of our planet.
00:39:01And with it, it also attracts our arrow of time.
00:39:05That means it slows the time down.
00:39:07And the closer the light cone is to us, the more the arrow bends, and the slower time goes.
00:39:13What does it mean?
00:39:15Well, for example, the fact that the watch on your ankle will lag behind the watch on your wrist.
00:39:20That your head is aging faster than your legs.
00:39:23And that astronauts in Earth's orbit age a little slower than people on Earth.
00:39:29This is what scientists call general relativity.
00:39:32Right.
00:39:32But how does this relate to our topic?
00:39:35How can we understand what will happen if we swap space and time?
00:39:39Nah, don't worry.
00:39:40We're almost there.
00:39:42Now, imagine a cosmic body with incredibly strong gravity.
00:39:46It bends time and space so much that it feels like they swap.
00:39:50This is a black hole.
00:39:52A black hole attracts absolutely everything to its center.
00:39:55No stars, planets, no light can escape from there.
00:39:59Let's say our light cone is approaching it.
00:40:02First, as usual, time begins to bend toward the center of the black hole, attracted by its gravity.
00:40:08But the gravity is very strong, so it bends more and more.
00:40:12And time goes slower and slower the closer you're to the center.
00:40:17In the end, the light cone crosses the boundary of the black hole, the so-called event horizon.
00:40:23At this point, it gets so distorted that now it's literally pointing downwards.
00:40:28We can say that time has changed its direction.
00:40:31Time is pointing downwards.
00:40:33What kind of nonsense is that, you may ask?
00:40:35It'll be easier to explain in a real example.
00:40:39Imagine you're a crazy astronaut who decided to jump into a black hole.
00:40:43And there's an observer in the spaceship who watches you doing this for some reason.
00:40:48At first, for you, nothing changes.
00:40:50You look at your watch, you see that 5 minutes have passed, and everything's OK.
00:40:55But for the observer?
00:40:57First of all, you'll fall for a very long time.
00:41:00The observer has been sitting there for 50 years, and you're still falling.
00:41:05All because your time has slowed down.
00:41:08Secondly, since space is also distorted near the black hole,
00:41:12the observer will see how you'll begin to stretch like spaghetti.
00:41:16This is a scientific term, by the way.
00:41:18It's called spaghettification.
00:41:21And then, you finally cross the event horizon.
00:41:24The observer doesn't see you anymore.
00:41:27Light cannot escape from a black hole,
00:41:29so your image won't reach the observer even if you're still inside.
00:41:33And what about you?
00:41:35What if you somehow survived?
00:41:37Remember, the time arrow is pointing to the center of the black hole.
00:41:40What does it mean?
00:41:42It means that now, the center of the black hole is your future.
00:41:46It isn't a place, it's a fate that you can't change.
00:41:50And wherever you came from, as well as the rest of the universe, no longer exists for you.
00:41:56Because now, it's not a place, but an event from the past.
00:42:00And since you can't turn back time, you'll never be able to come back.
00:42:05But what is around you?
00:42:07Complete chaos.
00:42:08The rays of light now move in all directions, forward, backward, and so on.
00:42:13The rays depicting the events of the past, the future, the present, all this is moving around you.
00:42:19In reality, space and time didn't swap places.
00:42:22But it feels like they did.
00:42:24Because in space, you can now only move forward, as if along a straight line.
00:42:30And time, reflected in the light rays, surrounds you everywhere and moves in all possible directions.
00:42:36And here we go back to the beginning.
00:42:39This horrifying example helps us imagine what it would feel like if time and space got reversed.
00:42:46Of course, all this is just theories and guesses.
00:42:48The very idea that we're moving in some one direction, the one we haven't chosen,
00:42:53and there's complete time chaos around sounds quite frightening.
00:42:58And yet, it would be a very interesting experience.
00:43:02Sounds dangerous.
00:43:03Why don't you go first?
00:43:06It's normal for planets to be a bit tilted on the side.
00:43:09The Earth is tilted at a 23-degree angle.
00:43:12That's why we have seasons.
00:43:13It's summer when the part of the world where you are leans closer to the Sun.
00:43:17It works the opposite way too.
00:43:19It's winter when you lean away from it.
00:43:21But Uranus is tilted more than normal.
00:43:24It lies at a 98-degree angle, which has a huge effect on its seasons.
00:43:28Each season on Uranus takes 21 years to play out.
00:43:32Something to think about the next time we complain that winter lasts forever.
00:43:37Now, here on Earth, we measure distances in minutes and hours, maybe even days.
00:43:42It takes 10 minutes to walk to your best friend's house,
00:43:44or 15 minutes to drive to your favorite cafe.
00:43:48But in space, it's different.
00:43:49It's vast, which means we measure how long it takes to get to a certain point in years,
00:43:54or in most cases, light-years.
00:43:57So, if you want to walk to the Moon one day,
00:44:00that would take you 9 years to span the 239,000 miles.
00:44:04Perhaps you'd like to take a ride to the nearby star, Proxima Centauri.
00:44:08Maybe if you kept the pedal to the metal at a constant speed of 70 mph,
00:44:12you'd get there in about 356 billion hours, or around 40.5 million years.
00:44:19Trust me, after the first 20 million years,
00:44:21you'd be second-guessing yourself as to why go there in the first place.
00:44:25Now, Mars contains the biggest valley, Valles Marineris, we've discovered so far.
00:44:30It's a pretty impressive system of canyons, 2,500 miles long.
00:44:35It's five times longer than the Grand Canyon.
00:44:38Researchers first spotted it back in the 1970s.
00:44:41A bank of volcanoes located on the other side of the canyon ridge
00:44:44probably helped form this valley.
00:44:47We haven't discovered a planet completely made of diamonds yet,
00:44:50but on some planets, it actually rains diamonds.
00:44:53On Jupiter and Saturn, gas giants of our solar system,
00:44:57lightning storms turn abundant methane into soot, which we also know as carbon.
00:45:02The soot falls and transforms into graphite.
00:45:05Further graphite transforms into diamonds with a diameter of about 0.4 inches.
00:45:11Now, before you start figuring out how to book a diamond-collecting field trip,
00:45:15know that these diamonds don't last.
00:45:17After they enter the planet's core, they melt.
00:45:20Ever notice how when you're stargazing two nights in a row at the same time,
00:45:24let's say 9 p.m., the stars stay in the same place, but the Moon doesn't?
00:45:29Well, there are two reasons for that.
00:45:31First, it depends on what time you go stargazing.
00:45:34For instance, if you go outside at 8 p.m., and tomorrow you look for it at 11 p.m.,
00:45:39you'll see the Moon in two pretty different places.
00:45:42In this case, even the stars take different places in the sky, since our planet is spinning.
00:45:48As you know, it takes 24 hours for it to make one full circle.
00:45:51That means, from our point of view, it seems like both the sky and everything
00:45:55up there is just moving around us one time per 24 hours.
00:45:59In the same way, the Sun changes its position, rising and setting every day.
00:46:04So, if you went outside two nights in a row at the same hour, in most cases,
00:46:09you'll have to wait for an extra half-hour or more until the Moon gets back to the same
00:46:13position as the night before.
00:46:15The stars are pretty much standing still.
00:46:17It seems like they're moving, but that's because the Earth is spinning.
00:46:21But the Moon is actually moving around our planet and goes through different phases.
00:46:26For example, a new Moon is when it's completely dark in the sky.
00:46:29A full Moon is when its day side is facing the Earth.
00:46:32It takes approximately a month for it to finish one circle around the Earth.
00:46:37Maybe you'd be luckier on a diamond-collecting expedition on this next planet,
00:46:4140 million light-years away from Earth.
00:46:44Scientists used to call it a Super-Earth.
00:46:46Now, a Super-Earth is generally a planet way bigger than ours.
00:46:50This planet, for example, is double the Earth's size.
00:46:53It's so close to its star that it makes a full circle around it in less than 18 hours,
00:46:58which means a year there is pretty short.
00:47:01Since it's so close to its star, its temperature goes up a whopping 4,900 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:47:08Because of the heat, in combination with the planet's density,
00:47:11scientists have the theory that its core is made of carbon in the form of graphite and diamonds.
00:47:17Over 10 years ago, astronomers discovered a huge water vapor cloud.
00:47:22It was 12 billion light-years from our home planet.
00:47:25That cloud is the biggest source of water we know of.
00:47:28It's also the oldest, dating back to when the Universe was only 1.6 billion years old.
00:47:33Now it's 13.8 billion years old.
00:47:36Man, if only I had started a savings account 12 billion years ago!
00:47:41With compound interest, I'd have me quite a pile of cash by now.
00:47:45But I wasn't around then.
00:47:46Anyway, this cloud is so large it holds 140 trillion times
00:47:51the amount of water in all the oceans on our planet.
00:47:55This cloud kind of feeds a black hole.
00:47:57It may also contain enough gases, such as carbon monoxide,
00:48:01to encourage the black hole to grow 6 times bigger than it is at the moment.
00:48:06The average temperature of our planet is about 57 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:48:10And the highest temperature ever measured was 134 degrees.
00:48:14Sound too hot?
00:48:15Well, on Venus, it can go up to 900 degrees, which makes it the hottest planet in our solar system.
00:48:21It's not hot enough to melt steel, though.
00:48:24It would need to be higher by 2,500 degrees to get there.
00:48:27But it's hot enough to melt lead.
00:48:30And it's way too hot to sustain life.
00:48:32At least, not in any form that we know.
00:48:35Venus is not even the closest to the Sun.
00:48:37It's Mercury.
00:48:38But it has a super-thick atmosphere that traps greenhouse gases.
00:48:42It's like you covering yourself with a pretty thick blanket in the middle of the summer.
00:48:47Now, we're used to seeing volcanoes spewing hot molten lava.
00:48:50After all, that's what they mostly do on Earth.
00:48:53But in space, volcanoes tend to spew methane, water, or ammonia.
00:48:58And these materials freeze as they erupt and eventually transform into frozen vapor
00:49:03and something called volcanic snow.
00:49:05I'm talking about cryovolcanoes here.
00:49:08You can find them on Jupiter's moons, Io and Europa, Saturn's moon, Titan, and Pluto.
00:49:14These volcanoes are especially active on Io, which has hundreds of vents.
00:49:19NASA vehicles have even captured some of these erupting in real time.
00:49:23Plumes of frozen vapor coming out of them extended for about 250 miles.
00:49:28Hey, by the way, they just discovered another moon around Jupiter
00:49:32that might actually be good for farming someday.
00:49:35It's named EIEIO.
00:49:38Now, what exactly happens to the light after it disappears inside of a black hole?
00:49:43Well, photon is a particle of light.
00:49:45The event horizon is the boundary of a black hole.
00:49:48When something, say, a photon, crosses the line and enters those boundaries,
00:49:53it can't escape anymore.
00:49:55But it doesn't mean a black hole destroyed it.
00:49:57It pulls the photon in rapidly towards its center,
00:50:00where an enormous mass is packed into an infinitely small space.
00:50:04But we're not sure what happens to photons in such extreme conditions.
00:50:09It's still one of the biggest mysteries.
00:50:11Does a black hole destroy the light or not?
00:50:14Saturn has 82 moons we know about.
00:50:1753 confirmed and 29 more that are still on the waiting list to be confirmed as actual moons
00:50:22before they get their official names.
00:50:25And one of the coolest moons might be a 914-mile-wide hunk of rock called Aeapetus.
00:50:32It's dark on one side and bright on the other.
00:50:34Its lighter half is 20 times more reflective than the other one.
00:50:38As it turned out, the bright side is ice.
00:50:41The dark side is a bit more complicated.
00:50:43One theory says it's dark because of particles coming from another moon, the one named Phoebe.
00:50:49Another theory says it could be because of heat.
00:50:52Since the moon is rotating really slowly, its dark material is absorbing heat,
00:50:57which makes it even darker.
00:50:59Now, how big do you think a black hole can become?
00:51:02In theory, we can't find an upper limit to its mass.
00:51:05But astronomers believe the ultramassive black holes, or UMBHs,
00:51:10located in the cores of certain galaxies are mostly up to 10 billion solar masses big.
00:51:15Recently, they even discovered these UMBHs physically can't grow much more than this,
00:51:21because in that case, they would start to disrupt the accretion disks that feed them.
00:51:26That way, they would kind of stuff the source of new material.
00:51:30Most people picture the universe as somewhere between aquamarine and pale turquoise.
00:51:34Even some researchers thought that was the case.
00:51:37They managed to determine the cosmic color by combining light from more than 200,000 galaxies
00:51:42within 2 billion light-years of our planet.
00:51:45But the real color is actually closer to beige.
00:51:49Researchers got it all wrong because there was a bug in the software.
00:51:52No, really?
00:51:54It converted the cosmic spectrum into the color our eyes would see if we were exposed to it.
00:51:59The team defined this color as a cosmic latte.
00:52:03Ooh, make that a double-shot low-fat large to go, please!
00:52:07Venus most likely used to be covered with oceans, from 30 to 1,000 feet deep.
00:52:13Also, some water was locked in the soil of the planet.
00:52:16On top of that, Venus had stable temperatures of 68 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit,
00:52:22which, you have to admit, was quite pleasant and not that different from the temperatures
00:52:26on Earth nowadays.
00:52:28So, what I'm getting at is that for 3 billion years,
00:52:31right until something irrevocable happened 700 million years ago,
00:52:35Venus could've been habitable.
00:52:37But now, it's not.
00:52:40The Moon is the second brightest object in our sky.
00:52:43At the same time, among other astronomical bodies, it's one of the dimmest and least reflective.
00:52:49Our natural satellite only seems bright because it's so close to Earth.
00:52:53For comparison, our planet looks much brighter when you look at it from space.
00:52:58It's because clouds, ice, and snow reflect way more light than most types of rock.
00:53:03Triton, Neptune's moon, has all its surface covered with several layers of ice.
00:53:08If this satellite replaced our current moon, the night sky would get 7 times brighter.
00:53:15Neutron stars are some of the smallest, yet most massive objects in space.
00:53:20They're usually about 12 miles in diameter, but are several times heavier than the Sun.
00:53:25Oh, and they also spin about 600 times per second,
00:53:28far faster than your average figure skater.
00:53:34Saturn is the least dense planet in the Solar System.
00:53:37It has one-eighth the average Earth's density.
00:53:39And still, because of its large volume, the planet is 95 times more massive than Earth.
00:53:46A transient lunar phenomenon is one of the most enigmatic things happening on the Moon.
00:53:51It's a short-lived light, color, or some other change on the satellite's surface.
00:53:56Most commonly, it's random flashes of light.
00:53:59Astronomers have been observing this phenomenon since the 1950s.
00:54:03They've noticed that the flashes occur randomly.
00:54:06Sometimes they can happen several times a week.
00:54:09After that, they disappear for several months.
00:54:12Some of them don't last longer than a couple of minutes,
00:54:14but there have been those that continued for hours.
00:54:18The year was 1969, one day before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.
00:54:23One of the mission participants noticed that one part of the lunar surface
00:54:27was more illuminated than the surrounding landscape.
00:54:30It looked as if that area had a kind of fluorescence to it.
00:54:34Unfortunately, it's still unclear if this phenomenon
00:54:37was connected with the mysterious lunar flashes.
00:54:40Trash isn't just a problem in Earth's oceans, cities, and forests.
00:54:44There is a thing called space junk,
00:54:46which is any human-made object that's been left in space and now serves no purpose.
00:54:51There's also natural debris from meteoroids and other cosmic objects.
00:54:55There are currently over 500,000 pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth
00:55:00at speeds high enough to cause significant damage
00:55:03if they were to collide with a spacecraft or satellite.
00:55:06NASA does its best to track every single object
00:55:09to ensure that missions outside Earth can reach their destination safely.
00:55:14Our Sun is insanely massive.
00:55:16Want some proof?
00:55:1899.86% of all the mass in the Solar System is the mass of the Sun.
00:55:24In particular, the hydrogen and helium it's made of.
00:55:27The remaining 0.14% is mostly the mass of the Solar System's 8 planets.
00:55:33The Sun's temperature is hotter than the surface of a star.
00:55:36The surface temperature reaches 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit,
00:55:40but the upper atmosphere heats up to millions of degrees.
00:55:44If someone could dig a tunnel straight into the center of the planet and out the opposite side,
00:55:49and you were adventurous enough to jump into it,
00:55:52it would take you 42 minutes to fall to the other side.
00:55:56You'd speed up as you fell, reaching maximum speed by the time you reached Earth's core.
00:56:01After the halfway point, you would then fall upwards, getting slower and slower.
00:56:06By the time you reached the opposite surface, your speed would be back to zero.
00:56:11Unless you managed to climb out of the hole, you'd immediately start falling again,
00:56:15back down, or up, to the other side of the planet.
00:56:19This trip would go on forever, all thanks to the weird effects of gravity.
00:56:23Hey, might be a fun way to spend an afternoon!
00:56:27There might be more metals, for example, titanium or iron,
00:56:31in lunar craters than astronomers used to think.
00:56:35The main problem with this finding?
00:56:36It contradicts the main theory about how the Moon was formed.
00:56:40That theory says that Earth's natural satellite was spun off from our planet
00:56:44after a collision with a massive space object.
00:56:47But then, why does Earth's metal-poor crust have much less iron oxide than the Moon's?
00:56:54It might mean the Moon was formed from the material lying much deeper inside our planet.
00:56:59Or these metals could've appeared when the molten lunar surface was slowly cooling down.
00:57:04Or maybe, as they've been saying for centuries, it's made of green cheese.
00:57:11Earth could've been purple before it turned blue and green.
00:57:14One scientist has a theory that a substance existed in ancient microbes before chlorophyll,
00:57:19that thing that makes plants green, evolved on Earth.
00:57:23This substance reflected sunlight in red and violet colors, which combined to make purple.
00:57:28If true, the young Earth may have been teeming with strange,
00:57:31purple-colored critters before all the green stuff appeared.
00:57:35The highest mountain in the Solar System is Olympus Mons on Mars.
00:57:39It's three times as high as Mount Everest, the Earth's highest mountain above sea level.
00:57:44If you were standing on top of Olympus Mons,
00:57:47you wouldn't understand you were standing on a mountain.
00:57:49Its slopes would be hidden by the planet's curvature.
00:57:54Astronomers have found a massive reservoir of water in space, the largest ever detected.
00:58:00Too bad it's also the farthest, 12 billion light-years away from us.
00:58:05The water vapor cloud holds 140 trillion times as much water as all the Earth's oceans combined.
00:58:12What are we supposed to do with that information?
00:58:14Venus spins at its own unhurried pace. A full rotation takes 243 Earth days,
00:58:21and it takes the planet a bit less than 225 Earth days to go all the way around the Sun.
00:58:27It means a day on Venus is longer than a year.
00:58:30There's very little seismic activity going on inside the Moon.
00:58:34Yet many moonquakes, caused by our planet's gravitational pull,
00:58:38sometimes happen several miles below the surface.
00:58:41After that, tiny cracks and fissures appear in the satellite's surface,
00:58:45and gases escape through them. Hey, they sometimes escape from me too.
00:58:51Mars is the last of the inner planets, which are also called terrestrial
00:58:56since they're made up of rocks and metals.
00:58:58The red planet has a core made mostly of iron, nickel, and sulfur.
00:59:03It's between 900 and 1,200 miles across. The core doesn't move. That's why Mars lacks
00:59:09a planet-wide magnetic field. The weak magnetic field it has is just 1,100% of the Earth's.
00:59:18When the planets in the Solar System were just starting to form,
00:59:21Earth didn't have a moon for the longest time.
00:59:24It took 100 million years for our natural satellite to appear.
00:59:28There are several theories as to how the Moon came into existence,
00:59:32but the prevailing one is the fission theory.
00:59:36Somebody went fishing and caught the Moon? Actually, no.
00:59:40The fission theory proposes that the Moon was formed when an object collided with Earth,
00:59:45sending particles flying about. Gravity pulled the particles together,
00:59:50and the Moon was created. It eventually settled down on the Earth's ecliptic plane,
00:59:55which is the path that the Moon orbits. So, looks like the green cheese is off the table now.
01:00:01The largest single living thing on Earth turns out to be a mushroom in Oregon.
01:00:06This enormous honey mushroom lives in Malheur National Forest
01:00:09and covers an area of 3.7 square miles. It could be as much as 8,500 years old.
01:00:16You could be forgiven for missing it, though, since most of it's hidden underground.
01:00:20When the roots of individual honey mushrooms meet, they can fuse together to become a single fungus,
01:00:28which explains how this one got so big. If you could gather all that mushrooming stuff
01:00:33into one big ball, it could weigh as much as 35,000 tons. That's about as heavy as 200 gray
01:00:40whales. Hey, that's a whale of a mushroom! The largest asteroid in the Solar System is
01:00:47Vesta, and it's so big that it's sometimes even called a dwarf planet. A trip to the nearest star,
01:00:54apart from the Sun, would take you 5 million years on a commercial airplane. That's what I call a
01:00:59long-haul flight. Space isn't supposed to be black. There are stars everywhere.
01:01:05Shouldn't they light up everything around? Well, you don't see stars wherever you look
01:01:10because some of them haven't existed long enough for their light to reach Earth.
01:01:14A day on Uranus lasts 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 24 seconds. But get this, the planet has a tilt
01:01:22of around 98 degrees, and that makes a season on the gas giant last 21 Earth years.
01:01:30Some scientists believe that our planet used to have an additional satellite. According to their
01:01:35research, a small celestial body about 750 miles wide orbited Earth like a second moon. It most
01:01:42likely crashed into our main satellite later on. Such a collision could explain why the two sides
01:01:48of the moon look so different from each other, one being heavily cratered and rough. Or it could be
01:01:54the green cheese. Wow, the James Webb Telescope has been fully deployed! If you're interested in
01:02:02astronomy or space, you've got to be excited about the James Webb Space Telescope. Here's why.
01:02:08For starters, it's huge. How huge? The primary mirror of the JWST is over 21 feet wide. The
01:02:15Hubble Space Telescope, the previous largest eye in space, has a mirror of about 7 feet,
01:02:2010 and a half inches. By comparison, if you place the two telescopes side by side, it'd be like
01:02:26putting a horse next to an elephant. And elephants are enormous. There's a perfect reason why the
01:02:31Webb, as it's affectionately called, is massive. It has to be huge because it's not an optical
01:02:37telescope in the traditional sense that most telescopes are. The JWST is an infrared telescope.
01:02:43It sees heat. Infrared light has a longer wavelength than visible light, so it needs a larger
01:02:50mirror to focus that light. So what do we have here with the James Webb Space Telescope? We have two
01:02:56never-before things going on. We have incredible technology and incredible science missions. Both
01:03:03the missions and the technology are out of this world cutting edge. The Webb is a classic example
01:03:09of engineering in the service of science. Because of its greater light-gathering power, the James
01:03:15Webb Space Telescope will be able to take images of things that we were never able to see before,
01:03:20but have always wanted to see. Things like exoplanets and the first galaxies in the universe,
01:03:25and stars and planets forming inside nebulae. And you can bet that there will be plenty of
01:03:30surprises too. The James Webb Space Telescope has several technological tricks up its sleeve,
01:03:37which promise to provide its greatest scientific discoveries. The Webb has a coronagraph, and a very
01:03:43special coronagraph at that. The coronagraph is the tool that will allow the first real pictures
01:03:49of exoplanets. The coronagraph blocks out the bright pinpoint light of stars, which we already
01:03:55know have planets orbiting around them. Without the coronagraph, the starlight would make things
01:04:00too bright to see these planets, because planets are hundreds of thousands of times dimmer than the
01:04:05star. But with the coronagraph blocking the starlight, the exoplanets come into view. And the JWST
01:04:12coronagraph can block the light from up to a hundred stars at once. We can expect a swarm of
01:04:17exoplanets. This brings us to the next high-tech gadget the JWST has up its sleeve, a no-slit
01:04:24spectrograph. Usually, an ordinary spectrograph will have a slit to allow a sliver of light to
01:04:30enter and be diffracted. Diffraction is the scattering of light to reveal the spectrum of
01:04:35the light's component wavelengths. But the James Webb Space Telescope's work is so sensitive that
01:04:41a sliver of light would overwhelm the optics. So a no-slit spectrograph was installed. The starlight
01:04:48gathered from the big mirror is sent into a fiber-optic cable to send only a single spot of
01:04:53light into the spectroscope. And that's where the grism takes over. Sir Isaac Newton used a prism to
01:05:00discover the spectrum of sunlight. Roy G. Biv, as you may recall. But the Webb uses a grism. That's a
01:05:07compound word, like smog, which is smoke and fog. A grism is a graded prism. That means it has itsy
01:05:15bitsy teeny tiny grooves that diffract the spot of light the big mirror sends down the fiber-optic
01:05:20cable and into the spectrograph. The science of reading a spectrum of light is called spectroscopy.
01:05:27By analyzing the spectra of light from the exoplanets, the JWST will determine what gases
01:05:33are in the planet's atmospheres, as well as their density and even their temperature. It's an
01:05:38incredible advance in our knowledge. We'll be able to tell if a planet has oxygen or nitrogen or
01:05:44methane and other gases that may or may not indicate that the planet is habitable. Another
01:05:50Earth, perhaps. Presently, the JWST is parked in its permanent location. Unlike the Hubble Space
01:05:57Telescope, which orbits the Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope orbits the Sun. It orbits the Sun
01:06:03at one of the gravitational balance points between the Earth-Sun system. It just stays there without
01:06:09having to use much or any fuel to hold its position. So, as the Earth orbits the Sun, the
01:06:14James Webb remains parked at a spot that is also orbiting the Sun. There are five gravitational
01:06:20balance points between the Earth and Sun. They are called Lagrange points after their discoverer
01:06:26Joseph-Louis Lagrange in the 18th century. The Webb is parked at L2, the second of the five
01:06:33Lagrange points, which lies 932,000 miles out into space, way beyond the Moon. All this to observe a
01:06:40spot of infrared light. But first, the engineers must get or acquire that spot of light. To get a
01:06:48spot of infrared light, the 18 hexagonal mirrors had to be unfolded from their position inside the
01:06:54Ariane rocket that sent the Webb into space. Once the mirrors have unfolded, their positions must be
01:07:00adjusted to microscopic level accuracy so that all 18 mirrors produce a single image. Several tiny
01:07:06motors are attached to each mirror segment to make these adjustments. These motors, which must be
01:07:11activated individually, will gradually pull the honeycomb-like mirror segments into alignment.
01:07:17It's a critical part of the mission and takes months to complete. To align the mirrors to produce
01:07:22a single spot of light, the James Webb Space Telescope can't be jiggling around. The telescope
01:07:28must be kept absolutely motionless, and that requires two other cutting-edge technologies,
01:07:33the sunshield and the cryocooler. In space, direct sunlight is very hot and shadow is very cold.
01:07:42Therefore, the James Webb Space Telescope brought along its own high-tech sunshield. It's huge, too,
01:07:48as big as a tennis court huge. Comprised of five individual layers of Kapton film only a millimeter
01:07:55thick, each layer of the sunshield has to be remotely deployed individually using a system
01:08:00of eight motors and 139 actuators with thousands of parts. The purpose of the sunshield is to help
01:08:07the JWST stay cold. The colder, the better. And colder is what the cryocooler is for. Temperature
01:08:14can be measured three different ways. In degrees Fahrenheit, where water freezes at 32 degrees and
01:08:20boils at 212. In degrees Celsius, where water freezes at zero degrees and boils at 100 degrees.
01:08:26But neither of these thermometers have a starting point. So Lord Kelvin in the 19th century devised
01:08:33a third temperature scale, the Kelvin scale, which starts at absolute zero, the coldest
01:08:39temperature possible. The onboard cryocooler will cool the JWST to just seven degrees Kelvin,
01:08:46seven degrees above absolute zero. At this temperature, virtually all heat from motors
01:08:52is removed and the telescope will be able to focus the light to a point without any noise,
01:08:57basically any motion interfering with the quality of the image. Finally, after all this incredible
01:09:03technology functions remotely as planned, we are almost ready to observe the infrared images from
01:09:09the giant multi-segmented mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope. Almost ready. A telescope
01:09:15can collect all the light it wants, but in the end it must also be able to detect what it's
01:09:20collected. If the light is not detected, it's not truly observed. Enter the piece de resistance,
01:09:27the infrared detectors. The Webb has 15 of them. The specially fabricated semiconductor material
01:09:34produces a slight electrical charge when struck by a photon of infrared light. The Webb's infrared
01:09:39detectors can produce a million pixel high def image. A few of the detectors can produce a 4
01:09:45million pixel image. They must be durable enough to last 10 to 20 years without warping or corrupting,
01:09:52all while working at seven degrees above absolute zero. In themselves, the infrared detectors on
01:09:58the JWST are an engineering marvel. But what are they going to take pictures of?
01:10:04Ah, the missions of the JWST. Well, they're cutting edge too. 70 of the first 280 target
01:10:11observations are exoplanets. Is there another Earth? Which exoplanets seem habitable? The
01:10:17Webb Telescope will provide detailed spectroscopic analysis of the atmospheres of thousands of known
01:10:23exoplanets. For the first time, we will see images of exoplanets as they appear in infrared light.
01:10:30Cosmology, the study of the universe, is perhaps the primary mission for the Webb.
01:10:35Galaxies receding away so fast that their light is stretched into the infrared will be a prime
01:10:40target for observation. Hundreds of hours of observations are necessary to collect the faint
01:10:46infrared light from these first galaxies formed after the Big Bang. The JWST will give us a
01:10:52picture of what the infant universe looked like. Astronomers will learn new information about the
01:10:58dark energy that is driving the expansion of the universe and what role, if any, black holes play
01:11:04in the formation of galaxies. Star formation in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies is also part
01:11:10of the mission of the James Webb. By imaging hundreds of solar systems forming around newborn
01:11:15stars, astronomers will establish a definite history of solar system development. Now,
01:11:21fact will replace theory and a big step forward will be taken in our understanding of space.
01:11:27The James Webb Space Telescope is a bold endeavor that will mark an epoch time in scientific
01:11:33history. People stop their cars on the highway, get out of them, and lift their heads in wonder.
01:11:39In the cities, everyone takes to the streets. Balconies and rooftops of houses are full of
01:11:44people staring at the moon in shock. It's red. Some people scream that it's the end of the world.
01:11:51Some seek shelter. Indeed, the usual white moon now looks like it's been doused in red paint.
01:11:58There's no need to be afraid if you see such a thing. On the contrary, enjoy the view because
01:12:03you have witnessed a rare astronomical phenomenon. This is a total lunar eclipse. Here's the sun.
01:12:11It's in the center of our solar system. Mercury, Venus, and here's Earth and the moon. The Earth
01:12:17takes 365 days to orbit around the star. At the same time, the moon revolves around the Earth and
01:12:24completely orbits our planet in 27 days. The Earth creates a shadow zone and sometimes the moon
01:12:31passes through it. The shadow is cone-shaped and gradually narrows. The moon is 238,000 miles away.
01:12:39That's like nine lengths of the equator. At this distance, the width of the shadow is about 2.6
01:12:45times the width of the moon. When the moon is in this zone, direct sunlight doesn't reach it.
01:12:51That is, it should have disappeared. But instead, it becomes red. All because the sun's rays pass
01:12:59through the Earth's atmosphere. They scatter and most of the blue light disappears. But the red
01:13:05and orange rays continue and hit the surface of the moon. Voila! You see a phenomenon called
01:13:11the blood moon. By the way, this curvature of light occurs at sunsets and dawns. The atmosphere
01:13:18scatters the blue light and you see a red and orange sky. If you were standing on the surface
01:13:24of the moon during a total lunar eclipse, planet Earth would be exactly between you and the sun.
01:13:30So, you would be able to observe the solar eclipse. The surface of the Earth would become
01:13:35entirely dark for you. All you'd see would be the sun's corona illuminating the edges of the planet.
01:13:42The Earth from the surface of the moon is almost the same size as the moon from the surface of the
01:13:47Earth. Such a red eclipse of the moon is rare because several factors must coincide. One of
01:13:54them is that the moon must be full. Usually, you can see two total lunar eclipses a year. In 2038,
01:14:02you'll be able to see four such eclipses. And the eclipse itself can last up to 108 minutes.
01:14:08But this is rare, and the last time such a long blood moon was seen was in 2000. Many years ago,
01:14:15people didn't know so many facts about our satellite, and the sight of a red moon frightened
01:14:20them. It was a bad sign and a harbinger of trouble. People who knew the schedule of eclipses
01:14:27could take advantage of it. For example, Christopher Columbus had an astronomical almanac
01:14:32and knew when the next lunar eclipse would occur. He frightened the inhabitants of the
01:14:37Caribbean islands when he predicted the red moon. Once upon a time, the moon used to be a red ball
01:14:45of lava. This was way back in time, 4.5 billion years ago. Now this is our solar system. It's
01:14:52full of dust and asteroids. They're constantly bumping into each other, playing space billiards.
01:14:58This is Earth. It's just beginning to cool off from the constant asteroid and comet impacts.
01:15:03But then, Theia appears on the horizon, a planet the size of Mars. It had a chaotic orbit and was
01:15:10approaching Earth in a spiral. A collision was inevitable, and at one point, one of the biggest
01:15:17crashes in our solar system occurred. Theia struck the Earth at an angle. It ripped out part of the
01:15:22Earth's crust and threw it into space. The Earth, in turn, absorbed part of the planet that rammed
01:15:28it. The debris from the collision circled the Earth for a long time. They were a kind of ring,
01:15:34almost like Saturn's. Debris in orbit collided and piled up around a common center of gravity.
01:15:41And that's how the Earth got the moon. There's a theory that this collision helped give birth
01:15:46to life on our planet. Theia hit the Earth at a perfect angle. If the crash had been head-on,
01:15:52both planets would likely have been destroyed in a massive explosion. If the impact had been
01:15:58tangential, then there wouldn't have been enough debris in Earth's orbit to form the moon.
01:16:03But we got the lucky ticket. The moon stabilized the Earth's rotation. The collision shattered the
01:16:09planet's solid crust and allowed oceans to form. Remember, water is the basis of life. When the
01:16:16cores of Earth and Theia merged, we got a powerful magnetosphere. This protects all living organisms
01:16:23from solar radiation. The moon, along with the sun, controls the tides. Its gravity seems to draw
01:16:30water to it from the Earth's surface. The sun does the same thing. That is, if we imagine the Earth as
01:16:36a ball of water, there would be two mountains, one on the moon's side and one on the sun's side.
01:16:42And as the moon moves around the Earth, this mountain of water moves with it. If you were in
01:16:48the open ocean with a tape measure, you would see that the moon is attracting water to itself by
01:16:53about four to six inches. The moon is gravitationally locked with the Earth. That's why it's always
01:17:00turned to us with one side, like Mercury and the sun. But the moon doesn't stand still. It's
01:17:06gradually moving away from our planet, about 1.5 inches a year. Not quickly, but in about 600
01:17:13million years, it will have shrunk in our sky so much that we won't be able to see lunar eclipses
01:17:18anymore. Do you see this crater? It's Tycho. It's visible during a full moon because of these bright
01:17:25rays that extend thousands of miles from its epicenter. This is the youngest crater on the
01:17:30moon. Scientists say it appeared there due to a meteorite impact about 109 million years ago.
01:17:36At that time, dinosaurs were roaming the surface of our planet, and they may have seen the impact.
01:17:42It was most likely accompanied by a big explosion and looked like a salute in the night sky.
01:17:49Humanity loves to explore the moon. We've sent a bunch of missions there. A total of 12 people
01:17:55have set foot on the surface of the moon. The gravitational force there is six times less than
01:18:00on Earth. So if the average person on our planet weighed about 180 pounds, on the surface of the
01:18:06moon, the scales would only show 30 pounds, like the weight of an average dog. That's why the
01:18:12astronauts moved, jumped, and fell so strangely there. And you would be six times stronger on
01:18:19the surface of the moon. Here on Earth, the average person could lift about 130 pounds,
01:18:24but on the moon, you could raise a big motorcycle or a grizzly bear.
01:18:30The surface of the moon is covered with regolith. This is the lunar dust that covers the solid
01:18:35ground. Such dust is good at preserving footprints. Here's the most famous footprint,
01:18:40which gave birth to many crazy theories. Here's the footprint, and here's the shoe that left it.
01:18:47But the shoe is completely flat. This is explained simply. The astronauts wore extra boots for
01:18:53walking on the lunar surface. They have exactly the kind of soul that left these marks. In
01:18:59addition to the footprints, we left many fascinating objects on the moon. Several lunar rovers, a golf
01:19:05ball, flags, and human waste. There's also a lot of broken satellites and rocket parts. All in all,
01:19:12about 413,000 pounds of human-made objects are there. That's the weight of three passenger
01:19:18planes or 31 adult elephants. In the future, we plan to resume missions to the moon. New landers
01:19:25will explore the surface of our satellite to find natural resources there. It's also a great place
01:19:31to test new rovers. We're even going to build something like the International Space Station
01:19:36in the moon's orbit, the Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway. It'll be a convenient platform for
01:19:42exploring our satellite and launching spacecraft into distant space. If you start from here,
01:19:47the spacecraft won't need to spend almost all its fuel to overcome the force of Earth's gravity.
01:19:52So, such a station would save fuel and money. Scientists hope that we'll be able to mine water
01:19:59from the moon's surface. It's been proven that there's ice there, mostly at the bottom of craters
01:20:04where the sunlight doesn't reach. Perhaps we'll send a rover there that can drill down a few feet
01:20:09into the surface, searching for water. Humanity already has the technology to build a full-fledged
01:20:15colony there. It would take up to three days to get there. We just need to get enough solar panels
01:20:21and building materials to the moon. There's no atmosphere on the moon, so potential lunar
01:20:26inhabitants would be defenseless against solar radiation. We would have to build houses underground
01:20:32to provide protection. Modern 3D printers will help make construction easy and fast. However,
01:20:38food and water supplies can only be maintained by constant supplies from Earth. The same goes for
01:20:44oxygen. Each rocket launch costs millions of dollars, so for now, colonization of the moon
01:20:50is in question. The moon could also become an object for space tourism. Imagine a spaceship
01:20:56launches from Earth. Three days on the road and you're orbiting the moon. The lunar module undocks
01:21:03and you land on the surface. You ride the rover, explore the craters, then return to the lander.
01:21:09The engines start. The lander returns you to orbit.
01:21:12You dock with the ship and return to Earth. Sounds like some pretty great plans for a week's vacation.
01:21:19Our sun is an average-sized star, and still, it could fit 1,300,000 Earths.
01:21:26The star is also 333,000 times as heavy as our planet. NASA has translated radio waves created
01:21:34by planets' atmospheres into audible sounds. That's how astronomers found out that Neptune
01:21:40sounds like ocean waves, Jupiter like being underwater, and Saturn's voice resembles
01:21:47background music to a horror movie. Here on Earth, it's bebop jazz. Now I made that up.
01:21:55The Sun's surface is scorching hot, but a bolt of lightning is five times hotter.
01:22:00Earth gets struck by 100 lightning bolts every second,
01:22:04which results in 8 million lightning strikes a day and around 3 billion a year. Shocking!
01:22:12If you manage to go to the Moon one day and see fresh footprints, that doesn't mean there's
01:22:16someone else there with you. Footprints or similar marks can last for a million years over there.
01:22:24Because the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere. There are no winds, not even a breeze,
01:22:29that can slowly erase those footprints. Astronomers have found the largest hole
01:22:35we've ever seen in the Universe. It's the giant void that spreads a billion light-years across.
01:22:42They found it accidentally. One of the research team members was a little bored and wanted to
01:22:47check how things are going in the direction of the cold spot. That's an anomaly in the Cosmic
01:22:53Microwave Background Map, or CMB for short. It's a faint glow of light that falls on our planet
01:22:59from different directions and fills the Universe. It's been streaming through space for almost 14
01:23:04billion years as the afterglow that occurred after the Big Bang. So you fall right into the
01:23:12heart of the black hole and prepare for a sad end. Well, you don't have to. Falling into a black hole
01:23:18won't necessarily destroy you or your spaceship. You have to choose a bigger black hole to survive.
01:23:26If you fall into a small black hole, its event horizon is too narrow, and the gravity increases
01:23:32every inch down. So if you extend your arm forward, the gravity on your fingers is much
01:23:37stronger than on your elbow. This will make your hand lengthen, and you'll feel some discomfort.
01:23:43Rather significant, to be honest. Things change if you fall into a supermassive black hole,
01:23:49like the ones in the center of galaxies. They can be millions of times heavier than the Sun.
01:23:55Their event horizon is wide, and the gravity doesn't change as quickly. So the force you'll
01:24:00feel at your heels and at the top of your head will be about the same. And you can go all the
01:24:05way to the heart of the black hole. This myth is busted. If you watch a very touching movie
01:24:12in space and start crying, your tears won't run down. They will gather around the eyeballs.
01:24:19Your eyes will get too dry, so you'll feel like they're burning. Any exposed liquid on your body
01:24:25will vaporize, including the surfaces of your tongue. Speaking of burning, that's one thing
01:24:31fire can't do in space. Fire can spread when there's a flow of oxygen, and since there's not
01:24:36any in space, well… Once they explode, stars aren't supposed to come back to life.
01:24:44But some of the stars somehow have survived the great supernova explosion.
01:24:49Such zombie stars are pretty rare. Scientists found a really big one called LP40365.
01:24:56It's a partially burnt white dwarf. A white dwarf is a star that burned up all of the hydrogen,
01:25:03and that hydrogen was previously its nuclear fuel. In this case, the final explosion was
01:25:09maybe weaker than it usually is, not powerful enough to destroy the entire star. It's like
01:25:16a star wanted to explode but didn't make it, which is why part of the matter still survived.
01:25:22If you ever go into space, don't take off your spacesuit unless you're on a spaceship. Air in
01:25:28your lungs would expand, as well as the oxygen in the rest of your body. You'd be like a balloon,
01:25:34twice your regular size. Good news, the skin is elastic enough to hold you together,
01:25:39which means you wouldn't explode. When something goes into a black hole, it changes shape and gets
01:25:47stretched out just like spaghetti. This happens because gravitational force is trying to stretch
01:25:53an object in one direction but at the same time squeeze it into another, like a pasta paradox.
01:26:00Speaking of, a black hole that's as big as a single atom has the mass of a really big mountain.
01:26:07There's one at the center of the Milky Way called Sagittarius A.
01:26:11It has a mass like for a billion suns, but luckily, it's far away from us.
01:26:16If you made a big boom on an asteroid, you'd never be able to hear its loud sound. Yes,
01:26:22we often hear the sound of spaceships and battles in space in the movies, but that's just a myth.
01:26:28Sound is a wave that spreads because of the vibrations of molecules. A person claps a few
01:26:35feet away from you, the sound wave begins to push the first air molecule next to the clap,
01:26:40then the second, third, and so on, until the wave reaches your ear. So, if you're in a black hole,
01:26:47to spread sound, we need molecules like air or water. In our atmosphere, sound waves spread out
01:26:53just fine, but space is a vacuum, so it's nothing here. You can clap your hands loudly there,
01:27:00but there just won't be any molecules that can vibrate and carry that sound.
01:27:04So, to carry on a conversation, you'd either need a radio or really good lip-reading skills.
01:27:11Meteoroids orbit the Sun, while the majority of human-made debris orbits our planet. For example,
01:27:18we launched almost 9,000 spacecraft around the world from satellites to rocket ships.
01:27:24Even the tiniest pieces can damage a spacecraft at such high speeds.
01:27:29Galaxies, planets, comets, asteroids, stars, space bodies are things we can actually see in space,
01:27:37but they make up less than 5% of the total universe. Dark matter, one of the biggest
01:27:43mysteries in space, is the name we use for all the mass in the universe that's still invisible to us.
01:27:49And there's a lot of it, it may even make 25% of the universe. Dark energy makes the other
01:27:5570% of the universe. Hmm, that adds up to 100, right?
01:28:00Now, let's look at the Moon. It always looks at us with one side. This means the Moon has a dark
01:28:07side, and the Sun's rays never get there. Well, that's a myth. The whole point is that the Moon
01:28:14is gravitationally locked to the Earth. There are days and nights there too. It's just that this
01:28:19rotation is perfectly aligned with the rotation of the Earth. So, whenever you look at the Moon,
01:28:25you only see one side. Although there are days when the Sun shines there too,
01:28:30so it's not the dark side, it's the far side. And we even have pictures of this place. And there's
01:28:36one of the biggest craters in our entire solar system, the South Pole-Aitken Basin. It's as wide
01:28:43as two states of Texas. Yeehaw! One myth that turned out to be untrue is that people have never
01:28:50actually been on the Moon. This is the original spacesuit of the first astronauts who were there.
01:28:57Look at the sole of the shoe. Some people claim there's no way they could've left footprints like
01:29:02this there. Actually, they could. On the Moon, the astronauts wore extra boots over their suits,
01:29:08and their soles matched the footprints on the Moon perfectly. Now, the astronauts didn't
01:29:13need them when they left the Moon and tossed them when the Moonwalk was over.
01:29:18They left a lot of stuff there too. They even tossed the armrests of the seats in the lunar
01:29:22module to reduce the weight. Now, counting all the Apollo lunar missions, the total weight of
01:29:28rubbish on the Moon is approximately 187 tons, including several lunar rovers, spacecraft debris,
01:29:36six lunar modules, and all the experiments left behind. That's like three Boeing 737s.
01:29:43Another myth about the Sun is that it's yellow. Let's send you into space for this one. You look
01:29:48out the window, and… it's white! The Sun only appears yellow to us through the filter of our
01:29:54atmosphere. The composition of the air and its thickness just distorts the light of the star.
01:30:00But stars do come in different colors. Cooler stars have bright orange and red colors.
01:30:05These are usually very old stars, older than our Sun. But young and very hot stars are bright blue.
01:30:12The Sun is about in the middle of this spectrum.
01:30:16Oh, one more myth about asteroids. We need to fly a little farther than Mars' orbit.
01:30:22Whoa, we're in an asteroid belt, and we constantly have to dodge giant rocks and blocks of ice.
01:30:28We got in some dense asteroid clouds. Not true.
01:30:33The fact is that space is huge, and the distances are incredible. All the rocks and debris in the
01:30:39asteroid belt are only 4% of the weight of the Moon, so there really aren't that many of them
01:30:45there. To understand the dimension of the emptiness in space, look at the collision of two galaxies.
01:30:52There are billions of stars in each of them. If we mix them up,
01:30:55it's unlikely there will be any collisions even here.
01:31:03Many people would like to fly into space. Zero gravity, a stunning view of Earth from one side,
01:31:09and the boundlessly frightening black area from the other. Yeah, it's all cool. But don't forget
01:31:14that this journey can turn into a nightmare. Lack of oxygen, floating in outer space,
01:31:20and staying in a spaceship for a long time without understanding when you can return home.
01:31:25This last thing happened to a Russian cosmonaut. His stay in space is one of the longest in the
01:31:32world. 33-year-old flight engineer Sergei Krikalev spent 311 days in zero gravity on the Mir space
01:31:39station. But that's not the most interesting part of this story. Sergei's long journey began on May
01:31:4518, 1991. That day, he boarded a transport ship and went into space to the Mir space station.
01:31:52On May 20, the docking with the station was completed. There, together with another engineer,
01:31:58Sergei performed his space duties. They went on spacewalks several times,
01:32:03did repairs, took care of the station, and conducted scientific experiments.
01:32:07When you have company and a lot of work, living in space is not so hard. But things got worse
01:32:13on the day when Sergei was supposed to return home. According to the plan, the mission should
01:32:18have lasted for five months. A new astronaut was supposed to replace the old ones. The transport
01:32:24ship had finally docked with the station. But on October 10, only one astronaut returned to Earth.
01:32:30Sergei was left alone at the Mir station. He continued to work as the sole flight engineer
01:32:35of the crew. The station couldn't remain empty. They had to send someone to replace Sergei.
01:32:40He wasn't ready for such a long stay in space. He hadn't trained for it. But there was no choice.
01:32:46He couldn't just leave the station. One month passed. They informed Sergei that he would return
01:32:51home soon. But something happened that no one expected. They contacted Sergei and said he
01:32:58couldn't return since the country that promised to bring him home no longer existed. During this time,
01:33:04a big crisis began in Russia. The cosmonaut's return was impossible since no one had the money
01:33:09for it. Just imagine Sergei's condition. You were hundreds of miles from home in black outer space,
01:33:16completely alone, and have no idea how many days you have left to be there.
01:33:21The days passed slowly. Weeks. Then a month passed. It would have been much easier if being in space
01:33:28was not harmful to your health. But in conditions of zero gravity, the human body takes serious
01:33:34damage. First, it's a weakening of the muscles. The body doesn't receive the necessary load it
01:33:39needs, and the muscles are constantly in a relaxed state, leading to dystrophy. Yes, astronauts do a
01:33:46set of exercises every day. But this is not enough to keep the body in shape. In addition to muscles,
01:33:52bones begin to weaken, and a person becomes weak. Even after six months of such a life,
01:33:58any astronaut needs a long time to get back into their previous shape after returning home.
01:34:03Also, there's a lot of radiation in space, which is dangerous for people.
01:34:08It comes from several sources at once. The main radiation comes from the sun. On Earth,
01:34:13we're protected from it, thanks to the planet's magnetic field. Almost all radiation accumulates
01:34:19in the upper atmosphere and doesn't reach us. This accumulation of radiation in the atmosphere
01:34:24is also bad for astronauts. But the worst radiation is the galactic one. It comes from
01:34:30distant stars and galaxies and has a powerful effect on all living things. Radiation provokes
01:34:36many unfavorable conditions and destroys the body at the cellular level. Now, all spaceships and the
01:34:42ISS are equipped with shields and coatings that reflect radiation. But still, it doesn't provide
01:34:48100% protection. In space, the astronaut's immune system changes. There are no conditions under
01:34:55which immunity could improve. It seems that there's nothing wrong with the absence of many
01:35:00bacteria and microbes. But the body's defense is weakening. A person becomes more vulnerable to
01:35:06microbes that can be brought by another astronaut. You also have serious food restrictions. Food in
01:35:12tubes doesn't contain as many useful vitamins as it does in natural products. Without vitamins,
01:35:18the body weakens even more. And sometimes, astronauts have to go on spacewalks, which
01:35:25aren't easy. A space suit is a huge and uncomfortable outfit. It constrains your
01:35:30movements and puts pressure on your body. Work in space can last up to several hours.
01:35:36During this time, you sweat a lot. One of the suit's filters may be broken, and all the fluid
01:35:41released by your body can spread throughout the suit and reach your face. Your eyes may water.
01:35:47The drops could interfere with your vision. Thousands of dangers can await an astronaut
01:35:52during a mission in outer space. Imagine that you do some repairs, and something goes wrong.
01:35:58The wrench jumps off the bolt, and it flies out, for example. You try to catch it and unconsciously
01:36:04push off from the ship. You catch the bolt, but your body is already flying away. You have nothing
01:36:09to hold on to. But fortunately, you have a safety rope. Anyway, it can break off from your space
01:36:16suit because you attached it incorrectly. As soon as the rope breaks, your body changes the angle
01:36:21of flight. Now you're not just flying away. Your body is spinning at this moment. The Earth and
01:36:26black space flash in your eyes. So you get it. There are definitely risks, but nothing like that
01:36:33happened with Sergei. All astronauts spend many hours training to be ready for any troubles.
01:36:39They gain good physical shape and lose it during the mission. Add to this the psychological factor.
01:36:46Your body weakens. You don't breathe fresh air. You can't see your friends, and you don't have
01:36:51the opportunity to return home. A small layer of wall separates you from the cold vacuum of space.
01:36:57All this causes stress, which also weakens your immunity and harms your nervous system.
01:37:03Fortunately, astronauts also get through serious psychological training.
01:37:07They can maintain self-control in the most stressful situations. But when you're alone
01:37:12in space for more than six months and don't know when you'll return, you can get seriously nervous.
01:37:18Fortunately, Sergei didn't panic. He performed his daily duties, trained, and of course, missed home.
01:37:25A month later, he received the same response. We can't bring you back yet. The country is in a
01:37:31difficult situation. He felt worse every day. His strength was leaving him. He wasn't sure if he'd
01:37:37be able to survive. The most interesting thing is the station had a capsule developed to return to
01:37:43Earth. But Sergei didn't use it because no one would have served the station. Russia sold the
01:37:49station seats to other countries. Also, they hoped to sell Mir. This meant that Sergei had to keep
01:37:56the station working. Sergei's mission lasted twice as long as planned. As a result, he spent 10 months
01:38:03or 311 days in space and set a world record. During this time, he flew around the Earth about
01:38:115,000 times. Finally, he received the long-awaited message. He's coming home! Germany paid about
01:38:1824 million dollars for a ticket to the station. They were going to replace the astronaut.
01:38:24Krikalev got into the capsule and flew to Earth. Many people were waiting for his return down
01:38:29there. The cosmonaut landed and everyone rushed to help him. He looked very thin, sweaty, and exhausted.
01:38:37Four men helped him out of the capsule. They helped him stay on the ground, gave him a fur coat, and
01:38:43brought a bowl of broth. It seemed that such a flight would leave an imprint on his life forever.
01:38:48But the cosmonaut's mood was excellent. Two years later, he went into space again and became the
01:38:55first Russian cosmonaut to fly on a NASA shuttle. And two years later, he was one of the first to
01:39:01live on the ISS. In 2005, he made his sixth and last flight. He went to the ISS, where he spent
01:39:09about six months, after which he returned home on the lander. After this flight, he set a world record
01:39:16for the total duration of stay in space at 803 days. Only 10 years later, someone managed to
01:39:23break that record. But that's a different story.
01:39:28Hey MythBusters! Today we're debunking some classic space myths.
01:39:33Hop on the next space shuttle and let's get to the bottom of these tales once and for all.
01:39:40Picture this. You're floating weightlessly in space, sipping on a cup of delicious hot chocolate,
01:39:46when a peculiar thought pops into your head. Can you scream in outer space? And if yes,
01:39:52would anyone hear that scream?
01:39:57If you've watched the movie Alien, then you know the answer to this one.
01:40:01You can't hear sounds in outer space. It's not that sounds don't exist. It's just that you can't
01:40:07hear them. There's no one better to clarify this myth than Chris Hadfield. He's been on a couple
01:40:13of spacewalks during his life as an astronaut. And once you're out there in the darkness of space,
01:40:19you can't hear anything. All you hear is silence. Complete silence. But hey,
01:40:26just around the corner is a massive ball of explosion, aka the sun. We just can't hear the
01:40:33explosions happening because there's no medium for sound to travel through. It would be quite
01:40:38uncomfortable for an astronaut though if they could hear all the noises going on in outer space.
01:40:45Now, imagine you're zipping through space, feeling like a futuristic superhero.
01:40:49When a shooting star passes by your side. But wait, is it really a star? Unfortunately,
01:40:55shooting stars are not stars at all. They are small space rocks known as meteoroids,
01:41:02entering Earth's atmosphere and creating a stunning light show.
01:41:06Oh, and since we're debunking myths, let's head straight for another one.
01:41:11You've probably heard that meteors only crash into Earth on extremely rare occasions. Like once
01:41:18every dinosaur extinguishing apocalypse. That's not true. Scientists estimate that about 48 tons
01:41:25of meteoritic material fall on Earth each day. But almost all of this material is vaporized in
01:41:32Earth's atmosphere. The bright trail we see in the night sky is what we popularly call a shooting
01:41:37star. Next time you make a wish upon a shooting star, remember, you're actually hoping on a tiny
01:41:43piece of space debris. It's not so romantic after all. Can we or can we not fly into the stratosphere
01:41:52on air balloons? Apparently, we can. The Earth's stratosphere starts relatively close to the ground,
01:41:59about 7 or 8 miles up from the Earth's surface. But it continues a long way up.
01:42:05If you were to fly yourself all the way into the stratosphere with some type of air balloon,
01:42:10just make sure you have really good equipment at hand. You'll need a special suit and some
01:42:15breathing devices because air starts to get pretty thin the higher you get. Of course,
01:42:21if you do go all the way up, you need to get a picture of the Earth's curvature.
01:42:25So take a chest harness with you where you can put a special camera or something like that.
01:42:30And how about you live stream the whole thing? That would be a first!
01:42:34Imagine it's been 102 days since you left Earth. You've adapted well to life in outer space.
01:42:40But something weird is happening to your body. You're getting taller. How is that even possible?
01:42:46Don't stress about it, it's completely normal. The truth of the matter is, you're not getting
01:42:52taller. This is what happens to your body when it's not under the effect of gravity.
01:42:57Our body has natural space between vertebrae and joints. On Earth,
01:43:02this space is almost completely squeezed due to the force of gravity. But in space,
01:43:07your body gets some time off of the pushing force of gravity and begins to stretch more and more.
01:43:14So yes, astronauts can grow up to 3% taller when they're on long missions. And here's a curiosity,
01:43:20NASA has that all covered when they're tailor-making spacesuits of course.
01:43:24This way, astronauts will always have extra space in their suits.
01:43:28Once astronauts are back on Earth, the anti-gravity effect will wear off. So maybe they'll
01:43:33spend a few days wearing capri pants before it fits perfectly on their bodies again.
01:43:39Never have I ever pictured an airplane door bursting open mid-flight and a bunch of passengers
01:43:44being sucked into the atmosphere like flying feathers. Well, I'm betting most of you have
01:43:49had similar thoughts when getting inside a plane. Now imagine if this were to happen in outer space.
01:43:56Common knowledge says that if an astronaut is sucked out of an airlock,
01:43:59this person would be burnt to a crisp. Brace yourselves, because this is not only true,
01:44:05but the reality of it is way worse. According to astronaut Chris Hadfield, this is what would
01:44:11happen. The part of your body in the shade of the sun would experience temperatures of negative
01:44:15418 degrees Fahrenheit, while the part of you getting sunlight would burn at around 4 degrees
01:44:22Fahrenheit. Your lungs would collapse, and your blood would start to boil like tea water.
01:44:28So you would burn, freeze, lose your ability to breathe, and boil. Yikes!
01:44:36How many times have you heard that astronauts have to work out every second of every day,
01:44:41otherwise they'll pass out? This is a complete myth. Remember we talked about gravity earlier?
01:44:48Due to the lack of gravity in outer space, our bodies don't have to do any heavy work.
01:44:53Our torsos don't have to sustain the weight of our heads, and we don't have to make any effort
01:44:58to move our legs because, essentially, there's no walking in outer space. Now imagine living
01:45:04like that for 6 months, or even a year of your life. Your muscles could turn into jello. That's
01:45:12why astronauts work out. They'll strap themselves and run on a treadmill, or they'll do some
01:45:18weightlifting in a special machine. This way, their muscles won't feel the lack of gravity too
01:45:23much. They do need to keep hydrated, though. You know what? If I was an astronaut, I'd ask
01:45:30NASA if I could take my super soft water flask up into space with me. You've probably heard that
01:45:37space smells like burnt steak, or barbecue sauce. Now as much as this sounds absurd,
01:45:43this myth is more true than it is false. Astronauts obviously can't smell space when they're in it
01:45:49because they can't take off their helmets. They usually smell it once a space vehicle docks and
01:45:55they open up a hatch. Apparently, what causes this smell is the presence of hydrocarbons that
01:46:00float around in space. That's why astronauts don't have to work out how to get out of outer space.
01:46:08Who would've thought, huh? Hey smart people, let me ask you a question.
01:46:13Do you really think that if astronauts fly at the speed of light, they won't age a single second?
01:46:18I knew you'd say no! Let's get a few things straight. First of all, we haven't figured out
01:46:24how to operate vehicles at the speed of light. This would require an immense amount of energy
01:46:30and we don't have the technology to do that. Second, even if we managed to send a human
01:46:36inside a spacecraft that traveled at the speed of light, this person would still age. They would
01:46:41age differently than the people who remained on Earth, that's a fact, but they would still age.
01:46:46Do you lot really think there's such a thing as immortality? Nah. If you've seen the first Avatar,
01:46:53then you certainly remember that humans only managed to get to Pandora because they traveled
01:46:58in cryosleep. In other words, they froze their bodies, put them in a cryo bed, and traveled for
01:47:04years without aging. Yes, this sounds amazing, but we still don't have the technology to do that.
01:47:10Our bodies are mainly made out of water, right? And when you freeze water, it expands. That's why
01:47:17you should never leave soda cans unattended in your freezer. Right now, if we froze a person's
01:47:22body, the water inside of it would expand, harming tissues and organs. So no, we can't cryosleep our
01:47:29way into interstellar travel. Not yet, at least. Here's a crazy thought. What would happen if an
01:47:36astronaut took a drone with him on one of their spacewalks? Unless it's a NASA-designed drone,
01:47:42maybe the thing would freeze and burn like humans would if they went into space without a suit.
01:47:47But hey, a person can dream, can't they?
01:47:49Houston, we've got good news. A group of select humans is being interviewed to hop on board the
01:48:00first commercial vacation to outer space. The space agency has given you a survey to answer.
01:48:05They want to know what you would pack on this space adventure. Depending on your answers,
01:48:09you just might be one of the chosen ones. Now how about we take a look at that list together?
01:48:19Pencils. I guess I never would have thought of that, but it makes sense. Legend has it that the
01:48:25US spent millions of dollars trying to design a pen that worked in space. You know, since the lack
01:48:30of gravity is a huge, I mean, inescapable factor of life in outer space, pens don't work. The ink
01:48:37won't flow down as it does here on Earth. It turns out that pencils will do the trick. This way you
01:48:42can play word puzzles with the other space tourists, or even make some drawings of your
01:48:46adventure. You'd never forget to pack a toothbrush, of course. According to veteran astronauts,
01:48:52toothbrushes are so simple, yet their technology is enough for space. If you were to squeeze a
01:48:58water bottle inside a spacecraft, the molecules of water would float around in small bubbles.
01:49:03But if you wet your toothbrush, it naturally holds the water in it, keeping it moist to receive your
01:49:07toothpaste. Oh, I was going to say funny socks. Glad that you beat me to it. Here are two things.
01:49:14First, there's not a lot of walking that goes on in space. People don't tend to touch the ground
01:49:19too much up there. And second, space isn't the best place to showcase your fashion style.
01:49:25Astronauts tend to use special clothes while they're out there, and it will be no different
01:49:28for you as a space vacationer. So socks will keep your feet warm and fuzzy, but they'll also speak
01:49:34for your fashion interest. Maybe one day you'll wear a smiley face sock, while the other day
01:49:38you'll go for a Grinch-themed one. Of course, socks are pretty helpful on board an aircraft.
01:49:43They'll make you slide through stuff more easily. Next time I go to the convenience store,
01:49:48I'll remember to buy some wet wipes for your space travel. Experienced space travelers do
01:49:52love them. And it wasn't even NASA that invented them, huh? Since water is a no-go inside a
01:49:58spaceship, the best option is wet wipes. Better yet, if they're scented. Astronauts even use
01:50:03different kinds of wipes. They buy the disinfecting ones and the ones to use on their bodies.
01:50:08Just make sure you know how to tell the difference between them when you're up there.
01:50:12There's a popular myth that says that NASA invented Velcro. But the truth is, we tend to
01:50:17think that everything that's used in space was invented by NASA for a very intelligent and
01:50:21specific purpose. It wasn't, though. Velcro was invented for mundane reasons back in the 1950s
01:50:27by a Swiss company. They were adopted by space travelers because they work as anti-gravity props.
01:50:32They don't erase gravity, of course. But you can glue Velcros into daily stuff and then hang them
01:50:37on the Velcro attached to the spaceship's walls. It's a very smart system. But best to take your
01:50:43own pair, right? If you're spending a long time in outer space, photographs from back home might
01:50:48come in handy. Choose them well, though. Since the spacecraft isn't all that big, the rest of
01:50:53the people on board will know which pictures you decided to bring along. Best to keep that Harry
01:50:58Stiles poster back in your earthly bedroom, right? Just bring real pictures of people that you know
01:51:03and love. Did I hear pizza? A huge part of traveling and exploring new places is being
01:51:10able to taste different flavors of food. In outer space, that's a bit more complicated. But hey, at
01:51:16least you can take some pizza with you. Well, actually, you'd have to have it delivered to you
01:51:21in a cargo ship. This way, ingredients would come fresh and ready to eat. It wouldn't be the first
01:51:26time that people in space tried eating earthling junk food. Some astronauts have even eaten crepes
01:51:31and hot dogs. Perhaps the best part of this pizza party would be that your food could float.
01:51:36Now, isn't this a super nice way to enjoy some earth delicacies? Hmm, as much as I understand
01:51:41your desire to pack a toilet with you on this space trip, that's virtually impossible. I mean,
01:51:45I understand you. Some people are attached to the toilets in their homes, and a space toilet is far
01:51:50from the ideal experience. But NASA has been improving their toilet system, and it's the best
01:51:56it's been over the years. So that will have to do. Here's something I would take as well. A laptop.
01:52:02But what good would it do in outer space, you might ask? Apparently, there is internet all
01:52:08over the International Space Station. So even if you're not spending most of your trip docked at
01:52:12the ISS, you could enjoy some Netflix on the days you spend over there. There is internet all over
01:52:17the ISS apparently. Crazy, huh? And speaking of leisure, I love that you would take a yo-yo.
01:52:23I'm not sure how efficient it would be in space, since there's no gravity to bounce it back and
01:52:27forth. But it would be nice to see how a yo-yo reacts in a gravity-free environment.
01:52:33Oh, I love jigsaw puzzles. This would definitely be on my list as well.
01:52:37Imagine trying to build a jigsaw puzzle that keeps floating in the air.
01:52:41Maybe you'll have to create a system to avoid the separate pieces floating aimlessly through
01:52:45the spacecraft. But imagine once you finish that turtle puzzle, it will look like it's swimming
01:52:49around the craft. You can't pack a window, but they sure are an important part of life in outer
01:52:55space. Let's keep in mind some of the rules of the trip. Each traveler will have the opportunity to
01:53:00do one spacewalk during their time in space. This is already huge. Consider yourself lucky.
01:53:09Some elite astronauts only get to do one spacewalk during their entire career.
01:53:13That is so because spacewalks are risky and require a lot of training.
01:53:17But you'll get your training once you're up there. The thing is,
01:53:20all other days, you'll be stuck inside a floating tin can. So windows will come a long way.
01:53:27They'll help to remind you where you are. They'll give you some perspective of space and Earth.
01:53:32Of course, you should take your camera. How else will you be able to register for this
01:53:36once-in-a-lifetime experience? Just make sure it works inside an aircraft or the ISS,
01:53:41and you're good to go. Hmm? Coffee? Don't worry. You don't need to pack your own.
01:53:47Up until recently, astronauts had to rely solely on instantly brewed cups of coffee when they were
01:53:52in space. But you're lucky that coffee experts have already solved this issue. Nowadays, there's
01:53:57the ISSpresso machine. The machine itself is similar in size to an earthling espresso machine.
01:54:04But to drink it, space travelers have to use a zero-gravity coffee cup together with a straw.
01:54:09If you try drinking it regularly, you wouldn't get hot coffee to hit you directly in your face.
01:54:14Instead, the coffee would be glued to the bottom of your cup. I have to say I really stand this
01:54:19invention. Last, but not least, why not pack your guitar with you? I noticed you were missing a
01:54:25musical instrument. If this was a conventional flight, you might have to pay extra for luggage.
01:54:30But since it's all included, don't be shy and take your guitar. Astronauts such as Chris Hadfield
01:54:36take their musical instruments with them when they're in space. He even became famous for his
01:54:40version of Bowie's Space Oddity, up to the point that Bowie himself told him he lived Chris's
01:54:45version of it. It helps to pass the time, but it's also great for socializing. Can you imagine a
01:54:50pretend bonfire happening in the void of space? I can, and it looks super cool. Well, I think you're
01:54:56set to go. I'll personally call NASA and ask them to pick you as one of the lucky space travelers.
01:55:02See you in outer space, amigo!
01:55:11At a distance of 640 light-years from the Sun, scientists discovered planet WASP-76b,
01:55:17where it rains iron. The planet is very close to its Sun and always turned to it in the same side.
01:55:24The term is tidally locked. The temperature on the sunny side is so high that metals melt and
01:55:30evaporate there. The other half of the planet is cool enough so that metals condense again and
01:55:35fall down as rain. Speaking of tidal locks, our Moon is the same way. There's no dark side to
01:55:41our satellite. It's just always turned to us with one side. When the Moon happens to be in between
01:55:47the Earth and the Sun, what we call its dark side becomes brightly lit. We just can't see it from
01:55:53our planet. Figures. A recent study claims that the Moon has a tail. And every month,
01:56:00it wraps around our planet like a scarf. A slender tail made up of millions of atoms of sodium
01:56:06follows Earth's natural satellite. And our planet regularly travels directly through it.
01:56:11Meteor strikes blast these sodium atoms out of the Moon's surface and further into space.
01:56:17You won't believe it, but the Moon seems to be shrinking. Earth's natural satellite is now 150
01:56:23feet smaller than it used to be hundreds of millions of years ago. The reason for this
01:56:28phenomenon might be the cooling of the Moon's insides. It could also explain the quakes shaking
01:56:34the surface of our planet's natural satellite. Astronomers have recently found out that Mars is
01:56:40seismically active. Mars quakes occur there on a regular basis. For several days every month,
01:56:46the Moon remains between the Sun and our planet. That's when Earth's gravity picks up that sodium
01:56:51tail. Our planet drags it into a long stripe that wraps around its atmosphere. This lunar tail is
01:56:58totally harmless. It's also invisible to the human eye, 50 times dimmer than what you can perceive.
01:57:05But on those rare days, high-powered telescopes can spot its faint yellowish glow in the sky.
01:57:11The tail looks like a gleaming spot that's 5 times the Moon's full diameter.
01:57:17Turns out, there are plenty of planets in the Universe, and even in the Milky Way galaxy,
01:57:21that have liquid or frozen water on them. The closest one is within our Solar System.
01:57:26It's Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. Scientists are almost sure that, underneath its frozen surface,
01:57:33there's an actual ocean of water. But it's too soon to be hyped about possible life on such
01:57:38planets. Liquid water is only one of many things that have to come together for life to appear on
01:57:44a planet. A star in the galaxy GSN 069 is likely to turn into a planet the size of Jupiter in the
01:57:52next trillion years. It might happen because of the stars' regular encounters with a black hole.
01:57:58First, astronomers noticed unusual X-ray bursts that were strangely bright. They went off every
01:58:049 hours. After studying this phenomenon for some time, the scientists realized it was a star moving
01:58:11in a unique orbit around a black hole. The dazzling flashes? It was the material getting
01:58:16slurped off the star's surface by the black hole. It turned out that over millions of years,
01:58:22the black hole had already transformed the red giant into a white dwarf. And the process isn't
01:58:27going to stop whatsoever. Astronomers have found some traces of phosphine in the atmosphere of
01:58:33Venus. On our planet, this gas, colorless and flammable, is often found where microbes live.
01:58:40No wonder a new theory suggests that there might be life on Venus. But even if there was some life
01:58:45on the evening star, it could have only appeared in its atmosphere. Probably no living organism
01:58:52would be able to survive the planet's extreme environment. Venus' surface is extremely dry,
01:58:57there's no liquid water on the planet, and the pressure there is 90 times greater than that on
01:59:02Earth's surface. The temperatures often rise higher than 900 degrees. That's hot enough to
01:59:08melt some metals. As for vacations there, I'll pass. In fact, there's a place millions of light
01:59:14years away where there's a whole floating space cloud made entirely of water. There's so much of
01:59:20it that we could fill all our oceans 140 trillion times over. Slightly more than what we need.
01:59:27Water on Earth is actually a puzzle shrouded in mystery and covered with riddles. The most
01:59:32popular theory is that it was brought to our planet by icy comets and asteroids that left
01:59:38behind not only mighty craters, but the liquid substance thanks to which we can now thrive.
01:59:44But in space, there's a whole lot of organic matter, and under specific conditions,
01:59:49it could yield so much water it would be enough to fill our oceans thousands of times over.
01:59:54Researchers conducted an experiment in which they heated this organic matter and obtained
01:59:59clear water and oil. If this is confirmed in future studies, it could mean that even oil
02:00:05appeared on Earth not only thanks to fossilized remains of living beings, but came from outer
02:00:11space as well. And yet, there might just be about 6 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way
02:00:17galaxy alone. The latest data has shown that every fifth Sun-like star can have at least one planet
02:00:23in its habitable zone. And not just any planet, mind you. It has a rocky core and surface,
02:00:29and it's of comparable size to the Earth. Being inside the habitable zone of its star,
02:00:35such a planet would have high chances of becoming home to living creatures, microbes at least. And
02:00:41if there are billions of these planets in our galaxy, you could safely say that at least one
02:00:46of them is not only habitable, but inhabited already. And now, multiply this by the number
02:00:52of galaxies in the universe, also considering that many of them are much bigger than the Milky Way.
02:00:58This gives us billions upon billions of Sun-like stars and Earth-like planets,
02:01:03and some of them are surely more like ours than others. And get this, we might be able to walk
02:01:08upright because of supernova explosions. About 2.5 million years ago, a supernova sent cosmic
02:01:15rays to our planet. They triggered a series of electrical storms in the Earth's atmosphere,
02:01:20which turned into thunderstorms. Those, in turn, caused wildfires in northeast Africa,
02:01:25where our earlier ancestors lived. Fires turned the forest area into a savanna,
02:01:31the atmospheric pressure changed, and our ancestors had to stand on two legs to survive.
02:01:36The biggest explosion since the Big Bang was registered in 2019. This happened in the
02:01:41Ophiuchus Cluster, which unites thousands of galaxies. According to scientists, the blast
02:01:47was equal to 20 billion billion, that's 18 zeros, megaton explosions happening once a millisecond
02:01:53for 240 million years. Um, I'll have to trust that, my math is not that good.
02:01:59In 2019, NASA's InSight lander, whose goal was to study the interior of Mars,
02:02:04registered the first Marsquake ever. These quakes were coming fast, about two per day.
02:02:10Most of them were tiny, you wouldn't even feel them if they happened on our planet.
02:02:14So far, more than 300 Marsquakes have been detected. Those are the first quakes on any
02:02:20space body other than Earth and the Moon. Another mysterious phenomenon discovered by the mission
02:02:26was bizarre magnetic pulses. They occurred every midnight around the lander. It's still unclear
02:02:32what those pulses were. Maybe after midnight, they're going to let it all hang out, or something.
02:02:37Pluto's atmosphere rises much higher above the surface of the dwarf planet than, let's say,
02:02:42Earth's. It also has more than 20 layers, all of them freezing cold and extremely condensed.
02:02:49Remember the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth? Hey, I wasn't around then.
02:02:53But who could forget? There might've been another space show that ended badly for at least 75% of
02:02:59all life on our planet in the past. Roughly 360 million years ago, a supernova explosion occurred
02:03:06about 65 light-years away from us, and the cosmic rays sent by it swept away the ozone layer of our
02:03:12pretty blue ball. Wow, tough neighborhood. That's it for today! So, hey, if you pacified
02:03:20your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends! Or,
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