How the Universe Works - S02E03 - Planets from Hell - video Dailymotion

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00:00Our universe is violent.

00:06The cosmos is full of planets from hell.

00:10What we have is a collection of monsters.

00:14Super hot worlds roasting at thousands of degrees.

00:19Frozen planets too cold for life.

00:23Desolate worlds seared by deadly radiation.

00:28Even planets where rock rains from the sky.

00:32We have hundreds and hundreds of these things we found and they're crazy.

00:38We search the heavens for worlds like our own and find planets where life could not

00:43possibly survive.

00:46How can the universe be so weird?

00:51Is the earth a one-off?

00:54The only habitable planet in the universe?

00:59Or are there worlds like ours out there, just waiting for us to find?

01:24Look out at the cosmos.

01:29Billions of galaxies.

01:37Trillions upon trillions of stars.

01:43And one profound question.

01:47Is anyone else out there?

01:51We want to find another earth.

01:53Is there a pale blue dot orbiting some star out there in the galaxy?

02:03The search is on for worlds that could harbor life.

02:08We're searching for our own vision of ourselves out there in space.

02:11We're searching for our heaven.

02:17We've already discovered more than 700 planets beyond our solar system.

02:26And yet these exoplanets look nothing like our own.

02:32Boy, were we wrong.

02:38All these solar systems that we're seeing in outer space, we find that they don't look

02:43like our solar system at all.

02:46We are the oddball.

02:48We're the freaks.

02:53These are nightmare worlds.

03:05And the cosmos is full of them.

03:09We're finding all different flavors of hell.

03:12All these different ways that planets can go wrong.

03:14So that's where we are right now.

03:17Searching for heaven, finding hell.

03:27These are worlds where life couldn't possibly survive.

03:32Could we really be alone?

03:39A cosmic fluke in a universe hostile to life.

03:44We may soon have the answer.

03:47Now we have discovered hundreds of exoplanets in outer space at the rate of over one exoplanet

03:53a week.

03:54In a few years, that will probably be thousands.

03:56And in the end, there could be millions or even billions of these things waiting for

04:01us to discover them.

04:04How could all of them be planets from hell?

04:08The quest for answers starts here, 63 light years from Earth.

04:19We've discovered a planet.

04:22It's even larger than Jupiter.

04:27And it has a serious problem.

04:37Its orbit is incredibly tight.

04:40It's closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun.

04:48And 30 times closer in than the Earth.

04:53The result is a superheated hell.

05:01But there's another reason why nothing could survive here.

05:14And that's the ferocious wind.

05:20The surface is battered by a never-ending storm.

05:32We can't see these winds with our telescopes, but we know this superstorm exists.

05:48Because of this.

05:52NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

05:56Spitzer can see things that we can't.

06:00It doesn't use visible light.

06:06Instead it sees in infrared.

06:09It's a part of the light spectrum we don't see with our eyes.

06:14The planet is heat.

06:19One advantage of studying the universe in infrared is it gives us this opportunity to

06:24see the light coming from planets around other stars.

06:27When you try to look at the light of a planet next to the light of a star, the star is hundreds

06:32of thousands of times brighter than that planet, which renders the planet very, very faint.

06:37But if we push into the infrared part of the spectrum, the internal heat of the planet,

06:43just as my internal heat, causes the planet to glow.

06:47Now it's observable and measurable.

06:53Spitzer gives us something completely new.

06:56The very first weather map of a planet beyond our solar system.

07:03This simple image is a technological triumph.

07:10The colors represent temperature differences.

07:14But the map also proves the planet has hellish winds.

07:23That's because the hotspot isn't where it should be.

07:29One side of the planet permanently faces the star, so its center should be the hottest

07:34point on the planet.

07:38It isn't.

07:42Something pushes the planet's hotspot to the side.

07:47And that takes incredible force.

07:58Only a non-stop 6,000 mile an hour hurricane could be this powerful, 20 times stronger

08:11than the strongest winds on Earth, 8 times the speed of sound.

08:22A small shift on a weather map.

08:28A series of supersonic winds raging on an alien planet.

08:38Truly a planet from hell.

08:49We're finding new planets at a staggering rate, an average of one a week.

08:58Each one could be an Earth-like heaven.

09:03But the more we explore them, the more hellish worlds we find.

09:09And some are so nightmarishly hot that they're more than uninhabitable.

09:18They shouldn't even exist.

09:33This Jupiter-sized gas planet is 256 light years from Earth.

09:39In infrared, it shines like a star.

09:44Tens of times brighter than Venus, the hottest planet in our solar system.

09:55It's a blistering 3,700 degrees.

10:03It's nearly impossible for a planet to get this hot.

10:16Its hellish temperature provides a clue to its appearance.

10:29An absolutely black object could absorb enough light from its star to reach such scorching

10:35temperatures.

10:36If you were coming up on the night side, away from the star, you would just see this blackness

10:44in front of you.

10:45Very little radiation, very little light.

10:47It would almost just look like the stars were avoiding a part of the sky.

10:58Just as black pavement absorbs sunlight and heats up on a sunny day, the black planet

11:03roasts beside its star.

11:10We don't understand its atmospheric chemistry.

11:13There's nothing on Earth that can absorb so much light.

11:23The planet's only color comes from a scorching hot spot.

11:29As you flew around to the day side, things would begin to glow red hot.

11:34There'd be a huge swirling storm, all red and glowing.

11:38What a hellish world.

11:45Deep inside, clouds of titanium oxide swirl around a solid heart 100 times heavier than

11:53Earth.

11:56Darkness visible, another world from hell.

12:04But some planets are even bigger, seemingly impossible puzzles.

12:13Here's a mystery.

12:14Every astronomy textbook says that gigantic Jupiter-sized planets form way out in outer

12:20space where it's really cold.

12:22So why is a Jupiter-sized planet, what's it doing inside the orbit of Mercury?

12:33Jupiter-type planets can only form far from their parent stars, out in the cold of space.

12:47A gas giant orbiting this close means these monsters can move.

12:56This is WASP-12b, a scorching vision of hell.

13:05It's so close to its star that its orbit lasts just one Earth day.

13:11This world is so hot it's over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

13:15This is just crazy hot.

13:18WASP-12b is one of the hottest planets in our galaxy.

13:25We've never seen anything like this before.

13:28This certainly is one of the most violent environments in the universe.

13:38WASP-12b is only 2 million miles from its star.

13:44Firing heat puffs up its atmosphere, giving it the density of styrofoam.

13:51In a big enough bathtub, it would float.

13:56We actually think it's so close to its star that the gravity, the tidal effect of gravity,

14:01warps it into almost an egg shape.

14:03It's not even round, it's oblong.

14:10Tens of miles beneath the puffed-up atmosphere lies a solid core.

14:17It's rich in carbon, and the pressures are extreme.

14:23There could be mountains of diamond and graphite, and seas of liquid tar.

14:39But WASP-12b won't last long.

14:44It orbits so closely that its star is literally tearing it apart, ripping away nearly 190

14:51quadrillion tons of gas a year.

14:59One million years from now, WASP-12b will vanish.

15:15The question is, how did it get so close in the first place?

15:28This is the birth of a solar system.

15:32In the center, a new star.

15:40Around it swirls a disk of microscopic dust grains.

15:48These are planets in the making.

15:51Dust grains collide, and every time they collide, they merge, and so they get bigger and bigger,

15:57and so they sort of grow like the dust bunnies under your bed.

15:59And you have 100,000 years or a million years to make a very big dust bunny, and they get

16:05bigger and bigger and bigger.

16:14Trillions of miles from the star, it's cold enough for ice to form.

16:23Ice picks up dust and gas.

16:32These gaseous clumps grow bigger and bigger over millions of years.

16:37Eventually, they become gas giants.

16:45In our solar system, the gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, all form this

16:53way, in the distant orbits we still see today.

17:02So how did WASP-12b end up so searingly close to its star?

17:10The answer, gravity.

17:14This planet is huge, 40% more massive than Jupiter.

17:25Its immense gravity disturbs the dust disk it formed from, creating turbulence.

17:37And so the planet creates waves in the disk, you know, sort of density waves, and you can

17:42sort of think of them as like waves on an ocean.

17:46The gas giant becomes a galactic surfer.

17:52Over hundreds of thousands of years, the planet rides the waves inward toward the star.

18:00As the planet gets closer and closer to the star, it starts to feel the radiation from

18:07the star more and more, and so it heats up.

18:11Traveling millions of miles from the cold outer reaches of the star system into the

18:19tight, scorching orbit we see today, an ice-cold world becomes a planet from hell.

18:31Nobody had any real clue that you could form a planet a billion miles out from a star.

18:37It somehow moved in.

18:39That is incredible, but that's really the only explanation of how these planets got

18:44so close to their stars in the first place.

18:50WASP-12b is bizarre, but it isn't alone.

19:02We've found many of these super-hot, super-close giants.

19:08We call them hot Jupiters, battered by supersonic winds, blacker than night, hotter than hell.

19:29But these hot Jupiters all have one thing in common.

19:36There's no life here.

19:40These planets are just about as different from the Earth as you can possibly imagine.

19:44In fact, we've now found over a hundred of these things, rendering them so common that

19:50the question really emerges, which ones are the weirdos, them or us?

19:58This planetary roller coaster has consequences.

20:02As they spiral inward, hot Jupiters cause chaos.

20:06They create a whole new class of planets from hell, orphan worlds flung away from their

20:14star into the emptiness of interstellar space.

20:32Planets orbit stars.

20:37Between the stars is a vast sea of darkness.

20:42We've always thought of space as being empty.

20:44That would be considered its defining characteristic.

20:47That's why we call it space.

20:49But when planet hunters switched from gazing at stars to staring deep into space, they

20:58made an amazing discovery.

21:01Out of the darkness, between the stars, planets began to appear.

21:12First, one dark gas giant, then several more.

21:24Eventually, ten dark, starless planets emerged from the shadows of space.

21:39I often wonder what it would be like to be on one of these rogue planets in between stars.

21:46The night sky would be perfectly black, it'd be festooned with stars, it'd be beautiful.

21:54But if you were at one of these planets, you would be in a world of perpetual night.

21:58There would be no sunrise or sunset, there would be no warmth of the sun.

22:05These planets formed around a star, but now they roam the darkness of interstellar space.

22:15Their journey here was violent, each one forced from its home orbit by the gravity of a hot Jupiter.

22:30A Jupiter-sized planet is an 800-pound gorilla.

22:35Where does it sit?

22:36Anywhere it wants to.

22:42Hot Jupiters are killers.

22:48As they surf in toward their star, their immense gravity disrupts the system.

23:00Curling planets from their orbital paths.

23:04It flings into outer space any small planet, so any planet unfortunate enough to be orbiting

23:11close to the mother star would be flung into outer space with a passing Jupiter.

23:25These planets will never again feel the heat or see the light of a star.

23:34All the rogue planets we've found so far are gas giants.

23:38But perhaps there are smaller, rocky worlds too.

23:49Worlds that were once like Earth.

23:54The large Jupiter-like planets are just easier to see, but there's no reason to assume there

23:58also aren't smaller orphaned planets.

24:01Maybe as a Jupiter planet moves in toward the star and plays ping-pong with the planets,

24:05even something like Earth could have gotten kicked out.

24:08Then you would have this cold, frozen little world, just streaking between the stars, dark

24:13and lonely.

24:17These planets are victims of a violent gravitational battle.

24:22Frozen, orphaned Earth twins.

24:27There may be hundreds of billions, with a B, of these planets roaming the galaxy.

24:33Now there are only a couple of hundred billion stars in the galaxy, so that means these rogue

24:38planets may actually outnumber stars.

24:46Right now, we find an average of at least one new exoplanet a week.

24:52As our technology improves, we'll see smaller and smaller planets orbiting stars.

24:59Worlds with a solid surface like our own.

25:03But the first rocky planets we've found are nothing like Earth.

25:09These planets have been to hell and back.

25:27We have found hundreds of alien worlds.

25:32And now for the first time, we're finding small planets made of rock, just like Earth.

25:47Planets this size are potential homes for life.

25:55But instead we find more planets from hell.

26:01Weird, nightmarish, and uninhabitable.

26:20This is Coro-7b.

26:26A world of violent extremes.

26:32Two hells in one.

26:37It's so close in that its star looms 360 times larger in the sky than our sun.

26:48On Coro-7b, the first hell is unimaginably hot.

26:56The surface is a furnace, roasting at 4700 degrees.

27:04Lava boils, turning the atmosphere into vaporized rock.

27:10When a cooler front moves in, small pebbles condense.

27:17And rocks rain from the sky.

27:20If that's not a classic vision of hell, I don't know what is.

27:25But that's only half the story.

27:31The hot side of the planet is locked, permanently facing the star.

27:40Beyond is the twilight zone.

27:47It's temperate here, cool enough to turn the lava oceans into solid rock.

28:00But this pleasant zone is narrow.

28:05Travel further, and you descend into a second hell.

28:14This is the dark side.

28:20The half of the planet that never sees the sun.

28:26Eternal darkness and savage cold.

28:32The temperature is hundreds of degrees below zero.

28:39So one side is hot, another side is cold.

28:41You either have, you know, fire or ice in the extreme.

28:44The coldest places in the universe and the hottest places in the universe.

28:47You couldn't think of a worse place to end up.

28:55The planet was not always this way.

28:59Turn back the clock 1.5 billion years.

29:06Coro-7b is forming.

29:11But it isn't rocky.

29:14It's a gas giant, a hundred times bigger than Earth.

29:24It migrates in toward its star.

29:30As it closes in, the star blowtorches gas from the planet.

29:38Its gaseous shell blasts off into space to reveal a rocky core.

29:49Coro-7b is the skeletal remains of a hot Jupiter.

29:55Its parent star has reduced this once massive gas giant to a rocky cinder.

30:10It's hard to imagine planets more extreme than Coro-7b.

30:17Yet they do exist.

30:21Dayworlds, machine gunned by deadly cosmic rays.

30:41This is a pulsar 7,000 trillion miles away from Earth.

30:51It's a kind of cosmic lighthouse.

30:57This unbelievably tiny world, just 10 miles across, fires an intense beam of radiation

31:04through space as regularly as an atomic clock.

31:10A single cubic centimeter, the size of a keyboard key, actually has about as much mass as Mount

31:15Everest.

31:17Smash a Mount Everest into a cubic centimeter, the whole star, which is only about 10 miles

31:22across, is like that.

31:26It's one of the most hostile environments in the universe.

31:30Anything nearby gets hammered by intense gravity and magnetism.

31:37No one expected to find a planet here.

31:41But this pulsar has three, small, rocky, near-Earth sized.

31:53They were the first exoplanets ever discovered, and the last place you would ever find life.

32:02It's got a tremendous magnetic field.

32:04It's blasting out X-rays.

32:05So these poor planets are just getting cooked by radiation.

32:09The word Earth-like I don't think could be applied to these guys at all.

32:17The X-ray beam strafes the planets over and over, firing radiation a million times more

32:24deadly than medical X-rays, slowly stripping their surfaces away.

32:37These are sterile worlds.

32:42Everybody admits there's no chance for life, at least as we know it, on the planets that

32:46orbit the pulsar.

32:51Radiation cooks pulsar planets to death.

33:00The opposite hell is no better.

33:04Frozen worlds too cold for life.

33:10In the constellation Scorpius, 20,000 light years away, is a red dwarf star.

33:21These dwarfs are tiny and relatively cool.

33:36And this planet is too far away to fill what little heat there is.

33:42It's so distant, its orbit lasts 10 Earth years.

33:49It's the coldest planet we have found in the universe.

33:58Its surface is a frigid 370 degrees below zero.

34:05This is a world made entirely of ice.

34:09Methane, ammonia and nitrogen are gases on Earth.

34:17Here they form a frozen, toxic frost.

34:23Glaciers and canyons and cliffs of ice are the only terrain.

34:30Here hell really has frozen over.

34:43Our search for Earth's elusive twin reaches another dead end.

34:50Perhaps we are truly alone.

34:58Or will our first tantalizing glimpses of an alien world, potentially perfect for life,

35:06Earth, the only habitable world in our solar system.

35:25But in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, can we really be alone?

35:40It's a question that planet hunters are trying to answer.

35:45The whole purpose, in my opinion, of the discovery of exoplanets is to establish our true place

35:52in the universe.

35:54Who are we?

35:56Where do we belong in the cosmic scheme of things?

35:59Are there other planets that can have life just like ours?

36:05That's where NASA's Kepler Space Telescope comes in.

36:11Kepler lets us calculate how far a planet is from its star.

36:15That's critical in figuring out whether it could sustain life.

36:21Life on Earth is only possible because we're the perfect distance from the sun, not too

36:27hot and not too cold.

36:33Just right for liquid water, oceans, rivers, lakes, rain, and life.

36:46You know, journalists say, follow the money.

36:49Astronomers say, follow the water.

36:52Because water is the universal solvent that dissolves most chemicals, and that's where

36:57DNA got off the ground.

37:00And where there's liquid water, there could be life.

37:05We're looking for planets that are not too close to their parent star, where all the

37:10water would boil away, and not too far away from their parent star, where all the water

37:14would be tied up in a frozen form.

37:16We're looking for that Goldilocks zone, where the temperatures are just right for liquid

37:20water to pool on the surface.

37:26Once Kepler has identified a new planet, astronomers check whether it lies in the habitable zone

37:32of its parent star.

37:36So far, Kepler hasn't found a single confirmed Earth twin.

37:45But it has identified more than 2,000 planetary possibilities.

37:52And it's this sheer abundance of planets that gives scientists hope.

37:58The important thing to remember is that even though we're finding all of these terrible

38:02planets that are just completely unlivable, is that we're finding lots of them.

38:07We're finding hundreds and thousands of these planets.

38:10And what that's telling us is that planets are easy to make.

38:14And that means that even rare things are probably out there in large numbers.

38:20Even if the Earth is a rare, precious jewel in our galaxy, there may be dozens or hundreds

38:25of them out there.

38:32Kepler has opened our eyes to a universe full of planets.

38:37We can now guess at how many there might be in our own galaxy.

38:44Fifty billion.

38:50Fifty billion worlds just waiting to be discovered.

38:55And we think one percent could be in the Goldilocks zone of their star.

39:06That's 500 million planets, each with a chance of harboring life.

39:14Right here on our own doorstep.

39:24We haven't found one yet, but we're getting closer.

39:33This is Gliese 581, a red dwarf star 20 light years from Earth.

39:41Gliese 581 is a tiny little star.

39:44If the sun were the brightness of about a hundred watt light bulb, then Gliese 581 would

39:48be like a little Christmas tree light, a tiny little fairy light, very, very small.

39:52This shifts the life zone in, because now if you want to be warm enough, you need to

39:56snuggle up right next to the star.

40:07The star has four planets.

40:11Three are too close and hot for liquid water.

40:16But the fourth is different.

40:21It's a rocky world twice the size of Earth.

40:26And it's right on the edge of the Goldilocks zone.

40:37In theory, if the planet has a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, it could trap enough heat

40:43to have clouds, rain, and oceans.

40:51It would be a strange place to live, twice Earth's gravity, bathed in permanent red twilight.

41:07But right now, this weird world is the closest we have to a planet like ours.

41:15It's a promising start.

41:19When we actually know for a fact that up there around that star is a planet like Earth, that's

41:25going to just fundamentally change how people look at the sky and how people perceive their

41:30place in the universe.

41:31So that's going to be a profound moment, not just for me, but I think for humanity in general.

41:37Our goal is to find another Earth, but along that path, we are going to find more things

41:46than we could have ever possibly imagined.

41:48And that's the part I love about this the most.

41:51We don't know what craziness is going to be around the next corner when we're looking

41:55for more planets.

41:56I can't even imagine.

42:05Two decades ago, the only planets we knew were right here in our solar system.

42:13Now there are hundreds, all very different from our home.

42:23The universe is filled with hellish worlds, super hot, ultra cold, violent and bizarre.

42:47But the universe is also unimaginably vast.

42:53With so many stars, there are probably countless Earth-like heavens.

42:58All we have to do now is find them.

How the Universe Works - S02E03 - Planets from Hell

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