Astronomers discovered a mysterious object zooming through the Milky Way at an unbelievable speed! It’s moving so fast that it might even escape our galaxy entirely. Some scientists think it could be the leftover core of a dead star, while others believe it might be something we’ve never seen before. Whatever it is, it’s traveling at millions of miles per hour, leaving a strange trail behind. Studying it could give us new clues about the forces shaping our universe. One thing’s for sure - space just got a whole lot weirder! Credit:
Comet NEOWISE: By Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA23792, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92225511
WISE: By NASA/JPL-Caltech - http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17254, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27838913
Comet 2020 F3: By SimgDe, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92294694
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This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.
Comet NEOWISE: By Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA23792, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92225511
WISE: By NASA/JPL-Caltech - http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17254, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27838913
Comet 2020 F3: By SimgDe, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92294694
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
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Stock materials (photos, footages and other):
https://www.depositphotos.com
https://www.shutterstock.com
https://www.eastnews.ru
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For more videos and articles visit:
http://www.brightside.me
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This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.
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FunTranscript
00:00At breakneck speed, this mysterious object is zipping through our galaxy.
00:05It's moving at a staggering 1 million miles per hour.
00:08That's so fast it might potentially escape the Milky Way altogether.
00:13While scientists are trying to understand exactly what this space weirdo is,
00:17we're going into space to learn more about it.
00:20The object is currently moving at a distance of 400 light years away from Earth.
00:25Let's have a closer look and try to figure out if it could be a runaway probe.
00:30Nah, it's way too large for that.
00:32The object is around 30,000 times the mass of Earth and 8% of the mass of the Sun.
00:38What a giant!
00:39Such a size places it in a category that Dr. Darren Baskill,
00:43an astronomy lecturer at the University of Sussex,
00:46describes as somewhere between a star and a planet.
00:50Stars moving at such extreme speeds are super rare.
00:53Only one or two out of every thousand local stars travel so incredibly fast.
00:59So, if one day you found a star moving as rapidly as our cosmic enigma,
01:04you'd see it leave our home Milky Way galaxy in just a few tens of millions of years.
01:10In terms of space and cosmic distances, it's a blink of an eye period of time.
01:15After all, such stars can live for tens of billions of years.
01:20Even though the mysterious object is only moving at 0.001% of the speed of light,
01:26it's still potentially fast enough to eventually break free from the gravitational pull of our galaxy
01:32and fly into intergalactic space.
01:36Let's put this speed into perspective.
01:38J1249 is traveling 2.6 times faster than the fastest space probe ever launched.
01:45I'm talking about the Parker Solar Probe.
01:49The Parker probe reached this speed in June 2024 while looping around the Sun.
01:56J1249 was discovered by citizen scientists volunteering for NASA's Backyard Worlds,
02:02Planet 9 project.
02:04These volunteers sift through online images taken by NASA's Wide Field Infrared Explorer
02:10and NEOWISE missions.
02:12They're looking for anything interesting.
02:15Three of those volunteers spotted a faint, fast-moving object as it moved across WISE images.
02:22When they realized what they were looking at, they were incredibly excited
02:26but thought someone had already reported the space object.
02:30But surprisingly, that wasn't the case.
02:33At the moment, most scientists believe that CWISE J1249 could either be a low-mass star
02:39or a brown dwarf.
02:42That's a type of star that is larger than a planet but too small to support nuclear fusion in its core,
02:48like our Sun does.
02:50In other words, such stars don't have enough mass,
02:53and their cores can't burn their star fuel, radiating starlight.
02:57That's why brown dwarfs, often referred to as failed stars, are smaller and cooler than the Sun.
03:03They even have complex, planet-like atmospheres, which have clouds and molecules.
03:09For example, H2O.
03:12Anyway, to confirm or disprove this theory,
03:15astronomers continued to observe the object with the help of ground-based telescopes.
03:20Soon, they found out that the object had an unusual composition,
03:24with much less iron and other metals, compared to typical stars or brown dwarfs.
03:30It allowed NASA to claim the unthinkable.
03:33J1249 could be one of the oldest stars ever found in our galaxy.
03:38OK, that's certainly a game-changer, but why is this potential star moving so fast?
03:44The research team has a few theories.
03:47For example, the object might be the remains of a binary star system
03:52where its companion, a white dwarf, exploded in a supernova
03:56after pulling too much material from J1249.
04:00Another possibility is that our mysterious traveler may have originated from a cluster of stars
04:06that dispersed after coming across two black holes.
04:10According to experts, one way to get to such extreme speeds
04:14is to fall toward an object and miss it.
04:18Such gravitational slingshots are how space probes are accelerated to extreme speeds,
04:23which allows us to explore the solar system up close over reasonable timescales.
04:29The same technique could also explain the speed of J1249.
04:34The star could have been born in the crowded center of our galaxy.
04:38Then it might have fallen toward a star, missed,
04:42and in the process was accelerated to extreme speeds.
04:48Well, let's leave astronomers to search for more evidence to confirm this exciting theory.
04:53Meanwhile, we're heading further, to the binary star system 55 Concrete.
04:59It lies 41 light-years away from Earth and hosts an amazing planet,
05:0555 Cancri e, also known as Janssen.
05:09This is a scorched super-Earth, 8 times the mass of our planet,
05:14and it orbits its star in just over 17 hours.
05:18Yep, the year on this planet is shorter than one day on Earth.
05:22Plus, it's 25 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our Sun.
05:28No wonder the planet's surface reaches blistering temperatures of 4,350 degrees Fahrenheit.
05:35That's hot enough to melt nearly any known metal.
05:39Back in 2010, a study found out that the host star of 55 Concrete e
05:44had an unusually high carbon-to-oxygen ratio.
05:48If this ratio was also true for the planet,
05:50it would mean that 55 Concrete e might have huge quantities of carbon.
05:56And the coolest thing? It would be in the form of diamonds!
06:00It'd make this space body a literal diamond planet!
06:04Sadly, some follow-up studies discovered that the carbon-to-oxygen ratio on the planet
06:09was less extreme than originally thought.
06:12It makes the idea of a diamond-encrusted world less feasible.
06:16On the bright side, planets don't always have to match the composition of their host stars exactly.
06:22If some other process topped up the carbon on 55 Concrete e,
06:26it could still be the most precious planet known in the universe.
06:30Definitely worth a visit.
06:33But let's leave the diamond planet behind and fly to Vega,
06:37which holds a special place as one of the brightest and most important stars in the sky.
06:42The brightest of other stars is measured against the brightness of Vega on a special magnitude scale,
06:48where Vega's magnitude is zero.
06:51A star with a magnitude of 1 is 2.5 times dimmer than Vega,
06:56and a star with a magnitude of negative 1 is 2.5 times brighter.
07:01Vega is also a pole star, although not at the moment.
07:06Right now, Earth's axis points toward Polaris, the North Star.
07:11But Earth's axial tilt draws a circle over 26,000 years,
07:15and Vega will again be the pole star in about 12,000 years.
07:20Just you wait.
07:21But the coolest thing about Vega, which sets it aside from other stars,
07:25is that it's not shaped like a perfect sphere.
07:28Unlike the Sun, which rotates slowly and is almost spherical,
07:32Vega spins very fast, completing one rotation in just 12.5 hours.
07:38And it causes it to bulge at the equator, taking on an egg-shaped appearance.
07:44And now, get ready for the most dangerous encounter of them all.
07:48But first, I must warn you.
07:50Even though space is unimaginably vast, it's populated extremely sparsely.
07:56The universe's average density is equivalent to six protons in 35 cubic feet.
08:02But some areas, known as voids or supervoids, contain even less matter.
08:07These regions are enormous and can span 30 to 300 million light-years,
08:13and there's almost nothing there.
08:16There are also places in the universe where time and space are distorted
08:20in ways that challenge our human comprehension,
08:23like binary black hole systems,
08:25where two massive black holes dance around each other before eventually merging.
08:31As they spiral closer, they release immense gravitational waves
08:35that ripple across spacetime.
08:38The first detection of such waves was made by the Laser Interferometer
08:42Gravitational Wave Observatory in 2015,
08:45when it recorded the final collision of a black hole pair.
08:49In the final 20 milliseconds before the merger,
08:52the black holes released more gravitational energy
08:55than the total energy emitted by all the stars in the observable universe
08:59during the same period.
09:01But that's not all the universe has to offer.
09:04Once you start exploring, you can come across exoplanets,
09:07like CoROT-7b, where rock clouds form and send pebbles raining from the skies,
09:14or KELT-9b, the hottest known planet
09:17with surface temperatures reaching 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit,
09:21or TRES-2b, the darkest planet ever discovered.
09:26It absorbs over 99% of the light it receives,
09:29making it blacker than coal.
09:32So, as you can see, in the vast, almost incomprehensible scale of the cosmos,
09:37mysterious, fast-moving objects, strange planets, and immense voids
09:42all serve as a reminder of how much we have yet to learn about the universe.