There’s a bizarre object out in space that’s not a star and not a planet, but it’s hotter than the Sun! It’s called a “brown dwarf,” sometimes nicknamed a “failed star.” Brown dwarfs are too small to start nuclear fusion like real stars, but they’re much bigger and hotter than regular planets. One brown dwarf, called WD 0032-317B, is especially strange because it gets heated up by a nearby white dwarf (a super-hot leftover core of a dead star). This makes its atmosphere reach temperatures of over 14,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the surface of our Sun! It’s a wild example of how weird and surprising the universe can be. Credit: A Journey Into Andromeda: By NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler, https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/30124/ Kepler's Supernova Remnant: By Smithsonian Institution https://flic.kr/p/5tVWWm, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51392778 CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0: Venus: By Kevin M. Gill - https://flic.kr/p/2jXHMt3, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95498116 Venus - August 24 2016: By Kevin M. Gill - https://flic.kr/p/2jY1WHX, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95498106 Eta Carinae: By geckzilla - https://flic.kr/p/QMu1J2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145992911 Freeman dyson: By Monroem, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15509893 CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0: Large Magellanic Cloud: By Astro.sin, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83165272 Structure of Stars: By ESO - http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0729a/, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26372192 Animation is created by Bright Side. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/ Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brightside Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en Stock materials (photos, footages and other): https://www.depositphotos.com https://www.shutterstock.com https://www.eastnews.ru ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me
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00:00Okay, it seems scientists have come across a strange object in space, and they're not
00:05sure if it's a star or a planet.
00:08What we do know is that it's located 1,400 light-years away from us, and it makes us
00:14question what we thought we knew about the Universe.
00:18Let me explain the dilemma here.
00:20We can tell if something is a star or a planet by considering the object's mass or the
00:25amount of stuff it has.
00:29Stars have a lot of mass, which gives them strong gravity that squeezes them tightly.
00:35Squeezing creates high temperatures inside them, causing them to shine brightly.
00:41Planets have less mass, so their gravity is weaker.
00:44They don't experience the same squeezing or high temperatures as stars.
00:48Instead, planets shine because they reflect the light from their stars, like our beautiful
00:53Earth does with our Sun, too.
00:56And this weirdo falls somewhere in between, since we consider it a brown dwarf.
01:01That's a special type of big, gaseous protostars.
01:05Brown dwarfs are usually like Jupiter in terms of their atmosphere.
01:10But they are much larger in size, about 13 to 80 times.
01:14If a brown dwarf has more than 80 times the mass of Jupiter, it can start burning regular
01:19hydrogen just like a star.
01:21That's what usually makes stars shine brightly.
01:26But normally, brown dwarfs are not as hot as stars.
01:30Their inability to burn hydrogen has even earned them the nickname of failed stars.
01:36They burn at around 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is cooler than most stars.
01:42But this object defies the norm.
01:44Its temperature measures an incredible 13,900 degrees Fahrenheit.
01:49Now let's put that into perspective.
01:52The hottest day in history was reported to happen in Death Valley, California, more than
01:57a hundred years ago.
01:58With a temperature of 134 degrees Fahrenheit, people back then must've felt like they
02:03were melting along with everything around them.
02:07Now imagine getting closer to the Sun, like taking a trip to Venus.
02:11Venus can reach insane temperatures of 860 degrees.
02:17It's not only about the distance, though.
02:19Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun, but it's still colder than Venus.
02:24Venus is extremely hot due to the greenhouse effect.
02:28Did you know that Venus could've been a delightful place to live a long, long time
02:32ago?
02:33Or at least be home to any form of life.
02:36But at some point, it started to trap carbon dioxide and eventually created this thick,
02:41smoggy oven that doesn't release heat.
02:45And that's why it's so hard to explore.
02:47The longest a probe managed to last on Venus was 2 hours.
02:52But hey, that's longer than I can do at work, and then I melt.
02:59So yeah, then you get to the Sun.
03:01Its surface burns at an incredible 9,930 degrees Fahrenheit.
03:07And what's fascinating is that this weird brown star we're talking about is hotter
03:11than that.
03:12I mean, it's not hotter than the Sun's core, whose temperatures go up to 27 million
03:17degrees, but it's still very impressive and unusual for a brown dwarf to be this hot.
03:23At least, that's what everyone thought until they realized why it was happening.
03:28The brown dwarf is remarkably close to another star that falls into the category of white
03:33dwarfs.
03:34They're so close to each other that our mysterious star makes one orbit around its
03:39white dwarf friend in just 2.3 hours.
03:43How old we'd be over there!
03:46Since they're this close, they're tidally locked like our Moon and Earth.
03:50That means one side of this brown dwarf always faces the white dwarf, and the other side
03:56is forever in darkness.
03:58Because of all this, our brown dwarf is superheated on one side only.
04:03So its day side is what got us confused.
04:07While the temperature on the night side is what you would expect from a brown dwarf.
04:12But these extreme conditions won't last long.
04:16Such a hot temperature makes the molecules in the dwarf's atmosphere break apart into
04:20individual atoms.
04:21And while its molecules are falling apart, this brown dwarf is slowly disappearing.
04:30And if you think this brown dwarf is hot, what would you say about Eta Carinae?
04:35It's a star located about 7,500 light-years away from Earth, and it belongs to an elite
04:41group of stars we call luminous blue variables.
04:46One astronomer first noticed it in the 17th century, but back then, it was just a regular
04:51medium bright star.
04:55Almost 200 years later, another astronomer was observing it, but this time it was a very
05:00bright star, one of the brightest ones in the sky.
05:04A few years later, it reached the highest level of brightness in a big event called
05:09the Great Eruption.
05:10When it happened, the star could be easily seen in the night sky.
05:14It released so much light, as much as is emitted in a supernova explosion.
05:19It remained like that for a couple of years, which is not what usually happens with exploding
05:24stars.
05:25After the party reached its peak, the star decided it was time to leave.
05:30It's still hesitating, though, so it's still alive, but dimmer than before.
05:35There's a nebula around Eta Carinae, too.
05:39It is a shell made of gas and dust that formed during the Great Eruption.
05:43It even blocks some of the star's light.
05:46Eta Carinae is a binary star system.
05:49That means there are two stars that orbit around each other.
05:53One component has a temperature of about 26,500 degrees, and the other 62,500 degrees.
06:02The main star in the Eta Carinae system, which is the more massive of the two, is a hundred
06:07times heavier than our Sun.
06:10Because of its enormous mass, scientists predict that this star may eventually explode in a
06:15powerful event known as a supernova.
06:19But not for another several thousand years.
06:24So by now, you might've already guessed what the hottest thing in the Universe is.
06:29Ta-da!
06:30A supernova.
06:32The supernova is what tells us that the life of a star has ended.
06:36We're talking about the most powerful explosions in space.
06:41They happen when a star that's between 8 and 40 times more massive than our Sun flops.
06:47Its core can no longer create enough energy through a process called fusion, so the star
06:52can't even handle its own gravity.
06:55It's like a stellar burnout, too much work a star can't handle, and its core just collapses.
07:01During a supernova, the temperatures in the star's core can get 6,000 times higher than
07:07in the core of the Sun.
07:08Or sometimes, a specific type of star called a white dwarf suddenly restarts its nuclear
07:14fusion, and bam, you get a supernova again.
07:19Kepler's supernova happened at the beginning of the 17th century.
07:24And it was the last really big supernova event we directly observed from Earth.
07:29On average, supernovas in our galaxy happen 3 times every century.
07:34I mean, we got a smaller supernova in 1987, too, when a blue supergiant exploded in one
07:41of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies, which we know as the Large Magellanic Cloud.
07:49This explosion was so strong, people could even observe it with the unaided eye, even
07:54though it was incredibly far – 168,000 light-years away from our home planet.
08:01What a topic for summer days, huh?
08:03But check this out.
08:04We can also talk about the hottest thing people have ever created, made in a surprising place
08:10– Switzerland.
08:11No, we're not talking about a super-hot chocolate.
08:15A group of scientists there created a subatomic soup called a quark-gluon plasma.
08:20In this experiment, the temperature got 250,000 times as hot as the Sun's core.
08:26The purpose of this experiment was to recreate the conditions that existed shortly after
08:31the Big Bang, when the Universe was still in a state of chaos.
08:37Ok, let's get even more extreme.
08:39In theory, things can get even hotter.
08:43Have you heard of the Planck temperature?
08:44It's an insanely hot temperature with numbers so high we can't even imagine.
08:51A supernova is like tepid tea compared to this madness.
08:55And who even knows what the matter does at these temperatures?
08:58Ok, I'm done.
09:01Now we take you back to your regular Universe.
09:04Bye now!
09:07That's it for today!
09:08So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your
09:12friends.
09:13Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the Bright Side!