How the Universe Works - S05E06 - The Universe's Deadliest
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00:00In space, no one can hear you scream, which is a shame because the universe is more violent
00:11and far scarier than anything you can imagine.
00:18Super dense neutron stars collide.
00:23Newborn planets smash each other in demolition derbies.
00:29And super massive black holes blast out swarms of deadly cosmic rays.
00:36There are stars exploding, galaxies colliding, nebulae where there's all kinds of radiation
00:44and shock waves.
00:46This is the ultimate guide to the worst places in the universe.
01:10Let's say you've got a taste for adventure.
01:13A risk taker extraordinaire, used to laughing at danger and death.
01:19Want to take on the worst the universe can throw at you?
01:22You better think twice because the cosmos has it all.
01:27Havens for life and lethal hell holes.
01:38Our universe is both benevolent and violent.
01:41There are little oasis pockets where things are very nice and calm and really good for
01:45life like right around here.
01:48But there are definitely places and times where things get violent and rough.
01:55But you don't have to venture to the wrong side of the tracks to encounter some of the
02:00universe's scariest locations.
02:03Some are right here in the neighborhood.
02:07Like Betelgeuse, hidden amidst the beautiful Orion constellation, a red star 640 light
02:15years away from Earth and ready to die.
02:20Now Betelgeuse is a huge red supergiant star and it even looks kind of angry and red hanging
02:25up there in the sky.
02:27It's so big that if you put it in our solar system, it would expand all the way out to
02:30the planet Jupiter.
02:33It's gigantic.
02:35When massive stars like Betelgeuse die, they go out with an epic bang.
02:42Now this star is just on the edge of going supernova and when it does, we're in for quite
02:47a show.
02:51Betelgeuse is running out of gas.
02:55The nuclear fire at its heart fights a constant battle against the crushing gravity of its
03:00enormous mass.
03:03Once the gas is gone, you better stand back.
03:07No one can predict exactly when, but soon the star will begin to collapse.
03:14Imagine you're near the surface of this star just before it goes out, just before it goes
03:18supernova.
03:19You're going to see the surface of that star just recede away from you incredibly rapidly.
03:24Much like if you were at the beach and you saw the water just recede away from you really
03:27rapidly, you know something bad is coming.
03:33Collapsing outer layers pummel the core, making it denser and denser.
03:38The core compresses as more of the star falls in.
03:43All that gas has to go somewhere, and so it bounces with an explosive force we can hardly
03:49imagine.
03:56When Betelgeuse goes supernova, we are talking about an epic catastrophe.
04:01An entire star is exploding.
04:05It's hard to describe just how much energy that is.
04:12Imagine all the energy the sun puts out every second.
04:15Multiply that times 31 million seconds in a year.
04:18Multiply that by 10 billion years in the sun's lifetime.
04:23That is how much energy a supernova puts out.
04:28The energy unleashed is a shockwave of light, heat, and superheated gas, racing out at thousands
04:37of miles a second, destroying everything around it.
04:42Life on any planet orbiting this exploding star would be completely eliminated.
04:48You certainly wouldn't want to book a cruise to Betelgeuse any time soon, or for that matter,
04:56after it's gone supernova, because when it finally dies, it might leave behind a nasty
05:04surprise.
05:05One of the most extreme objects in the universe, a neutron star.
05:11Neutron stars are kind of like vampire zombies.
05:14They are the cores of massive stars that have died.
05:19But now these neutron stars have their own gruesome lives, and you don't want to get
05:22anywhere near this thing.
05:25Trillions and trillions of tons of matter are compressed into a sphere roughly the size
05:31of Manhattan.
05:33A neutron star is the densest body we know of in astrophysics besides a black hole.
05:42If you somehow had a little stone-sized piece of neutron star matter, it would weigh 100
05:49million metric tons, and it would immediately fall right through your hand.
05:55Because the neutron star is so dense, it generates an intense gravitational field.
06:01It is really hard to exaggerate how dramatic and dangerous a neutron star is.
06:07The gravity is so intense, it would actually bend light around it.
06:11You would see all these kind of weird shimmering effects.
06:18Dazzling but deadly.
06:20No astronaut will ever be able to approach a neutron star.
06:25But if you're an armchair traveler and want to find out what would happen, let's send
06:30a galactic crash test dummy.
06:33Let's call him Chuck.
06:36Crash test dummies are a species that are completely devoted to ensuring human safety,
06:42and they sacrifice themselves to do it.
06:48Everything he encounters is going to be a pretty rough ride.
06:52Better him than me.
06:56As Chuck nears the neutron star, its gravitational grip is doing some very bad things.
07:05The gravity is pulling on him so hard that he is accelerating all the way down to the
07:09surface.
07:10He'll be moving at very roughly one-half to two-thirds of the speed of light.
07:16The neutron star's gravity is 200 billion times stronger than on Earth.
07:22Around 150 miles above the surface, it starts to pull on Chuck's limbs in a distinctly unpleasant
07:29way.
07:31As you get closer and closer to a neutron star, we were told to think that it would
07:35be this elegant spaghettification where you would get longer like a piece of spaghetti.
07:39But in reality, you're going to get ripped shreds.
07:43Think about what you're really going to experience.
07:45Think about, first, all your joints dislocated in your body.
07:51Your skin getting ripped off of your body.
07:53Your bones being pulled apart.
07:55Your organs being pulled apart.
07:59Within the blink of an eye, Chuck is reduced to a thin stream of atoms hurtling towards
08:04the star.
08:05Those atoms will eventually fall down onto the neutron star.
08:10And unfortunately, the violence doesn't stop there.
08:14What's left of Chuck hits the surface, triggering a huge burst of energy.
08:20So we're talking about 100,000 miles per second.
08:24That's an impact.
08:25He's going to hit so hard that the amount of energy released is just huge.
08:30It would completely dwarf the entire arsenal of nuclear weapons on our planet.
08:36Anything and anyone venturing too close to a neutron star is destined for this catastrophic
08:44end.
08:45A neutron star is one of the most dangerous objects you can meet in any phase of their
08:49existence.
08:50If you're meeting a neutron star right when it's born, that means you're very near a supernova,
08:54and that means death.
08:56If you meet a neutron star after the supernova has gone off, that would be death.
09:00And then if you were lucky enough or unlucky enough to go falling onto a neutron star,
09:05you'd be destroyed very rapidly and torn apart.
09:10If I had one piece of advice about neutron stars for future space travelers, it would
09:15be no, no, stay away.
09:22So you really don't want to be anywhere near one neutron star, but two neutron stars colliding?
09:33That creates one of the strangest and most lethal particles in the universe.
09:52A neutron star is definitely not the place to visit unless you want to be torn to oblivion.
10:06But two neutron stars can be even worse, creating something so weird, so deadly, it could potentially
10:15transform the entire universe into a zombie.
10:28June 2013, NASA's Swift satellite spotted a short burst of energy from a nearby galaxy.
10:37It was evidence that something incredibly energetic and violent had taken place.
10:44It was a collision between two neutron stars.
10:50When two neutron stars merge, the amount of energy in this explosion is crushing.
10:56There's almost no way to describe it.
11:02The explosion released more energy than the sun will in its entire lifetime.
11:09These are the biggest explosions in the universe since the Big Bang itself.
11:15But there may be more than just energy released in the explosion.
11:20It's possible that neutron star collisions release something really, really weird, a
11:27new theoretical particle called a strangelet.
11:37Strangelets are called this because they're made up of a type of matter that nothing else
11:41around you is.
11:44All the matter around you is made up of neutrons and protons, and these are made up of two
11:49types of quarks.
11:51One we call the up, the other we call the down.
11:56Strangelets have a different type of quark in them, and this is called the strange quark.
12:02Strange quarks can come together to make bigger particles, but it's not like normal matter.
12:06It's not like neutrons and protons that make up us.
12:10This would form a weird conglomerate called a strangelet.
12:18To understand strangelets, scientists use a theory called the strange matter hypothesis.
12:26It states that strangelets could be a stable form of matter, and that under certain extreme
12:33conditions, they could form.
12:36The inside of a neutron star might be an interesting place to look for strange matter.
12:41If strangelets could exist, that might be one place where they would.
12:47The pressures inside the core of a neutron star are off the charts, high enough to potentially
12:54form strangelets.
12:57These strangelets come in two forms, positive and negatively charged.
13:03The positive kind is fine, but the negative ones, well, you better watch out.
13:10You can think of strangelets as being these subatomic zombies.
13:14Once they bite you, you're a strangelet too.
13:18And what'll happen is that the nuclei in the normal matter will be converted to strange
13:23matter.
13:25If negatively charged strangelets are released during neutron star collisions, they could
13:31set off a chain reaction, zombifying any normal matter they touch.
13:37So you have this runaway reaction of normal matter being converted to strange matter and
13:43giving off energy as it does so.
13:47It's a little bit like the old sci-fi movie, The Blob.
13:50Everything The Blob touches just basically turns into more blob.
13:53Strangelets basically will consume the matter around them, and you get a runaway cascade
13:58effect that doesn't end well.
14:03When a strangelet hits Chuck, it transforms him into a ticking time bomb.
14:11So everything that was Chuck in terms of normal matter would quickly convert into strange
14:17matter, not only changing his identity, but also in the process releasing tremendous amounts
14:23of energy.
14:26Once an area around the size of his fingernail is converted into strange matter, he explodes,
14:35blasting strangelet particles through space.
14:40Once you start to convert a small amount of matter into strange matter, the energy released
14:44will propel more strange particles out to find yet more matter, and the whole process
14:50will just get worse and worse and worse.
14:55If strangelet particles were to hit a planet like Earth, the results would be catastrophic.
15:06So imagine this strangelet strikes our atmosphere.
15:09When it strikes those atoms, they're going to be converted into strange matter, and that
15:13strange matter is going to generate more strange matter.
15:15So you're going to have a strange bubble emanating from this location, all the while
15:20giving out more and more energy, which goes into creating more strangelets until the entire
15:25planet is consumed in the strangelet explosion.
15:31The debris left over shoots out into space, a swarm of newly formed strangelet zombies
15:39ready to destroy everything they touch.
15:45One planet gets converted into strange matter, then the next planet, then the star, then
15:49the next star.
15:52So in this way, you could have entire strange galaxies.
15:57Ultimately, strangelets could transform the entire universe.
16:10So, how are we still here?
16:17We've witnessed neutron star collisions.
16:20So where are the strangelets?
16:23On the one hand, we're not made of strange stuff.
16:26Maybe it's not something that really exists or could happen.
16:28But on the other hand, space is really big, and it would take millions of years for any
16:35strange matter particle coming from the nearby largest galaxy to reach us if it's moving
16:39at the speed of light.
16:41So it could be happening, and it just hasn't made it here yet.
16:46Perhaps there are colliding neutron stars far across the cosmos releasing strangelets.
16:54Only the future will tell.
16:59But neutron stars are not the only source of lethal particles in the universe.
17:05There are billions of them out there.
17:08And there's one in the heart of our galaxy.
17:15The Milky Way, our home galaxy.
17:32It's over 100,000 light years across, and home to extraordinary nebulas and hundreds
17:39of billions of stars.
17:42These stars orbit the center of the galaxy, circling the supermassive black hole called
17:48Sagittarius A star.
17:52They look stunning, but their glow is pure lethality, adding the heart of our galaxy
18:00to our itinerary of worst places in the universe.
18:07The biggest factories of radiation in the universe are stars.
18:11They're actually burning through these nuclear reactions, and that creates the light that
18:14we're familiar with.
18:15The bigger and more massive the star is, the hotter it burns, and the more dangerous the
18:19radiation.
18:24The galactic core is home to the most active stars of all.
18:29And should we visit, we'd be blasted by a blizzard of intense radioactivity.
18:36The word radiation sounds very dangerous, very bad.
18:39But when you think about the definition, it's all around us.
18:43Radiation is really any form of light.
18:45So right now, I'm giving off heat.
18:47I'm a warm thing.
18:48That's radiation.
18:50It's just that some forms of radiation are very benign and good for matter, and some
18:54aren't.
18:57Some has lower energy, some has higher energy.
19:00And when you start getting to higher and higher energies, that can get more and more dangerous.
19:05Because as your cells absorb that energy, it can damage them.
19:10This type of radiation is called electromagnetic radiation.
19:14And the most powerful, X-rays and gamma rays, are so strong, they can cause radiation sickness,
19:21and in some cases, death.
19:26There's another kind of radiation called cosmic rays, tiny subatomic particles that move at
19:33near the speed of light.
19:35New research suggests the most energetic cosmic rays don't come from stars.
19:42They come from supermassive black holes.
19:47When people think about black holes, the whole idea is that they're dark.
19:50They actually absorb light.
19:52But what might surprise you is that as stuff falls into a black hole, it gets hotter and
19:57hotter.
19:58That heat is directed into extremely high energy jets above the black hole.
20:04As this material falls into the black hole, it forms into this disk, and a tremendous
20:09wind is blown away because this disk is so hot, it's blasting out subatomic particles.
20:17So this isn't matter from inside the black hole, but as stuff falls in, it becomes the
20:22most intense radiation in the universe.
20:27Massive black holes act like turbocharged particle accelerators.
20:33They superheat and blast particles in jets from their poles.
20:38These jets are extremely powerful.
20:40They are so powerful that they are able to accelerate particles to 99.99% of the speed
20:47of light.
20:48That's really fast.
20:49It's perilously close to the upper limit to which things can be accelerated.
20:55These accelerated particles are cosmic rays.
21:02Cosmic rays are the most energetic particles we know of in the universe.
21:06They might even just be a single proton, but these have been accelerated to such high speeds
21:11that one of these can pack the wallop of a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball.
21:16These are like tiny cosmic bullets, and if you get hit by one, it can actually blow apart
21:21the DNA in your cell, or blow apart the cell itself.
21:33Our sun's heliosphere deflects most of the cosmic rays coming our way.
21:40But outside this magnetic protective bubble, we'd be vulnerable.
21:46Even a spaceship might not protect us.
21:49To protect yourself from particle radiation, you have to be careful.
21:53You might think, well, I'll just use a big sheet of lead and that'll do it.
21:56And it turns out, that makes things worse.
22:02Planetary scientist Dan Derda explains.
22:07He staples balloons to a board to represent cells.
22:10I feel a little bit like Frankenstein.
22:13I'm assembling a body here, cell by cell.
22:17A half-inch-thick sheet of steel represents the protective hull of a spacecraft.
22:24A rifle bullet, the cosmic ray.
22:27I'm going to fire this galactic cosmic ray toward our solar system and see what it does
22:31to our spacecraft.
22:41As the bullet hits the metal, it shatters into a hail of shrapnel that spreads out,
22:49hitting the balloons.
22:51It's the same with cosmic rays.
22:54These little particles will hit the metal, and they will basically free a bunch of electrons
22:59from the atoms in the metal.
23:00And those electrons will then shoot through you.
23:02And so now, instead of getting hit by one particle, you're being hit by a bazillion
23:06particles, and that's bad.
23:09So if those were the cells of your body, you'd be in severe trouble.
23:13Because when this galactic cosmic ray blasted through the wall of the spacecraft, it spalled
23:18out of there at an atomic level.
23:21It's not just the damage from that one cosmic ray bursting one cell, all of this atomic
23:27shrapnel blasted through many cells.
23:30So these stand-ins for human cells really represent the severe challenge that future
23:35space travelers have out there in space.
23:37How do you protect yourself from these high-energy galactic cosmic rays?
23:41You don't want that happening to the DNA, to the cells in your body.
23:53The center of the galaxy is off-limits, a vacation, no-go area.
24:01We're lucky to live far away from the center and protected by our sun.
24:07It may seem kind of unfortunate that we're sort of in the suburbs of the galaxy.
24:11We're almost 30,000 light-years away from the center.
24:14But this may be the best place for life.
24:20Next in our tour of the worst places to visit in the universe, a cosmic nursery, the birthplace
24:27of stars and planets.
24:31But you won't be humming any lullabies here, because it's also a shotgun loaded with
24:37cosmic buckshot.
24:53We've seen the death of stars.
24:59Now we witness the birth of a planetary system, a beautifully orchestrated family of planets.
25:08Somehow coming together out of gas and dust.
25:13Who wouldn't want to witness such a thing up close?
25:18You if you don't want to be in one of the most deadly places in the universe, because
25:24as it turns out, planet birth can be lethal.
25:32This is LKCA 15.
25:35It's a star 450 light-years away, similar in mass to our sun.
25:41A proto-planetary disk of dust and gas surrounds it.
25:46And in it, new planets are being born.
25:58When planets are first forming, there's a disk of material around the star when it's
26:03very young, and the planets basically form from all this debris.
26:07Stuff hits and sticks together, and it grows bigger and bigger and bigger, and then its
26:11gravity draws material in.
26:20Planet formation is like a demolition derby.
26:23There are a lot of similarities.
26:25In a derby, the cars are racing around a track, going around in circles at different speeds.
26:28Well, it's the same thing with planets.
26:30The material is orbiting the sun.
26:32It's going around, and they're all going at different speeds, at different angles,
26:35different trajectories.
26:37Sometimes this material collides, and you get a bigger object left over.
26:41And that's how planets grow.
26:42It's how they form.
26:48It looks beautiful from afar.
26:51But venture too close, and you'll be surrounded by speeding material.
26:58That material, the dust, the grains of sand, even the bigger rocks, are moving at orbital
27:03speeds around this proto-star.
27:06So we're talking about 10, 15, 20 miles per second.
27:11You might think that the large rocks are the most dangerous, but in space, that's not
27:18necessarily the case.
27:22The bigger rocks can be seen, can be tracked.
27:26Things this big can be tracked in space.
27:28But anything that's about this big is hard to find in space.
27:31You don't know it's coming.
27:35So while we're all fearing the big rock, if you're out in space, you better watch out
27:39for the small rock that's moving fast.
27:44If a BB-sized rock going at 40,000 miles an hour hits our crash test dummy, it's going
27:50to cut right through him.
27:56You know, there are rules in baseball that a batter has to wear a helmet, because there's
28:00a baseball moving at him at 100 miles an hour, and if that hits him in the head, it could
28:05kill him.
28:07Now imagine that that baseball is being thrown 1,000 times faster, right?
28:12That would put a hole right through a batter's head.
28:14It wouldn't even slow down.
28:16That's how dangerous these things are.
28:22The space around the star is jammed full of every size of debris.
28:30Rocks are going to be spinning around, ricocheting off each other, colliding and sticking.
28:36It's a horrible, hostile environment for Chuck.
28:40He's going to be hit often and hard.
28:47You're just going to see him get blown to bits.
28:54Putting Chuck into a protoplanetary disk like that is like basically sticking a shotgun
28:58in front of him and pulling the trigger.
29:00There's just a huge amount of material moving at tremendous speeds, and it would hit him
29:04and just rip him to pieces.
29:10So, what if you decide to get a little peace and head to one of the quietest places in
29:16the universe, far from dangerous debris?
29:21Well, looks can be deceptive, because visiting even one of the emptiest places in the cosmos
29:30can be a nightmare, where something thinner than an atom and light-years long can cut
29:38you to ribbons.
29:59When we look out at the heavens, we can see billions of galaxies and trillions of stars.
30:08They generally look evenly spaced out.
30:11But in 2015, scientists spotted something strange.
30:23Every now and then, we find something we can't explain.
30:25There is a giant area that's colder and emptier than it possibly could be.
30:35There's not very much matter in there.
30:37There's not that many galaxies there.
30:38There's not much energy in there.
30:40And we call these voids, and some of them are quite large.
30:42They're called supervoids.
30:45One of these supervoids is 1.8 billion light-years across, making it the largest individual structure
30:54ever identified.
30:58This void has 20% less matter, 10,000 less galaxies than would be expected.
31:06That equates to around 1,000 trillion stars, all missing.
31:16We are not completely sure how the supervoid formed.
31:21We do know the layout of the galaxies was determined at the very start of the universe,
31:26so it makes sense to look at the Big Bang, or more specifically, a baby picture of the
31:35infant universe when it was just 380,000 years old.
31:41It's a snapshot of the cosmic microwave background, the pattern of heat left over from the Big Bang.
31:49When you look at maps of the microwave background, we see different colors, red and blue.
31:55Those aren't real colors.
31:56They're artificial colors that we put down to indicate where the temperature is a little
32:00hotter than the average and a little colder than the average, not by much.
32:04Only one part in 10,000.
32:09The regions that appear a tiny bit warmer had slightly more material.
32:18They would go on to form galaxies and all of the structures we observe in the universe
32:23today.
32:27The colder regions had less matter, so they didn't form complex structures.
32:34It's thought that some of these less dense areas ended up forming the supervoids.
32:43These voids may be quiet, but even they could be home to some really weird phenomena, something
32:50like a cosmic string.
32:56These are completely theoretical.
32:58We don't know if they exist, but they could have been created when the universe was very
33:03young.
33:05It's thought when the super-hot, super-dense infant universe started to cool, it created
33:11cracks in the fabric of time and space, cracks that are thin and dense.
33:21These cosmic strings are incredibly weird.
33:25They're one-dimensional, and they're incredibly heavy.
33:31They're thought to be thinner than a proton, but incredibly dense.
33:37Just 10 miles of a cosmic string would weigh more than the Earth.
33:42And so imagine all of this mass and energy in a one-dimensional object.
33:48This is like the sharpest, most powerful knife the universe has.
33:55So what would happen if our crash test dummy, Chuck, encounters a cosmic string?
34:01A cosmic string is like a cosmic lightsaber.
34:05It's a one-dimensional path of pure energy that would slice him right in two.
34:12Cosmic strings do strange things to the space they hide in.
34:16They twist and distort time and space.
34:20After cutting Chuck in half, the string slams his head and feet together.
34:26When Chuck encounters this super-powerful cosmic string, he encounters perhaps the opposite
34:32of spaghettification.
34:33He gets pancake-ified.
34:39The supervoid is large, cold, and lacking matter.
34:47Our final location is just the opposite.
34:52It's compact, hot, violent, and crammed with stuff.
34:59It's also the site of the most violent battle in the history of the cosmos, the battle to
35:05create everything.
35:26Our number one worst place in the universe is the most extreme of all, the birth of time
35:32and space, the Big Bang.
35:37The universe is full of wonders, and they were all set in motion during the first second
35:43of existence.
35:46But this nearly didn't happen.
35:49First, matter had to win a battle for survival.
35:54When the universe was first born, it occupied this phase that we call the primordial fireball.
36:02Picture the scene.
36:06Intense heat.
36:08Intense pressure.
36:11It would be an awful place to visit.
36:14You'd be crushed, incinerated, and blasted by radiation.
36:20But there's worse, a battle between particles of matter that will determine the future of
36:25the universe.
36:30Einstein's equation, E equals mc squared, tells us that energy can become matter.
36:38And in this early universe, this turns out to be the case.
36:43Primitive particles of matter spark into existence.
36:47But there's a problem.
36:49This matter comes in two forms, regular matter and antimatter.
36:55We know what matter is.
36:56We see it all around us.
36:58But what is antimatter?
37:01Antimatter is not as mysterious as most people think it is.
37:05Antimatter is normal matter, but with opposite charge.
37:09So there are protons and there are antiprotons.
37:11A proton is the nucleus of hydrogen, and it's possible to have antiprotons.
37:16And an antiproton has the opposite charge of a proton.
37:22On its own, antimatter isn't dangerous.
37:25But when it comes into contact with matter, well, that's a whole different ballgame.
37:32In the end, what happens is if you have matter and antimatter and you bring them together,
37:37they will annihilate each other and turn themselves into pure energy.
37:46It's the quintessential example of E equals mc squared, Einstein's famous equation.
37:52You can take the mass of one particle and the mass of another particle, and you can
37:56combine them.
37:57And since it's matter and antimatter, they produce pure energy.
38:07The infant universe was a battlefield of matter and antimatter, annihilating each other in
38:12a frenzy of obliteration, which raises a question.
38:18How is there a universe made of matter?
38:22Why wasn't everything destroyed?
38:24If there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter, they would have annihilated in
38:30the early universe, because matter particles can annihilate with antimatter particles,
38:34and all we'd be left with is pure radiation.
38:37What's amazing is that we live in a universe which, as far as we can see, just has particles
38:42of matter.
38:44In the early universe, there must have been an imbalance between matter and antimatter.
38:54The universe was born with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but for every billion
38:58particles of antimatter, you had a billion plus one particles of matter.
39:05That tiny difference was enough to create the entire cosmos.
39:11We know antimatter nearly wiped out matter.
39:16So would we be wiped out if a particle of antimatter hits us?
39:22Antimatter is the stuff of science fiction because, of course, it annihilates matter.
39:25So people suddenly think that if a particle of antimatter came in this room, what it would
39:29do would ultimately annihilate a particle of matter.
39:34But big deal.
39:35It's an elementary particle.
39:36The amount of energy that would be released would be incredibly small.
39:40So we're safe, if there's only a little antimatter.
39:47But back in the early universe, it was a whole different story.
39:51There was loads of the stuff.
39:54And if Chuck wanders into a cloud of antimatter, game over.
39:59Well, what happened at the time, if Chuck were immersed in that environment of that
40:04much antimatter, then ultimately every particle in his body would interact with an antiparticle,
40:12turning into pure radiation, and Chuck would go out poof in a mass of light.
40:26Chuck would turn into a light being.
40:36We've taken a tour of the absolute worst places to be and the worst things to see in the universe.
40:49There are so many things in our universe that sound like science fiction, but it's really
40:52based off of real science.
40:57Everything out there can kill you.
40:58Dust can kill you.
41:00Stars exploding, the heat from stars, gravity from black holes, radiation, all this stuff
41:05is very dangerous.
41:08You can say, hey, isn't it safer to stay on Earth?
41:11But you know what?
41:13Ships are safe in the harbor, but that's not what ships are for.
41:19With all these dangers lurking in space, I'm happy to be right here on Earth.
41:23That is, unless the aliens show up with their spaceship, in which case I'm out of here.
41:29The irony of the dangerous places, we wouldn't be here without them.
41:35Our universe only exists because matter defeated antimatter and the annihilation of the Big
41:40Bang.
41:41And we only exist because a supernova blew up and spread materials that built planets
41:48and us.
41:50So the universe gives, and the universe takes.
41:56Space may seem like a very scary place, but then you have to consider that we wouldn't
42:00even be here if it weren't for supernovae.
42:03So although these things seem outside the realm of our experience, they really are just
42:07how the universe works.