BIG BANG

Billions and billions of galaxies The universe is so vast, we can't

even imagine what those numbers mean.
But 14 billion years ago, none of it existed until the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is the origin of space and the origin of time itself.
We take a journey through space and time, from the beginning to the end
of the universe itself.
This is our world.
Cities forests oceans people Everything in the universe is made from
matter created in the first seconds of the Big Bang: every star, every
planet, every atom, every blade of grass, every drop of water.
Water is ancient.
The hydrogen atoms in here were born moments after the Big Bang.
Then came everything else.
The Big Bang is the defining event of our universe and everything in
it.
The secrets of our past, our present, and our future are locked inside
this one moment in time.
To unlock the secrets of the Big Bang, we have to travel outside of our
own solar system and journey beyond even our own galaxy.
As we travel into deep space, we're actually seeing into the past and
getting closer to being able to witness the dawn of time itself.
Passing the first infant galaxies and the first stars we arrive back at
the moment the universe began and face the biggest questions in all of
science.
This is the Holy Grail of physics.
We want to know why it banged.
We want to know what banged.
We want to know what was there before the bang.
To get the answers, we've built machines the size of cities to simulate
conditions when the universe was created And space telescopes to peer
deep into our past.
We are getting close to answering the old-age questions, "Why are we
here? Where did we come from?" Does the universe in fact have a
beginning or an end? And, if so, what are they like? If we find the
answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason.
We would know the Mind of God.
The origin of the Big Bang is the greatest mystery of all time.
And the more we learn, the deeper the mystery becomes.
We like to think that our universe is unique.
However, now we're not so sure.
Perhaps there is a multiverse of universes.
Another possibility is that our Big Bang is just one of many Big Bangs,
but it may be one of just an infinite number of universes.
And there may be other regions in that infinite number of universes
where a Big Bang is just happening today.
But there's only one universe we're sure of, and understanding this one
is hard enough.
Since the late 1920s, everything we know about how our universe works
has been turned upside down.
It's important to realize how much our picture of the universe has
changed in the last century.
At the beginning of the wisdom in science was that the universe was
static and eternal.
In 1929, that all changed.
At the Mount Wilson observatory above Los Angeles, astronomer Edwin
Hubble discovered galaxies aren't stuck in one place.
Not only are they moving, but they're flying away from Earth at
incredible speeds.
This was the first real evidence of the Big Bang.
All galaxies on average are moving away from us, and, stranger still,
those that were twice as far away were moving twice as fast.
And those that were three times as far away were moving three times as
fast, and so on.
Everything was moving away from us.
It became known as Hubble's Law.
His discovery is still the starting point for exploration of the Big
Bang.
What Hubble convincingly demonstrated, by seeing the motion of those
galaxies, is that the universe is expanding.
Theoretically, an expanding universe must have started from a single
point.
By measuring how fast the universe is expanding, astronomers calculated
backwards and figured out when it burst into life.
People ask the question, "How do you know that the universe is 13.
7 billion years old? I mean, smarty-pants, you weren't there Well, when
you watch television on videotape, you hit the stop button when you see
an explosion, and you can run it backwards and see when it actually
took place.
The same thing takes place with cosmology.
We can run the videotape backwards and then calculate when it all came
from a cosmic explosion.
You don't have to be an astronomer to look back in time.
If you gaze up at the night sky, you're seeing stars that are millions
of light-years away, meaning it took the light from those stars
millions of years to get here.
So if you look far enough, you should be able to see the beginning of
the universe.
Named for the groundbreaking astronomer, the Hubble Space Telescope
allows us to look deep into the universe, back in time, and closer to
the moment of the Big Bang.
But for scientists, winding back the clock to the Big Bang was only the
first step.
When people first hear about the Big Bang theory, they say, "Well,
where did it take place? It took place over there.
It took place over there.
Where did it take place?" Actually, it took place everywhere, because
the universe itself was extremely small at that time.
These are only some of the most abstract and difficult concepts there
are.
So here's a mind-bender.
What came before the Big Bang? The philosophers in ancient times used
to say, "How could something arise from nothing?" And what's amazing to
me is that the laws of physics allow that to happen.
And it means that our whole universe, everything we see, everything
that matters to us today, could have arisen out of precisely nothing.
It's one of the biggest hurdles to understanding the Big Bang.
First you have to buy into the premise that something was created out
of nothing.
It's impossible to describe the moment of creation in human language.
All we know is that from what may have been nothing, we go to a state
of almost infinite density and infinite temperature and infinite
violence.
Understanding how nothing turned into something may be the greatest
mystery of our universe.
But if you understand that, you start to understand the Big Bang, when
time and space began, and the great big explosion created everything.
At the dawn of time, the universe explodes into existence from
absolutely nothing into everything.
But everything is actually a single point, infinitely small,
unimaginably hot, a super-dense speck of pure energy.
The Big Bang was so immense that it brought into existence all of the
mass and all of the energy contained in all of the our universe in a
region smaller than the size of a single atom.
The entire observable universe was a millionth of a billionth of a
centimeter across at that time.
Everything was compressed into an incredibly hot, dense region.
It's not even matter yet, just a point of raging energy.
It was the beginning of the universe and everything in it.
Everything was simple.
All the forces that we know about today were one and the same.
The universe was amorphous.
It had no structure.
In that instant of creation, all the laws of physics, the very forces
that engineer our universe, began to take shape.
The first force to emerge was gravity.
The fate of the universe its size, structure, and everything in it was
decided in that moment.
Carlos Frenk studies how gravity shaped the universe by creating
artificial universes in this supercomputer.
He gives each one a different amount of gravity.
The first one he tried had too little, resulting in, well, nothing.
Gravity has saved our universe, for if gravity was weaker than it is,
we would have a very boring universe in which everything would be
flying apart so fast that there would be no galaxies forming.
Next, he programmed a universe with too much gravity.
If gravity was stronger than we think it is, again, we'll end up with a
failed universe.
Everything will end up in black holes.
It has to be just so.
It has to be just right.
Lucky for us, the Big Bang got it just right the perfect amount of
gravity.
In the turmoil of forces after gravity emerged, still a fraction of a
second after the Big Bang, a shock wave of energy erupted and expanded
the universe in all directions at incredible speed.
All of space expanded by an unbelievably large factor in a fraction of
a second.
We think that in less than a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of
a millionth of a second, space expanded by a factor bigger than a
million, million, million, million times.
And for the record, that's faster than the speed of light.
But, wait, doesn't that break one of the laws of physics? Even
schoolchildren know that, "You can't go faster than the speed of
light".
But I say there's a loophole there.
You see, nothing can go faster than light, nothing being empty space.
Don't worry.
This idea gives even the best minds in science a headache.
But it's critical to understanding the early universe.
Scientists think it took less than a millionth of a millionth of a
millionth of a millionth of a second for the universe to expand from
the size of an atom to a baseball.
That may not sound like much, but it's like a golf ball expanding to
the size of the Earth in the same amount of time.
That means it was expanding faster than the speed of light.
That's fast.
So many things were happening so fast in the early universe, because
everything was so close together, that we needed a new unit of time to
describe things.
It's called Planck time.
To understand just how short a Planck time is, consider this.
There are more units of Planck time in one second than all the seconds
since the Big Bang.
The math is mind-blowing.
There are more than 31 million seconds in a year, and it's been since
the Big Bang.
So multiply 31,556,926 by a really big number.
It's a time scale that's so small that all human intuition goes out the
window.
If we look at our watches and measure one second, we can ask, how many
Planck times is that? Well, it is a billion, billion, billion, billion,
billion Planck times.
So, now the Big Bang is only a few Planck times old.
An exploding mass of pure energy, expanding faster than the speed of
light.
In the next few Planck times, the universe as we know it will be born.
A fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe is so small it
can fit in the palm of your hand.
But in another tiny fraction of a second, it expands to the size of the
Earth.
Then, moving faster than the speed of light, it grows larger than our
solar system.
And it's still just a raging storm of superheated energy.
It would be hotter and denser and more violent than anything that we
can experience in the universe today.
Even the interior of a star is calm and serene by comparison to the
violence of the earliest moments of the Big Bang.
Temperatures were so hot that even the atoms of your body would
disintegrate so hot, in fact, that the atoms would be ripped apart.
How hot? Trillions of degrees hot.
But as the universe continues to expand, it also begins to cool.
Dropping temperatures trigger the next stage in the universe's
evolution.
The raw energy of the explosion transforms into tiny subatomic
particles.
It's the first matter in the universe.
This conversion of energy into matter was predicted by Albert Einstein,
years before anyone started talking about the Big Bang.
It's the one scientific equation every schoolkid knows.
There is one very familiar formula.
And that is e equals mc squared.
It says something about the creation of the universe.
It says even if the universe is created just out of pure energy, that
because energy can be converted to matter and matter to energy, that
you can get all of the stuff that we see in the universe from this pure
energetic event.
Einstein's little equation had a big impact.
It led to the first nuclear bombs.
In a nuclear explosion, a small amount of matter is converted into an
enormous amount of energy.
As the universe was forming, the exact opposite happened.
Pure energy transformed into particles of matter.
You don't need to create matter in the beginning.
You just need energy.
And energy alone can lead to the creation of an entire universe.
In just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the building blocks
of our universe begin to take shape.
But this first matter is like nothing we see today.
The stuff of matter has been very different over the age of the
universe.
What we now think is normal matter was not at all normal in the
earliest moments of the Big Bang.
That's because condition were so extreme.
There were no atoms yet.
But there were tiny subatomic particles.
In the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the universe was so hot and
dense, there were great amounts of energy.
And so particles were being created all the time, and energy and matter
were transferring back and forth in this hot, dense soup.
That earliest matter was too unstable to start forming the universe as
we know it.
Think of it like this.
Imagine rush hour at Grand Central in New York City as that superheated
early universe.
The commuters racing through the main concourse are subatomic
particles.
If you look at a crowd of people a large crowd of people they may
appear random.
That random, quirky motion is very similar than what was happening to
the particles in the universe in the earliest moments of the Big Bang.
The extreme temperature of the early universe energizes the subatomic
particles.
They appear.
They disappear.
They race around at incredible speeds.
It's pure chaos.
It's like people.
If they're excited and running around fast to catch trains at a train
station, they'll be moving around quickly.
But eventually, they calm down and get slower.
That's what's been happening to our universe, in a sense.
The particles are moving around very fast.
And as the universe cools down, the particles move more slowly and, in
some sense, less random.
As the universe cools, the particles stop changing back into energy.
Now there are more and more subatomic particles, but it's still a hot,
violent place.
All this is happening in fractions of a second too small to detect.
But the Big Bang is moving into a critical stage now, a titanic battle
between matter and the one thing that can destroy the universe before
it even gets started antimatter.
Everything in the universe is made from matter, from the smallest rock
to the largest star.
And all the matter there will ever be was created from the pure energy
of the Big Bang.
Einstein's equation, E=mc², says that energy transforms into matter.
But it was just a theory.
Today science is able to test that theory.
This is CERN in Switzerland, home to the world's largest machine.
It's the size of a city and engineered to re-create the conditions
millionths of a second after the Big Bang.
If we want to probe ever-smaller scales, paradoxically we need an ever-
bigger machine.
There's just no other way of doing it, so big machines mean small
physics, means early times and, therefore, getting closer and closer to
the origin of the universe itself.
This monster machine is called a collider.
It's designed to take us back to those first fractions of a second
after the Big Bang.
It's a 3,6-meters-wide concrete-line circular tunnel, The collider
makes tiny particles of matter smash into each other at almost the
speed of light.
For a split second, those collisions generate turbocharged energy
similar to the explosive force of the Big Bang.
And then that pure energy briefly transforms into matter, just like it
did nearly But a monster machine needs a monster detector to see these
collisions.
This detector is five stories tall and weighs over 7,000 tons.
And 7,000 tons to give you a sense of perspective is the weight of the
Eiffel Tower.
But as big as it is, it can't see the actual particles of new matter.
They hang around for just a split second and move so fast it can only
record their trails.
There's a lot of energy in these particles.
They move very, very quickly, and so you need a very large amount of
detector in order to be able to map the path of these particles very
precisely.
So, the detector is so big because you need better resolution.
It works exactly the same as a camera.
The more pixels you have, the better the picture.
It's exactly the same here.
We just have a five-story camera.
Scientists hope that it'll reveal just how energy transforms into
matter But not just any matter the kind of matter that emerged the dawn
of time itself.
But the dawn of time was a critical moment in the birth of the
universe, because pure energy also produced one of the most dangerous
things in the universe antimatter.
That's right - antimatter.
It's real.
Antimatter is the mirror image of ordinary matter.
However, matter has one charge, and antimatter has the opposite charge.
If there was an anti-me made out of antimatter, that person, in
principle, could look exactly like me same personality quirks, same
everything, except, of course, when I decide to shake his hand.
At that point, we both would blow ourselves to smithereens in a
gigantic nuclear explosion.
Matter with a positive charge locks horns with its archenemy,
antimatter, with a negative charge.
The fate of the universe hangs in the balance of this epic battle.
Equal amounts of matter and antimatter will cancel each other out not
good.
A universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter is equivalent to
a universe with no matter at all, because the matter and antimatter
will annihilate back into pure radiation.
And there'll be nothing interesting no stars and galaxies and people in
between.
Like a cosmic game of Risk, the side with the most soldiers wins.
The score was very close, but there was a winner.
For every billion particles of antimatter, there were a billion and one
particles of matter.
That was the moment of creation.
The one extra particle of matter in each little volume survives,
survives enough to form all the matter we see in the stars and galaxies
today.
One in a billion might not sound like much, but it's enough to build a
universe.
We're the leftovers.
So, believe it or not, everything you see around you, the atoms of your
body, the atoms of the stars, are nothing but leftovers leftovers from
this ancient collision between matter and antimatter.
Lucky for us, there was enough left over to make all the stars and
planets.
And the universe is still less than one second old.
But now it's swarming with tiny, primitive particles.
The next stage is assembling those tiny particles into the first atom.
Give or take a couple of Planck times, the universe is nearly a second
old and still a very strange place.
But matter has won the battle with antimatter.
And now it's time to build the universe.
It's still extremely hot and expanding incredibly fast.
When the universe was a second old, the particles in it were very
different than the particles we see today.
There were no atoms.
Nothing that we recognize in the room around us today yet existed.
Now all that begins to change.
Temperatures continue to cool.
And as the primitive particles keep slowing down, they start bonding
together to form the atoms of the first elements.
The first one to form is hydrogen.
Then over the next three minutes, the universe begins to create two
more elements helium and lithium.
We went from a universe that was infinitely small to a universe that
was light-years in size.
In the first three minutes, essentially everything interesting that was
going to happen in the universe happened.
Well, not quite.
If you were there, you couldn't see it.
When we look at the night sky, we can see literally billions of years
into the past, and we think it's always been that way.
Nope, not true.
Bang that's when the universe began to become transparent.
But before then, it was milky.
There is a milky soup of loose electrons.
The young universe has to cool down enough for the electrons to slow
down and stick to new atoms.
It took a long time for all of the hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms
in the universe to form.
Scientists calculate it took to slow down enough so that the universe
could start mass-producing atoms.
When that happens, the milky fog clears.
The first light escapes and races across the universe.
Nearly 14 billion years later, two young scientists in New Jersey pick
it up by accident.
In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were mapping radio signals
across our galaxy.
Everywhere they looked, they picked up a strange background hum.
They first suspected their equipment.
Maybe pigeon droppings on the antenna were causing the strange signal.
But after cleaning the antenna, the mysterious hum remained.
So much for pigeon droppings.
Penzias delivered a talk at Princeton University.
And according to lore, one person in the back said, "Either you have
discovered the effects of bird droppings or the creation of the
universe".
It was in fact the moment of creation, nearly first atoms got their
electrons.
That's the moment when the milky cloud clears and the new universe
comes into view for the first time.
To capture better images of this critical event, NASA launched the
Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite, or COBE.
They pointed it out into space, where it took the temperature of the
universe.
By measuring differences in temperature across space, they created the
first map of our early universe.
The images were called the Face of God.
We got gorgeous pictures baby pictures of the infant universe when it
was But there were problems with it.
The picture was very fuzzy.
The COBE results were simply not good enough.
Mission looking good.
Liftoff.
So NASA launched an even more advanced satellite, WMAP, the Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe.
In 2001, David Spergel was part of the team looking for a clearer image
of the early universe.
It was exciting to go to the Cape.
It was one of these moments we were sitting there, watching this I was
there with my family watching the rocket go off.
It was very exciting when, within about a day, we were able to get our
first signal from the satellite and know it was working and working
properly.
This is the most detailed picture of the early universe ever taken,
just the Big Bang.
The red and yellow areas are warmer, the blue and green regions cooler.
And those temperature differences are clues to the future structure of
the universe.
You see tiny variations in temperature.
Those tiny variations in temperature reflect small variations in
density.
This region has more matter.
This region has less matter.
Like a blueprint for the construction of our universe, this image shows
us where there's more matter and where there's less.
Regions with no matter will become empty space.
Areas with denser matter will become the construction sites of
galaxies, stars, and planets.
These are the fluctuations that will grow to form galaxies.
So if it wasn't for those little density fluctuations, you and I would
not be here today.
Our universe is now and trillions of miles across.
Clouds of hydrogen and helium gas float through space.
It will take another gases create the first stars.
These first stars ignited the universe into what must have been the
most amazing fireworks.
The universe went from the dark ages to an age of splendor when the
first stars illuminated the gas and the universe began to glow in
majestic fashion.
I wish I'd been there.
It was like Christmas tree lights turning on.
The universe began to light up in all directions, until you form the
beautiful mosaic we now see today.
More and more stars turn on.
Bang, the first galaxy forms.
Over the next 8 billion years, countless more take shape.
Then about 5 billion years ago, in a quiet corner of one of those
galaxies, gravity begins to draw in dust and gas.
Gradually they clump together and give birth to a star, our Sun.
Bang, our tiny solar system springs to life, and with it, planet Earth.
Everything there is exists because of the Big Bang, and it's still
going on.
Our universe is still expanding.
But it won't just keep going forever.
Our universe had a beginning, and it will also have an end.
In the 14 billion years since the Big Bang, galaxies have been created
filled with stars, planets, and moons.
And the universe has been expanding the whole time.
We've learned space is quite big at least 150 billion light-years
across.
The universe may be infinite.
It might literally go on forever.
The answer is there doesn't have to be anything, in principle.
The universe could be infinite, and there's no outside, or it could be
closed on itself.
It could be such that if I looked far enough in that direction I'd see
the back of my head.
We may never know if the Big Bang produced a universe that goes on
forever.
But we do know that the Big Bang hasn't stopped yet.
The Big Bang is really continuing now.
We're continuing to bang, if you want, in the sense that the expansion
of the universe is continuing.
One of the most astounding discoveries in the last few years has been
the realization that our universe is not slowing down, like we once
thought, but it's actually speeding up.
It's accelerating.
It's in a runaway mode.
We now believe there's something called dark energy, the energy of
nothing, that is pushing the galaxies apart and is killing the
universe.
We can't see this destructive force, and we have no idea why it exists.
But it could mean the end of everything created in the Big Bang.
If dark energy continues pushing the universe apart, our Milky Way
galaxy could become a lonely outpost.
of our galactic neighbors will be out of sight.
Stars will burn out.
Galaxies will grow dark.
Even atoms will tear apart.
The birth of the universe, the Big Bang, was over in a flash.
But the death of our universe will take almost forever.
That great philosopher of the western world, Woody Allen, once said:
"Eternity is an awful long time, especially toward the end".
Figuring out how our universe will end is as dark a mystery as the Big
Bang.
It could collapse back in on itself, like a balloon when the air is let
out.
So, would the universe end with a Big Crunch, a reverse of the Big
Bang, or would it end by expanding out and becoming cold and dark? If
you wished, would it end in fire or ice, or with a bang or a whimper?
If the universe collapses, it might trigger another Big Bang.
Maybe that's already happened, and we're just one in a long line of
universes.
Personally, I believe in continual genesis that is, there's a never-
ending process whereby universes collide, split apart, give birth to
new universes, perhaps with different laws of physics within each
universe.
Maybe this isn't the first time it's happened.
Maybe it's cyclic, and it goes around and around again, eventually will
collapse, and the whole thing will start over again.
One universe or many, they all start with a Big Bang.
Everything that makes us human the atoms in our bodies, the jewelry we
wear, all the things that lead to the tragedy of life and the beauty
and the excitement, love, everything else arose because of processes
that happened And if we really want to understand ourselves at some
fundamental level, we really have to understand the Big Bang.
ago, the Big Bang created time and space, our whole vast universe, and
everything in it, including us.
Some people ask the question, "What's in it for me?" The Big Bang gave
us everything we see around us the distribution of galaxies and stars.
It set into motion the creation of elements that we see in the
universe.
And even the laws of physics themselves, we think, were born at the
instant of creation.
Everything started with the Big Bang, one brief moment in time 14
billion years ago, that contains the answers to our greatest questions
about our past, our present, and our future.
Each discovery brings us one step closer to understanding how the
universe works.

Black holes

The universe is home to real monsters.

We can't see them, but we know they're out there.
You really can't get anything bigger or stronger or scarier than a
black hole.
Black holes consume planets and stars anything that gets too close.
Black holes give physicists no end of headaches, 'cause they break all
the rules.
But they rule the universe.
They are center-stage.
We now know they dominate the evolution of the universe itself.
Black holes are the most mysterious objects in our universe.
Their gravity is absolute.
Nothing can escape.
They can suck in whole galaxies.
Black holes used to be science fiction.
Now we know they're real.
When I was a PhD student, people used to giggle when you'd hear about
black holes.
They're like unicorns, mythical creatures.
We called this the "giggle factor".
People would say, "Beam me up, Scotty".
Well, no one is laughing anymore.
So, they're not science fiction.
Even though we've never landed in one, we have enough evidence to know
that they're really out there.
This image might not look like much to you and me, but to a scientist,
it's proof that black holes exist.
It's an actual movie of a black hole devouring a star in the
constellation of Aquila.
Black holes are messy eaters.
The red spots you see are gas that's being spit out of the hole, into
space.
Eventually, over the next million years, this star will be eaten alive
and disappear.
A black hole is pretty much the end point of everything.
It's the end point of a star.
It's the end point of matter.
It's the end point of energy.
It's the end point of gravity.
I mean, that's really it.
That's the top of the scale.
Although they have the power to destroy like nothing else in the
universe, black holes also help build galaxies, a vital part of the
great cosmic machine.
Some astronomers think they could even be gateways to parallel
universes.
We are now entering the golden age of research in black-hole physics.
They could be the key to understanding the birth of the universe, its
formation, and then its death.
Black holes really represent, in one sense, the frontier of modern
astronomy.
And they're changing our ideas about how galaxies form and, indeed, how
the universe works.
Their power comes from one of the primary forces in nature gravity.
I teach astronomy.
And we teach our students that the fundamental principle of gravity is,
"gravity sucks".
Gravity keeps our feet on the ground and our planet orbiting around the
Sun.
But in a black hole, the force of gravity is off the charts so strong,
it sucks in anything nearby.
It can even bend the light from distant stars.
And if that light gets too close, the black hole swallows it.
Think of it like this.
Imagine a black hole as a waterfall.
Gravity is the river flowing toward the falls, and a beam of light the
kayak.
Upriver from the waterfall, the current is weak.
The kayaker can paddle against it and get away.
But closer to the waterfall, the current is stronger, and the kayaker
struggles to escape.
The edge of the waterfall is like the edge of a black hole.
No matter how strong the kayaker is, he's going down.
It's the same in space.
The way black holes are really devastating is because when you get
close to them, the gravity gets super-strong.
So strong that they eat light.
That's why black holes are black.
A black hole is like a roach motel.
Everything checks in.
Nothing checks out.
Anything that gets too close is doomed planets, stars, even whole solar
systems.
And don't think this is some faraway phenomenon.
Black holes are on the loose right here in our own cosmic neighborhood.
We now know there are wandering nomads throughout the Milky Way galaxy
vagabonds throughout the galaxy, where black holes can come up right
behind you and perhaps gobble you up, and they won't even burp.
If one ever comes close, watch out.
If a black hole found its way into our solar system, it would rip us
apart.
Any kind of black hole that could pass through the solar system would
be pulling on all the planets harder than the Sun does.
And so it's just gonna totally disrupt the gravitational balance of the
solar system.
The black hole would literally tear planets from their orbits and smash
them into each other.
It's just an epic disaster.
It's a bull in a china shop.
If it got close enough to, say, Jupiter, it could actually pull the
moons of Jupiter away from the planet itself.
It would just be flinging planets left and right everywhere as it
whipped through the solar system, leaving disaster in its wake.
If a black hole approached Earth, all that gravity would rip asteroids
from their orbits and hurl them toward our planet.
The Earth's surface would become an inferno.
It would be the beginning of the end.
First, it would swallow up the atmosphere, then the planet itself.
Destroying an entire solar system is nothing to a black hole.
But it's more than just a big, empty, sucking piece of space.
It's incredibly heavy.
To get an idea just how heavy and dense a black hole is, imagine the
Earth.
Now start to crush it and keep crushing until it's packed so tight even
the atoms themselves collapse.
When the Earth crushes down to just 5 centimeters across, that's the
density of a black hole.
It would be the size of a golf ball, yet weigh the same as the Earth,
with the same amount of gravity.
What can make something that small, that dense, and that powerful? We
don't have external forces, large pistons in the universe, to create
black holes.
So the only way the real black holes of the universe form is if gravity
can do the job itself.
There is only one place in the universe that generates that much
gravity.
And it's inside the largest stars.
When massive stars 10 times heavier than our sun die, gravity crushes
them, creating a huge explosion, a supernova.
But some stars are even bigger than that.
These supermassive stars weigh and have 100 times more gravity.
When one of these stars dies, it sets off the biggest explosion in the
universe - a hypernova.
This is the birth of a black hole.
Our universe is full of stars.
At the end of their lives, some die quietly.
Others go out in spectacular explosions.
And some give birth to black holes.
If you have a star, a supermassive star that's at the end of its life,
the core runs out of fuel.
There's nothing left to hold it up, and the core collapses down into a
black hole.
When that happens, the enormous gravity generated at the heart of
supermassive stars runs wild.
This is the dying star V.
Y.
Canis Majoris.
It's more than a billion miles across.
Like all stars, it's a giant nuclear-fusion reactor, pumping energy
outward.
At the same time, the star's extreme gravity crushes inward.
For a few million years, fusion and gravity are locked in standoff.
But when the star runs out of fuel, fusion stops and the stalemate
ends.
Gravity wins.
In a millisecond, the core shrinks to a fraction of its original size
and a baby black hole is born.
Immediately, it starts to cannibalize what's left of the star.
As matter swirls into the black hole, it gets incredibly hot.
And there are magnetic forces and frictional forces, and it's just a
witch's brew, a nightmare, what's going on right above the surface of
the black hole.
The new black hole in the middle keeps feeding on the body of the star
around it.
It eats the gas so fast, it chokes and coughs, blasting out huge beams
of energy.
They basically eat their way out from the star.
This happens in milliseconds.
It happens before the rest of the star even knows the core is gone.
And so basically, the star is dead before it hits the ground.
Finally, the star explodes.
In one second, it blasts out than our sun will produce over its entire
life.
What's left is a new black hole and two jets of energy hurtling through
the universe at the speed of light.
These jets are called "gamma-ray bursts".
They're incredibly energetic events.
In terms of raw energy and power, gamma ray bursts are second only to
the Big Bang itself.
Most of them last only a few seconds.
And they fry anything in their way.
They're so intense that if there was a gamma-ray burster in the region
of our galaxy near our solar system, it could literally vaporize the
entire planet.
Fortunately, most gamma-ray bursts occur outside our galaxy.
But they tell us something important about black holes and how our
universe works.
What we were seeing every time a gamma-ray burst went off was basically
the birth cry of a black hole.
By counting gamma-ray bursts, astronomers can figure out how many black
holes are being created.
In 2004, NASA launched the Swift probe to scan the universe for gamma-
ray bursts.
Five four three two one We have ignition.
And we have lift-off of NASA's Swift spacecraft, on a mission to study
and understand gamma-ray bursts throughout the universe.
This is the most powerful gamma-ray burst Swift has detected so far.
The flash of light announces the birth of a new black hole on the other
side of the universe.
Swift can only look at a fraction of what's out there.
Still, it detects at least one gamma-ray burst every day.
That discovery rocked astronomy to its foundations.
We once thought that black holes, like unicorns, could never be found.
We now believe that there are perhaps billions of black holes in the
night sky.
When we look around our galaxy and other galaxies, it's clear that the
universe is full of powerful black holes.
Finding black holes is one thing.
Figuring out how they work - that's a whole different ball game.
The only way to find out is to visit one.
You'd have to take a spacecraft across the vastness of space just to
get close to it.
Then you'd have to go inside the black hole.
There, you'd find a place where reality breaks down and time stands
still.
There are billions of black holes in the universe.
We can detect them with telescopes and satellites.
But we don't actually know what they're like up-close.
It's a long way off, but scientists are already speculating about a
mission to a black hole - a one-way trip to the most dangerous place in
the universe.
Originally, physicists were horrified at the idea of black holes.
They wanted to banish them, because the laws of physics, as we know
them, seem to break down at the instant of a black hole.
Time stops.
Gravity becomes infinite.
This is a nightmare.
Obviously, we can't send humans anywhere near a black hole.
But a robot? Well, sure.
A robotic probe could transmit data back just before it goes over the
edge.
That edge of a black hole is called the "event horizon".
It's the edge of time and space at least, in the universe we know.
We call the event horizon "event horizon" quite simply because it
separates space into two regions.
It's not a physical surface.
You might not even notice it if you were falling through it, but
ultimately, once you're inside of it, you're doomed.
As you approach the event horizon, gravity gets stronger and very
strange things start to happen.
As you fall into a black hole feet-first, your feet are closer to the
black hole.
And so the gravity they feel is stronger.
Your head is not quite as close, and so the gravity it feels is less.
And basically, what happens is, you get stretched out.
Your feet are being pulled much harder than your head, and you're like
a piece of taffy being pulled between two strong people.
As you get thinner and thinner and thinner, as you get closer and
closer and closer, you're undergoing a process we call
"spaghettification" because you're basically turned into a long, thin
tube of pasta.
Gravity would stretch our robotic probe to the limit, then rip it
apart.
But imagine if the probe was strong enough to survive and keep going.
As it gets close to the event horizon, everything goes crazy.
Gravity is so extreme, it stops time.
We think of time as being endless.
However, in a black hole, in some sense, time stops.
This sounds like it's nuts, but that's the way it works.
It's in the math.
It's actually woven into the fabric of the universe itself.
If you were to watch from a distance, the robot probe would seem to
slow down as it gets closer to the black hole.
Then it would appear to stop completely.
The whole process might just take a brief moment.
But from the outside, you appear to freeze and fall ever more slowly.
You actually can never observe an object fall all the way through the
event horizon.
It literally freezes at the surface because its clock is going
infinitely slowly compared to yours.
In reality, the probe hasn't stopped at all.
It keeps going and crosses the event horizon.
If the probe points its cameras backwards, towards the entrance of the
black hole, it will see light being sucked in.
If it points the camera forward, at first it sees only black, but as it
moves toward the heart of the black hole, it encounters the most
bizarre place in the universe.
The black hole's immense gravity pulls everything down to an
unimaginably small point at its center.
Scientists call it the "singularity".
We really just don't know what happens at the center of a black hole.
The densities are so great that the laws of physics break down, as we
know them.
A singularity is a point of infinite gravity, where space and time
become meaningless.
Now, that is ridiculous.
A singularity is basically a word for saying "I don't know".
It's a word for saying "I'm clueless".
Even now, scientists can't really answer the question, "What is a black
hole?" It's upsetting, a little bit, to think that there are objects
out there that are breaking the laws of physics.
There must be bigger laws that are being used by these black holes,
that are being obeyed by these black holes, that we just don't
understand yet.
Okay, so, the one thing we do understand is that black holes are born
from dying stars.
And most are small around 32 kilometers across.
But now scientists have discovered that some black holes are much
bigger.
They're called "supermassive black holes".
They're the same size as our entire solar system.
And one of these monsters lies at the heart of our own galaxy.
Our solar system lies in the Milky Way galaxy.
It's made up of billions of stars, including our sun, all revolving
around a mysterious region right at the center.
Children ask the question if the Moon goes around the Earth, the Earth
goes around the Sun, then what does the Sun go around? It's a good
question.
And astronomers ask the same thing.
Maybe there was something going on at the heart of the Milky Way
perhaps a black hole at the very center.
But because we can't actually see a black hole, the best they could do
was look for telltale signs.
Using infrared telescopes, they looked at the middle of the galaxy and
discovered a densely packed swarm of millions of stars.
But they couldn't see what was at the center.
One team has spent 15 years looking for clues.
High above the clouds on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, the giant Keck telescope
has the power to see right through to the center of the Milky Way.
The region which we have to study to prove that there's a black hole is
incredibly small.
It is absolutely the case of looking for a needle in a haystack, except
we know exactly where the needle is.
Andrea Ghez has spent countless nights scanning the center of the
galaxy for signs of a black hole.
To be able to do this experiment, one has to be able to see the stars
that are very close to the center of the galaxy and to position them
incredibly accurately.
And this would be equivalent to me in Los Angeles looking at you in New
York and seeing you be able to move your finger like this.
As the Keck kicks into action, a laser beam detects tiny disturbances
in the atmosphere that would distort the image.
Motors then adjust the huge The image is clear enough to track the
stars at the heart of our galaxy.
Ghez has taken thousands of images over the last 15 years.
And what they reveal is amazing.
The stars at the center of the galaxy are moving at millions of miles
an hour.
The center of the galaxy is a very extreme environment.
The speeds with which stars move is much higher than anywhere else in
our galaxy.
And that is absolutely the signpost of the black hole.
They look like tiny planets racing around an invisible sun.
But they're not planets.
They're stars.
It takes a lot of gravity to swing huge stars around in such fast,
tight orbits.
There's only one thing in the universe with that much pull a
supermassive black hole.
Watching these things shows the presence of a 4-million-times- the-
mass-of-our-sun black hole, located right at the heart of our galaxy.
It is a huge discovery.
Everything in our galaxy, including our own solar system, orbits around
a supermassive black hole.
But the Milky Way isn't the only galaxy with a black hole in the
middle.
There are supermassive black holes at the heart of most galaxies in the
universe.
The Andromeda galaxy is our closest neighbor.
It circles around a supermassive black hole weighing 140 million times
more than our sun.
Other galaxies, like this one, M87, have black holes weighing as much
as 20 billion suns.
How do black holes get so big, and what are they doing at the center of
galaxies? For answers, we have to go back nearly 14 billion years to
the beginning of the universe.
Back then, the universe was filled with clouds of gas from the Big
Bang.
In some places, the gas was thick enough for millions of stars to form.
Most of these new stars were supermassive.
They burned hot and fast and then exploded, creating lots of black
holes.
The early universe was a wild-and-crazy place where huge regions of
mass were collapsing catastrophically, producing black holes.
And, in fact, the early universe might have been full of emerging black
holes everywhere.
Gravity pulled many of them together.
All over the early universe, they merged, creating larger and larger
black holes.
Over hundreds of millions of years, each black hole grew, producing
stronger gravity and pulling in more and more gas.
New stars were born from the gas, forming primitive galaxies.
But the black hole kept on sucking in gas, until it could take no more,
igniting the most powerful flamethrower in the universe.
A young galaxy is a vast cluster of stars, stars that formed from
clouds of gas.
At the center of the new galaxy is a young, supermassive black hole
feeding on the gas, getting bigger and bigger.
If you can imagine, when a galaxy is very young and still forming,
there's a supermassive black hole forming at the core, and the gas is
still falling into it and still forming the galaxy.
Well, near that central black hole, things are getting very hot.
That material is heating up.
Gas is speeding into the black hole.
But it overloads, and there is no room for all that excess hot gas.
It has nowhere to go but out.
It's blasted into space in huge jets of energy.
Each jet is 20 times wider than our solar system and shoots clear
through the galaxy.
The supermassive black hole has ignited a quasar.
Quasars are literally the brightest objects in the universe.
They're so intense, they can outshine an entire galaxy.
This is a real photograph of a real quasar in the galaxy M87, Quasars
blast away huge quantities of gas from the surrounding galaxy - the
equivalent of 10 Earths every minute.
When you heat up a gas, it tends to expand and it blows outward.
And it's sort of like a wind, but on a huge scale.
And you get a black-hole wind, gas blowing out from the black hole.
Black holes suck gas in.
Quasars blow it out.
But eventually there's no gas left to make stars, and the galaxy stops
growing.
So we think that the eventual size that a galaxy can achieve depends on
the black hole in its center.
The two are tied together.
With no gas left to feed on, the quasar jets shrink and die.
What's left is a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy,
with a whole lot of young stars, just like our Milky Way back when it
was young.
Early on in the history of the Milky Way, when it was a young galaxy,
we were probably a quasar.
Probably every big galaxy was a quasar when it was young.
But right now we're old enough that the galaxy has quieted down.
Now astronomers are looking for quasars, the secret to finding more
black holes and figuring out how they work.
The Chandra observatory is a space telescope that can detect the
powerful x-rays quasars send out.
It's found thousands.
These remarkable images show quasars of all shapes and sizes firing out
into space.
Each one is a signpost for a young galaxy with a new black hole at its
center.
These quasars will eventually calm down as their galaxy matures and
takes its final shape.
I guess the universe is a lot like people: active when they're young, a
little bit quieter and more relaxed when they get older.
We now know that supermassive black holes and the quasars they create
control galaxies.
Black holes are central to understanding how galaxies form.
They're a key to understanding how they evolve with time.
So, in fact, rather than being obscura, they're fundamental to our
understanding of our galaxies and our universe.
The only way to find out more about black holes is to get a good look
at one.
And since an up-close visit is, well, not a good idea, astronomers are
trying to devise a way to take a picture of the supermassive black hole
at the heart of our own galaxy.
To get it, they'll need a telescope as large as Earth itself.
There's a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
It's hidden by a dense cluster of stars circling the heart of the
galaxy.
But soon, we hope we'll be able to see it.
Seeing is believing.
It would be spectacular if we can go right up there, nose-to-nose with
the event horizon of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way
galaxy.
And that's the Holy Grail.
A supermassive black hole lies hidden at the center of most galaxies.
We only know they're there because the stars around them are drawn in
at millions of miles per hour.
But there might still be a way to take a picture of the very edge of
the black hole - the event horizon.
Shep Doeleman and his team are trying to capture an image that shows
its outline.
We're essentially looking for the shadow, or the silhouette, of the
black hole, within this cloud of gas that's swirling around it.
This technique that we're exploiting is the best hope I think we have
to actually image a region of the universe which has hitherto been
completely invisible to us.
Optical telescopes can't see the black hole directly.
But the glowing, super-heated gas surrounding the black hole sends out
radio waves that can be used to make an image.
Huge radio telescopes pick up these signals from space.
The antenna will move in azimuth and elevation.
This one, at the M.
I.
T.
Observatory near Boston, is more than 30 meters wide.
It's big enough to detect very faint radio emissions from the black
hole in our own galaxy, 25,000 light-years away.
But it's not nearly big enough to capture an image.
We need to take multiple copies of these telescopes, place them around
the world to create a virtual telescope as large as the Earth itself.
Doeleman's team will link up radio telescopes around the globe, from
Hawaii to Chile to Africa.
When the whole network is connected, they'll have a virtual dish over
16,000 kilometers across, with 500 times the power of a single
telescope.
They think it will be powerful enough to take a picture of the event
horizon of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
They're already picking up signals from the dark heart of our galaxy.
When we saw the first detection, it was a moment where I just looked at
the computer screen and said to myself, "My God, we've done it.
We've actually seen something that's so small that it has to be coming
from right around the event horizon".
The signals are still too weak to give a complete picture, but Doeleman
expects the images to improve as more telescopes come online over the
next few years.
Eventually, the outline of the black hole itself should emerge.
But even a picture can't compare to witnessing it for yourself.
In the distant future, we may have the technology to actually enter and
pass through a black hole and maybe even survive the journey.
Then we might finally answer the question what lies at the heart of a
black hole? Some scientists believe we could use black holes as a kind
of portal, with the potential for travel across the universe.
This is still very speculative, but the mathematics seem to indicate
that as you fall through a black hole that you don't simply die - you
fall right through a wormhole, which is a gateway, a shortcut through
space and time.
Perhaps we could simply rocket across the universe through a subway
system that we call a black hole.
If black holes are shortcuts through space and time, it could turn one
of the coolest ideas from science fiction into reality.
Time travel is possible, but not very practical.
You see, the energy source, the material that you need to keep the
throat of a wormhole open is something so exotic that we cannot produce
it in the laboratory.
But if you could, it might be possible to exploit the power of black
holes to visit yesterday.
Perhaps our descendants in the future have already mastered this
technology.
So one day, if somebody knocks on your door and claims to be your
great-great-great-great- great-great granddaughter, don't slam the
door.
Black holes might even be gateways to other universes.
On the other side of a black hole, there could even be a Big Bang.
As a black hole collapses and matter falls into it, perhaps the matter
is blown out the other side in a white hole.
Doesn't that sound like the Big Bang? If a Big Bang is just the flip
side of a black hole, this could be how our own universe was born.
If you look at the equations for a black hole and put in the parameters
of the universe: the mass of the universe, the size of the universe
bingo! You find that our universe actually solves the equations for a
black hole.
In other words, we could be inside an event horizon.
Perhaps we are actually living inside a black hole.
Every black hole might be the origin of an entirely separate universe.
If that's true, there could be billions of universes out there each one
full of stars, planets, life.
Whatever we figure out later, we know now that black holes are
everywhere.
They're bigger in size and more critical to the evolution of the
universe than we ever imagined.
Literally, our understanding of the universe that's important around
us, the universe that's visible to telescopes, has been profoundly
affected by our realization that black holes are everywhere.
Once upon a time, people thought that black-hole physics was too
fantastic to be true.
And now they are center-stage.
We now know they dominate the evolution of the universe itself.
When I was a kid, black holes basically played a part in science
fiction.
It was always something to avoid.
Your spaceship - you try to get around them before you get drawn in.
But what we've learned since then is that black holes play a huge role
and a huge number of roles in the universe.
It's not an exaggeration to say that if black holes did not exist, we
wouldn't be here.
We literally owe our existence to black holes.
The story's not over yet.
There's still much more to be discovered about the mysterious objects
called black holes - the masters of the universe.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s01e02

Galaxies

We live in a galaxy called the Milky Way, an empire with hundreds of

billions of stars.
How did we get here, and what's our future? In every way, those
questions involve galaxies.
There are 200 billion galaxies in the known universe, each one unique,
enormous, and dynamic.
Galaxies are violent.
They were born in a violent history.
They will die a violent death.
Where do galaxies come from? How do they work? What is their future?
And how will they die? This is our galaxy, the Milky Way.
It's around The galaxy itself is a huge disk with giant spiral arms and
a bulge in the middle.
It's just one of a huge number of galaxies in the universe.
Galaxies are, first and foremost, large collections of stars.
The average galaxy may contain 100 billion stars.
They're really stellar nurseries, the place where stars are born and
where they also die.
The stars in a galaxy are born in clouds of dust and gas called
nebulas.
These are the pillars of creation in the Eagle nebula, a star nursery
deep in the Milky Way.
Our galaxy contains many billions of stars, and around many of them are
systems of planets and moons.
But for a long time, we didn't know much about galaxies.
Just a century ago, we thought that the Milky Way was all there was.
Scientists called it our island universe.
For them, no other galaxies existed.
Then, in 1924, astronomer Edwin Hubble changed all that.
Hubble was observing the universe with the most advanced telescope at
the time, the 254 centimeter Hooker on Mount Wilson near Los Angeles.
Deep in the night sky, he saw fuzzy blobs of light that were far, far
away.
He realized they weren't individual stars at all.
They were whole cities of stars, galaxies way beyond the Milky Way.
Astronomers had an existential shock.
In one year, we went from the universe being the Milky Way galaxy to a
universe of billions of galaxies.
Hubble had made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of
astronomy: the universe contains not just one but a great number of
galaxies.
This is the Whirlpool galaxy.
It has two giant spiral arms and contains around 160 million stars.
And Galaxy M87, a giant elliptical galaxy; it's one of the oldest in
the universe, and the stars glow gold.
And this is the Sombrero galaxy.
It has a huge, glowing core with a ring of gas and dust all around it.
Galaxies are gorgeous.
They represent, in some sense, the basic unit of the universe itself.
They're like gigantic pinwheels twirling in outer space.
It's like fireworks created by Mother Nature.
Galaxies are big really, really big.
On Earth, we measure distance in miles.
In space, astronomers use light-years - the distance light travels in a
year.
That's just under Here we are, from the center of our galaxy, and our
galaxy is over But even that, as large as it is, is kind of a speck in
the cosmic-distance scale.
Our Milky Way galaxy may seem big to us, but compared to some others
out there it's actually pretty small.
Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbor, is over 200,000 light-years
across, twice the size of the Milky Way.
M87 is the largest elliptical galaxy in our own cosmic backyard, and
much bigger than Andromeda.
But M87 is tiny compared to this giant.
IC 1011 is the biggest galaxy ever found.
It's 60 times larger than our Milky Way.
We know galaxies are big and they're everywhere, but why is that? One
of the very big questions we have in astrophysics is where galaxies
come from.
We really don't have a complete understanding of that.
The universe started in what we call a Big Bang, an extremely hot and
extremely dense phase about 13.
7 billion years ago.
We know that nothing like a galaxy could have existed at that time.
So galaxies must have been born, they must have formed, out of that
very early universe.
It takes gravity to make stars and even more gravity to pull stars
together into galaxies.
The first stars formed just 200 million years after the Big Bang.
Then gravity pulled them together, building the first galaxies.
The Hubble Space Telescope has allowed us to peer back in time to
almost the dawn of time the period when galaxies have just begun to
form.
The Hubble sees lots of galaxies.
But the light we see today from those galaxies left there thousands,
millions, even billions of years ago.
It's taken all that time to reach us, so what we see today is the
ancient history of those galaxies.
When we look at the Hubble Deep Field, what we see are little smudges.
They don't look much like the galaxies we see today.
They're just little smudges of light that we can barely discern.
Those smudges of light contain millions or billions of stars that have
just begun to merge together.
These faint smudges are the earliest galaxies of all.
They were formed around one billion years after the beginning of the
universe.
But that's as far back as Hubble can see.
If we want to go even further back in time, we need a different kind of
telescope, one too big to launch into space.
Well, now we have one, in the high desert of northern Chile.
This is ACT, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope.
At 5,181 meters, it's the highest ground-based telescope in the world.
I really like working in the extreme environment of ACT.
It's very, very cold often, and the wind blows violently.
But the good thing about it from our point of view is that the sky is
very, very clear almost all the time.
Clear skies are important for ACT's precise mirrors to focus on the
earliest galaxies.
With ACT, we're able to zoom in with unprecedented detail on parts of
the sky.
We can also study the progress of growth of structures, where
structures are things like galaxies and clusters of galaxies, with a
very fine-scale detail.
ACT doesn't detect visible light.
It detects cosmic microwaves from the time the universe was just a few
hundred thousand years old.
The telescope not only detects early galaxies it actually sees how they
grew.
We're able to track the progress of the formations of galaxies and
clusters of galaxies.
We see the footprints of all the galaxies that have grown in the time
between when the universe was a few hundred thousand years old till
now.
ACT has helped astronomers understand how galaxies have evolved since
almost the beginning of time itself.
And we can start answering the question, what did galaxies look like
when they were young? How did they compare with modern-day galaxies?
How have they grown? Astronomers are seeing how galaxies evolve from
groups of stars into the patchwork of systems we see today.
Our current understanding is that stars form clusters that build into
galaxies that build into clusters of galaxies that build into
superclusters of galaxies, the largest structures we observe in the
universe today.
Early galaxies were a mess, lumpy bunches of stars, gas, and dust.
But today galaxies look neat and orderly.
So, how do messy galaxies transform into beautiful spirals and
pinwheels? The answer is gravity.
Gravity shapes galaxies and controls their future.
There is an unimaginably powerful and incredibly destructive source of
gravity at the heart of most galaxies.
And there's one buried deep at the center of our own Milky Way.
Galaxies have existed for over 12 billion years.
We know these vast empires of stars come in all shapes and sizes, from
swirling spirals to huge balls of stars.
But there's still a lot about galaxies we don't know.
How did galaxies come to have the shapes they do? Was a spiral galaxy
always a spiral galaxy? The answer is almost certainly no.
Very young galaxies are messy and chaotic, a jumble of stars, gas, and
dust.
Then, over billions of years, they evolve into neat, organized
structures, like the Whirlpool galaxy Or our own Milky Way.
Our Milky Way began not as a single baby galaxy, but many.
What is now our Milky Way was once comprised of lots of small
structures, irregularly shaped objects that began to merge.
The thing that pulls the small structures together is gravity.
Gradually, it pulls stars inward.
They begin spinning faster and faster and flatten into a disk.
Stars and gas are swept into huge spiral arms.
This process was repeated billions and billions of times across the
universe.
Each of these galaxies looks different, but they do have one thing in
common - they all seem to orbit something at their center.
For years, scientists wondered what could be powerful enough to change
how a galaxy behaves.
They found out - a black hole.
And not just any kind of black hole - a supermassive black hole.
The first clue that supermassive black holes existed was that at the
heart of some galaxies, there was an immense amount of energy emanating
out from the center.
What we're seeing is the black holes in these galaxies feasting on the
material around them, so it's like having a huge Thanksgiving dinner.
The meal is gas and stars, and it's being eaten by the supermassive
black hole.
When black holes eat, they sometimes eat too fast and spit their dinner
back out into space in beams of pure energy.
It's called a quasar.
When scientists see a quasar blasting from a galaxy, they know it has a
supermassive black hole.
But what about our galaxy? There's no quasar here.
Does that mean there's no supermassive black hole? Andrea Ghez and her
team have spent the last 15 years trying to find out.
So, the key to discovering a supermassive black hole at the center of
our Milky Way is to watch how the stars move.
The stars move because of the gravity, just like the planets orbiting
the Sun.
But the stars closest to the center of the galaxy are hidden by clouds
of dust.
So Ghez used the giant Keck telescope in Hawaii to look through the
clouds.
What she saw was a strange and brutal place.
Everything is more extreme at the center of our galaxy.
Things move really fast.
Stars are gonna be whizzing by one another.
It's windy.
It's violent.
It's unlike anyplace else in our galaxy.
Ghez and her team began to take pictures of a few stars orbiting near
the center.
The task has been to make a movie of the stars at the center, and so
you have to be patient, because you take a picture, and then you take
another one, and you see it move.
The pictures of the orbiting stars revealed something amazing.
They were moving at several million miles an hour.
When we had the second picture was the most exciting point in this
experiment, because it was clear to us that these stars were moving so
fast that the supermassive-black-hole hypothesis had to be right.
And it was right.
Ghez and her team tracked the movement of the stars and pinpointed what
they were orbiting.
There's only one thing powerful enough to sling big stars around like
that - a supermassive black hole.
It's the gravity of the supermassive black hole that makes these stars
orbit, so the curvature was the definitive proof of a supermassive
black hole at the center of our galaxy.
The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is gigantic So, is Earth
in any danger? We are in absolutely no danger of being sucked into our
supermassive black hole.
It's simply too far away.
In fact, the Earth is 25,000 light-years away from the supermassive
black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
That's many trillions of miles.
The Earth is safe for now.
Supermassive black holes may be the source of huge amounts of gravity,
but they don't have enough power to hold galaxies together.
In fact, according to the laws of physics, galaxies should fly apart.
So why don't they? Because there's something out there even more
powerful than a supermassive black hole.
It can't be seen, and it's virtually impossible to detect.
It's called dark matter, and it's everywhere.
Astronomers have figured out that supermassive black holes live at the
heart of galaxies and pull stars at incredible speeds.
But they're not strong enough to hold all the stars in a gigantic
galaxy together.
So, what does hold them together? It was a mystery until a maverick
scientist came up with the idea that something unknown was at work.
Back in the 1930s, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky wondered why galaxies
stayed together in groups.
By his calculations, they didn't generate enough gravity, so they
should fly away from each other.
And so he said, "Well, I know that they haven't flown apart.
I see them all gathered together in this nice collection.
Therefore, something must be holding them in place".
But our own gravity was just not strong enough.
And so he concluded that it must be something which nobody had detected
before, nobody had thought about, and he gave it this name, dark
matter.
And this is really a stroke of genius.
Fritz Zwicky was decades ahead of his time, and that's why he grated on
the astronomical community.
But, you know, he was right.
If what Zwicky called dark matter held galaxies together in groups,
perhaps it also holds individual galaxies together.
To find out, scientists built virtual galaxies in computers with
virtual stars and virtual gravity.
We did a simulation where we put a lot of particles in orbit in a flat
disk, which was just like the picture of our galaxy.
And we expected to find that we get a perfectly good galaxy, and we
were looking to see if it had a spiral or whatnot.
But we found it always came apart.
There just wasn't enough gravity in the galaxy to hold it together.
So Ostriker then added extra gravity, from virtual dark matter.
It seemed like a natural thing to try.
And it solved the problem.
It fixed it.
Gravity from dark matter held the galaxy together.
Dark matter acts as a sort of protective scaffolding for galaxies that
really holds them up and holds them in place and prevents them from
falling apart.
Now scientists are discovering that dark matter doesn't just hold
galaxies together - it might have sparked them into life.
We think that dark matter was created out of the Big Bang, and dark
matter began to clump, and these clumpings of dark matter eventually
became the nuclei, the seeds, for our galaxy.
But scientists still have no idea what dark matter actually is.
Dark matter is weird because we don't understand it at all.
It's clearly not made of the same stuff that you and I are made of.
You can't push against it.
You can't feel it.
Yet it's probably all around us.
It's a ghostlike material that will pass right through you as if you
didn't exist at all.
We might not know much about dark matter, but the universe is full of
it.
So, the dark matter, weight-for-weight, makes up at least six times as
much of the universe as does normal matter, the stuff that we're all
made from.
And without it, the universe just wouldn't work the way that it seems
to work.
But the universe does work, so maybe dark matter is real.
Strange stuff, and recently, it's been detected in deep space, not
directly but by observing what it does to light.
It bends it in a process called gravitational lensing.
Gravitational lensing really allows us to test the presence of dark
matter.
And the way that works is that, as a beam of light from some distant
galaxy is traveling towards us, if it passes by a large collection of
dark matter, its path will be deflected around that dark matter by the
gravitational pull.
When the Hubble telescope looks deep into the universe, some galaxies
do seem distorted and stretched.
That's caused by the dark matter, which warps the image.
It's sort of like looking through a goldfish bowl.
By probing the shapes of those galaxies and the degree of distortion,
we can really measure very accurately the amount of dark matter that's
there.
It's clear now that dark matter is a vital ingredient of the universe.
It's been working since the dawn of time and affects everything
everywhere.
It triggers the birth of galaxies and keeps them from falling apart.
We can't see it or detect it, but, nevertheless, dark matter is the
master of the universe.
Galaxies look isolated.
It's true they are trillions of miles apart.
But, actually, they live in groups called clusters.
And these clusters of galaxies are linked together in superclusters,
containing tens of thousands of galaxies.
So, where does our Milky Way galaxy fit in? If you take a look at the
big picture, you realize that our galaxy is part of a local group of
galaxies, perhaps 30, and our galaxy and Andromeda are the two biggest
galaxies in this local group.
But if you look even farther out, we are part of the Virgo supercluster
of galaxies.
Scientists are now mapping the overall structure of the universe and
the position of clusters and superclusters of galaxies.
This is Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, home to the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS.
It's a small telescope with a big price tag, and it has a unique
mission.
SDSS is building the first a process that's identifying the exact
positions of tens of millions of galaxies.
To do it, SDSS goes galaxy hunting way out into space, far beyond our
Milky Way.
It pinpoints the positions of galaxies, and this information is copied
onto aluminum disks.
These aluminum disks are about 80 centimeters across, and they have 640
holes each, and these holes correspond to the objects of interest in
the sky.
Each object is a galaxy.
Light from the galaxy is channeled through a hole and down a fiberoptic
cable.
This method records data on distance and position from thousands of
galaxies and plots their location in 3-D.
It's telling us about their shape.
It's telling us about their makeup.
It's telling us how they're distributed.
And all of this is very important to astronomy and understanding our
universe.
And this is what they're creating - the biggest 3-D map ever.
The map is showing us things we've never seen before.
It shows galaxies in clusters and superclusters But pull back even
more, and we see that these superclusters are connected into structures
called filaments.
SDSS has found one that's 1.
4 billion light-years across.
It's called the Great Sloan Wall, and it's the largest single structure
ever discovered in the history of science.
You get a sense that you are in something quite vast.
You can see the clusters and filaments as the data would scroll by.
And, you know, each one of these little, fuzzy spots were actually
galaxies not stars but galaxies and so you're seeing whole clusters of
these things.
SDSS is showing galactic geography on a vast scale.
Scientists have taken it even further.
They've built the whole universe in a supercomputer.
Here you can't see individual galaxies.
You can't even see galaxy clusters.
What you can see are superclusters, linked together on filaments in a
vast cosmic web.
As one begins to come back from the whole scale of the universe, one
begins to reveal a filamentary pattern, a cosmic web containing
galaxies and clusters of galaxies that light up the universe where
there are as many galaxies in that direction as that direction as that
direction as that direction.
And, in fact, on larger scales, the universe kind of looks like a
sponge.
Each of the filaments is home to millions of galaxy clusters, all bound
together by dark matter.
In this computer simulation, the dark matter glows along the filaments.
Dark matter affects where in the universe galaxies will form.
When we look at galaxies, they're not sprinkled around at random.
They actually tend to form in little groups, and that's really
reflecting the large-scale distribution of dark matter.
Dark matter is the glue holding together the whole superstructure of
the universe.
It binds galaxies in clusters and clusters in superclusters.
All these are locked together in a web of filaments.
Without dark matter, the whole structure of the universe would simply
fall apart.
This is the big picture of our universe.
It's a giant cosmic web.
And hidden deep in one of these filaments is the Milky Way.
It's been around for nearly 12 billion years.
But in the future, it's going to be destroyed in a gigantic cosmic
collision.
Galaxies are vast kingdoms of stars.
Some are giant balls, and others, complex spirals.
The thing is, they never stop changing.
While it may seem, when we look out at our galaxy, that our galaxy is
static and been here forever, it's not.
Our galaxy is a dynamic place.
Its very nature has been changing over cosmic time.
Galaxies not only change they move, as well.
And sometimes they run into each other.
And when they do, it's eat or be eaten.
There's a zoo of galaxies that you can find out there, and this entire
zoo can interact or collide with any of the other members of the zoo.
This is NGC 2207.
It looks like an enormous double-spiral galaxy, but it's actually two
galaxies colliding.
The collision will last millions of years, and eventually the two
galaxies will become one.
Collisions like this happen all over the universe.
Our own Milky Way is no exception.
The Milky Way is, in fact, a cannibal, and it exists in its present
form by having cannibalized small galaxies that it literally ate up.
And today we can see small streams of stars that are left over from the
most recent mergers that have formed the Milky Way galaxy.
But that's nothing compared to what's coming up.
We are on a collision course with the galaxy Andromeda.
And for the Milky Way, that's bad news.
Our Milky Way galaxy is approaching Andromeda at the rate of about a
quarter of a million miles per hour, which means that in 5 to 6 billion
years, it's all over for the Milky Way galaxy.
You would see the entire Andromeda galaxy speeding towards us, really
barreling straight into us.
As the two galaxies interact, they both become more and more disturbed
and closer and closer together.
And the whole process starts to snowball.
The two galaxies will enter a death dance.
This is a simulation of the future collision, sped up millions of
times.
As the galaxies crash together, clouds of gas and dust are thrown out
in all directions.
Gravity from the merging galaxies rips stars from their orbits and
shoots them deep into space.
As we approach doomsday for the Milky Way galaxy, it would be
spectacular.
We would have a front-row seat on the destruction of our own galaxy.
And eventually, the two galaxies will go right through each other and
then come back and then coalesce.
It's strange, but the stars themselves won't collide.
They're still too far apart.
All of the stars are basically just gonna pass right by each other.
The probability of one individual star hitting another individual star
are basically zero.
However, the gas and dust between the stars will start to heat up.
Eventually, it ignites, and the clashing galaxies will glow white-hot.
So, at a certain point, the sky could be on fire.
The Milky Way and Andromeda as we know it will cease to exist, and
Milkomeda will be born, and it will look like a whole new galaxy.
This new galaxy, Milkomeda, will become a huge, elliptical galaxy
without any arms or spiral shape.
There's no escaping what's going to happen.
The question is, what's it mean for planet Earth? We may either be
thrown out into outer space when the arms of the Milky Way galaxy are
ripped apart, or we could wind up in the stomach of this new galaxy.
Stars and planets will be pushed all over the place, so this may well
be the end of planet Earth.
Galaxies all over the universe will continue to collide.
But this age of galactic cannibalism will eventually pass because there
is an even more destructive force in the universe, a force that nothing
can stop.
It will ultimately push galaxies away from each other, stretching
everything until the universe rips itself apart.
Galaxies are home to stars, solar systems, planets, and moons.
Everything that's important happens in galaxies.
Galaxies are the lifeblood of the universe.
We arose because we live in a galaxy, and everything we can see and
everything that matters to us in the universe happens within galaxies.
But the truth is, galaxies are delicate structures held together by
dark matter.
Now scientists have found another force at work in the universe.
It's called dark energy.
Dark energy has the opposite effect of dark matter.
Instead of binding galaxies together, it pushes them apart.
The dark energy, which we've only discovered in the last decade, which
is the dominant stuff in the universe, is far more mysterious.
We don't have the slightest idea why it's there.
What it's made from, we don't really know.
We know it's there, but we don't really know what it is or what it's
doing.
Dark energy is really weird.
It's as if space has little springs in it which are causing things to
repel each other and push them apart.
Far in the future, scientists think that dark energy will win the
cosmic battle with dark matter.
And that victory will start to drive galaxies apart.
Dark energy's gonna kill galaxies off.
It's gonna do that by causing all the galaxies to recede further and
further away from us until they're invisible, until they're moving away
from us faster than the speed of light.
So, the rest of the universe will literally disappear before our very
eyes.
Not today, not tomorrow, but in perhaps a trillion years, the rest of
the universe will have disappeared.
Galaxies will become lonely outposts in deep space.
But that's not going to happen for a very, very long time.
For now, the universe is thriving and galaxies are creating the right
conditions for life to exist.
Without galaxies, I wouldn't be here.
You wouldn't be here.
Perhaps life itself wouldn't be here.
We're lucky.
Life has only evolved on Earth because our tiny solar system was born
in the right part of the galaxy.
If we were any closer to the center, well, we wouldn't be here.
At the center of a galaxy, life can be extremely violent.
And, in fact, if our solar system were closer to the center of our
galaxy, it would be so radioactive that we couldn't exist at all.
Too far away from the center would be just as bad.
Out there, there aren't as many stars.
We might not exist at all.
So, in some sense, we are in the Goldilocks Zone of the galaxy not too
close, not too far, but just right.
Scientists believe that this galactic Goldilocks Zone might contain
millions of stars, so there may be other solar systems that can support
life right here in our own galaxy.
And if our galaxy has a habitable zone, then other galaxies could, too.
The universe is immense, and the amazing thing is that we're always
discovering more.
Every time we think we know the answer to one problem, we find it's
embedded in a much bigger problem.
And that's exciting.
There are endless questions to ask and mysteries to solve in our own
galaxy, the Milky Way, and in galaxies all across the universe.
who would have thought that we would be able to identify the black hole
at the center? Who would have thought that the astronomical community
would believe in dark matter and dark energy? More and more, scientific
research is focusing on galaxies.
They hold the key to how the universe works.
We should be amazed to live at this time, here, at a random time in the
history of the universe, on a random planet, at the outskirts of a
random galaxy, where we can ask questions and understand things from
the beginning of the universe to the end.
We should celebrate our brief moment in the sun.
Galaxies are born They evolve They collide And they die.
Galaxies are the superstars of the scientific world.
And even the scientists who study them have their favorites.
The Whirlpool galaxy, or M51.
I kind of like the Sombrero galaxy, if I had to put one on a wall.
The Sombrero galaxy, ring galaxies They're just beautiful to look at.
My favorite galaxy is the Milky Way galaxy.
It's my true home.
We're lucky that the Milky Way provides the right conditions for us to
live.
Our destiny is linked to our galaxy and to all galaxies.
They made us, they shape us, and our future is in their hands.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s01e03

Stars

Stars they're big, they're hot, and they are everywhere.

Stars rule the universe.
Our destiny is linked to the destiny of stars.
Born in violence, dying in epic explosions.
They fill the universe with stardust, the building blocks of life.
Every atom in your body was produced inside the fiery core of a star.
Stars are what make our universe work.
All life begins here.
The night sky is packed with stars.
On a clear night in the country, if you're lucky, you can see maybe
3,000 stars.
But that's just the tip of a vast cosmic iceberg.
In our galaxy alone, there are over 100 billion stars.
And, in fact, there are over 100 billion galaxies in the observable
universe.
There are more stars than there are specks of sand on Earth.
Every star is powerful, creating the basic matter for everything in the
universe including us.
Most are so far away, we know little about them.
But there is one star that's really close, and virtually everything we
know about stars, we've learned from that neighbor.
The sunlight from our sun that bathes us and warms us every day is
nothing but starlight because our sun is nothing but a star like all
the rest.
Seen from Earth, our sun is a blinding ball of light.
But take away the glare, and one of the most powerful objects in the
universe appears in our own backyard.
It's a ball of superheated gas that's been lighting our solar system
for 4.
6 billion years and dominates all life on Earth.
The Sun is 149 million kilometers away.
And that means, in actuality, it's immense.
You could fit a million Earths inside the Sun.
It's nearly yet our sun is tiny compared to the really big stars out
there.
Eta Carinae over five million times larger than our sun.
Betelgeuse 300 times larger than Eta Carinae.
If it was our sun, it would reach as far out as Jupiter.
And then there's this monster V.
Y.
Canis Majoris, the largest star ever discovered.
A billion times bigger than our sun.
Stars burn in different colors, from red to yellow to blue.
Some live alone.
Others in pairs, orbiting each other and coming together in huge
galaxies - entire cities made up of billions of stars.
Each star is a one of a kind.
But they all start life in the same way, as clouds of dust and gas
called nebulas.
Many billions of miles across, they drift through space, forming
spectacular shapes.
The Flame nebula.
The Horsehead nebula.
The Orion nebula.
Each nebula is a star nursery where millions of new stars are being
born.
But this birth is hidden from view.
Some of the more dramatic parts of a nebula are not the beautiful
glowing gas that you see but the dark parts.
The dark parts have areas of dense gas and dust, and that's where the
real action is happening in terms of star formation.
The dust clouds are so thick, regular telescopes can't see inside.
There's nothing more important to us than stars, but for a long time,
the way they formed was a complete mystery.
We couldn't observe them.
Imagine that.
We could not see the first moments of a star at all.
Until 2004 when NASA launched the Spitzer space telescope.
And liftoff.
Seeking hidden secrets and the evolution of our universe.
Spitzer is an infrared telescope.
It only sees heat.
Heat passes through the thick dust of the nebulas, allowing Spitzer to
see new stars coming to life inside.
These remarkable pictures capture the earliest moments in a star's life
as pockets of hydrogen gas begin to heat up.
Any little bit of gas and dust is glowing.
Areas that were entirely dark now became bright.
We can actually see the very earliest parts of star formation.
All you need to make a star is hydrogen, gravity, and time.
Gravity pulls the dust and gas into a giant swirling vortex.
Gravity brings matter together.
And when you bring matter together and you squeeze things into smaller
spaces, they necessarily heat up.
It's a simple law of chemistry.
You compress something, you drive the temperature up.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, the cloud gets thicker and forms a
giant spinning disk bigger than our entire solar system.
At its center, gravity crushes the gas into a superdense, super-hot
ball.
Pressure builds until huge jets of gas burst out from the center.
That really shows you how violent a process star formation is.
These jets are many light-years across.
Something is literally accelerating material very fast across
unimaginable distances.
Gravity keeps the pressure on, sucking in gas and dust particles that
smash into each other, generating more and more heat.
Over the next half a million years, the young star gets smaller,
brighter, and hotter.
Temperatures at its core reach 8 million degrees.
Only at that mind-boggling temperature can atoms of gas begin to fuse
together, releasing massive amounts of energy.
And just like that, a star is born.
It will shine for millions, even billions, or perhaps even trillions of
years.
Stars produce massive amounts of heat and light over billions of years.
But that takes fuel and lots of it.
Until the early 20th century, no one had any idea what this fuel was.
The greatest problem facing physics at the turn of the last century
was, what drives the energy of stars? All you had to do was look
outside and realize there was a huge gaping hole in our understanding.
To solve the secret of the stars, we needed a new engine.
We needed a fabulous source of energy that could drive a star for
billions of years at a time.
And it took a genius to discover it - Albert Einstein.
His theories proved that stars could tap into the energy inside atoms.
The secret of the stars is Einstein's equation E=mc².
In some sense, matter, which makes up our body, is concentrated energy,
condensed energy energy that has condensed into the atoms that make up
our universe.
Einstein showed that it's possible to release this energy by smashing
atoms together.
It's called fusion, the same force that powers stars.
It's astonishing to realize that the physics of the very small
subatomic particle physics determines the structure and nature of
stars.
From Einstein's theories, we learned how to release the energy inside
an atom.
Now science is trying to simulate a star's energy source to control the
power of fusion in a lab.
Inside this laboratory near Oxford, England, there's an 36,000-kilogram
machine.
Every day, Andy Kirk and his team transform it into a star on Earth.
This machine is called a tokamak.
It's effectively a large magnetic bottle, a cage to hold a very hot
plasma.
We're able to re-create the conditions within a star.
Inside the tokamak, hydrogen atoms naturally repel each other.
To smash hydrogen atoms together, the tokamak heats them to more than
166 million degrees.
At these temperatures, the energized hydrogen atoms are moving so fast,
they can't avoid smashing into each other.
If you heat it up, heat is motion.
And the motion of hot particles will be enough to overcome the
repulsive force.
All personnel, be prepared to leave.
Come off the machine area.
When everything goes right, the result is the single best power plant
in the universe - nuclear fusion.
Traveling at over 1,600 kilometers a second, the hydrogen atoms smash
into each other and fuse creating a new element helium and a small
amount of pure energy.
The hydrogen gas weighs slightly more than the helium.
You lost mass in the process of burning.
That mass that you lost, the missing mass, turns into energy.
The tokamak can only maintain fusion for a fraction of a second.
But inside a real star, fusion continues for billions of years.
The reason is simple - size.
The engine which drives a star is gravity.
That's why stars are big.
Stars are huge.
You need that amount of gravity in order to compress the star to create
fantastic amounts of heat sufficient to ignite nuclear fusion.
That is the secret of the stars.
That's why stars shine.
Fusion at the core of a star generates the explosive force of a billion
nuclear bombs every second.
A star is a gigantic hydrogen bomb, so why doesn't it simply blow
apart? It's because gravity is compressing the outer layers of the
star.
Gravity and fusion lock horns in an epic battle.
We have this constant tension between gravity, which wants to crush a
star to smithereens, and, also, the energy released by the fusion
process, which wants to blow the star apart.
And that tension, that balancing act, creates a star.
This power struggle plays out over the entire life of a star - two
awesome forces of nature in a dynamic standoff.
As that battle rages, the star blast out light in heat, but also
something far more destructive.
Each beam of starlight makes an epic journey.
Light travels at 1 billion kilometers an hour.
A beam of light could travel around the Earth seven times in one
second.
Nothing in the universe moves faster.
Yet most stars are so far away, their light takes hundreds, thousands,
millions, even billions of years to reach us.
So, when the Hubble space telescope looks into the far corners of our
universe, it sees light that's been traveling for billions of years.
The light we see today from Eta Carinae left that star when our
ancestors first farmed the land Light from Betelgeuse has been
traveling since Columbus discovered America 500 years ago.
Even light from our own sun takes eight minutes to reach us.
But even before light starts its journey through space, it's already
been traveling for thousands of years.
When the Sun fuses hydrogen into helium in its core, it creates a
photon of light, a particle of light.
That new ray of light has a long way to go just to reach the star's
surface.
There's a whole star in its way.
And so when the photon is created, it doesn't get very far before it
immediately slams into another atom another proton, another neutron,
something.
It gets absorbed and then shot off in another direction.
And so it's sort of randomly moving around inside of the Sun, and it
has to work its way out.
For the photons, it's a wild ride, smashing into atoms of gas billions
of times as they struggle to escape from inside the star.
What's funny about this whole process is that it takes the photon
thousands and thousands of years to get from the core of the Sun to the
surface.
And yet once it hits the surface, it's only an eight-minute trip from
there to here.
Photons are the source of light and heat, but they also cause something
far more destructive - the solar wind.
As they reach the surface, photons heat up the outer layers of the Sun
sending it hurtling around the star, creating extreme turbulence and
intense shock waves.
It's so violent, we can actually hear it.
Picked up by the orbiting SOHO satellite, this is the sound of the Sun.
The speeding gases also generate powerful magnetic fields.
As the star rotates, the fields clash and burst through the surface.
Giant magnetic loops erupt into space.
Some are so large, the Earth could pass right through them with
thousands of miles to spare.
They are spectacular, and they are deadly, blasting a stream of
electrical particles deep into space.
This is the solar wind.
It can damage spaceships and satellites, even put astronauts' lives in
jeopardy.
To discover how the magnetic loops trigger the solar wind, a team of
scientists at CalTech re-create the surface of a star right here on
Earth.
It's very exciting to be able to create in a laboratory the same sort
of physics that are on the solar surface.
We can't go there.
We can't even send probes there.
But we can try to study what's happening there.
An airless chamber simulates the vacuum of space.
An enormous electric current produces a pair of man-made magnetic
loops.
The main difference between the plasma loops we make in the lab and the
ones on the surface of the Sun is just their size.
The ones we make in lab are, you know, about this big, and the ones on
the surface of the Sun can be many times the size of the Earth.
Their experiment reveals that when magnetic loops clash in the lab,
they trigger a massive burst of energy.
When giant loops collide on the surface of a star, the energy released
sends temperatures soaring from 5 thousand to 5 million degrees.
That extreme heat triggers the solar wind, sending millions of tons of
particles streaming out into space.
The bigger the star, the more deadly the wind.
If we were orbiting a star like Eta Carinae at the same distance, it
would be hell on earth, quite literally.
The amount of energy blasting down on the Earth would strip away our
atmosphere, boil our oceans, melt the surface.
Understanding how stars work could help us protect ourselves by
predicting their most destructive forces.
But there's nothing we can do to protect ourselves when a star dies.
In its final moments, it annihilates everything around it.
From the moment of its birth, every star is destined to die.
Its fuel will run out.
Then gravity will win the battle with fusion, triggering a chain of
events that will destroy the star.
Our sun is no exception.
Every second, it burns through 544 million tons of the hydrogen fueled
in its core.
At that rate, the hydrogen will run out In about seven billion years.
As the hydrogen gets used up, it slows down the fusion at the star's
core.
This gives gravity the edge.
With less fusion pushing outward, gravity crushes the star in on
itself.
But fusion fights back, heating the star's outer layers.
When you heat up a gas, it expands.
And so the Sun will actually expand up.
Instead of being a 1.
6 million kilometers across like it is now, it'll swell up until it's
about Our sun will become a red giant.
Imagine a sunrise 7 billion A.
D.
It's not just a little, yellow disk coming up all cheerful and nice.
What you would see is a huge, swollen, bloated, red disk slowly
reaching up over the horizon.
And when the Sun is fully up in the sky, it's blasting down heat on the
Earth.
It would be like sticking your head in an oven set to "broil".
Temperatures here on Earth will reach thousands of degrees.
The oceans will boil, the mountains will melt, and we'll have the last
nice day on the planet Earth.
Then the bloated star will engulf the Earth.
But the giant red star is self-destructing.
Its core becomes dangerously unstable.
With no hydrogen left to fuel it, the star begins burning helium and
fusing it into carbon.
The star is now destroying itself from the inside out, blasting violent
surges of energy from its core to its surface.
These energy waves blow away the star's outer layers.
Slowly, it disintegrates.
The star is dead.
All that remains is an intensely hot, dense core.
The red giant has become a white dwarf.
By the time a star reaches the white-dwarf stage, the fusion process
has stopped.
The engine has finally come to rest.
Our sun will end its life as a white dwarf no larger than the Earth but
a million times denser.
A white dwarf is a pretty amazing object.
It's incredibly dense.
If you could take a sugar-cube-sized chunk of white dwarf and put it on
the surface of the Earth, it would be so dense, it would fall right
through the ground.
At the heart of a white dwarf, astronomers believe there's a giant
crystal of pure carbon.
A cosmic diamond thousands of miles across.
The idea that the Sun will become this sort of cool, dark lump of
cinder material is kind of sad.
But that really will be sort of a trillion-trillion- trillion-karat
diamond.
Think of that - a diamond in the sky.
But stars can create something much more precious than a massive
diamond.
When stars much bigger than our sun die, their death is much more
violent.
But, in dying, they create a building blocks of life.
Giant stars live fast, burn bright, and die hard.
But from their destruction comes life.
The death of massive stars creates the building blocks of the universe
- the seeds of life itself.
Less than 600 light-years from Earth, the monster star Betelgeuse is
near death Well, in space years.
It's younger than our sun millions, not billions of years old.
But the fusion at its core is far more intense.
Betelgeuse is a different beast from the Sun entirely.
It's a red supergiant.
And the reason is because Betelgeuse is more massive.
It has 20 times the mass of the Sun, and that means what's going on in
its core is very different than what's going on in the Sun's.
Massive stars generate pressures and temperatures greater than anywhere
else in the universe.
The gravity of Betelgeuse is so powerful, it can smash together bigger
and bigger atoms.
The core of a massive star is a kind of factory, manufacturing heavier
and heavier elements which is what also leads to the star's
destruction.
Once it makes the element iron, the star is doomed.
In the world of science fiction, there are many ideas about what a
star-killer machine might be like.
Strangely enough, it's as run of the mill as something as iron.
To a star, iron is the most dangerous element in the universe.
It's poison.
Iron absorbs energy.
From the moment a massive star creates iron, it has only seconds to
live.
The star is trying to dump energy into that iron ball and trying to
make it fuse, but it can't.
And so that ball is robbing the star of energy, and it's that energy
that is supporting the star itself.
So, as soon as that iron starts to be created in the core, the star has
written its own death sentence.
The battle between gravity trying to crush the star and fusion trying
to blow it apart is over.
With iron, fusion hits a dead end.
Gravity always wins.
The iron core collapses.
The outer layers of the star slam down into it, and a huge explosion is
generated.
It's the single most violent event in the universe - a supernova.
In just a few seconds, supernovas create more energy than our sun ever
will.
Within a couple seconds after beginning to make iron, the star explodes
in a supernova.
So, think about that when you're holding one of your iron frying pans.
The iron killed a star in just a few seconds Dangerous stuff.
Telescopes around the world scan the skies for supernovas.
In 1987, a brilliant light appeared in a nearby galaxy These pictures
record the events following the death of a massive star as a fireball
trillions of miles wide hurtles out into space.
But there's no record of the actual moment of death when the star first
ripped itself apart.
The only way to know what happens inside a massive star when it
explodes is to make our own supernova.
What's amazing when these stars explode is that they almost turn inside
out.
Here in this lab in Rochester, New York, scientists are making a
supernova with a giant laser.
Telescopes can't see inside the dying star.
With this laser, we can detect the processes that occur as the star
explodes.
Working with these tools is the most exciting thing I can imagine
doing.
This massive machine amplifies the power of a single laser beam That's
enough power to supply And all that energy will be directed toward an
area the size of a pinhead.
Look at this tiny target as a star's core.
The laser simulates the most violent explosion in the universe.
This would not be a safe place to be when the laser was fired.
If a human were struck by all these laser beams, they would drill a
hole right through them.
Now going to closed access in the laser bay.
Main doors locked.
Final preparations are complete.
The target is vaporized by the laser.
The explosion lasts just 1/100,000 of a second.
But a high-speed camera captures the shock wave expanding outwards.
Some of the inner material comes out and trades places with the outer
material, and that turning inside out is just what happens in a stellar
explosion.
Material from deep inside a star's core surfs the shock wave out into
space.
In the extreme heat and turmoil of the explosion, heavier elements are
forged.
Among them, gold, silver, and platinum.
And because there's so little time for the elements to form, they are
the rarest and most valuable in the universe.
Silver, gold, everything else are created by the explosion of the star,
by the immense energy released, and that's how they come to us.
But even after the universe's most violent explosion, there's something
left behind.
We scientists used to believe that after a supernova explosion, a star
would literally blow itself to bits, and there'd be nothing left.
Well, we were wrong.
There's a corpse a corpse of a supernova explosion.
Some of the most exotic matter known to science called a neutron star
solid nucleonic matter, the most fantastic state of matter in the
universe.
The superdense core is now a neutron star.
It's around 32 kilometers across and unbelievably heavy.
It's incredibly dense.
Just a cubic centimeter, just the size of a sugar cube of neutron-star
material would weigh as much as all the cars in the United States of
America combined.
The dying star doesn't just leave the corpse of a neutron star.
It blasts the new elements far out into space.
These clouds contain the building blocks of the universe.
Everything we know and love is built from this stardust.
Only a supernova has enough energy to fuse these elements, which are so
essential for life.
Without supernovae, there's no life.
There's no you, and there's no me.
When massive stars die, they seed the universe with stardust full of
elements like hydrogen carbon, oxygen, silicon and iron.
The raw materials to build new stars, solar systems, planets, and, of
course, us.
Everything we see around us once blasted out from the core of a star.
You may wonder what stardust is.
Well, you're stardust because every atom in your body was produced
inside the fiery core of a star.
The atoms in your left hand may come from a different star from the
atoms in your right hand, but you are literally a star child.
Long-dead stars provided the stardust to create our solar system, the
planets, and everything on them.
So, you're made of carbon, you're made of oxygen.
There's iron in your blood.
All of those things had to be generated inside the core of a star.
There's no other way to get them.
So, when you think about star stuff, look around you.
Everything that you're made of, everything in the world around you is
made of had to come from the belly of a star that blew up a long time
ago.
Even the atoms in our own sun are recycled.
They're third or fourth generation, leftover debris shot into space by
dying stars a long time ago.
Our sun is our stepmother.
Our true mother died in a supernova explosion to give birth to the
elements which made up our body.
But how come the poets and the songwriters, how come they don't write
poems to our true mother? It's perhaps they don't understand physics
and the laws of stellar evolution.
We live in an age of stars.
But it will come to an end.
There's only so much hydrogen in the universe.
Trillions of years from now, it'll all be used up.
And when there's no hydrogen left, there'll be no new stars.
We live in a very brief period in the history of the universe.
Well, we still have stars illuminating the sky, stars creating life as
we know it, but it's not gonna last forever.
Sooner or later, the stars will begin to blink out.
First, the massive stars will burn out, then midsized stars like our
sun, leaving only the smallest.
Trillions of years later, they, too, will fade away.
Slowly, inexorably, the universe will get colder and darker until the
last star burns out and the universe becomes dark once again.
The age of stars will be over.
Honestly, the future of the universe looks kind of grim, but you can
take something positive out of that.
This is the best time to be alive.
This is the time where life can flourish, stars can form.
We are in the golden age of the universe right now.
We live in a season for life in the universe, if you will, that lasts
for a few billion years.
And that makes me, at least, appreciate the way things are right now
because they weren't always that way, and they won't always be.
We live in the stage where stars glow and illuminate the night sky,
when stars create life as we know it.
We live in the best of all stages of the universe.
For now, stars will continue to shape our universe, generating the
building blocks of new worlds, creating new stars and filling the
darkness with light.
Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s01e04

Supernovas

This is an exploding star.

It's called a supernova.
A supernova is the greatest cataclysm in the history of the entire
universe.
Supernovas come in different sizes and types.
All of them are so bright, they can be seen across the universe.
A supernova is the most violent death of a star you can imagine.
But this violent destruction of a star is also the birth of everything
we see around us.
Really big stars go out with a bang, called a supernova.
A supernova can outshine an entire galaxy, releasing trillions of times
the energy of our Sun.
They're so violent, if one of them exploded just a few dozen light-
years away, planet Earth would be toast.
A nearby supernova would really ruin our day.
First of all, the sudden burst of radiation would scorch the
atmosphere.
The only place to go is underground.
Underground, you could then withstand the blistering burst of x-rays
which hit the Earth.
And then it would scorch all plant life.
And with the collapse of the food chain, we're talking about a possible
extinction on the Earth.
Supernovas are killers.
But they also create the basic elements that make up our world.
Our planet, our star, everything around us formed out of the debris of
a dead exploded star.
Everything that makes up our bodies and the skyline came from
supernovae.
All of the iron, all of the silicon, all of the elements that went into
these buildings.
The things that make up my blood, my body, the gold in my wedding ring
Everything you see here is a supernova.
But our Sun won't become a supernova.
It's too small.
Like all stars, it's basically a giant nuclear reactor.
The fusion reactor inside a star burns hydrogen, the simplest, most
common element.
The reaction fuses hydrogen atoms together producing helium and energy.
And when the hydrogen runs out, stars keep burning by fusing helium
into carbon then carbon into oxygen.
When small stars like our Sun make carbon, they begin to die.
During the lifetime of a star, there's a balance between gravity
pulling in and pressure pushing out.
For a star that's generating energy, there's no problem.
But once energy generation switches off, the pressure goes away, and
gravity wins.
Now gravity begins to crush the center of the star.
The star's outer layers are pushed outwards.
They expand into a huge ball of gas called a red giant.
Our Sun, when it dies 4½ to 5 billion years from now, its corona will
go all the way out to Mars.
Everything on the planet Earth will vaporize.
While the outer layers expand, in the center of the Sun, gravity will
have the opposite effect.
It'll crush the Sun's core to just a millionth of its original size
about the size of the Earth.
Now it's a dense ball of oxygen and carbon called a white dwarf.
In our solar system, this will be the end of the story.
The gas from the dying star will gradually disperse, but the tiny white
dwarf will burn for billions of years.
But our solar system is unusual.
It has just one star.
The fact is, the vast majority of stars orbit in pairs.
When one of the two stars dies and becomes a white dwarf, if it's close
enough, it starts stealing material from the other star.
Think of two stars rotating around each other.
One star's slowly sucking all the hydrogen and helium from its
companion star.
It's like a vampire.
As the white dwarf sucks more and more fuel out of its companion star,
it gets heavier and denser and less stable.
Inside, carbon and oxygen atoms are about to fuse together, and that's
bad news.
A white dwarf, in some sense, is like a bomb waiting to be lit.
There's a huge amount of energy stored in that star, gravitational
energy and nuclear energy.
This white dwarf is turning into a monster, a type 1A monster.
A type 1A supernova is a 20-billion-billion-billion- megaton
thermonuclear carbon bomb.
It's one of the most explosive substances in the universe.
Eventually, the white dwarf drains so much material from its companion,
it goes into nuclear overload.
The carbon and oxygen inside it start to turn into a common but
dangerous element, at least to stars.
You've probably seen in "Star Trek" the idea that there is some sort of
secret technology that kills a star.
Well, I mean, it's in your frying pan that you used this morning for
breakfast iron.
The moment the white-dwarf star starts to fuse carbon and oxygen into
iron, it's doomed.
Suddenly, the white dwarf explodes.
The nuclear explosion of a white dwarf include, among other things,
huge amounts of iron.
And, in fact, type 1A supernovae are of vital importance to populating
the universe with the kind of elements that are important to us.
Type 1A supernovas blast iron trillions of miles into space.
It's where most of the iron in the cosmos comes from.
But what about all the elements that are heavier than iron, like gold
and silver? Where do they come from? The answer, again, is other stars
single stars, bigger stars.
Supernovas make everything in the universe.
Everything we see, all the material in planet Earth, was created inside
a supernova.
Even you and I are made from dying stars.
Without supernovae, we wouldn't be here.
Every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded.
And the atoms in your left hand may have come from a different star
than the atoms in your right hand.
You are literally stardust.
Almost all of the iron in our solar system came from a double-star
supernova that exploded more than five billion years ago.
From our planet's molten core to our skyscrapers to the hemoglobin in
our blood it's all made of iron from type 1A supernovas.
But the heavier elements in our world, like gold, silver, and uranium,
come from another type of supernova a single-star supernova.
This is our Sun.
A single star has to weigh much more than our Sun to go supernova.
And there are some monster stars out there.
Some are dozens of times heavier than our Sun.
And some are hundreds of times more massive.
The heavier the star, the faster it burns.
And when these massive stars begin to age and die, the nuclear
reactions inside them speed up.
Giant stars burn through their nuclear fuel very, very fast sort of
the, you know, the "live fast, die young".
The more mass a star has, the hotter it burns inside, the faster it
burns through its fuel.
Unlike double-star supernovas, really massive single stars create lots
of elements before they explode.
Once they turn hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, and carbon
into oxygen, they don't collapse into white-dwarf stars.
Instead, giant stars keep on burning, building up layer after layer of
new elements deep in their core.
Big stars don't stop after they've burned helium to carbon and oxygen.
They go ahead and burn carbon to still heavier elements and then neon
and oxygen to silicon until you get this nested Russian-doll spherical
layer cake kind of thing.
These elements are the building blocks of the universe.
But they're trapped inside the giant star.
Somehow, they've got to get out.
Studying exploding stars has taught us how the heavy elements of the
universe came to be.
They were formed by nuclear reactions inside stars.
But if some of those stars were not to explode, then those elements
would be locked up forever.
The trigger that'll release the elements in the single giant star is
the same element that causes the type 1A supernova to blow up - iron.
Iron eats up all the energy of the star's nuclear fusion.
Without the energy from nuclear fusion pushing out, gravity begins to
crush down.
The big star is doomed.
The last moments of a star are really phenomenal.
The star might last for 10 million years on the way to becoming a
supernova, but the last little bit takes place very rapidly.
Once you have an iron core and once it gets out of balance, it
collapses in a thousandth of a second, a millisecond, from the size of
the Earth down to the size of Manhattan.
It's traveling about 1/3 of the speed of light as it crunches down.
As the star becomes unstable, the massive power of gravity causes the
core to collapse.
This happens with such incredible power, even the atoms inside start to
crush together.
As it gets smaller and denser, the core builds up more and more energy.
It's something with about that is collapsed to something that's only
about 24 kilometers across.
It's got incredible density.
It's a thousand trillion times the density of water.
Now the star explodes.
The blast rips through the star's outer layers and in the process,
makes all the elements heavier than iron.
Iron becomes cobalt.
Cobalt becomes nickel.
And on and on to gold, platinum, and uranium.
The explosion is so brief, it only makes small amounts of these heavier
elements, which is why they're so rare.
The supernova blasts these new elements billions of miles into space.
The only method we know, the only mechanism that we have found anywhere
in the universe for creating new elements is in the death throes of a
star called a supernova.
It seems incredible that anything could survive a supernova explosion.
But we now know that some of the biggest bangs in the universe leave a
corpse behind.
And these are some of the strangest and most deadly objects ever
discovered.
When a giant star goes supernova and explodes, it's not always the end.
Sometimes there's a corpse.
What kind of corpse depends on the size of the star.
Supernovas from stars more than eight times bigger than our Sun leave
behind a neutron star.
And it's one of the strangest objects in the universe.
These things you can almost think of as sort of the zombies of the
stellar world.
They're very dangerous, they're very weird, and stars make them all the
time.
They're all around us.
As a giant star goes supernova, the core is crushed from the size of a
planet to the size of a city.
The pressure in the core is so intense, even the atoms inside it are
crushed together.
When the atoms are packed that tightly and there's no space left
between them, the massive energy buildup means something's got to give.
The core blasts off the outer layers of the star.
And what remains is a superdense neutron star.
A neutron star has the mass of a star crunched into a very small
volume, and that means the density is incredibly high.
Well, imagine taking the Empire State Building here behind me, crushing
it into the size of a grain of sand.
That's the density of the entire neutron star.
So if you had something that dense, if you dropped it, it would fall
straight through the Earth, just like a hot knife through butter.
A teaspoon of neutron star would weigh 90 million tons.
Imagine something as heavy as a star but only the size of New York
City.
And it's spinning.
Some of them may be born rotating 1,000 times a second.
I mean, think about it something 1½ times the mass of the Sun going
around Some neutron stars spin so fast, they generate huge pulses of
energy beams of radiation blasting out of the star's north and south
poles.
This neutron star is called a pulsar.
There's one of these things in the center of the Crab Nebula, a place
where there was a supernova explosion about 1,000 years ago.
And it's one of the fastest spinning of these objects.
This is the actual sound a pulsar makes, recorded by radio telescope.
It will flash 30 times a second for millions of years.
But pulsars aren't the strangest thing a supernova can leave behind.
When stars 30 times bigger than our Sun explode, they produce a type of
neutron star called a magnetar.
Magnetars are even weirder than pulsars and generate powerful magnetic
fields.
Now, in the most extreme case, the magnetic field can be 10 to the 15,
you know, a a hundred trillion times the magnetic field of the Earth.
That's so strong, it would suck the iron right out of your blood from
thousands of miles away.
But even pulsars and magnetars aren't the most dangerous objects a
supernova can leave behind.
When the core of the supermassive star collapses it doesn't just crush
atoms, it crushes space and time itself.
And that is when a supernova creates a black hole.
When stars over 100 times heavier than our Sun explode, they make a
supernova explosion so big scientists call them hypernovas.
And it was a hypernova that almost started World War lll.
In 1963, the U.
S.
and Soviet Union agreed to ban testing nuclear weapons.
To keep tabs on the Russians, the U.
S.
launched spy satellites.
When they heard this sound coming from deep space, they suspected the
worst.
United States government launched the Vela satellite, looking for
nuclear detonations.
And then, looking in outer space, they saw these monster explosions
take place.
And the military thought, "Oh, my God, the Russians! The Russians are
testing secret atomic weapons in space".
But these weren't secret atomic-bomb tests, and the Russians had
nothing to do with them.
They began to look at where this radiation came from.
It came from all over the galaxy, beyond the galaxy.
Now, there's no way the Russians could shoot explosions in outer space
beyond the galaxy.
And then people began to realize that we were staring something new in
the face.
They were super-powerful explosions of high-energy radiation called
gamma-ray bursts.
The question was, where did they come from? The answer was exploding
hypernovas.
During a regular supernova explosion, gravity crushes a star's core
into a neutron star.
But during a hypernova explosion, the giant star is so much bigger that
gravity crushes the core into something much stranger - a black hole.
And the black hole immediately begins to devour the dying star around
it.
The rest of the star can't all go in that little bitty hole in the
middle.
It starts to swirl around, and it forms an accretion disk, which is
feeding the black hole at about a million earth masses a second.
And so, as you might imagine, something dramatic is gonna happen here.
A million earth masses a second is too much for the black hole to
consume all at once.
So it spits a lot of it back out at nearly the speed of light.
This creates two beams of pure energy blasting their way out of the
black hole.
Takes it about eight seconds to bore through the star, keeping a very
tight focus, and erupt from the surface.
Now, if we're standing in the opening of this jet, we'll see gamma-ray
bursts.
The gamma rays produced from the black hole tear through the outer
layers of the star and into space.
Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent event that we know of in the
universe.
A giant star blows itself to pieces and forms a black hole.
It's incredibly spectacular.
These gamma-ray bursts are so energetic, they light up the entire
universe.
Any point in the universe will eventually pick up this astounding
radiation coming from a gamma-ray burst.
That's how energetic they are.
They are the brightest things in the known universe.
To put things in perspective, a typical supernova explosion is about
what the Sun will put out in its entire A gamma-ray burst viewed jet on
is a hundred million times more luminous than a supernova.
They're the champions for brightness, for sure.
They're not only bright, they're lethal.
If a gamma-ray burst were to hit the Earth, it would destroy most of
the atmosphere in seconds.
A gamma-ray burster is like a rifle shot.
And if you're in the line of sight, watch out.
Once the radiation hits you, it'll bathe the entire surface of the
Earth with nitric oxides, which will wipe out the ozone layer.
Blistering radiation would hit plant life, hit algae.
The whole food chain would collapse.
If the burst was close enough, it would cause mass extinctions.
Gamma-ray bursts turn out to be a lot more common than we thought they
would be.
So it's possible that some of these have even hit the Earth in the
past.
That's a pretty scary scenario.
It may already have happened.
The question is, if it happened before, could it happen again? A gamma-
ray burster is basically a supernova on steroids.
You need a giant star to die violently.
Now, the nearest star to us that might do that is Eta Carinae, and it's
a spectacular nebula.
There's all kinds of material flying off this star.
It's very unstable.
It may already have exploded in a gamma-ray burst.
But Eta Carinae may not be the only threat.
There are other dying stars out there.
Believe it or not, one of them is pointed in our direction.
We are staring down the gun barrel of WR 104, two dying stars that will
one day undergo the gamma-ray burst.
Not a question of if, a question of when.
That WR 104 may have our name on it.
But the good news is we probably wouldn't know about it in advance.
The shock would hit us before we had a chance to do anything.
So there's no sense worrying about it anyway.
The truth is, we'll never know if a star is about to go hypernova and
explode.
Anyway, by the time we see it, it'll already be too late.
In fact, we're already exposed to rays from dying stars every second of
every day.
When giant stars explode they make the biggest bangs in the universe.
But what gives them so much punch? Until recently, no one knew.
Scientists, when they tried to simulate a supernova explosion in a
computer, had a problem.
They simply could not get enough energy out of the dying star to create
a supernova.
This was a calamity in astronomy.
Computer models couldn't make the simulated stars blow up.
To blow up a star, you need a lot of energy.
The trouble was, astronomers couldn't find it.
The visible radiation that you see is a tiny fraction of the total
energy emitted.
Even the energy of motion of the expanding gases is only 1% of the
total energy.
Where was the missing 99% of the energy from the explosion? The only
way scientists could get their simulations to match the real thing was
to add in a mysterious particle called the neutrino.
Without it, their numbers didn't add up.
That was the easy bit.
Their next step was to prove supernovas really do produce neutrinos.
In 1987, they got lucky.
a supernova exploded in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic
Cloud.
When scientists saw the light from the blast, they called it supernova
1987.
Supernova 1987 A is really important in the study of supernovae because
it's the first one since the invention of the telescope.
It's the one that we've been able to study right from the time of
explosion through now, using all the instruments that we've developed.
One of those instruments was a giant neutrino detector buried deep
underground.
And bingo we saw a burst of radiation go through our neutrino
detectors, and we said, "Aha! That's the proof!" The discovery of
neutrinos from supernova 1987 A was a tremendous thing because for many
years people had been saying, "That's where 99% of the energy goes,"
but no one had ever seen it.
This is now the smoking gun that we can now prove that neutrinos carry
the energy of a supernova, and we detected it right on the Earth as we
saw a supernova in outer space.
Neutrinos are trillions of times smaller than atoms.
They're created by all sorts of nuclear reactions from nuclear power
plants and bombs to exploding stars.
If you had "neutrino-vision," you'd see them everywhere.
Neutrinos are ghostlike particles.
Literally, trillions of them are going through my body even as we
speak.
In fact, neutrinos come from the bottom of the floor, right through the
Earth, and even hit me right through my legs.
Pretty strange.
Imagine so many tiny particles zooming through our bodies.
But where do they get all their energy? When a core crushes down just
before a supernova explosion, the atoms inside it are broken up.
The core gets so hot, it turns this atomic debris into blazing
neutrinos.
We think that supernovae produce a stupendous sum of neutrinos when the
core collapses to a neutron star.
For about 10 seconds, that core shines with a neutrino luminosity that
is greater than all of the energy being produced in the rest of the
universe at that time.
In other words, it's really bright.
But gravity can't hold these neutrinos in the core.
They burst free in a blinding flash of light that rips the dying star
apart.
The discovery of neutrinos transformed the science of supernovas.
But supernovas were about to reveal the most mysterious force of all,
one that's changing the destiny of the universe.
Supernova explosions are so bright, we can see them across the entire
universe.
This has helped astronomers unlock one of the deepest mysteries of the
cosmos.
The universe came to life in the Big Bang It expanded from a tiny ball
of energy smaller than an atom to a universe billions and billions of
light-years across.
And it's still expanding.
I've often wondered how far future people will even know the Big Bang
happened, because we know the Big Bang happened from watching all the
galaxies fly away from us.
Someday, the galaxies will be so far away from each other, it will be
impossible to see anything else in the sky.
Scientists used to think the expanding universe was slowing down, but
there was no way to prove it until they found double-star supernovas,
type 1As.
They always explode when the white-dwarf star reaches exactly 1.
4 times the mass of our Sun.
And their explosions always release exactly the same amount of light.
They are the perfect markers to measure distance in space.
Type 1A supernovae, when we know how bright they are and how bright
they look, we can tell the distance, 'cause the farther away they are,
the less bright they'll look in the telescope.
And that has allowed us to accurately measure distances not just to
nearby galaxies but to galaxies at the other end of the visible
universe billions of light-years.
And that has allowed us to make incredible discoveries.
Astronomers thought they had found a way to prove the expansion rate of
the universe was slowing down.
What they got was a big surprise.
In 1998, astronomers made a remarkable and unexpected discovery.
It was recognized that the universe, which should be slowing down,
'cause gravity, after all, is attractive, and the mass of objects
should cause the expansion of the universe to slow down.
But the expansion is speeding up.
It's accelerating.
The constant light from type 1A supernovas completely changed the way
astronomers understand the universe.
Every science textbook on the Earth says that the universe is expanding
and slowing down.
Wrong.
We now have to rewrite all the science textbooks on the planet Earth.
But astronomers still didn't know why the universe is expanding faster
and faster.
They began to think it's some kind of unknown energy.
They called it "dark energy," but it's difficult to prove because it
can't be seen or touched or detected.
We really don't have a very good clue as to the physical nature and
origin of dark energy.
It's perhaps the number-one observationally motivated problem in all of
physics right now the nature of the dark energy.
From dark energy to black holes, supernovas have revealed some of the
most profound mysteries of the universe.
These exploding stars give us the building blocks of the universe and
show us how it's all made.
It's hard to imagine, but the atoms in our bodies today were made by a
supernova billions of years ago.
The Bible say, "From dust to dust".
Astronomers say, "From stardust to stardust".
So supernovae are the key link in this cycle of life.
People think of space as being something very distant and very remote.
It's light-years away, hugely distant from us.
That's completely wrong.
Supernovae are right here.
We are their children.
They made us, literally put us together.
We are star stuff.
Without the supernovas, we could not exist.
So when we walk around at night and we look up at the night sky and we
see the stars and we feel somehow a part of them the truth is, we are.
They are our parents.
Some scientists believe the age of supernovas could be ending.
Smaller, slower-burning stars, like our Sun, will become more common
and giant stars become more rare.
Supernovas have given us galaxies, solar systems, stars, and planets.
They made us and everything we see.
They are where destruction and creation meet.
The destiny of the universe lies in the ashes of dying stars.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s01e05

Planets

It used to be the only planets we knew about were the ones that orbit
our Sun.
But now we've discovered rocky worlds and gas giants orbiting other
stars.
They tell an amazing story.
The early history of these planets would have been very, very violent.
Planets are made everywhere in the same way.
They form from the dust and debris left over from the birth of stars.
So, if they're all made the same way, what makes them all so different?
The universe is full of galaxies gas clouds stars and planets, as it
turns out.
Our solar system has eight planets.
But we now know they're a tiny group, compared to the huge cosmic
family of planets across the galaxy.
It's an extraordinary moment in scientific history to know for sure
that there are other planetary systems out there.
They're very common.
And out of the 200 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, there are
surely dozens of billions of planets out there.
In 2009, NASA launched the Kepler Space Telescope on a six-year mission
to find new planets orbiting other stars.
So far, astronomers have found over 400.
Some are colossal balls of churning gas five times the size of Jupiter.
Others are huge, rocky worlds many times larger than Earth.
Some follow wild, erratic orbits, so close to a star they're burning
up.
One thing is clear - no two planets are the same.
Each is one of a kind.
But most of these new planets are far away and hard to study.
Most of what we know about how planets work comes from the eight that
orbit our own star.
Our own planets come in two main types.
There are four rocky planets in the inner solar system: Mercury, Venus,
Earth, and Mars.
And in the outer solar system, there are four giant gas planets:
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Each of the eight planets is distinct and very different.
Their unique personalities began to form at the birth of our solar
system When the Sun ignited, it left behind a huge cloud of gas and
dust.
All eight planets, the inner rocky and the outer gas planets came from
this cloud of cosmic debris.
The planets in our solar system are all made from the same stuff.
They're made from the same cloud of gas and dust, but they formed under
very different conditions.
Some of them formed in close to the Sun, where it was much hotter, some
much farther away, where it was much colder.
And because the conditions were so different, the end result, the
product of their formation, was different, as well.
So, you start the solar system, in my view, with a pretty homogeneous
mix of silicates and water vapor and hydrogen, lots of hydrogen, and
methane and other elements.
These elements in the dust cloud are like ingredients in a cake.
They cook differently, depending on the combination of the ingredients
and the temperature of the oven.
And just like with the cake, you'd mix the ingredients.
And then you'd put it in the oven and bake it, and it would change.
And so this is kind of what happened in the solar system.
Overall, the planet cooks in a slightly different way, depending on how
close it is to the Sun.
Close in, where it's hot, the Sun burns off gases and boils away water.
Only materials that stay solid at high temperatures, like metals and
rock, can survive, which is why only rocky planets form close to the
Sun.
Move farther away from the heat of the Sun, and you get different kinds
of planets cooking.
But it's the ingredients in the cloud that determine precisely what
kinds of planets will form.
Well, depending on the type of cloud a solar system forms in, you could
have solar systems that don't have rocky planets because it was just
too poor in the materials to build something like the Earth, and
instead you could end up with more gas giants and no rocky planets at
all.
If you want rocky planets, you need a cloud full of metals and rock.
Next step turn the heat down.
As it cools down, some of the elements in there that have a high
boiling point start to condense out as solids.
And you can get these very tiny little mineral grains forming.
These tiny mineral grains are the seeds of a new rocky planet.
Over time, they start to stick together.
You would have one dust molecule and another dust molecule, and they
would basically slam into each other and become one slightly bigger
dust molecule.
And they would pick up more and more and more.
This process is called accretion.
As these things got bigger, they became basically rocks.
Then rocks slam into other rocks and form boulders.
Boulders smash together to form bigger boulders.
Eventually, you've got something big enough that it's gravity was
strong enough that it could start drawing material in.
So, instead of just slamming into material and gaining mass that way,
it was actually actively pulling material in.
In our own solar system, there were many growing infant planets at
first maybe 100.
Most of them didn't make it.
If you go to the Asteroid Belt and look at the asteroid that is a good
indicator of how big a rocky planet has to be before it can pull itself
into a spherical shape.
Vesta is only not quite big enough to become a sphere.
For a growing planet to become round, it has to reach Then it has
enough gravity to crush it into a sphere.
Any smaller, and it stays an irregular shape.
As round infant planets keep eating up stuff, each collision makes them
hotter and hotter, until they start to melt.
Now gravity begins to separate the heavy stuff from the light.
Lighter materials tend to float up into crusty film, and the heavier
materials many of the metals falling down and forming a much denser
core at the center of the planet.
The young planets are finally beginning to look like planets.
But now they have to survive a period of violence and destruction a
brutal phase that determines which planets will live and which planets
will die.
After the birth of the Sun, our eight planets all evolved from the same
cloud of dust and gas, and yet they ended up completely different.
There was no real blueprint for each of the newborn planets.
They did obey the laws of physics and chemistry, but the most important
things happened by pure chance.
around 100 baby planets circled our Sun.
It turned into a demolition derby.
Planet hit planet.
Most were destroyed.
The early history of these planets would have been very, very violent,
with lots of these impacts taking place in the final stages of the
growth of each planet.
As these impacts took place, as objects ran into each other, certain
objects began to grow at the expense of all the others in this swarm of
planetesimals.
And these planets, these things that would become planets, grew and
grew, and as they got bigger, they swept up all the smaller
planetesimals around them, the consequence on the surface of that
protoplanet being an enormous amount of bombardment by debris from
space.
When it was over, all that was left were four very different rocky
planets.
Each planet's impact history left its stamp, and that's why they're all
so different from each other.
Mars is a frozen wasteland.
Earth flows with liquid water.
Venus is a volcanic hellhole.
And Mercury is tiny, bleak, and super hot, the result of a monster
collision.
Mercury, for example, is extremely dense and has a very thin crust.
So, it's possible it started off as a bigger planet.
And then something hit it at an angle, and it sheared off the lighter-
weight crust, leaving only the dense core.
The young Earth also took a big hit.
Sometime late in its development, the Earth was impacted by another
object that ripped debris out of the Earth's mantle which then went
into orbit around the Earth and re-accumulated to form what is now the
Moon.
There's also evidence that something crashed into Mars.
The northern hemisphere has a thinner crust than the southern.
A theory that has emerged for how this happened is that early in the
planet's history, the northern hemisphere of Mars was whacked by some
object that blasted a lot of the crust off of it.
And that crust re-accumulated on the southern half of Mars.
All these collisions did two things.
They cut down the number of surviving infant planets.
And they brought more ingredients to the survivors.
If you had a collision with something that was metal-rich, those chunks
would tend to descend down into what was becoming the core or if you
collided with something light, icy, they would tend to just float about
and form part of the crust instead.
The four rocky planets close to the Sun were almost complete.
They had a solid, hot-iron core surrounded by a layer of liquid iron,
all wrapped in a jacket of molten rock.
Above that, an outer surface crust.
These rocky planets all formed in the same basic way, from the same
basic stuff.
But each of them was very different Different sizes and very different
destinies.
Space may look empty, but it's not.
It's full of stuff blown out of the Sun.
The Sun generates powerful magnetic fields that rise above the surface
in giant loops.
When they clash, it triggers a storm of super hot, highly charged
particles blasting out into space.
It's called the solar wind.
Astronauts in space can see it but only when they close their eyes.
Occasionally, you see a little flash with your eyes shut.
And that is an energetic particle coming through your head and
interacting with the fluid inside your eye, and it makes a little light
flash.
And you see these every couple of minutes or so that you're awake with
your eyes shut.
If the astronauts were exposed to a lot more of the solar wind, it
could be a killer.
During the Apollo program, in between two of the Moon missions, there
was an outburst on the Sun that would have killed the astronauts if
they had been there.
So, space radiation is a serious business.
But here on Earth, the solar wind isn't much of a threat because we
have an invisible protective shield, a magnetic field generated by the
planet's core.
The very center of the Earth is the solid inner core.
It's a hard, iron, crystalline ball.
Then there's a thick layer of liquid iron, which is convecting churning
motions, which give rise to the magnetic field.
Well, that's the theory.
To prove that an iron core can generate a magnetic shield, scientists
built their own planet in a lab.
This 3 meters, 23 tons sphere simulates conditions deep inside the
Earth.
A metal ball in the center acts as the planet's inner core.
Liquid sodium spins around it at 144 kilometers an hour, imitating the
effects of molten metal spinning around the Earth's core.
We built this experiment to try to generate a magnetic field to attempt
to understand why the Earth has a magnetic field and why other planets
do not have magnetic fields.
It works like the generator in your car, where rotating coils of wire
produce electricity.
In the experiment, liquid sodium churns around the core and generates a
magnetic field.
It's very much like an electrical generator.
You have motion that is able to generate magnetic fields by turning the
energy, the motion, into magnetic energy.
The same thing happens deep inside the Earth.
As the Earth spins, the hot liquid metal flows around the solid core,
transforming its energy into a magnetic field that emerges from the
poles.
It protects the planet's atmosphere from the solar wind.
And if the planet has a magnetic field, that solar wind will be
diverted around the planet by the magnetic field.
The magnetic field deflects the solar wind around the planet,
protecting the atmosphere and everything on Earth's surface.
Sometimes big storms of solar radiation will mix it up with the
magnetic field.
Then we get big light shows over the poles - the auroras.
Without a magnetic force field, the solar wind would blast away Earth's
atmosphere and water leaving a dead, arid planet a lot like Mars.
Mars formed just like Earth.
But today it's cold and dry, with little atmosphere.
So, why are the two planets now so different? In 2004, NASA sent two
robot explorers to Mars to find out.
The rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity, explored miles of the Martian
surface.
They confirmed that Mars is a dry and hostile desert, with only 1% the
atmosphere of Earth.
But they did find evidence of water in the past.
Mars was not always a desert.
We have found compelling evidence that water was once beneath the
surface, came to the surface, and evaporated away.
We also see in a few places ripples preserved, of the sort that are
formed when water flows over sand.
So, not only did water exist below the surface.
It had flowed across the surface.
If Mars had water once, it probably also had a thick atmosphere.
So what happened? We can see that Mars once had active volcanoes.
So, it had a hot interior at some point.
And because it was made of the same stuff as Earth, it would have had a
hot-iron core, surrounded by liquid metal at its center.
So, it should have had a magnetic field, too.
The question is where did it go? Early in the planet's history, Mars
apparently had a strong magnetic field.
And it was probably caused in the same way as it is on Earth.
But Mars is a smaller planet than Earth.
It's gonna lose its heat more rapidly as a consequence.
And what that means is that liquid core can freeze solid.
Freeze the core solid, the convection will stop.
The convection stops, the magnetic field goes away.
As the magnetic shield died, the solar wind blasted away the
atmosphere, and the water evaporated.
Mars became a cold, barren planet.
Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury the rocky planets all formed within But
four times farther out, the Sun baked a very different kind of planet.
They're gigantic, they're made of gas, and these monsters have no solid
surfaces at all.
So far, astronomers have discovered over 400 new planets orbiting in
far-off solar systems.
Nearly all of them are gigantic and made of gas.
We have four of these so-called gas giants in our own solar system.
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune which all have these very thick, very
soupy atmospheres, lots of hydrogen, lots of helium, lots of methane.
Why are these outer four made of gas when the inner ones are rocky? It
all has to do with location.
Out here, 800 million kilometers from the Sun, it's very cold.
At the start of the solar system, there was some dust, but mostly gas
and water, frozen in ice grains.
Where the giant planets started to form, it was cold enough to get
solid snow.
And we think we were able to make ice snowflakes, and these things were
able to clump together to form the cores of the giant planets.
And we think that's maybe why the giant planets got to be so big.
There was so much ice and gas their cores grew huge, around 10 times
larger than the Earth.
These giant cores generated a lot of gravity.
They had so much pulling power, they sucked in all the surrounding gas
and built up thick, soupy atmospheres tens of thousands of miles deep.
The larger they got, the more gravity they generated.
More and more dust and debris got pulled in towards the planets, and
this became the building blocks of their moons.
Jupiter and Saturn have over 60 moons each.
The gas planets have another special feature rings.
Saturn is unique among the planets in that it has this gorgeous ring
system.
It turns out Jupiter and Uranus and Neptune they have ring systems, as
well, but they're really weak and pathetic and extremely hard to
detect.
But they are there.
All four of the gas giants have rings, but Saturn's are the most
obvious.
From a distance, Saturn's rings look like a single flat disk.
However, they're actually thousands of separate ringlets, each only a
few miles wide.
When the Cassini Probe flew past, it detected billions of pieces of ice
and cosmic rubble orbiting inside the rings at speeds of up to 80.
000 kilometers an hour.
These bits of ice and rock constantly crash into each other.
Some grow into tiny moons.
Others smash apart.
But they never form into larger moons because Saturn's immense gravity
tears them apart.
Scientists are only just beginning to figure out how the rings formed
in the first place.
The theory goes like this: a comet smashed into a moon and knocked it
out of its orbit and closer to the planet.
Saturn's gravity tore it to pieces.
And all of that debris got trapped in rings around the planet.
But the real mysteries of the gas giants lie deep inside them, tens of
thousands of miles beneath the clouds.
This is where the real action is.
It's a place so extreme it challenges the laws of nature.
Most of the new planets we're finding around distant stars are gas
giants.
They're so huge they make Jupiter look small.
But what goes on inside all gas giant planets, both in our solar system
and way out there, is a mystery.
We know Jupiter's dense atmosphere is 64.
000 kilometers deep, and we can see high-speed bands of gas creating
violent storms that rage across its surface.
But what we don't know is what's going on deep inside, far beneath the
storms.
To find out, NASA launched the spacecraft Galileo on a 14-year mission
to Jupiter.
2, 1.
We have ignition and lift-off of Atlantis and the Galileo spacecraft
bound for Jupiter.
December 7, 1995.
Galileo dropped a probe that dove into Jupiter's atmosphere at 260.
000 kilometers an hour.
Parachutes slowed it down as it dropped through the thick atmosphere.
It detected lightning in the clouds and winds of 725 kilometers an
hour.
The probe transmitted data back to Earth for 58 minutes.
So, people have asked me, "What happened to the Galileo probe that we
dropped in?" It didn't hit anything.
It just fell continually into the Jupiter environment, and the pressure
increased and increased and increased.
As it descended, it recorded pressures and temperatures of over 140
degrees.
When you're in the gas-giant environment and you go deeper and deeper
into this hydrogen soup that has no solid surface, it nevertheless can
have a tremendous weight.
And so eventually you would be crushed by the overlying weight of the
material that's there.
Even though the probe descended for only 200 kilometers before it was
crushed, it gave scientists a glimpse of Jupiter's interior.
But the dark heart of the planet still remains a mystery.
Like some rocky planets, the gas giants have a magnetic field, too.
But these are off the charts.
Jupiter's magnetic field is 20.
000 times more powerful than Earth's and so huge it extends all the way
to Saturn, more than Like on Earth, the magnetic field deflects the
solar wind and protects Jupiter's atmosphere.
When scientists studied Jupiter's magnetic field, they discovered it
was affecting Jupiter's moons.
The volcanic moon - Io - orbits only Io's volcanoes blast a ton of gas
and dust into space every second.
And Jupiter's magnetic field supercharges it, creating powerful belts
of radiation.
And that makes the vicinity of Jupiter very active in many different
ways.
If you point a radio antenna at Jupiter, one can hear all sorts of
interactions happening between the planets and the magnetic field.
This is the sound of Jupiter's magnetic field.
Jupiter and Saturn don't need the solar wind to make auroras.
They have huge magnetic fields that create their own.
The Chandra Space Telescope took these images of Jupiter's auroras.
And NASA's Cassini Probe took these beautiful pictures of auroras on
Saturn.
These auroras are proof that gas planets have magnetic fields, too.
But how do gas planets generate magnetic fields? On Earth, a super-hot
liquid metal spinning around the planet's solid-iron core does the job.
Gas planets probably do roughly the same thing.
But gas planets don't have hot-iron cores.
They formed around frozen cores of dust and ice.
So, exactly what's going on deep inside is a mystery.
At the very deepest interior of Jupiter, we really don't understand
what composes those deep interior states.
So, it could be that the very center of Jupiter has a solid core.
Or it could actually just be still fluid.
We may never find out.
No probe could ever make the 70.
000 kilometers journey to the planet's center to investigate.
Galileo was crushed before it got anywhere near the planet's core.
So, now scientists are recreating Jupiter's interior right here in a
lab on Earth.
Here at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California,
they're simulating Jupiter's core using the world's most powerful
laser.
This facility is really designed to compress hydrogen to extreme
densities and temperatures.
Inside Jupiter, extreme pressures are created by the weight of 64.
000 kilometers of hydrogen gas crushing down on the core.
In the lab, it's done by focusing 192 laser beams on a tiny sample of
hydrogen.
As the pressure in the sample reaches over a million times the surface
pressure on Earth, the hydrogen turns into a liquid.
But when it reaches tens of millions of times the pressure more like at
Jupiter's core something really weird happens to the hydrogen.
The pressure is so great that it actually re-arranges the hydrogen,
which is a very basic molecule, until it is able to conduct.
So it changes the structure of H2 into a metallic form.
Scientists think this is what's happening inside Jupiter: pressure and
heat have transformed the planet's core into metallic hydrogen.
Jupiter's metallic core works like the iron core in the Earth.
It generates the gas planet's gigantic magnetic field.
Gravity and heat shape how planets evolve, from their inner cores to
their outer atmospheres.
They're the great creative forces in planet building.
But there's another ingredient that has a lot to do with how planets
turn out.
And that ingredient is water.
Planets may seem fixed and unchanging, but they never stop evolving.
In our own solar system, one lost its atmosphere and became a barren
wasteland.
Another heated up and became the planet from hell.
Planet Earth has changed, as well, and the game changer was water.
When you look at Earth from space, you see a lot of water.
We are the Blue Planet, after all.
So, it must be really wet, right? It looks at first glance that our
Earth of course, covered ¾ by oceans it's a very water-rich world.
Not true.
The Earth, by mass, is only 0.
06% water.
There's some water on the surface in the form of oceans, some water
trapped in the mantle.
But actually, the Earth is a relatively dry rock.
All of the inner rocky planets formed very close to the Sun, so they
started off dry.
Any water they might have had evaporated away or was blown away by
impacts.
These massive collisions that formed the Earth were so energetic that
any water that had been here would have been vaporized and lost from
the Earth.
So, where did Earth get all the new water we have today? It moved here.
When you look farther out and you look at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and
Neptune, those planets have enormous amounts of water locked up inside
them.
And even more dramatically are the moons.
The moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are at least 50%
water.
There was a lot of water out there.
So, how did some of it get to planet Earth? And the answer almost
certainly is that left farther out in our solar system were some
asteroids and some comets, far enough from the Sun that they could
retain their water.
Millions of these watery comets and asteroids came flying into the
inner solar system.
And some of them smashed into Earth.
Over the eons, the Earth acquired the water that had been a part of the
asteroids, and that indeed makes up the mass of water that nearly
covers the Earth today.
But the amount of water that was delivered? That was the luck of the
draw.
Couldn't it have been the case that the Earth would have acquired maybe
half as much water as it did? If so, the Earth would be nearly dry on
its surface, if not completely dry, the sponge of the interior soaking
up the rest of the water.
No surface water would have meant no life.
And what about too much water? We would be a water world, the oceans
much deeper, covering the continents, even Mt.
Everest.
And so you can ask, then, "If the Earth were covered by water, only
having twice as much as it currently has, would we have had a planet
that was suitable for technological life?" Technology requires dry
land.
And it's quite likely that the precise amount of water that the Earth
just happens to have has allowed a technological species like we homo
sapiens to spring forth.
The world as we know it exists because a blizzard of comets and
asteroids delivered just the right amount of water about four billion
years ago.
And just maybe the same thing is happening right now somewhere else in
the universe.
One thing's for sure - there is plenty of water out there.
Hydrogen, the most common atom in the universe, and oxygen, one of the
next most common atoms in the universe H2O is certainly going to be a
very popular molecule and indeed it is within our universe.
So, water is everywhere in the universe, and we're discovering that
planets are, too.
But we still haven't found another planet with liquid water.
Scientists have discovered more than 400 new planets.
None of them look like our world.
What we have not yet found is a planet that is about the same size and
mass and chemical composition as the Earth, orbiting another star.
So, it remains an extraordinary holy grail for humanity to find other
abodes that remind us of home.
But we'll keep looking.
We know that there are around 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone.
And as many as 40 billion of them could have planets.
We're still hopeful that when we discover terrestrial-style planets
that will help us tremendously in understanding how our own inner-
solar-system planets and the Earth evolved in comparison to the outer-
solar-system planets.
We are entering into what is gonna be thought of in the future as the
Golden Age of planetary discovery.
We will really for the first time begin to truly understand the actual
diversity that lies out there.
I think it's gonna be a fantastically exciting time.
Planets form according to the laws of physics and chemistry.
What they become that has a lot more to do with luck.
Many scientists believe it's only a matter of time before we find
another planet like Earth, one that formed from the same ingredients,
in the right place, with just the right amount of water.
One thing's for sure - there are billions of planets out there waiting
to be discovered.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s01e06
Solar systems

Our solar system circling the Sun like clockwork.

But it didn't start that way.
Our solar system has a long history of violence.
The solar system we see today is really just the final survivors of the
early chaos.
And in the future, that chaos will return.
The entire house of cards that is our solar system will completely fall
apart.
From start to finish, this is how solar systems work.
There are billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
One of them is our Sun.
And around the Sun orbits a system of planets and moons - a solar
system.
Our solar system is clearly a precious planetary system.
And it begs the question, are there other planetary systems like ours
orbiting other stars? To find out, Marcy scans the skies with the Keck,
one of the world's largest optical telescopes.
Perched at 4,000 meters, on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, it hunts for
new, distant solar systems.
The marvelous reality is that our own Milky Way galaxy contains some
and many of those stars have their own planetary systems.
Our solar system, with its eight major planets, is not alone.
There are other brethren planetary systems out there by the billions.
Of course, astronomers hope to find another solar system with a planet
like Earth, and they're off to a good start.
So far, Marcy and other astronomers have discovered over 360 stars with
orbiting planets.
One of the exciting discoveries that we've made is that stars tend to
be orbited not just by one planet but usually two, three, four, or a
multitude of planets.
Planets come in families, not unlike the family of planets we enjoy
here around our own Sun.
For the first time, scientists can study them in some detail.
We can actually observe how planets heat up as they go around their
sun.
For example, we actually saw that one planet got hotter and colder as
it orbited its star.
And we realized that we were actually seeing the night side of the
planet and then the day side of the planet.
That was the temperature difference.
We were observing sunrise and sunset on a planet in another solar
system.
But that planet is nothing like Earth, and most of these newly
discovered solar systems are nothing like our own.
Their planets are huge much bigger than Jupiter.
Some follow wild orbits, some orbit in the opposite direction, and some
shoot billions of miles out into space, then dive back toward their
star.
A few orbit so close to the star, their surfaces vaporize.
It's bizarre, at the least, if not completely frightening.
Planetary systems offer a wide diversity of different architectures,
sizes, masses of the planets, and so on, rendering our solar system
just one type of a planetary system out of thousands.
It could be that each and every solar system is a one-of-a-kind.
But they all have one thing in common - each one begins with a star.
First, a star is born in a cloud of dust and gas called a nebula.
This is the Eagle nebula.
These are the Pillars of Creation.
And this is the Horsehead nebula, an enormous star nursery.
What scientists have been trying to figure out is what triggers the
star-making process.
One possibility is that a nearby supernova explosion took place and
rammed into this otherwise innocuous molecular cloud smushing it,
smashing it, compressing it down so that gravity could take over.
Once gravity takes over, the cloud begins to shrink, sucking in more
and more gas into a giant, spinning disk.
Gravity at the center crushes everything into a dense, superhot ball
that gets hotter and hotter.
Suddenly, atoms in the gas begin to fuse, and the star ignites.
The leftover dust and debris forms a disk spinning around the new star.
It contains the seeds of planets, moons, comets, and asteroids.
In 2001, the Hubble space telescope was scanning the Orion nebula and
took this image of a young star surrounded by one of these disks.
It's a picture of a solar system being born.
Whenever I look at these beautiful pictures of nebulae, the thing that
really gets me is that these are baby pictures of our own solar system.
We looked like that once.
These fuzzy images have opened the door to understanding how planetary
systems form.
We have this marvelous first-ever tool by which we can take pictures of
planets caught in the act of formation.
It's quite a marvelous opportunity for us to see the planets around
other stars forming, thereby giving us a glimpse as to how our own
solar system must surely have formed.
Scientists understood where stars come from but not how planets grow
from the disk of gas and dust.
The answer was discovered by accident aboard the International Space
Station.
Astronaut Don Pettit was experimenting with grains of sugar and salt in
the weightlessness of space.
Stanley Love was watching from Mission Control when Pettit stumbled
onto the process of how planets form from cosmic dust.
Well, one of Don's Saturday-morning science projects was to take the
bags that we store drinks in and he put other stuff in it, like salt
and sugar, and there was one bag that he just left the coffee powder
in.
Then he inflated the bags, and with these particles in them, noticed
that the particles would just clump up immediately.
They make a little dust bunny.
We'll be spending some time watching that.
I said, "Don, this is incredible! You've just solved a 40-year-old
problem in planetary science!" Astronaut Pettit had discovered
something big.
In the zero gravity of space, particles of dust don't float apart, they
clump together.
This is how mighty planets are made from cosmic dust.
The dust particles would collide and stick and grow into ever larger
dust particles and eventually rocks and eventually boulders.
The bigger the boulder, the more gravity it has.
It begins to eat up everything around it and grows bigger.
It becomes larger, heavier, and consumes bigger and bigger rocks.
Eventually, some of these rocks grow into planets.
This is what happened in our solar system There were about 100 young
planets all orbiting the new Sun.
Collisions were inevitable.
At the beginning, solar systems are violent.
Ours was no different.
It began with about So, how did it go from 100 small planets to the 8
major planets of today? We got the answer by studying the evolution of
other solar systems.
We see solar systems forming planets, and all of a sudden, they had
these giant disks around them.
Those disks must be from huge collisions.
If planets are smashing together in other systems, they probably
smashed together in our own.
We now know that all solar systems do this before they settle down.
It's the way they're built.
The nice, neat, orderly solar system that we see today has not always
been the case.
In the early days a few million years, basically, after the planets
started forming there were dozens, maybe even hundreds of these young
planets that were bouncing around the solar system.
They would smash into each other.
Sometimes they would collect and get to be bigger planets.
Sometimes they would smash each other and turn into little bits.
There was heavy traffic in the new solar system, objects of all sizes.
They were bound to collide.
Some of the planets grew larger, and so did the collisions.
I like to try to imagine what it would have been like to actually stand
on the early Earth and look up into the night sky.
Things would have looked different.
Planet hit planet.
Only the largest survive.
The rest are smashed to pieces.
Something very large struck the young planet Mercury.
It blew the crust off and left behind just the iron core.
And the young planet Earth did not escape, either.
A planet-sized object slammed into the Earth off-center and blew a huge
amount of the Earth's crust into space.
The debris circled around the Earth and eventually coalesced to become
the moon.
This demolition derby raged for 500 million years.
What we see now Mars and Earth and Mercury and Venus these planets in
the inner solar system they're the survivors.
They're the ones who lived through these giant impacts.
Debris from smashed infant planets ended up in the Asteroid Belt - a
junkyard of rocky, leftover planet parts.
Most of the big impacts happened in the inner solar system.
But one of the outer planets, Uranus, was also hit and knocked on its
side.
A mystery, since the outer planets formed mostly from gas and largely
escaped the violence of the inner solar system.
These rocky cores formed.
The gas accumulated around them.
This process actually happened very rapidly, in astronomical terms, in
only about a million years.
And those are the giant planets we see today.
Beyond the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, are Uranus and Neptune.
These two are made of gas and ice.
And beyond them lies the Kuiper Belt, a band of orbiting icy rocks and
dwarf planets.
We used to think that one Kuiper Belt object, Pluto, was the ninth
planet.
We've since decided that Pluto is, in fact, a dwarf planet one of many
orbiting more than 900 million kilometers from the Sun.
There are millions of these things out there.
They're so far away and so faint that they're hard to see.
These are left over from the formation of the solar system itself.
The Kuiper Belt marks the edge of the Sun's influence.
There is no warmth and not much light way out here.
But the Kuiper Belt is not the end of our solar system.
A shell of trillions of icy objects, called the Oort Cloud, is even
further out.
The Oort Cloud is so far away, light from the Sun takes a full year to
reach it.
From the cold outer edge to the hot star at the center, our solar
system seems stable.
Everything appears orderly and in its proper place.
But something isn't right.
Uranus and Neptune are in the wrong place.
The planets of the solar system grew from a giant disk of dust and gas,
the four inner rocky planets close to the Sun, and the giant gas
planets farther out.
But Uranus and Neptune seem out of place.
There wasn't enough stuff this far from the Sun to make such big
planets.
So, what are they doing out here? That led us to a theory where Uranus
and Neptune formed very close to the Sun and were actually violently
pushed outward.
So, what could shove two massive planets clear across the solar system?
We believe that Jupiter and Saturn got into this funny configuration
where Jupiter went around the Sun exactly twice every time Saturn went
around once.
And that configuration allows the planets to kick each other more as
they pass one another, and that caused the whole system to go nuts.
The combined gravity of Jupiter and Saturn yanked hard on Uranus and
Neptune and pulled them away from the Sun.
As they moved outward, the two planets plowed through asteroids and
other debris left over from the formation of the other planets.
This sent billions of chunks of rock flying in all directions.
Some rocks formed the Asteroid Belt.
But most were thrown out to create the vast Kuiper Belt.
The analogy I like to use is, think of a bowling match.
And the bowling balls go down, and the pins just go kaplooey.
That's what happened in the outer part of the solar system.
The gravitational push from Jupiter and Saturn was so strong, it may
have reversed the position of the two planets.
It looks like it's possible that Uranus and Neptune actually formed in
the opposite order.
Neptune was closer to the Sun than Uranus, but these gravitational
interactions actually swapped their positions.
It was the blizzard of rocks that Uranus and Neptune ran into that
acted like a brake and slowed them into the orbits they keep today.
The idea of planets changing orbits may sound crazy, but scientists
have seen it happen in other solar systems.
So now they think it's just the way all solar systems work.
When we look out into the galaxy and look at planets around other
stars, we see lots of evidence of those kind of events happening
elsewhere.
In one far-off system, scientists have spotted something completely off
the charts: a planet as big as Jupiter, but it's not acting like the
Jupiter we know.
Some of these giant planets are found orbiting very close to their host
star, taking only days a few days to go around the host star.
Obviously, such close-in Jupiters are blowtorched by the star, raising
the temperature of the planet up to 1,000 or 2,000 degrees Celsius.
There's no way a gas giant could have formed this close in.
It's way too hot.
The only explanation is that it must have formed out there and then
moved in here.
The same thing could have happened in our own solar system.
Scientists have found large amounts of the element lithium on the
surface of the Sun.
Lithium doesn't normally exist in stars, but it is found in gas
planets.
Maybe there was another gas giant in our own solar system that spiraled
in and crashed into the Sun.
That would explain how the lithium got there.
Something very violent happened.
Could it have been one of these Jupiter-size planets getting thrown in
toward the Sun long ago? In the beginning, solar systems are violent
and messy, but, over time, they settle down and become more stable.
But stability is an illusion.
Any planet in the solar system is always in danger of total
annihilation.
There are all kinds of solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy.
Most seem strange compared to our own.
Some planets follow crazy orbits.
Some smash into each other.
Others dive into their stars.
So, why are the orbits of our own planets so regular and stable? Well,
that's because all the planets have motion left over from the formation
of the solar system.
When the nebula collapsed around the Sun, as the Sun was forming, there
was an intrinsic motion, and that gave our planet a velocity.
Literally, we are falling freely toward the Sun at all times, but we're
going so fast, we keep missing it.
That's what an orbit is.
Think of a merry-go-round.
The faster it spins, the farther and farther you're thrown from the
center.
When it slows down, you lose momentum and fall back inwards.
It's something like that with planets.
The disk that gave birth to the planets was spinning, and the momentum
left over from that keeps everything going around to this day.
Moving at 106,000 kilometers an hour, the Earth takes one year to orbit
the Sun.
Planets farther from the Sun have bigger orbits, move slower, and take
longer.
Saturn orbits the Sun once every 29 years.
Neptune takes 164 years.
Each planet stays on a precise path around the Sun, and for us, that's
a good thing.
Our solar system has a somewhat fortunate spacing of the planets, with
nearly circular orbits, which keeps the whole house of cards from
falling apart, crumbling, scattering to the wind.
If our solar system did not have nice, neat, stable, nearly circular
orbits, the Earth wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be here talking
about it.
The planets are on safe, stable orbits but billions of comets and
asteroids are not.
Many come streaking into the inner solar system.
And when they do, watch out.
The meteor crater which we see here today formed as a result of a 46-
meter rocky iron object coming in and slamming into the Earth roughly
50,000 years ago.
Some of the objects coming our way can be much bigger.
Look at the moon.
It's covered with large impact craters.
Earth has been hit, too a lot.
But the craters have eroded.
We know that a huge asteroid smashed into the Earth, off the coast of
Mexico, It was going and when it hit, it released more energy than 5
billion Hiroshima bombs.
It wiped out 70% of life on Earth.
A few more impacts like that could destroy all life on Earth.
But, believe it or not, Earth has a giant bodyguard.
Jupiter is more than just another pretty face through the telescope.
It's actually really important for life on Earth.
Jupiter's gravity is so huge and it's just in the right place in the
solar system, that it protects the Earth from comets that come from
deep in the solar system and swing by the Sun and could possibly hit
the Earth.
Jupiter plays the role of the biggest baseball bat in the solar system.
As these comets come by, most of them get knocked out of the solar
system by Jupiter.
In 1994, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 raced toward the inner solar system.
But it never got past Jupiter.
Astronomers watched as Jupiter tore it to pieces and dragged its
remains down to the planet's surface.
We have seen comets smash into Jupiter, creating fireballs that were
bigger than the Earth.
They were the biggest explosions ever seen in our solar system.
Had that comet hit us, it would have resurfaced the planet.
It would have been the end of life as we know it.
If Jupiter wasn't there, we believe that the impact rate on the Earth
would be something like 1,000 times more than we see today.
Lucky for us, Earth has the perfect orbit.
Jupiter protects us from asteroids and comets.
We're close enough to the Sun for liquid water but not so close that it
boils away.
It's just the right combination for life.
Question is, if our solar system could create the perfect conditions,
could other solar systems do it, too? Planet hunters have spotted a
solar system and it has a planet just the right size in just the right
place.
Astronomers around the world are looking for new planets in distant
solar systems.
So far, they've discovered more than 420.
Most are huge gas giants, like Jupiter but they're either very close to
the star or much farther away.
Then, in 2005, astronomers made an exciting discovery.
They detected a solar system with rocky planets like our own.
These planets orbit a star called Gliese 581.
This star, Gliese 581, and its 4 planets is, frankly, quite bizarre
relative to our solar system.
The four planets we know of all orbit very close to the host star, all
four of them orbiting closer than the planet Mercury, our closest
planet, orbits the Sun.
But Gliese 581 is a small star.
It doesn't burn as brightly or give off as much heat as our Sun, so the
planets can orbit much closer without being vaporized.
We know of four planets going around this star, and a few of them are
quite interesting.
There's one that's only about twice the mass of Earth.
Now, that particular one is very close to the star.
It's probably very hot too hot for life.
But there's another one, about eight times the mass of the Earth, which
is getting far enough away from the star that it might be in the
habitable zone.
Like Earth, this planet orbits at a distance where water is a liquid.
And where there's liquid water, there could be oceans and life.
In March 2009, NASA launched the Kepler Space Telescope.
Its mission to search for planets similar to our own in new solar
systems.
We may find planets that have methane atmospheres that have ammonia
atmospheres.
We may find planets that are covered in heavy organics a tarlike
material.
We may find some that are covered by water.
I think one of the glorious quests here in the next decade or two is to
learn the full diversity of the family of Earth-like planets that may
be out there in the universe.
With Kepler, astronomers expect to discover hundreds, possibly
thousands, of new solar systems.
Think about our own Milky Way galaxy.
The galaxy has roughly Some fairly large percentage of that have
planets.
Now, think about how many galaxies we know of.
We certainly haven't found all the galaxies in the universe yet.
But the ones we can take a picture of are actually about 60 billion
galaxies.
When you look up at the night sky tonight, simply in the path of your
sight, even if you can't see it, there are billions of solar systems
all around you.
And there could be a solar system with a planet just like Earth.
If it happened once, it could happen again.
Solar systems don't last forever.
Orbits fall apart.
Planets collide.
It might happen to us.
But even if it doesn't, in another 5 billion years, a catastrophe will
end our solar system as we know it.
Nothing lasts forever, not even solar systems.
Ours may seem stable now, but, actually, it's very slowly coming apart.
If the solar system was chaotic in the past, that doesn't mean it's all
settled down now.
There is still a possibility of a little bit of chaos in the future.
In the future, the gravitational pull of the planets on each other will
gradually disrupt their orbits.
Perhaps, over the billions of years, the planets will jostle each other
in this gravitational way so that, eventually, two of the planets will
come close to each other.
When that happens and it will those two planets will engage in a sort
of a do-si-do, flinging one or the other of them, maybe both, into wild
orbits, perhaps ejecting one or both of them from the solar system.
Mars could be thrown out of the solar system, and Mercury might crash
into the Earth.
The entire house of cards that is our solar system would completely
fall apart.
Solar systems begin and end with a lot of collisions and destruction.
But don't panic yet.
This is gonna take billions of years, but over the lifetime of the
solar system, these are eventualities that could come to pass.
But one way or another, our solar system is doomed.
Like all solar systems, the end will come when the star at the center
dies.
In 5 billion years, our own star will run out of fuel and become a red
giant.
It'll heat up, swell, and engulf the inner planets.
The Earth's surface will be scorched the seas will evaporate and the
land will melt.
The Sun will become about as big as where the Earth's orbit is, so a
likely scenario for the end of the world is that we're going to be
inside the Sun for a while.
The Earth's gonna get swallowed right up into the Sun, and it's gonna
be toast vapor, literally.
After a while, the red giant will fall apart, too, leaving behind a
tiny corpse of a star called a white dwarf.
It'll be about the size of the Earth, and it will cool off over many
millions or billions of years.
That will be the real end of our solar system.
From the Earth this dead, rocky planet that used to harbor an
enormously vibrant civilization we will look out And there will be this
fairly faint dot which is our Sun, now a white dwarf, a dying, almost
dead star.
The remains of the inner planets will continue to orbit the white
dwarf.
But the giant outer planets will live on, untouched.
They will have warmed up during the red-giant phase of the Sun.
But once the Sun is a white dwarf, those giant planets will survive
just as well, holding on to their hydrogen and helium, albeit colder
than they used to be, because that white dwarf will no longer be
warming them up.
Even though this is for our solar system, it may already have happened
to many other systems throughout the universe.
Our solar system emerged from chaos to eventually support life.
We were lucky.
We've just the right amount of planets, in the right place, at the
right distance from each other, all orbiting the right type of star.
But it could have been a very different story.
There are so many things that are fortunate about our solar system,
starting with the Sun.
The Sun is a very stable, easy star, a perfect thing for life to evolve
around.
That's probably not a coincidence that we're here.
An extraordinary chain of events over billions of years have made our
solar system the perfect place for life to evolve.
What we see today is not the way things have always been and not the
way things will always be.
We're not unique, but it is just the way things worked out.
The Earth has to be in the right place.
The planets had to be in the right place.
The giant planets have to be in the right place to protect us from
impacts.
All that has to be right in order to get life on Earth.
Ours is the only planetary system we know that supports life.
As solar systems go, does that make us extraordinary or perfectly
normal? We don't know.
But every week, we're discovering new solar systems with new planets.
It could be just a matter of time before we discover we're not alone.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s01e07

Moons

In the universe, everything seems to orbit something.

Planets orbit stars, and moons orbit planets.
Some moons are volcanic, but the volcanoes are ice.
Others are awash with great oceans.
There may be more habitable moons in our galaxy than there are
habitable planets.
Moons tell the unknown stories of our solar system and show us how it
all works.
In our own solar system, there are just eight planets.
But orbiting six of those planets are moons lots and lots of moons more
than 300 of them.
Each one is different each one a world all its own.
Well, when we look out on our solar system, we see a lot of planets.
But even more than planets, we see moons.
And in many ways, they're more interesting than the planets that they
go around.
We have moons that are airless and apparently dead, like ours.
Then, out in the outer solar system, we have moons with oceans inside
them and moons with atmospheres around them.
I'm for moons.
You can keep the planets.
The biggest eruptions the coldest temperatures and the largest oceans
in the solar system they're all on moons.
There are moons with ice volcanoes.
There are moons with lakes of methane and methane rainfall, smog clouds
moons that are so volcanically active that they keep remaking their
surface Moons with all kinds of plumes shooting off into space really a
much wider range of environments than we ever could have imagined.
Often, when I'm describing to the general public, or even to my fellow
scientists, these moons of Saturn and Jupiter, I call them "worlds"
because they really do have the complexity and mystery of a whole
world.
Jupiter and Saturn have over 60 moons each.
These giant gas planets and their moons are like mini solar systems,
and each moon has a distinct personality.
Iapetus, a two-toned moon in black and white.
Titan, with a dense, orange atmosphere.
And icy Enceladus, blasting ice geysers 320 kilometers into space.
Each moon is unique.
But they all have one thing in common.
All moons are natural satellites, held in place by gravity.
But moons do more than just go around planets.
They help stabilize the planets in their orbits and keep the machinery
of the solar system running smoothly.
The diversity of moons is an interesting combination of predictable
laws of science and then complete randomness of just things smashing
together and the chips kind of falling where they did in a way that you
could never predict.
Planets and moons begin the same way.
Once a star turns on, there's a lot of dust and gas left over.
Slowly, the dust particles clump together, forming rocks.
The rocks smash into each other and form boulders.
Slowly, the objects get bigger and bigger.
The process is called accretion.
One can think of it as forming a snowball and rolling it down a hill.
As it rolls down the hill, it collects and gathers up yet more snow,
which makes it roll faster and harder.
And so that process of runaway accretion actually happens in the
formation of the planets and in the formation of moons, as well.
It sounds simple enough, but nobody knew for sure how it worked until
2003.
On the International Space Station, astronaut Don Pettit was
experimenting in zero gravity.
He put grains of salt and sugar inside a plastic baggie.
Instead of floating apart, they began to clump together.
This is how both planets and moons build up.
But instead of taking shape around stars, most big moons take shape
around planets.
If the same process makes them all, what makes all of them so different
from each other? Take two of Jupiter's moons, Callisto and Ganymede two
very different moons, each born from the same debris when Jupiter was
still young.
Ganymede formed close to Jupiter, where there was lots of debris.
Because there was so much material, it came together quickly in about
10,000 years and it was hot.
The heat separated the ice from the rock.
You can still see it in Ganymede's distinct landscape.
The primary factor that affects why moons are the way they are today is
energy how much energy was put into them as heat during accretion and
how much energy has been lost.
All of those factors go into telling us why moons behave the way they
do and why they look the way they do today.
Callisto's surface tells a different story.
It formed much farther out, where there was less debris and less heat.
It took longer and cooled faster.
Unlike Ganymede, Callisto's surface is uniform.
Rock and ice never separated.
Where a moon forms can also mean the difference between survival and
destruction.
Get too close, and a planet's gravity will rip a moon to shreds.
Scientists believe this is what happened to many moons when Jupiter was
young.
And it's very likely that Jupiter had an entire conveyor belt of large
moons that were wanting to form, only to be swallowed up by the planet
itself.
The large moons we see today are only the last ones that were able to
stabilize right at the end of that process, stop their death spiral,
and survive into the position we see today.
But Jupiter keeps trying to eat them.
The gravity of the giant planet reaches out and pulls hard on the
orbiting moons.
It transforms them from lifeless balls of rock into strange and
dramatic worlds.
Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system.
It has 63 moons.
The four largest are called the Galilean moons, named after the
astronomer Galileo, who discovered them in 1610.
They show how gravity controls both what moons look like and how they
behave.
The first of the Galilean moons, Io, orbits closest to the planet, just
418,000 kilometers above Jupiter.
That's about the same distance as our Moon is from Earth.
But unlike our Moon, the surface of Io has no impact craters.
Scientists realized that meant the surface was new.
But how could that be? Every time you look at Io, with a spacecraft or
even with a telescope, it's a little bit different.
So the geology on Io changes like the weather on other planets.
It's that active.
When NASA first sent probes to fly past Io, they were shocked.
They saw dozens of active volcanoes.
This is footage of an erupting supervolcano on Io, blasting 320
kilometers into space.
Everyone had the same question how could there be active volcanoes on a
moon? The answer was simple gravity.
Jupiter's gravity is so huge that it reaches out and crunches the moon.
And it's not just Jupiter's gravity pulling on Io.
Other nearby moons also pull on it as they pass by.
So the core of the moon is being worked back and forth all the time.
It's called tidal friction and generates extreme heat in Io's core.
Almost like bending a wire coat hanger until it breaks.
And you feel the inside of the coat hanger there it feels rather warm.
That tidal friction that internal friction heats the interior of Io
until it's become, actually, one of the most volcanically active worlds
in the solar system.
The constant pushing and pulling generates temperatures thousands of
degrees high inside Io.
It blasts out in gigantic eruptions of lava.
Io is the prime example of tidal forces and gravitational interactions
in the solar system.
It is constantly being pulled by Jupiter, and it's constantly getting
pulled by the other moons, as well.
And so, as a result, there's a tremendous amount of heat created.
The floods of erupting lava constantly resurface Io, which is why there
are no visible impact craters on this moon.
Gravity also heats Io's neighbor, Europa.
Europa's orbit is farther away from Jupiter, so it's much colder.
Instead of lava, the surface of Europa is ice.
The lowest recorded temperature in Antarctica is minus-88 degrees.
Europa's surface is twice as cold.
But underneath all the ice, there may be an ocean of water heated by
the same tidal friction that makes Io volcanic.
Europa has a subsurface ocean, almost certainly.
And that subsurface ocean is in contact with the rocky mantle, which
provides heat and also provides, probably, appropriate nutrients to
sustain life.
Someday we'll send a probe to explore beneath the ice on Europa.
And maybe we'll discover life-forms living there in warm European
oceans.
Out beyond Io and Europa are nearly 60 more moons.
They orbit much further away from Jupiter, where the effects of the
giant planet's gravity are much weaker.
Out here, it's too weak to generate tidal friction and heat the moons.
So these remote worlds are cold and barren But not featureless.
They bear the scars of countless collisions, and scientists believe it
was collisions that created the most extraordinary moon system of them
all.
The planet with the most unusual moon system is Saturn.
It's spread out over more than 320,000 kilometers.
Technically, there are more than a billion moons.
That's right a billion moons.
And all together, they make up Saturn's rings.
A moon can be a hunk of rock or ice no bigger than a pebble, as long as
it orbits a planet.
The rings of Saturn are made of countless pieces of rock and ice.
They go from the size of a pebble up to the size of a city.
We don't refer to all the ring particles that can get to be as big as
10 or 20 meters across.
We don't refer to them as individual moons.
But when we find a body that is maybe a kilometer or two across, then
you can start talking about it as a moon or a moonlet.
Saturn's rings are one of the oldest mysteries of astronomy.
Where did they come from? To try and find out, NASA sent the Cassini
probe on a 12-year mission to study Saturn, its rings, and its moons.
We took, with Cassini, probably the most beautiful picture that's ever
been taken, and I'm not the only one who has said this.
Cassini was in the shadow of Saturn, cast by the Sun, and so you don't
see the Sun.
You see the backlit planet of Saturn and its beautiful rings.
You see the refracted image of the Sun poking out from the side of
Saturn.
And nestled in all of that splendor is this small little dot.
That tiny dot is not a moon.
That is the distant planet Earth, nearly a billion miles away.
Most of what we know about Saturn, of its rings and moons, comes from
Cassini.
Before Cassini, we thought there were only eight rings.
Today we can see over 30.
What we have found at Saturn has been just literally an embarrassment
of riches.
We're seeing something that we had seen before, but now we're seeing it
with a level of detail and clarity that was just mind-blowing.
Scientists used to think the rings were made of the icy leftovers after
Saturn was formed about 4 billion years ago.
But anything that old should be covered with cosmic dust, and dirty.
So why does Saturn's rings appear bright and clean, almost new? To get
the answer, Mission Control maneuvered Cassini close to the rings.
The probe saw that all the ice pieces in the rings are constantly
colliding and breaking up.
And each collision exposes new surfaces that are clean and polished.
This is what astronomers think happened.
When Saturn was young, it had no rings, just lots of moons.
At some point, an icy comet zoomed in from deep space and smashed into
one of those moons.
The comet broke up into billions of pieces.
The impact also pushed the moon closer to Saturn, where the planet's
enormous gravity broke it up.
Now debris from the moon and ice from the comet mixed.
Gradually, Saturn's gravity pulled all those fragments into rings
around it.
The story of moons is the story of gravity.
Gravity holds them in orbit.
It heats up their insides and shapes their surfaces.
In the end, it controls everything about moons, even their survival and
destruction.
Gravity can even create new moons by kidnapping asteroids, comets, and
even whole planets.
We know that gravity makes moons.
The standard way is to assemble them from debris left over when planets
are formed.
But gravity makes moons a second way, too.
It captures them.
Imagine a wandering comet or asteroid.
Somehow it gets knocked off course.
It wanders too close to a planet.
Gravity acts like a science-fiction tractor beam and grabs it.
Not quite enough gravity, and it escapes.
Too much gravity, and it collides with the planet.
Just enough, and the comet or asteroid goes into orbit around the
planet and becomes a new moon.
Mars has two tiny moons, named Phobos and Deimos.
Both are captured asteroids.
One is pushing outward as it circles the planet and will eventually
break free and continue on its journey through space.
The other is circling inwards, a little closer to Mars all the time.
Eventually, it'll smash into it.
This is Cruithne.
It's an asteroid, really, just four kilometers across.
But it's sometimes described as Earth's second moon.
With the little object Cruithne, which was discovered back in 1986, we
start to get into this realm of of what does it mean to be a moon.
Only a few thousand years ago, Cruithne was an ordinary asteroid,
orbiting the Sun like billions of others.
But eventually, it wobbled out of its orbit in the Asteroid Belt and
got snagged by Earth's gravity.
But then Cruithne did something unusual.
Instead of orbiting around the Earth, like a normal moon, Cruithne
began to follow behind it.
And so one might call it a sort of a moon of the Earth not exactly,
though, because that object is on you know, it's on its own independent
orbit around the Sun, not the Earth.
Sometimes asteroids capture their own moons.
In 1993, the Galileo spacecraft flew past the asteroid Ida and found
something nobody expected a tiny 800-meter-wide moon.
The fact that we saw a satellite around only the second asteroid ever
to be encountered with a spacecraft immediately tells us that moons
around asteroids must be incredibly common.
Not all captured moons are small.
The mother of all captured moons is Triton.
It orbits the planet Neptune, and it is big about 2,700 kilometers in
diameter.
But Triton is a moon with an unusual story.
Triton was a very puzzling problem for planetary scientists, because
our traditional view would tend to make all the moons orbit in the same
direction that the planet itself spins.
In the case of Triton around Neptune, it's the other way around.
Neptune is spinning this way.
Triton is orbiting around in the opposite direction.
This means it didn't form like most moons, out of the debris left over
from the birth of the planet, or it would orbit in the same direction.
So something wasn't right.
Triton is huge, and its orbit is funny.
It's anomalous.
It does not seem as though it formed as a part of the Neptune system.
It seems much more like a captured planet.
Scientists now think Triton was once a dwarf planet, like Pluto.
And a giant planet like Neptune certainly has enough gravity to capture
a moon the size of Triton.
Triton was almost certainly formed way out in the outer solar system
and then at some point was captured by Neptune.
Perhaps Triton, early on, had its own moon, they both were captured,
and then that moon was destroyed during the capture process.
But Triton is in danger.
Neptune is dragging it closer and closer.
Eventually, it will get too close, and Neptune's immense gravity will
tear it apart.
Triton the moon will be reborn as a ring system around the planet.
But what about our Moon? How did it get there? Was it captured? The
truth is even more extraordinary.
It was born in extreme violence.
Our Moon, like a lot of moons, is rocky, barren, and pockmarked with
craters.
But in one way, our Moon is unique in the solar system.
For a long time, astronomers thought the Moon formed from debris left
over from the birth of the Earth.
But researchers in the 1960s came up with a radically different idea.
They suggested it came from a giant impact.
When we first had the idea of forming the Moon from a giant impact,
that was not a terribly popular idea.
And I actually did have good science friends colleagues coming to me,
saying, you know, we really have to exhaust all the slow evolutionary
theories before we start talking about cataclysms.
The evidence Bill Hartmann needed was on the Moon itself.
And the proof had to wait until Apollo astronauts finally went there in
1969.
They brought back hundreds of pounds of Moon rocks.
Scientists analyzed the rocks and were amazed.
They were identical to rocks in the Earth's crust, and they'd been
superheated.
So, how did pieces of the Earth's crust become superhot and wind up on
the Moon? Hartmann was pretty sure he knew.
This whole idea was that the Earth forms.
Now you hit it with something.
You blow all this light, rocky material off the top.
That material goes into orbit and makes the Moon.
The Moon's just made out of rocky debris.
Imagine our chaotic solar system The young Earth is just one of a
hundred or so new planets orbiting the Sun.
One of them is a Mars-sized planet called Theia, and it's on a
collision course with Earth.
They smash into each other at many thousands of miles an hour.
Theia is destroyed, and Earth barely survives.
The impact blasts billions of tons of debris into space.
The Earth's gravity pulls it into orbit around the planet.
Now these hunks of leftover Earth clump together and form our Moon.
That's the theory, anyway.
But how do you test it for real? Here at NASA's Vertical Gun Range,
they're re-creating that ancient collision in a lab.
This 9-meter-long gun fires a tiny projectile at 29,000 kilometers an
hour.
The projectile is Theia.
This ball represents the Earth.
By changing the angle of Theia's impact, the team can figure out how
precise the ancient collision had to be in order to make the Moon.
In the first shot, Theia hits the top of the Earth with a glancing
blow.
So, here's the Earth, if you will, suspended in space.
And now it's gotten hit.
So, now we see the planet ejecta is being ripped out of the Earth and
is forming this giant impact basin.
And if this really were the Earth, this basin would be thousands of
kilometers thousands of miles across.
In this simulation, Theia only skims off the surface of the planet, and
very little debris is thrown out into space not nearly enough to build
our Moon.
The second shot is a head-on collision.
Ka-pow! That's the end of planet Earth.
It's gone.
Some of the debris is gonna go out of the solar system.
Some of the debris will reaccrete to form small planetesimals within
the solar system.
There's no Earth left, so there's no gravity to gather the debris and
form the Moon.
Now the gun is set to just the right angle halfway between a glancing
blow and a direct hit.
So we'll see what happens if the Earth barely survives.
Oh, oh, gorgeous! Oh, my gosh! Ka-pow! Now we have the entire part of
the Earth being ripped apart, but the vapor plume is oh, my gosh.
Aw, geez! That is gorgeous.
But this was the beginning the beginning of our Moon.
The experiment shows that Theia could have smashed into the Earth and
formed the Moon.
But the collision had to be just right.
And lucky for us, it was.
Today, the Moon orbits But when it first formed, the Moon orbited just
24,000 kilometers above the Earth's surface.
after the Moon formed, if we looked up in the sky, the Moon would have
comprised a tremendous portion of the sky.
It would have been enormous, because the Moon would have been much
closer.
Back then, the Earth was rotating so fast, a day lasted just six hours.
But the Moon was so close, its gravity acted like a brake.
It slowed our planet down until a day now lasts 24 hours.
The Moon's gravity also created giant tides that surged across the
planet, churning up the seas, mixing minerals and nutrients.
This created the primordial soup from which the first forms of life
arose.
Without our Moon, life on Earth may never have happened.
And there may be other moons with a link to life, as well.
Moons may be the great biology experiments of the universe the true
laboratories of life itself.
Moons are full of surprises.
There are moons with giant volcanoes, moons with vast oceans sealed
under thick ice.
And now we know a few are rich in organic compounds.
In the right combination, they might even support life.
In our solar system, the biological window through which we can
understand the rest of the universe may be through these moons of the
outer solar system.
That may be where we find our second genesis, and that second genesis
is really our first deep understanding of the biological nature of the
universe.
At first glance, moons don't look ideal for life.
Take Enceladus.
It's a shiny ball of ice, orbiting Saturn.
It's the brightest object in the solar system.
It reflects 100% of the light that hits it, so it's superbright, and
that's because it's water ice.
In 2005, the Cassini probe spotted ice volcanoes erupting from the
surface of Enceladus.
That meant there had to be heat under all that ice heat that created
oceans of water.
And where there's water, there's the possibility of life.
So, this is Beehive Geyser here in Yellowstone, and it is shooting
water vapor and water about 45 meters into the sky.
And it's pretty incredible.
So, now imagine if you're on the surface of Enceladus.
You would see geysers that look a lot like this, and they are shooting
ice grains and water vapor into space thousands of times higher than
this geyser here.
The ice volcanoes are powered by gravity.
Here's how.
Saturn's gravity works on the core of the moon, heating it up.
The underground water expands and forces its way up through cracks in
the surface ice and blasts out into space as ice crystals.
These are some of the most spectacular eruptions in our solar system.
They make Beehive Geyser look like a squirt gun.
From the ice in the volcanoes, scientists have detected salt and simple
organic compounds.
That means the water under the ice is not only warm but full of
nutrients.
Sound familiar? Heat, water, and nutrients - that's how life on Earth
began.
We realize you could have all the things that we associate with oceans
on the Earth going on inside a moon.
It's the discovery of a lifetime.
Saturn's Enceladus has an ocean.
So does Jupiter's Europa.
But these aren't the only moons where life could emerge.
Saturn has another moon Titan with an even greater potential for life.
In 2005, Cassini sent a probe, called Huygens, on a one-way mission to
Titan.
For just 3½ hours, Huygens transmitted live pictures from the hostile
surface, nearly a billion miles away.
Then the battery died.
It was just incredible.
This was the first time humans had ever touched this moon with
something of our own making.
It was just an event that should have been celebrated the world over.
We should have had ticker-tape parades in every major city across the
U.
S.
and Europe to celebrate this.
It was that history-making and that astonishing.
Raindrops on Titan are twice as big as raindrops on Earth.
But the rain isn't water.
It's methane.
On Earth, methane is a gas, but on Titan, it's a liquid because the
moon is so cold.
There may be methane icebergs.
There are certainly methane lakes and rivers, and there's methane rain
and methane clouds and maybe bugs swimming in methane.
Bugs living in liquid methane may sound unbelievable.
But scientists have discovered that Enceladus, Europa, and Titan are
all covered with a substance called tholin.
Tholin contains the chemical building blocks for life to begin.
So could life emerge on any or all of these moons? We can't get our
hands on the tholin from the moons, so Chris McKay makes it in the lab.
He zaps a mixture of gases found on Titan with electricity.
What he gets is a reddish-brown mud.
So, this is what we make tholin, this sort of nonbiological organic
material.
It's produced by chemical energy put into simple molecules, like
methane and nitrogen, and here we got it.
And that's the material we see on Titan.
We see evidence for something like this on Enceladus.
We see it on the surface of many of the moons in the outer solar
system.
This is nature's recipe for making the stuff that life eventually
emerges from.
Somewhere in the outer reaches of our solar system, on some remote
moon, life may have already emerged.
But it probably won't be life as we know it.
Life 2.
0 doesn't necessarily have to have the same genetics as life 1.
0, right? In fact, the more different it is, the more interesting it
is.
Whether it's the same or very different, the discovery of life on the
moons of our solar system will change the way we look at the universe.
I think that, should we ever find that life had originated not once but
twice in our solar system, then you you can easily dismiss any
arguments that say that life is unique to the Earth.
Moons are small, but they're still diverse and dynamic worlds.
They help us understand how the universe works.
They're essential cogs in the cosmic machine.
Without any moons, our solar system would be a very different place.
Without our Moon, life may never have evolved on Earth.
And who knows when and if we find new life somewhere else in the
universe, its home may not be another planet at all.
It might be a moon.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s01e08

Volcanoes

Our solar system is a savage place.

From the ice volcanoes of Saturn's moon Enceladus, to the vast lava
fields of Jupiter's Io, to our own world, the Earth, volcanoes destroy.
They also create.
It is literally true that, if there weren't volcanoes here, we would
not be here either.
Narrator: Volcanoes shape and change our climate.
Volcanoes are the giver of life and, also, the takers of life.
Narrator: Today's space probes and telescopes reveal volcanoes on
worlds we once thought dead.
Finding volcanoes on an object that's smaller than our own Moon was a
huge shock.
Narrator: If volcanoes exist on other worlds, could we find life there,
too? Planet Earth -- a jewel in the darkness of space.
Our home is timeless beautiful and incredibly violent.
Volcanoes are one of the most powerful natural phenomena on the planet.
They create new land, destroy the old.
They blast out gases that transform the air we breathe.
Deep in our oceans, volcanic heat fuels strange new life.
Volcanoes help power the living Earth.
Now we search for signs of life on alien worlds.
We know life needs water.
We know it needs energy.
And that's where volcanoes come in -- they pump out vast amounts of
energy.
Find volcanoes on other worlds, and we might find life.
The search starts here -- the planet orbiting closest to Earth Venus, a
world that appears very much like ours.
Venus and Earth are roughly the same mass.
They're roughly the same distance away from the Sun.
So they're kind of like twins.
Narrator: Earth and Venus were very similar new land, new oceans, an
atmosphere.
Both planets were perfect for life.
[ Thunder rumbling ] But on Venus, something went wrong.
Something made Venus diverge radically from the history of the Earth.
Venus took a definite turn to the dark side a long time ago.
Venus is a hellhole, our evil twin.
Narrator: Today, Venus' surface is like a furnace.
Dr.
Plait: It's 900 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface.
It's hot enough to melt, actually, some metals, so you wouldn't stand a
chance.
Narrator: Venus is a greenhouse world.
Its atmosphere is thick with carbon dioxide.
[ Thunder crashing ] It traps heat from the Sun like a blanket.
These actual images of Venus' surface reveal a barren, superheated
wasteland.
Venus' thick blanket of CO2 killed the planet.
The CO2 came from volcanoes.
Orbiting space probes gave the first clues.
Radar punched through Venus' thick clouds and revealed volcanic
formations across the planet like formations we also see right here on
Earth -- the shield volcanoes of Hawaii.
Shield volcanoes get their name from their round, flat shape.
These volcanoes ooze.
But they ooze for thousands of years.
Once we were able to map the entire surface of Venus using cloud-
penetrating radar, we started to study the landforms there, and we saw
a lot that was actually very familiar.
In particular, we saw giant shield volcanoes that are very similar to
the shield volcanoes here in Hawaii.
Narrator: The radar images of Venus were dead ringers for the shield
volcanoes on Hawaii.
Sometime in the past, Venus had volcanoes.
For the first time, we had a picture of Venus revealed, and, boy, were
we shocked.
We found a scarred surface, a volcanic surface.
There are at least a thousand volcanoes that are very large and maybe
tens or even hundreds of thousands of smaller ones.
Narrator: 3/4 of Venus' surface is lava plains, evidence of an ancient
cataclysm.
This could have been a home for life.
Instead, it was engulfed by fire.
Volcanoes belched trillions of tons of carbon dioxide into Venus'
atmosphere.
Temperatures soared.
The seas boiled dry.
A runaway greenhouse process began.
Dr.
Thaller: On Earth, carbon dioxide is able to absorb into the rocks.
It's able to absorb into the ocean.
But on Venus, you have no water, and it's now so hot the carbon dioxide
can't even combine with the rocks.
So as carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere by volcanoes a
long time ago, over time, there was less and less of a method to take
it back out of the atmosphere.
Narrator: If Venus ever had life, volcanoes sterilized the entire
world.
Earth remains the only living world we know of.
That may change.
This is the gas giant Jupiter, its moons frozen and dead or so we
thought.
Look closer, and a mystery emerges a cloud hanging over a cold and
lifeless world.
[ Rumbling ] Narrator: On Venus, volcanoes turned an earth-like world
into a superheated hell.
Finding volcanoes on an earth-like world was no surprise.
But spotting volcanoes on a moon was a shock.
[ Static crackles ] In March 1979, the Voyager 1 space probe gave us
our first close-up view of Jupiter's tiny moon Io [ Whirring ] a world
we once thought cold and dead.
Dr.
Plait: And they saw something really weird.
They saw this arc next to the moon, and it looked almost as if like
there was another moon behind it.
Kaku: And we scratched our heads and said, "Well, what could that be?
Everybody knows that io is dead, boring, uninteresting.
" And then people realized, "Oh, my God.
It's a volcanic eruption.
" We found that it's covered with volcanoes.
It is tremendously geologically active.
There are volcanoes erupting all the time.
And what they're erupting is a lot of sulfur, and it gets very hot.
And sulfur, when it changes temperature, changes color.
It can be red or orange or yellow or black.
And so these pictures of the face of Io make it look like a pizza
covered with different kinds of cheese and olives where the little
black spots are.
Narrator: Io is not dead.
It's alive and kicking.
It has over 400 active volcanoes.
The largest, Pele, erupts from a gigantic lava lake.
It reaches nearly 250 miles into space.
If we could stand on the edge of that lava lake and watch that plume
shooting off into the blackness of space, that would be an incredible
sight.
Narrator: Pele's eruptions are so huge because Io is so small.
There's nothing to hold the lava back -- virtually no atmosphere and
very little gravity.
These vast eruptions make Earth volcanoes look like firecrackers.
[ Rumbling ] How can such a tiny moon be so volcanic? The answer is
Jupiter.
Just as the Moon raises tides in Earth's oceans, Jupiter raises tides
on Io -- tides of solid rock.
Io's orbit around Jupiter is not a circle.
Sometimes, it's closer.
Sometimes, farther away.
Jupiter gives Io a gravitational pounding.
Dr.
Plait: And so, Jupiter's gravity pulls on it a little bit harder and a
little bit weaker.
And what happens is the moon stretches, like this.
It's called a tidal force.
And it doesn't stretch this much -- it's only a little bit.
But, in fact, it's enough to heat it up.
It's just friction.
It's the same way when you rub your hands together really fast, they
begin to feel warm.
Friction creates heat.
Narrator: Jupiter's gravity stretches and squeezes Io.
In every two-day orbit, the ground rises and falls by nearly 300 feet.
This pummeling generates intense heat and gigantic pressure.
Wherever there's a weak part in the crust, the lava rushes out.
So the volcanism is on a planetary scale.
Unlike here on Earth, where there are certain bits that are active
around the plates or in weak spots, this is an entire moon that's one
active hot spot.
Narrator: Thanks to the incredible power of gravity, Io is the most
volcanically active world in the solar system.
The volcanism on Io taught us something new.
It taught us that internal sources of energy can drive volcanism in a
way that's different from that on Earth.
In outer space, tidal forces, the differential squeezing of the moons
of a gas giant, can also create volcanic activity -- that was a game-
changer.
Narrator: Io is a lava world, superheated and violent.
It's hard to imagine anything surviving there.
Yet the volcanic principle here is the same as on Earth -- pressurized,
superheated magma below the surface blasts through fissures in the
crust.
But not all volcanoes need magma.
They don't even need to be hot.
[ Rumbling ] Travel out past Jupiter into the outer solar system, and
it gets cold -- really cold.
The distant moon Triton is so cold that much of its tenuous atmosphere
can freeze solid.
Yet there are volcanoes here -- volcanoes that may hold the secret of
alien life.
[ Rumbling ] Narrator: We think of volcanoes as mountains of solid
rock.
Deep beneath, rock is so hot and pressurized that it bursts violently
out as lava.
But not all volcanoes work this way.
There are volcanoes on other worlds that don't use molten rock at all.
Right at the frontiers of the sun's planetary system, Triton orbits the
ice giant Neptune.
from the Sun, the temperature is a frigid 390 degrees below zero.
When NASA's Voyager probe flew past, it revealed a world covered mostly
with frozen nitrogen ice.
[ Static hisses ] But the probe found something else.
Dr.
Thaller: When Voyager flew by, it saw these black smudges, and all of
the smudges were going in one direction, almost as if there was a wind
blowing dark material, dust, in one direction.
Narrator: Signs of activity on a world so cold, it freezes nitrogen --
volcanoes at almost 400 degrees below zero.
Forget molten rock.
Triton spews out a mixture of nitrogen and moon dust.
Dr.
Thaller: And the geyser not only has liquid nitrogen, which is in a
fluid form, but, also, sort of dusty stuff that's lighter, that can
even go farther in the weak winds.
So you have this wonderful sort of double plume of an icy area and then
a darker, smudgy area, basically made of dust, like moon dust.
Narrator: Triton's surface is nitrogen ice.
Underneath, there are lakes of liquid nitrogen.
How? Scientists believe it's because nitrogen ice lets light in, but
doesn't let heat out.
[ Ice cracking ] There's almost a bit of a greenhouse effect going on
on Triton, that there's a layer of nitrogen ice that's transparent.
And just like a greenhouse here on Earth, when you have glass, light
can pass through it, but then the heat is trapped by the glass.
Narrator: The Sun shines through the surface and warms the nitrogen
beneath.
Just a few degrees is all it takes to turn nitrogen ice into gas.
A temperature gradient, a change in that temperature -- that's what's
important.
And that's enough to melt the nitrogen underneath the surface on Triton
and have it burst through as a geyser.
Narrator: This is a cryovolcano, so cold that the material it erupts
would freeze water as hard as rock.
The solar system is more active than we ever imagined.
We have found weird eruptions on many planets and moons.
But so far, the only world where volcanoes are linked to life is ours
or so we thought.
This is Europa.
It orbits Jupiter nearly a frozen 2,000-mile-wide rock-hard ball of
ice.
From a distance, its surface looks smooth.
Up close, it's a different story.
Jupiter's enormous gravity gives Europa a pounding, just like its
neighbor, Io.
The surface heaves and flexes, creating ridges and deep crevices.
When we first got close-up images of Jupiter's moon Europa, they looked
a little familiar, and it turns out it looks like ice floes that you
see when you fly over the Arctic.
And it turns out it's the same thing.
Europa has a several-mile-thick shell of ice on its surface, and
beneath that is a global liquid ocean.
Narrator: Magnetic readings suggest Europa has an ocean that's a
staggering Jupiter's gravitational pounding heats the rocky core and
melts the ice above.
It's not unreasonable to think that, as the core is being stretched by
tides and heated up, possibly even molten, there's some boundary
between a hot core and a liquid-water ocean.
Narrator: On Earth, underwater eruptions are surrounded by life.
The same could happen on Europa.
Here, the darkness is total the pressure -- a crushing A brutal world,
but perhaps a cradle for life.
If life got off the ground here on Earth, why not on Europa? All the
ingredients are there -- an energy source -- volcanic activity -- a
universal solvent -- liquid water -- a rich hydrocarbon chemistry.
We have this mixing bowl of ingredients that happened on the Earth and
we have similar conditions on Europa.
So some people are saying, "If it happened here, why not there?"
Narrator: Life on Europa would be hard, but not impossible.
On Earth, there is life at every extreme -- searing heat, crushing
pressure, total darkness.
Alien life on Europa might look surprisingly similar.
If life exists under the ice cover of Europa, they would be aquatic,
but without eyes, because there's no light to speak of.
They would probably use sonar in order to make sense of their
surroundings -- organisms that literally feed off the energy from the
volcano.
Narrator: On Europa, volcanoes could be the source of new life.
It's even possible that Europa is normal, that this is how worlds with
life generally are.
Earth could be the exception.
Think of it -- Europa could be a template for billions of moons out
there that have liquid oceans on them.
So, all of a sudden, our horizons have expanded several billion times
by looking at the moons of Jupiter.
What a shock.
Narrator: Our solar system alone has over 170 moons.
Multiply that across the Universe, and that's a lot of places where
life might take hold.
All it takes is liquid water and a source of energy.
Potentially, volcanoes provide both.
And they are everywhere.
This is Saturn, twice as far from the Sun as Jupiter.
Yet it, too, has volcanic moons.
And just like Jupiter's Europa, these moons could harbor life.
Narrator: This is one of the strangest worlds in our solar system --
Saturn -- a ring system an amazing 62 moons, and one with a secret.
Enceladus is one of Saturn's smaller, more distant moons.
And it's been known for a long time that it's covered in ice, because
it's very bright, very reflective.
But when the Cassini spacecraft went there, it discovered something
amazing.
Narrator: The Cassini probe revealed something incredible -- not on the
planet itself, but on Enceladus.
Backlit by the sun, a gigantic plume bursts out into space -- a sure
sign of volcanic activity.
[ Rumbling ] It was an amazing discovery, and it helped answer a
question that has puzzled scientists for decades -- the mystery of
Saturn's "E" ring.
Saturn's outermost ring is vast, almost 200,000 miles across, and it
shouldn't exist.
The ice particles that make up most of the ring are too far from Saturn
to stay in orbit.
They constantly drift away into space.
Something replenishes the ring -- the ice volcanoes of Enceladus.
Dr.
Plait: Those plumes that are ejected from Enceladus' south pole -- it
turns out that those are going into space.
And they're not just going away.
They're feeding a ring around Saturn, the "E" ring.
So this little moon is giving something back to its parent planet.
Narrator: Water blasts from Enceladus' volcanoes, hits the vacuum of
space, and instantly freezes into tiny ice crystals, creating the vast
"E" ring.
One mystery solved.
Another replaces it.
What creates the volcanic plumes? Cassini's cameras zoom in on the
moon's south pole and capture these huge chasms scarring the surface.
There are these wonderfully huge cracks at the south pole of Enceladus,
and as Enceladus goes around Saturn, these cracks open and shut as the
tides go by.
Now, these cracks are huge.
They're hundreds of miles long.
And when they begin to open, you would have this big crevasse opening
at maybe 100 miles an hour down the length of that.
It'd be incredibly spectacular.
Narrator: Huge gravitational forces crack the surface open and closed
at enormous speeds.
Like Europa and Io's orbits 'round Jupiter, Enceladus' orbit 'round
Saturn is elliptical.
This helps generate the heat to melt ice and create oceans of water
beneath the surface.
Dr.
Thaller: The conditions of the water underneath Enceladus' surface are
absolutely perfect for life.
It's the right temperature.
It'd be a good pressure for life.
Liquid water would be just like seawater here on Earth.
And the chemistry of the water we see shooting out of these vents
suggests that it is very similar -- there's salt.
There's organic material in it, as well.
So we've identified a place in the solar system where there very well
may be life right now.
Narrator: Cassini has detected complex carbon molecules in the ice
plumes.
Combined with liquid water, they suggest that just maybe life could
survive deep within this enigmatic moon.
Enceladus may not be alone.
Another of Saturn's moons might also harbor life -- Titan, one of the
largest moons in our solar system, the only moon with a thick
atmosphere a frozen world -- ice as hard as rock, lakes of liquid
methane.
Yet here, too, we might find evidence of volcanoes and the tantalizing
prospect of alien life.
Narrator: A raging inferno on the surface of Io, eruptions of ice and
nitrogen on Triton Volcanoes are one of the most destructive forces in
our Universe.
But out of annihilation comes the possibility of life, even here on
Saturn's mysterious moon Titan.
It's 3,000 miles across, larger than the planet Mercury.
It's the only moon in our solar system with a thick atmosphere.
There is weather here -- storms, winds, rain, even lakes -- all so cold
that liquid methane takes the place of water.
And it's loaded with chemicals that life needs to survive.
Titan has turned out to be absolutely one of the most interesting
places in the solar system.
It's an active world.
It's the only moon with a thick atmosphere -- an atmosphere very much
like Earth, because it's mostly nitrogen, and it turns out, an
atmosphere loaded with organic molecules.
Narrator: Methane gas high in Titan's atmosphere reacts with sunlight
and creates the kind of chemicals life depends on.
But if sunlight converts methane into organics continuously, why
doesn't the methane run out? The atmosphere's full of methane, and yet
we know methane is being destroyed by sunlight on a short time scale,
so it shouldn't be there.
There needs to be a source of methane.
Narrator: Something on Titan pumps out a continuous supply of methane.
Cassini has detected what looks like a crater.
Its interior is as deep as the Grand Canyon.
Infrared cameras reveal different types of materials surrounding the
crater.
Scientists believe the green areas could be volcanic, perhaps plains of
lava ejected from Titan's interior.
If it exists, lava Titan-style is a superchilled icy slush.
But compared to the rest of Titan, even ice slush is scalding hot.
On Titan, the hot liquid spewing from volcanoes might be ammonia or
water.
Normally, those are frozen solid on the surface, but if they're heated
beneath the surface somehow, they could erupt out.
On Titan, what comes out of volcanoes is methane and ethane, and that's
probably the reason why we have this very thick cloud cover, this
orange haze around Titan.
This haze probably came from outgassing from the volcanoes of Titan.
Even for volcanoes on a world as cold as Titan, you need heat.
That's what turns ice into liquid and generates eruptions.
On Titan, that heat has two sources.
Radioactive materials warm the interior.
And Saturn's huge gravity massages the moon, just like Enceladus.
These two forces generate enough heat to turn ice into water and liquid
methane to gas.
We think of volcanoes as being hot and ice as cold, and yet if you're
out on Titan, where you're a billion miles from the Sun and it's --
it's quite cold, then those floes of just-barely-above-freezing water
ammonia ice -- they might be the hottest things around.
So "hot" is a relative term, depending on where in the solar system you
are.
Narrator: Could volcanoes on Titan give life a chance to survive here?
Life as we know it needs an atmosphere a solid surface liquid water and
the heat to drive chemical reactions.
On Titan, volcanoes could provide them all.
If you have a volcano on Titan, you'll have heat added to that, and all
of a sudden, you'll have liquid water surrounded by organic material --
I mean, literally, anything you need for the start of life.
Narrator: If life does exist on Titan, it would be truly alien.
It would breathe hydrogen in place of oxygen, perhaps swimming through
lakes of liquid methane at 300 degrees below zero.
Kaku: Perhaps there are oceans of ethane.
Perhaps there are tide pools and perhaps volcanic activity and
hydrothermal activity.
Perhaps there are hot springs.
Perhaps volcanic heat could generate enough to get life off the ground
in Titan.
That's a speculation, but it can't be ruled out.
Narrator: But we may not need to travel this far to find signs of life.
We may find it on a volcanic world much closer to home the red planet,
Mars.
Narrator: Volcanoes are everywhere across the solar system.
Worlds like Io, Titan, and Triton are complex, dynamic, and violent.
Once, we thought that Earth was the only planet with volcanoes and with
life.
Now we find volcanoes everywhere, but we have yet to find alien life.
Volcanoes embody the sheer power of creation and destruction.
They go hand in hand.
It is literally true that, if there weren't volcanoes here, we would
not be here either.
In the caldrons of volcanoes is the origin of life.
Narrator: Volcanoes create new landscapes, seed the atmosphere with
complex chemicals, replace the old with the new.
If volcanoes are bound up with the processes of life, then where is the
life on other worlds? Perhaps the answer originates in deep time, when
the solar system was young on a young planet much like our own.
This is Mars.
it had active volcanoes.
One still remains -- the largest volcano in the solar system.
The cliffs leading to it are over 6 miles high.
Mount Everest would sit comfortably in their shadow, and those are just
the foothills.
This is the awe-inspiring Olympus Mons.
It covers an area the size of Arizona.
Its crater alone is 53 miles wide.
A goliath like this takes millions of years to build, time that
volcanoes here on Earth never get.
On Earth, the crust is always moving.
[ Cracking ] Deep below, a single hot spot pushes magma through the
surface, building a new volcanic island.
But while the hot spot stays still, the surface is moving.
The new island moves away from the hot spot, and a new volcanic island
takes its place.
Mars is different.
The crust is locked solid.
On Mars, there's just none of that tectonic activity.
The crust is one big solid plate, and so if there's a hot spot, it just
sits there and builds and builds and builds.
And you get a bigger and bigger and bigger volcano.
And that's why Olympus Mons is so huge.
Narrator: Olympus Mons today is a frozen relic of a distant, warmer
past.
Mars' shrunken atmosphere means that Olympus now reaches almost into
space -- a true colossus, an extinct volcano on a dying world.
But Mars' ancient volcanic terrain could, one day, harbor life again.
The evidence is right here on Earth.
On Hawaii, volcanoes have created mysterious tunnels called lava tubes,
channels left behind when torrents of molten rock surge into the sea.
But some are now empty, and that offers us an opportunity.
Lava tubes are formed when you have an underground river of hot
basaltic lava, And picture it like a frozen river of water, with the
ice crust forming on the top.
It's the same thing, only here, the crust is solid rock and the river
keeps flowing underneath and makes this cave, this lava tube.
Narrator: Extraordinary recent images suggest Mars' volcanoes also may
have created lava tubes.
Any planet with basaltic volcanism, any rocky planet, will probably
have lava tubes.
And now we've found a couple of them on Mars, in places where there are
skylights, places where the roof has collapsed and you can see from
orbit right into those lava tubes.
Narrator: If some tubes have collapsed, perhaps many others are still
intact, the ancient relics of Mars' volcanic past.
Now, after lying dormant for perhaps millions of years, these lava
tubes could bring life back to the red planet.
That life will be us.
One of the challenges of living on Mars for future humans will be the
radiation environment.
And in particular, when there are solar storms, the cosmic rays coming
in can be deadly.
And having a storm shelter under some large mass of rock is really the
best way to protect yourself from cosmic rays.
Narrator: The tubes and caves of Mars' extinct volcanoes might one day
make a perfect home -- holding in air, shielding us from deadly
radiation.
A long-dead volcano could help fill a world with new life.
Volcanoes can destroy, but they can also create.
From the superheated vents of Europa's 60-mile-deep ocean to the water
volcanoes of Titan and the rock volcanoes of Earth, vast geologic
processes shape our worlds, our imaginations, and perhaps the very
stuff of life.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s02e01

Mega storms

We live in a violent Universe.

Planetary winds rage at six times the speed of sound.
Lightning storms stretch for thousands of miles.
Dust storms engulf entire worlds.
We can have planetary storms the like of which we never see here on the
planet Earth.
The largest storms can be on the scale of entire galaxies.
Sometimes those massive stars can literally explode.
The universe is a chaotic place.
Earth has storms.
Other worlds have megastorms, storms almost too vast to imagine.
Yet from the violence emerges a ray of hope.
We kind of owe our existence to these sorts of events, these sort of
galactic storms.
Could megastorms be necessary for life itself? On some planets, storms
are impossible.
Superheated Mercury is too small and too close to our Sun to have a
significant atmosphere.
And no atmosphere means no storms.
But move out away from the Sun, and we find worlds with turbulent,
chaotic atmospheres.
They can spawn some of the most awe-inspiring megastorms in our solar
system.
This is Venus, a planet completely shrouded with clouds.
Winds rip around the upper atmosphere at over 300 miles per hour.
About 35 miles above the surface, the winds are whipping around in a
ferocious pattern that basically carries the cloud features around the
entire planet every four days.
Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth, and it's heat from the Sun that
drives the wind.
The circulation pattern of Venus' clouds is actually quite simple.
There's a warm side of Venus and a cold side.
And as air warms up and rises on the day side of Venus, it spreads
around to the night side.
So, there's this continuous current that's actually quite a lot simpler
than the atmospheric circulation on Earth.
Venus' winds circulate faster than the fastest hurricane on Earth.
But they look very similar.
The Venus Express probe captured these remarkable images of the
planet's south pole.
One of the great mysteries of Venus which actually had jaws dropping in
the halls of many astronomy departments is the fact that we have
hurricanes at the poles of Venus, especially in the southern
hemisphere, that have two eyes.
Not one eye, but two eyes.
Now, we've never seen this before on such a planetary scale.
Venus' double-eyed vortex is 1,800 miles wide.
Two hurricanes whirl around each other.
If you could descend into the vortex of Venus, something I would love
to do, at least with a remote machine I think you would see some kind
of a fantastic wall of cloud and this sort of twisting form spinning
around you at ferocious speeds.
It would be quite a sight.
It's a mystery how deep this raging, spinning vortex goes, but maybe
this megastorm eye descends to the planet's surface.
Down here, permanent twilight bathes a volcanic landscape, and the
atmosphere's colossal weight creates immense pressure.
The atmospheric pressure on Venus is about 100 times that of the Earth.
Think of taking a car, squeezing it down to about a square inch, and
putting it on every square inch of your skin.
You'd be flattened within a fraction of a second because of all that
pressure.
Venus' dense atmosphere creates one of the strangest megastorms
imaginable -- four miles per hour winds with the force of a hurricane.
The winds on the surface of Venus are actually very slow because Venus
has a very slow rotation rate.
It takes Venus about eight months to turn once around with respect to
the sun.
The crushing atmospheric pressure rams gas molecules together so
tightly that they feel more like a liquid.
A gentle 4-mile-an-hour breeze packs a brutal punch.
It's like a hurricane in slow motion.
Winds on Venus are totally unlike anything we see on the planet Earth.
You would almost feel, like, a molasses effect.
It'd be quite difficult to simply walk and run right through the wind.
Venus' surface is so hostile that life is impossible here.
But the upper atmosphere's faster winds hold an extraordinary
possibility.
I harbor this -- I don't know if I would call it a hypothesis or a
scientific fantasy.
But I do think it's plausible that there could be some kind of life
living in the clouds of Venus.
There are certainly energy sources.
There's sunlight.
And there are certainly nutrients.
There's carbon, there's hydrogen, there's oxygen -- all the stuff we
think of that you need to make life exists in the clouds of Venus.
Earth's upper atmosphere is full of life -- microscopic bacteria
drifting on the wind.
Could Venus be the same? Perhaps one day we'll send a probe to find
out.
Leave Venus behind, and the next planet is Earth.
Here, too, the weather gets extreme.
We are bombarded by tornadoes hurricanes and these -- dust storms.
On Earth, they're localized.
But on the next planet out they engulf an entire world.
Over 100 years ago, astronomers thought they had found life on Mars.
A dark wave spread from the pole towards the equator.
They thought it was springtime vegetation spreading across the planet.
They were right about the season.
Mars tilts at roughly 23 degrees, like the Earth, so you would have
summer, fall, winter, spring, like the seasons.
Seasons bring weather.
The shadow astronomers saw was actually dark rock uncovered by a
violent dust storm.
It's all because of the way the planet tilts.
The Earth takes one year to orbit the Sun.
In January, the northern hemisphere leans away from the Sun, and we get
our winter.
In June, it leans inwards, our summer.
Mars has gigantic planetary dust storms the like of which we've never
seen here on the planet Earth.
Mars has around the same tilt as Earth, and springtime means storms.
The martian surface vanishes under a cloud of raging dust particles.
On Earth, we get dust storms, too.
They can be devastating, swallowing entire cities.
July 5, 2011, Arizona.
An unstoppable smashes into Phoenix.
Day turns to night.
Thousands of tons of dust settle over the city.
But the disaster stays in one place.
Mars' dust storms can engulf the entire planet.
On Mars, when dust gets kicked up once, it lands, it can get kicked up
again and again.
The dust is reusable.
On the Earth, when the dust gets kicked up and then finally settles
out, it's probably gonna settle out into the ocean, where it's gone for
good.
There's nowhere on Mars where there isn't ready dust and sand to add to
that storm.
So, these storm systems can kick up and last weeks or even months.
Mars' incredibly dry atmosphere contributes to the storms' size and
power.
In the case of the Earth, dust that gets up into the atmosphere is
rapidly washed out by the rain and gets into the ocean.
In the case of Mars, there's no comparable rain to wash the dust out.
So, once the dust gets into the atmosphere, it just sits there until
the particles by themselves are able to slowly settle out.
A lack of rain allows Mars' dust storms to cover the planet.
But dust storms on Mars can be equally spectacular on a much smaller
scale.
NASA rovers captured these extraordinary images -- dust devils sucking
up fine, dry, iron-oxide dust.
The biggest dust devils can reach six miles into the sky.
They pump fine particles high into Mars' atmosphere, creating a haze of
dust that may help control the planet's dry climate and lead to a
planet-wide megastorm.
Even on Mars, dust storms this big are rare.
Astronomers have detected just 10 in the last 100 years.
What the ancient astronomers mistook for life was a megastorm.
But even a planet-covering dust storm is dwarfed by the weather on the
next planet out from our Sun.
This is the giant of our solar system -- Jupiter.
Jupiter is gigantic.
It's 2½ times more massive than all the other planets in the solar
system added together.
It's also home to gigantic megastorms.
Jupiter's high-speed rotation drives vast bands of counter-rotating
clouds.
Colossal storms build along the boundaries.
And this is the biggest of them all, the oldest storm in the solar
system.
and over 300 years old, the great red spot.
Around the edges, turbulent winds rage at over 300 miles per hour.
The great red spot is a giant vortex, meaning that, in the case of the
red spot, it has a high-pressure center with winds that swirl around
the outer edge.
So, in that sense, the great red spot is a little bit like a hurricane.
A hurricane with a difference.
On Earth, hurricanes feed off heat from the ocean.
When they hit land, they start to die.
So, on average, they last only about a week.
Jupiter does not have land.
Jupiter is a completely gaseous planet, and the friction there is very
weak.
And so a vortex, like the great red spot, can last indefinitely.
There's nothing to slow it down.
To keep going, all the red spot needs is a power source.
On Earth, ultimately, that's heat from the Sun.
But Jupiter's five times farther from the Sun than us.
Heat from the Sun is not enough to drive the red spot.
Instead, Jupiter has an internal power source -- its own immense
gravity.
In 1995, NASA launched a probe straight toward the giant planet's
heart.
It plunged into Jupiter's upper atmosphere at over 106,000 miles per
hour.
As it fell, the planet's crushing gravity ratcheted up the pressure
what we feel on Earth.
Winds gusted to over 400 miles per hour.
The probe gave out just 100 miles in, crushed by pressure and fried by
the incredible heat the pressure generated.
Had the probe made it deeper, it would have reached a vast, silvery
ocean.
Intense pressures here turn hydrogen gas into a churning, metallic
liquid, superheated to over Jupiter's interior pumps out about twice as
much energy as the surface gets from the Sun.
This is Jupiter's power source, the heat that drives its massive
megastorms.
All of the convection, all of the heat comes from the hot, dense
interior of the planet itself.
So, the bands of clouds that you see that are even counter-rotating,
going in different directions, those are all driven by the internal
heat of Jupiter itself.
Jupiter's internal heat drives its violent megastorms.
But the giant planet may hold clues to an even deeper mystery.
Could life exist on other worlds? NASA's Cassini probe studied Jupiter
as it flew past en route to saturn.
It made an extraordinary discovery -- strange white clouds just north
of the great red spot.
Clouds just like the clouds on Earth -- droplets of liquid water.
Could Jupiter have the ingredients for life? The question of life on
the giant planets is an interesting one.
You have many of the ingredients for life.
You have sunlight coming in.
There's liquid water, at least in the form of cloud droplets.
On the other hand, if life can easily exist in clouds, you might expect
that bacteria and algae would populate the clouds on Earth and the
clouds would be green.
We don't see that on the Earth.
We do see microbes at many altitudes throughout the Earth's atmosphere,
but they seem to largely be blown off of the surface.
It's likely that life on Earth began on a solid surface.
But could life evolve without one? There's no surface on Jupiter, and
so that makes it difficult for organisms to have a constant source of
water.
So, if you imagine yourself being a little bacterium inside a cloud
droplet, you're gonna be in deep trouble when that cloud droplet
evaporates.
Whether life exists in Jupiter's clouds or not, gas giants like Jupiter
and its neighbor Saturn have all the right ingredients -- water, heat,
and one other vital element, a spark lightning on an unimaginable
scale.
These haunting images are from NASA's Cassini probe.
Its mission -- to explore one of the solar system's most awe-inspiring
planets Saturn.
The probe reveals Saturn's rings moons and the planet itself in near-
perfect detail.
Chaotic bands of cloud race around Saturn at more than Finding storms
here was no surprise.
It's a planet of storms.
But this was astonishing.
A bolt of lightning -- a gigantic thunderstorm on an alien world.
Lightning creates some of the most spectacular weather on Earth.
Electrical tension builds between the top and bottom of a vast 55,000-
feet-high storm cloud, a maelstrom of water vapor, rain, and ice.
Tiny ice crystals drive up past hailstones falling down.
As they rub past each other, it builds up a charge.
When the strain gets too great, you get an electric spark.
On Earth, the average lightning storm stretches 15 miles.
On Saturn, they can reach around the whole planet.
There are examples of lightning storms on Jupiter and Saturn where the
anvil cloud -- in other words, the big cloud at the top of the storm --
starts small and grows to be 20,000 kilometers long.
That's the size of the Earth.
On Saturn, we registered one lightning storm that was 10,000 times
greater than any lightning storm found on the planet Earth.
Lightning is hotter than the surface of the Sun.
The atmosphere literally explodes the sound we call "thunder.
" On Earth, it's the sound of new life.
Lightning seems scary and destructive, but actually it's very
productive for life on Earth.
And the reason why is because of its influence on atmospheric
chemistry.
Every bolt literally burns the air.
When you have a lightning discharge, you get this very high-
temperature, very energetic plasma, and that breaks up the nitrogen
molecules in the atmosphere, frees up those nitrogen atoms to enter
into other kinds of molecules.
And those nitrates formed by lightning allow nitrogen to go into the
soil as, basically, fertilizer, enter into plants, enter into the life
cycle.
So, it's the lightning that frees up nitrogen atoms in the service of
life on Earth.
Earth experiences every day helping life evolve and colonize the
planet.
But for Saturn, lightning alone may not be enough.
There's nowhere for alien life to live.
One place in our solar system may solve that problem -- Saturn's moon
Titan.
It has an atmosphere.
It has lakes of liquid methane .
and its own bizarre brand of megastorm.
Saturn is almost 900 million miles from the Sun.
This far out, orbiting the Sun takes time.
Saturn's year is nearly 30 Earth years long.
Right now, it's spring, and things are heating up.
Now we're moving into the summer cycle of Saturn, so the atmosphere is
slightly heating up.
Even as distant as Saturn is from the Sun, we've got a little more
energy and we're seeing the most spectacular storms we've ever observed
on Saturn.
After years of frozen silence, Saturn is coming alive.
Scientists have waited nearly 15 years for the Sun to light up its
north pole, to reveal extraordinary details about one of the strangest
megastorms in the solar system.
Saturn's unique hexagon storm.
A hexagonal pattern, how can that be? In mother nature, we have jagged
objects.
We don't have geometric figures arranged precisely, especially on a
gigantic planetary scale.
However, there's some theories.
If I take a bucket of water or a bathtub and simply vibrate it, I get
waves, waves that travel.
But there's another kind of wave.
You have traveling waves, but then you have stationary waves.
Inside a bucket of water, you can get resonances.
Water pulsates like this.
And you can also get them to pulsate in a circle like this to create
regular patterns.
These are called stationary waves, and we think that this mysterious
hexagonal pattern on Saturn is a hexagonal standing wave.
The megastorm at Saturn's north pole is a wind that travels at
hurricane speed, cornering sharply six times as it races 'round the
planet.
The central clearing is so big, you could fit four Earths inside.
What lies beneath its surface is a mystery.
As Saturn warms from spring to summer, another world comes alive, too.
One of Saturn's moons, Titan, is warming up.
And with the warmth come the storms.
One of the most interesting moons in our solar system is Titan.
It's straight out of science fiction.
It's an object with yellow skies and methane clouds that is truly
remarkable.
NASA's Cassini probe reveals Titan in unprecedented detail a thick,
dense atmosphere, vast mountain ranges, lakes of liquid methane.
And this -- an arrow-shaped band of white methane clouds moving over
its surface.
When the clouds drifted over a dusty, open plain, seen here as a dark
patch, the dark patch of ground beneath the clouds grew larger.
Scientists believe liquid methane drenched the surface.
A spring rainstorm, Titan style.
Rain on Titan, if it exists, would be very different from rain on the
planet Earth.
First of all, the gravitational field is very weak, so you would
actually see raindrops falling very slowly at you.
Also, the size of these droplets could be much larger.
But don't get caught in a rainstorm on Titan.
Those droplets are awfully cold.
Titan's methane monsoon sweeps across the moon.
Weak gravity creates ultra-cold, hazelnut-sized raindrops.
An alien world with truly alien weather.
These slow drops have carved valleys and lakes much like ours on Earth,
a slow-motion megastorm.
But fly even farther out through the solar system, and you find storms
that are altogether faster.
This is super-chilled Neptune.
The temperature never gets above 300 degrees below zero.
Neptune is one of these giant planets.
It's much larger than the Earth and has a very thick atmosphere.
It's about 2 billion miles out from the Sun.
So, you really might expect, since it's that far from the Sun, it would
be very cold and not have very much weather.
But in fact, Neptune is very dynamic.
It's got tremendous weather patterns.
Despite its incredible distance from Earth, astronomers can get close
to Neptune's turbulent atmosphere with a little help from this.
The Keck Observatory, of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
It sits above Earth's clouds and pollution.
The telescopes are so powerful they could see a candle on the Moon.
Neptune at first appears featureless.
But a closer look reveals white, high-altitude clouds in the upper
atmosphere.
It's a perfect opportunity to track wind speed.
Measuring the time and distance the clouds take between two points
allows scientists to clock their speed.
The Keck telescope swings towards Neptune.
A series of shots track the white clouds as they move around the
planet.
So, here we can take several photographs that show the positions of
clouds apparently changing.
You can measure the position at one moment to be there and at another
time a few hours later to be in a different place.
Now, most of that change in position is due to the rotation of the
planet as a whole.
However, if you know the rotation rate and subtract that out, that
gives you the motion of the clouds relative to the planet.
That tells you the wind speed.
The results are shocking.
We're seeing wind speeds on Neptune of many hundreds of miles per hour
up to 1,200 or even 1,260 miles per hour for the very fastest clouds.
That's really phenomenal.
Neptune has the fastest winds in the solar system.
So, what's driving this? You need energy to make weather.
Where's that energy coming from? And it turns out it's coming from
Neptune itself.
It does receive sunlight, but Neptune actually radiates away more
energy -- a lot more energy than it gets from the Sun, which means the
interior is very hot.
Probably it means there's radioactive material in there, there's
leftover heat from when Neptune formed that's very slowly leaking out.
And it's that that's heating up the air and driving all of this
circulation and all of this crazy weather that Neptune has.
Neptune's storms hit hard.
But the search for truly extreme weather takes us out of the solar
system altogether into uncharted territory.
Out here, there are storms that make even Neptune's winds look like a
breeze.
Katrina was just a sneeze compared to the winds we have on Osiris.
The search for megastorms leads to alien worlds whose violence defies
imagination.
Space is full of stars and planets where violence and chaos reign.
Astronomers scour the skies for new worlds.
And the king of the planet hunters is Professor Geoff Marcy.
He scans the night sky seeking new worlds around distant stars.
Marcy's team has instruments so sensitive they can even predict the
weather on these distant planets.
This is Osiris, a planet from hell with matching weather.
Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun.
It orbits the Sun in one year.
But Osiris is just 4 million miles from its star.
Its year races by in just 3½ days.
When Osiris passes between us and its star, starlight briefly shines
through its atmosphere, giving us a glimpse of conditions on the alien
world.
And they waited until the planet was in front of the star.
At that moment, some of the starlight passed through the atmosphere of
the planet.
They were able to do essentially a chemical assay, a chemical
assessment of the composition of this atmosphere.
Osiris gets blasted by the intense heat of its star.
Temperatures top 2,000 degrees.
Now, what that means is that the environment on that planet is, well,
hideous for life as we know it.
But even more, the intense heat causes the gases to expand, and they
have no place to go but the backside of the planet.
Osiris is tidally locked.
The same side of the planet always faces the star.
The other looks out into space.
The temperature difference is immense.
Superheated atmosphere roars from the bright side of the planet to the
dark at nearly six times the speed of sound.
In fact, the winds will be something like 2,000 or 3,000 miles per
hour, enormous speeds of these winds -- wind speeds than the strongest
hurricanes.
Katrina was just a sneeze compared to the winds we have on Osiris.
Osiris is a brutal world, too hot and too violent for any kind of life
we could imagine.
But there are even larger megastorms, storms on the scale of whole
galaxies.
And these fast storms may be the reason any of us are here.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this stunning image of the Galaxy
NGC 3079.
At its center, a super wind -- a storm on a truly cosmic scale.
It was triggered by an explosion from a forming star.
This raging galactic storm is about 3,000 light-years wide.
It has already raged for around one million years.
Filaments of 20 million-degree gas tower above the spiral galaxy.
This cosmic megastorm wreaks havoc within its host galaxy.
We see bubbles and jets and formations of gas falling into the galaxy,
colliding with galactic dust.
The gas from the galactic megastorm smashes into gas and dust at the
heart of the galaxy and compresses it into a swirling mass of matter.
Gravity takes over.
The compressed clouds of gas and dust get tighter and tighter.
The center gets hotter and hotter.
Finally, it ignites.
Powerful winds from the new star blast into space.
The whole cycle begins over again, and a new galactic megastorm is
born.
Around the fledgling stars, dust and rock come together, the birth of
new worlds with rocky surfaces where life could begin.
And perhaps the formation of life itself may be determined by how these
gases swirl and create super-galactic storms.
And if you have galactic winds churning away, then that would help to
distribute the elements necessary for life throughout the galaxy.
So, galactic storms may, in some sense, be one clue to the formation of
life itself.
Galactic megastorms rage for millions of years.
Billions of years ago, they may have created new homes for life in our
Milky Way galaxy.
On every scale, storms are not just a force of destruction.
They are linked to creation itself.
The search for life on other worlds is also the search for storms.
When you disrupt the status quo, you open all kinds of possibilities
for things to reassemble in different ways.
So, chaos or disruption is actually an important factor in the
development of complex systems like life.
A planet that might have changes of seasons, vulcanism, intense storms,
some environmental factors that you might think could be damaging to
life, in the long run makes life stronger.
Earth has storms.
Other worlds have megastorms.
Whether it's lightning on Saturn, the turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter,
or blistering temperatures on Osiris, vast, violent, and deadly
megastorms could also be the catalyst for life.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s02e02

Exoplanets

Our universe is violent.

The cosmos is full of planets from hell.
What we have is a collection of monsters.
Superhot worlds roasting at thousands of degrees Frozen planets too
cold for life Desolate worlds seared by deadly radiation Even planets
where rock rains from the sky.
We have hundreds and hundreds of these things we've found.
And they're crazy.
We search the heavens for worlds like our own and find planets where
life could not possibly survive.
How can the universe be so weird? Is the Earth a one-off -- the only
habitable planet in the Universe? Or are there worlds like ours out
there just waiting for us to find? Look out at the cosmos billions of
galaxies trillions upon trillions of stars.
And one profound question -- Is anyone else out there? We want to find
another Earth.
Is there a pale blue dot orbiting some star out there in the galaxy?
The search is on for worlds that could harbor life.
We're searching for our own vision of ourselves out there in space.
We're searching for our heaven.
We've already discovered more than 700 planets beyond our solar system.
And yet these exoplanets look nothing like our own.
Boy, were we wrong.
All these solar systems that we're seeing in outer space, we find that
they don't look like our solar system at all.
We are the oddball.
We're the freaks.
These are nightmare worlds.
And the cosmos is full of them.
We're finding all different flavors of hell, all these different ways
that planets can go wrong.
So, that's where we are right now -- searching for heaven, finding
hell.
These are worlds where life couldn't possibly survive.
Could we really be alone, a cosmic fluke in a universe hostile to life?
We may soon have the answer.
Now we have discovered hundreds of exoplanets in outer space at the
rate of over one exoplanet a week.
In a few years, that will probably be thousands.
And in the end, there could be millions or even billions of these
things waiting for us to discover them.
How could all of them be planets from hell? The quest for answers
starts here, We've discovered a planet.
It's even larger than Jupiter.
And it has a serious problem.
Its orbit is incredibly tight.
It's closer to its star than Mercury is to our Sun and 30-times closer
in than the Earth.
The result is a superheated hell.
But there's another reason why nothing could survive here and that's
the ferocious wind.
The surface is battered by a never-ending storm.
We can't see these winds with our telescopes but we know the superstorm
exists because of this NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
Spitzer can see things that we can't.
It doesn't use visible light.
Instead, it sees in infrared.
It's a part of the light spectrum we don't see with our eyes.
Infrared is heat.
One advantage of studying the universe in infrared is it gives us this
opportunity to see the light coming from planets around other stars.
When you try to look at the light of a planet next to the light of a
star, the star is hundreds of thousands of times brighter than that
planet, which renders the planet very, very faint.
But if we push into the infrared part of the spectrum, the internal
heat of the planet, just as my internal heat, causes the planet to
glow.
Now, it's observable and measurable.
Spitzer gives us something completely new -- the very first weather map
of a planet beyond our solar system.
This simple image is a technological triumph.
The colors represent temperature differences.
But the map also proves the planet has hellish winds.
That's because the hot spot isn't where it should be.
One side of the planet permanently faces the star, so its center should
be the hottest point on the planet.
It isn't.
Something pushes the planet's hot spot to the side, and that takes
incredible force.
Only a nonstop, could be this powerful 20-times stronger than the
strongest winds on Earth, eight times the speed of sound.
A small shift on a weather map evidence of supersonic winds raging on
an alien planet.
Truly a planet from hell.
We're finding new planets at a staggering rate -- an average of one a
week.
Each one could be an earthlike heaven.
But the more we explore them, the more hellish worlds we find.
And some are so nightmarishly hot that they're more than uninhabitable.
They shouldn't even exist.
This Jupiter-sized, gas planet is 256 light-years from Earth.
In infrared, it shines like a star, thousands of times brighter than
Venus, the hottest planet in our solar system.
It's a blistering 3,700 degrees.
It's nearly impossible for a planet to get this hot.
Its hellish temperature provides a clue to its appearance.
Only an absolutely black object could absorb enough light from its star
to reach such scorching temperatures.
If you were coming up on the nightside away from the star, you would
just see this blackness in front of you -- very little radiation, very
little light.
It would almost just look like the stars were avoiding a part of the
sky.
Just as black pavement absorbs sunlight and heats up on a sunny day,
the black planet roasts beside its star.
We don't understand its atmospheric chemistry.
There's nothing on Earth that can absorb so much light.
The planet's only color comes from a scorching hot spot.
As you flew around to the dayside, things would begin to glow red-hot.
There'd be a huge, swirling storm all red and glowing.
What a hellish world.
Deep inside, clouds of titanium oxide swirl around a solid heart
Darkness visible -- another world from hell.
But some planets are even bigger, seemingly impossible puzzles.
Here's a mystery.
Every astronomy textbook says that gigantic, Jupiter-sized planets form
way out in outer space where it's really cold.
So, why is a Jupiter-sized planet -- what's it doing inside the orbit
of Mercury? Jupiter-type planets can only form far form their parent
stars, out in the cold of space.
A gas giant orbiting this close means these monsters can move.
This is Wasp-12b, a scorching vision of hell.
It's so close to its star that its orbit lasts just one earth day.
This world is so hot.
It's over This is just crazy hot.
Wasp-12b is one of the hottest planets in our galaxy.
We've never seen anything like this before.
This certainly is one of the most violent environments in the universe.
Wasp-12b is only Searing heat puffs up its atmosphere, giving it the
density of styrofoam.
In a big enough bath tub, it would float.
We actually think it's so close to its star that the gravity -- the
tidal effect of gravity warps it into almost an egg shape.
It's not even round.
It's oblong.
Thousands of miles beneath the puffed-up atmosphere lies a solid core.
It's rich in carbon, and the pressures are extreme.
There could be mountains of diamond and graphite and seas of liquid
tar.
But Wasp-12b won't last long.
It orbits so closely that its star is literally tearing it apart,
ripping away nearly 190 quadrillion tons of gas a year.
Wasp-12b will vanish.
The question is how did it get so close in the first place? This is the
birth of a solar system.
In the center, a new star.
Around it swirls a disc of microscopic dust grains.
These are planets in the making.
Dust grains collide, and every time they collide, they merge.
And so they get bigger and bigger.
And so, they sort of grow like the dust bunnies under your bed, and you
have 100,000 years or 1 million years to make a very big dust bunny.
And they get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Trillions of miles from the star, it's cold enough for ice to form.
Ice picks up dust and gas.
These gaseous clumps grow bigger and bigger over millions of years.
Eventually, they become gas giants.
In our solar system, the gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and
Uranus, all formed this way in the distant orbits we still see today.
So, how did Wasp-12b end up so searingly close to its star? The answer
-- gravity.
This planet is huge -- Its immense gravity disturbs the dust disc it
formed from, creating turbulence.
And so, the planet creates waves in the disc -- you know, sort of
density waves.
And you can sort of think of them as like waves on an ocean.
The gas giant becomes a galactic surfer.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, the planet rides the waves inward
toward the star.
As the planet gets closer and closer to the star, it starts to feel the
radiation from the star more and more, and so it heats up.
Surfing millions of miles from the cold, outer reaches of the star
system into the tight, scorching orbit we see today an ice-cold world
becomes a planet from hell.
Nobody had any real clue that you could form a planet a billion miles
out from a star -- it somehow moved in.
That is incredible.
But that's really the only explanation of how these planets got so
close to their stars in the first place.
Wasp-12b is bizarre, but it isn't alone.
We've found many of these superhot, super close giants.
We call them hot Jupiters battered by supersonic winds, blacker than
night, hotter than hell.
But these hot Jupiters all have one thing in common -- there's no life
here.
So, these planets are just about as different from the Earth as you can
possibly imagine.
In fact, we've now found over 100 of these things, rendering them so
common that the question really emerges -- which ones are the weirdos?
Them or us? This planetary roller coaster has consequences.
As they spiral inward, hot Jupiters cause chaos.
They create a whole new class of planets from hell -- orphan worlds
flung away from their star into the emptiness of interstellar space.
Planets orbit stars.
Between the stars is a vast sea of darkness.
We've always thought of space as being empty.
That would be considered its defining characteristic.
That's why we call it "space.
" But when planet hunters switched from gazing at stars to staring deep
into space they made an amazing discovery.
Out of the darkness, between the stars, planets began to appear.
First, one dark gas giant then several more.
Eventually, 10 dark, starless planets emerged from the shadows of
space.
I often wonder what it would be like to be on one of these rogue
planets in between stars.
The night sky would be perfectly black.
It would be festooned with stars.
It would be beautiful.
But if you were at one of these planets, you would be in a world of
perpetual night.
There would be no sunrise or sunset.
There would be no warmth of the sun.
These planets formed around a star.
But now they roam the darkness of interstellar space.
Their journey here was violent -- each one forced from its home orbit
by the gravity of a hot Jupiter.
A Jupiter-sized planet is an 800-pound gorilla.
Where does it sit? Anywhere it wants to.
Hot Jupiters are killers.
As they surf in toward their star, their immense gravity disrupts the
system hurling planets from their orbital paths.
It flings into outer space any small planet.
So, any planet unfortunate enough to be orbiting close to the mother
star would be flung into outer space with a passing Jupiter.
These planets will never again feel the heat or see the light of a
star.
All the rogue planets we've found so far are gas giants.
But perhaps there are smaller, rocky worlds, too worlds that were once
like Earth.
The large, Jupiter-like planets are just easier to see.
But there's no reason to assume there also aren't smaller orphan
planets.
Maybe as a Jupiter planet moves in toward the star and plays ping-pong
with the planets, even something like earth could have gotten kicked
out.
Then you would have this cold, frozen little world just streaking
between the stars, dark and lonely.
These planets are victims of a violent, gravitational battle -- frozen,
orphaned earth twins.
There may be hundreds of billions -- with a "b" -- of these planets
roaming the galaxy.
Now, there are only a couple hundred billion stars in the galaxy, so
that means these rogue planets may actually outnumber stars.
Right now, we find an average of at least one new exoplanet a week.
As our technology improves, we'll see smaller and smaller planets
orbiting stars -- worlds with a solid surface like our own.
But the first rocky planets we've found are nothing like Earth.
These planets have been to hell and back.
We have found hundreds of alien worlds.
And now for the first time, we're finding small planets made of rock
just like Earth.
Planets this size are potential homes for life.
But instead, we find more planets from hell -- weird, nightmarish, and
uninhabitable.
This is Corot-7b a world of violent extremes two hells in one.
It's so close in that its star looms 360-times larger in the sky than
our Sun.
On Corot-7b, the first hell is unimaginably hot.
The surface is a furnace roasting at 4,700 degrees.
Lava boils, turning the atmosphere into vaporized rock.
When a cooler front moves in, small pebbles condense, and rocks rain
from the sky.
If that's not a classic vision of hell, I don't know what is.
But that's only half the story.
The hot side of the planet is locked, permanently facing the star.
Beyond is the twilight zone.
It's temperate here -- cool enough to turn the lava oceans into solid
rock.
But this pleasant zone is narrow.
Travel further, and you descend into a second hell.
This is the dark side the half of the planet that never sees the sun --
eternal darkness and savage cold.
The temperature is hundreds of degrees below zero.
So, one side is hot.
Another side is cold.
You either have, you know, fire or ice in the extreme -- the coldest
places in the Universe and the hottest places in the Universe.
You couldn't think of a worse place to end up.
The planet was not always this way.
Turn back the clock Corot-7b is forming.
But it isn't rocky.
It's a gas giant It migrates in toward its star.
As it closes in, the star blowtorches gas from the planet.
Its gaseous shell blasts off into space to reveal a rocky core.
Corot-7b is the skeletal remains of a hot Jupiter.
Its parent star has reduced this once massive gas giant to a rocky
cinder.
It's hard to imagine planets more extreme than Corot-7b yet they do
exist -- rocky worlds machine-gunned by deadly cosmic rays.
This is a pulsar 7,000 trillion miles away from Earth.
It's a kind of cosmic lighthouse.
This unbelievably tiny world, just 10 miles across, fires an intense
beam of radiation through space as regularly as an atomic clock.
A single cubic centimeter -- the size of a keyboard key -- actually has
about as much mass as Mount Everest.
Smash a Mount Everest into a cubic centimeter.
The whole star, which is only about 10 miles across, is like that.
It's one of the most hostile environments in the Universe.
Anything nearby gets hammered by intense gravity and magnetism.
No one expected to find a planet here.
But this pulsar has three.
Small, rocky, near-earth-sized, they were the first exoplanets ever
discovered and the last place you would ever find life.
It's got a tremendous magnetic field.
It's blasting out X-rays.
So, these poor planets are just getting cooked by radiation.
The word earthlike I don't think could be applied to these guys at all.
The X-ray beam strafes the planets over and over, firing radiation a
million times more deadly than medical X-rays slowly stripping their
surfaces away.
These are sterile worlds.
Everybody admits there's no chance for life, at least as we know it, on
the planets that orbit the pulsar.
Radiation cooks pulsar planets to death.
The opposite hell is no better -- frozen worlds too cold for life.
In the constellation Scorpius, is a red dwarf star.
Red dwarfs are tiny and relatively cool.
And this planet is too far away to feel what little heat there is.
It's so distant, its orbit lasts 10 earth years.
It's the coldest planet we have found in the Universe.
Its surface is a frigid This is a world made entirely of ice.
Methane, ammonia, and nitrogen are gasses on Earth.
Here, they form a frozen, toxic frost.
Glaciers and canyons and cliffs of ice are the only terrain.
Here, hell really has frozen over.
Our search for Earth's elusive twin reaches another dead-end.
Perhaps we are truly alone.
Or will our first tantalizing glimpses of an alien world, potentially
perfect for life, change everything? Earth, the only habitable world in
our solar system.
But in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, can we really be
alone? It's a question that planet hunters are trying to answer.
The whole purpose, in my opinion, of the discovery of exoplanets is to
establish our true place in the universe.
Who are we? Where do we belong in the cosmic scheme of things? Are
there other planets that can have life just like ours? That's where
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope comes in.
Kepler lets us calculate how far a planet is from its star.
That's critical in figuring out whether it could sustain life.
Life on Earth is only possible because we're the perfect distance from
the sun -- not too hot and not too cold just right for liquid water --
oceans, rivers, lakes, rain, and life.
You know, journalists say, "follow the money.
" Astronomers say, "follow the water," because water is the universal
solvent that dissolves most chemicals, and that's where DNA got off the
ground.
And where there's liquid water, there could be life.
We're looking for planets that are not too close to their parent star
where all the water would boil away and not too far away from their
parent star where all the water would be tied up in a frozen form.
We're looking for that "goldilocks zone" where the temperatures are
just right for liquid water to pool on the surface.
Once Kepler has identified a new planet, astronomers check whether it
lies in the habitable zone of its parent star.
So far, Kepler hasn't found a single confirmed Earth twin.
But it has identified more than And it's this sheer abundance of
planets that gives scientists hope.
The important thing to remember is that even though we're finding all
of these terrible planets that are just completely unlivable is that
we're finding lots of them.
We're finding hundreds and thousands of these planets.
And what that's telling us is that planets are easy to make.
And that means that even rare things are probably out there in large
numbers.
Even if the Earth is a rare, precious jewel in our galaxy, there may be
dozens or hundreds of them out there.
Kepler has opened our eyes to a universe full of planets.
We can now guess at how many there might be in our own galaxy 50
billion.
just waiting to be discovered.
And we think 1% could be in the goldilocks zone of their star.
That's 500 million planets, each with a chance of harboring life right
here on our own doorstep.
We haven't found one yet.
But we're getting closer.
This is Gliese 581, a red dwarf star Gliese 581 is a tiny, little star.
If the sun were the brightness of about a 100-watt light bulb, then
Gliese 581 would be like a little Christmas tree light -- a tiny,
little fairy light -- very, very small.
This shifts the life zone in because now if you want to be warm enough,
you need to snuggle up right next to the star.
The star has four planets.
Three are too close and hot for liquid water, but the fourth is
different.
It's a rocky world twice the size of earth.
And it's right on the edge of the goldilocks zone.
In theory, if the planet has a thick, carbon-dioxide atmosphere, it
could trap enough heat to have clouds rain and oceans.
It would be a strange place to live -- twice earth's gravity, bathed in
permanent red twilight.
But right now, this weird world is the closest we have to a planet like
ours.
It's a promising start.
When we actually know for a fact that up there around that star is a
planet like Earth, that's going to just fundamentally change how people
look at the sky and how people perceive their place in the Universe.
So, that's gonna be a profound moment not just for me, but, I think,
for humanity in general.
Our goal is to find another Earth, but along that path, we're gonna
find more things than we could have ever possibly imagined.
And that's the part I love about this the most.
We don't know what craziness is gonna be around the next corner when
we're looking for more planets.
I can't even imagine.
Two decades ago, the only planets we knew were right here in our solar
system.
Now, there are hundreds, all very different from our home.
The universe is filled with hellish worlds -- superhot ultracold
violent and bizarre.
But the Universe is also unimaginably vast.
With so many stars, there are probably countless earthlike heavens.
All we have to do now is find them.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s02e03

Megaflares

Our Universe is violent, deadly.

Cosmic bombs are everywhere.
And the most crazy, intense, violent explosions you can imagine are
happening out there.
The Sun spits flares millions of miles high.
Magnetic monsters rip worlds apart.
Galactic flamethrowers fire gamma rays halfway across the Universe.
It's like a cosmic blowtorch.
The energy of these things is unimaginable.
Mega-flares light up the Universe.
They illuminate hidden secrets.
They're also a threat.
If you're in the line of sight, watch out.
Our planet is under attack from colossal, cosmic firestorms.
Do these deadly mega-flares threaten life on Earth? An ordinary star
field, but home to one of the most extraordinary stars in our galaxy.
this is UV Ceti.
This mysterious object can grow five times brighter in less than a
minute.
Any planet circling this star would be blasted by the heat, quickly
melting its frozen surface.
Then, just seconds later, the sun dims.
The planet retreats into icy darkness.
But UV Ceti is about to go way further.
The star begins to brighten, but this time, it doesn't stop.
A runaway inferno, in just 20 seconds, it gets 75 times brighter than
normal.
UV Ceti has unleashed a mega-flare an immense explosion of energy on
the star's surface.
If our Sun fired off a mega-flare like this we'd be toast.
If you were standing on the surface of the Earth and the Sun were to
get even for only a minute or two, it would really probably be the last
thing you'd ever see.
The temperature on the Earth would rise up.
We'd have huge fires.
It would just basically cook everything.
Earth is a long way from UV Ceti.
We're safe from that particular star.
But the more stars we study the more flares we find.
They fire in all directions sometimes, directly at us.
The closer a star is to Earth, the greater the danger.
And one star is way closer than all the others.
Our Sun looks stable and calm.
But behind the glare the Sun is a monster.
Solar observatories capture the violence.
Flares erupt across its surface gigantic explosions on an unimaginable
scale.
One flare, one of the most energetic flares on the surface of the Sun
would be equivalent to over 200 million hydrogen atomic bombs.
It's enough energy to power the entire human race's energy consumption
for something like Each flare is as bright as 400 billion trillion
light bulbs.
But the visible light is just a fraction of the energy it emits.
Radio waves Infrared heat Ultraviolet light even X-rays unleashed in
every flare at incredible intensities.
These are the biggest explosions in the solar system yet the force
behind them is simple magnetism.
The Sun has an immense magnetic field.
The energy stored in this field powers solar flares.
Vast loops of magnetic force push toward the surface.
Huge magnetic arches rise out into space.
When two field lines cross, it triggers a magnetic short circuit.
This is a solar flare.
All the energy trapped in the magnetic field blasts out at 100 million
degrees.
It can hurl hot gas a billion miles out into space an eruption 10
million times more powerful than a volcano.
Magnetism -- the same force that powers a simple compass fuels the
biggest explosions in the solar system.
Yet by cosmic standards, our Sun is puny.
As we look out into space, we see even more active stars, even more
intense magnetism, and then things really start to get wild.
There are stars and objects in our galaxy and in other galaxies that
produce flares of great intensity -- so great, they would literally
destroy all life on Earth if they were nearby.
Outside our solar system, titanic explosions rock the cosmos on a scale
we can barely imagine.
Far beyond the sun, we enter the realm of mega-flares.
Our Sun is violent.
Flares explode with the force of billions of atomic bombs.
But travel out into the cosmos, and the explosions get bigger.
Other stars have flares so huge, they're planet killers.
EV Lacertae is 16.
5 light-years from Earth.
Every day, flares erupt on its surface.
But one mega-flare smashed every record.
The star blasted out than the sun's most powerful flare.
The ultraviolet light was so intense, the star turned blue.
This stellar firestorm was visible from Earth with the naked eye.
If our sun flared like this, we'd be incinerated.
But EV Lacertae is a very different kind of star.
Compared to our sun, it is tiny.
This is a red dwarf.
Red dwarfs are stars that have much less mass than the Sun.
They could be a tenth to about four-tenths the mass of the Sun.
They're smaller.
They're cooler.
These are dinky stars.
They burn so slowly that, unlike our Sun, which will last some of them
will last 10 trillion years.
They're also relatively cold.
Their surface is just half the temperature of our Sun -- and 10,000
times dimmer.
Yet somehow, they're capable of staggering violence.
That's because red dwarfs are immensely magnetic.
The fields which form inside them are enormous, much more powerful than
our suns.
That means the magnetic-field energy that can be released when those
fields get twisted up is incredibly intense.
And even though these objects are very dim in visible light, they can
produce flares that are thousands of times more energetic than those
released by the Sun.
You wouldn't want to be near one of those when it went off.
All red dwarfs flare violently, but EV Lacertae's flares are off the
chart.
That's because it's young -- just 300 million years old 15 times
younger than our Sun.
In one way, stars are a little bit like people.
They're hotheads when they're younger.
When stars are first born, they're spinning very rapidly, and that
actually helps generate magnetic fields, as well.
The result -- a star 100 times more magnetic than the Sun.
When its giant loops cross, the mega-flare is colossal a torrent of
radiation lasting 8 hours.
Big flares on our Sun have the energy of billions of atomic bombs.
EV Lacertae's monster flare was 10,000 times more powerful.
Incredibly, even these massive flares are just a flicker on the cosmic
scale.
There are eruptions millions of times brighter explosions that can
light up a whole galaxy From a tiny star with unimaginable power.
This is the Australia telescope compact array -- a network of five
radio dishes constantly listening to the cosmos.
In 2004, they were struck by a massive blast of energy evidence of a
mega-flare.
But this was bigger than any we had witnessed before the largest burst
of power ever recorded from our galaxy.
The object behind it is truly bizarre -- a kind of star we didn't even
know existed until a mega-flare gave it away.
I've studied black holes.
I've studied stars that explode.
I've talked about rogue planets wandering the galaxy.
For my money, the scariest single object in the galaxy is a magnetar.
Magnetars are the most magnetic objects in the Universe.
And this one beats them all.
Its magnetic field is 1,000 trillion times stronger than our sun's.
If it came near our solar system, the effects would be devastating.
The first thing you would notice is its magnetism would wipe every
credit card in your pocket.
As you start to get closer, anything metal on you would be ripped away
-- your earrings, your jewelry.
Once you got within a few million miles of the magnetar, its magnetism
would be so intense, it would actually disrupt the electrical signals
in your nerves, and your heart would stop beating.
Get even closer, and the magnetism would be so intense, it would rip
apart every atom in your body.
Amazingly, this vast magnetic field comes from an object no bigger than
an asteroid.
Our Sun is close to a million miles across.
The magnetar, just 10.
But it's unimaginably dense.
It weighs more than the Sun.
This is incredible.
Take the Sun and squeeze it down not just to the size of the Earth, but
down to the size of Manhattan.
The entire mass of a gigantic star packed into a space the size of a
city.
You could almost walk around the star in a day, except you couldn't,
because the gravitational field is so intense, the density of material
on these stars is so great, that a teaspoonful of material weighs
several thousand billion tons.
You would be crushed beyond recognition in a moment.
Dense and compacted, the iron-rich crust is under incredible magnetic
pressure.
Something has to give.
Fissures rip across the surface.
The crust splits open -- a starquake.
It's like an earthquake on Earth, except the crust literally moves a
half an inch.
It's just a little, tiny shift, but that is a huge amount of energy
because of this intense gravity.
It's like a magnitude-30 earthquake.
A flare erupts from the fracture.
A trillion-ton cloud of ultra-dense matter blasts into space.
It lasts just a tenth of a second.
But it unleashes more energy than the Sun emits over 250,000 years.
The energy emitted when one of these flares from a magnetar is released
-- in some cases, more than a billion times the energy emitted by the
Sun.
Mega-flares are time machines.
They show us events from long ago.
This magnetar is 50,000 light-years from Earth.
The flare we observed in 2004 actually happened It took that long for
the light to travel halfway across the galaxy and slam into our
atmosphere.
If a similar mega-flare exploded near Earth we wouldn't even see it
coming.
We would have no warning if a magnetar were to have another flare like
this.
The event is so sudden on the surface and it creates so much energy, it
blasts out at the speed of light, and nothing can travel faster than
light.
So, basically, this just happens, and that's it.
Any life within would be vaporized.
Thankfully, even the closest magnetar is too distant to threaten us.
We can't see them, even with the strongest telescope.
We've only detected these stars in the flash of a mega-flare.
Yet these explosions are dwarfed by an even more powerful monster.
Second only to the Big Bang in scale, this is the ultimate mega-flare.
many galaxies away a supergiant star is in trouble.
Its nuclear core has run out of energy.
It's about to implode.
For a few seconds, the colossal blast shines a million times brighter
than our entire galaxy.
This is the most extreme explosion in the Universe a gamma-ray burster.
Gamma-ray bursters are so powerful that they can be seen across the
entire universe, second only to creation itself.
Two intense jets of energy shoot out.
These two beams of gamma rays are the ultimate mega-flare.
The energy of these things is just unimaginable.
It's the entire power that the Sun puts out over its entire 10-billion-
year lifetime, focused into just these two things that last for maybe a
few seconds.
It's like a cosmic blowtorch of gamma rays and matter that march across
the Universe.
The most high-energy, intense light is gamma rays.
Gamma rays are naturally produced by things that are billions of
degrees hot.
There will never be a hotter type of flare.
This is where it stops.
Gamma rays is it.
after the explosion actually happened, we see it in our skies March
2008.
A flare from halfway across the entire Universe shines even more
brightly than the closest star.
Something blew up that you could see with your unaided eye on a dark
night.
That should tell you something.
It is the biggest flare ever witnessed.
But it is also a sign of the birth of the most destructive entity in
the Universe.
A black hole has formed in the core of the collapsing star.
It consumes the star from the inside out.
When the star finally explodes in a catastrophic supernova, all that
remains is a newborn black hole.
Usually when we look in outer space, we see old black holes -- black
holes that have been around for millions of years.
But to see a baby black hole being born -- that is an incredible event,
and that's what we think is a gamma-ray burster.
Amazingly, these gigantic explosions are common.
We see more than 350 a year.
We see them every day.
Our satellites detect them every few hours in all directions outside
the Milky Way galaxy.
Gamma-ray mega-flares reveal one of the Universe's most awesome secrets
-- a new black hole is born every single day.
Most of these explosions happened a long time ago, far away from Earth.
But if one went off inside our galaxy it could be catastrophic.
If you were to put a gamma-ray burst from the Earth it would be like
igniting a one-megaton nuclear bomb over every square mile of the
surface of the Earth facing that event.
You would be blowing up millions and millions of nuclear weapons over
the planet.
It would be the end of all life on Earth as we know it forever.
Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful mega-flares in existence, but
not the most dangerous for us.
The greatest threat to Earth sits terrifyingly close, right at the
heart of our own solar system.
We were once blissfully ignorant, safe in our solar system.
Now we know Earth sits in a cosmic firing range.
Monster mega-flares are everywhere we look.
But the deadliest cosmic weapon of all is right on our doorstep our
Sun.
We're lulled into thinking that the Sun is static, it's benevolent, and
is our friend.
Wrong.
The Sun is dynamic.
In some sense, it's alive.
It creates magnetism on a scale that we can only begin to comprehend.
And its most powerful weapon is this -- a coronal mass ejection, or
CME.
A colossal solar explosion rips a chunk of the star away and torpedoes
it out into space.
Coronal mass ejections are related to flares, but they're even larger.
You can sort of think of it as a solar flare being like a tornado --
very powerful, very intense, very short-lived.
And a coronal mass ejection is like a hurricane -- much more energy,
much bigger, and can last for days and days.
CMEs start with a magnetic short circuit.
Magnetic arcs emerge from the surface glowing with trapped solar
matter.
The loops cross, triggering a firestorm of energy.
The Sun erupts.
Solar matter explodes from the surface out into space a monstrous cloud
of super-hot gas and electric particles.
When one of these huge prominences is shot out, an energy equivalent of
about 10% of the entire luminosity of the Sun for a second is released
towards the Earth.
Over 10 billion tons of material is shot out at a speed of over a
million miles an hour.
The power of a coronal mass ejection is sort of mind-numbing.
It takes our probes years to get from the Earth to the Sun.
A coronal mass ejection can cross that distance in a couple of days,
sometimes in only a couple of hours or even faster than that.
So these are tremendously powerful events.
Powerful, but also deadly.
Because sometimes, the Sun shoots a CME straight toward the Earth.
The crackling, charged cloud plays havoc with our electronics.
It melts power grids, blows fuses, and disrupts communications.
But that's nothing compared to the damage that a really big CME could
do.
They can wipe out satellites, GPS, the Internet.
All sorts of havoc can take place when this huge Tsunami hits the
Earth.
The damage to satellites alone would total $100 billion.
Think of a blackout that hits not just one city, but hundreds of cities
around the planet Earth.
Property damage would be about $2 trillion.
We're talking about perhaps a collapse of modern-day civilization.
We can be thrown back perhaps into a world without electricity.
Big solar storms are rare.
On average, a massive CME strikes Earth every 500 years.
But it's happened before And it will happen again.
In 2003, we had one of the largest coronal mass ejections ever
recorded, but fortunately, it missed the Earth.
One of these days, it's gonna hit the Earth.
One of these days, one of these rifle bullets will be aimed right at
the Earth, and at that point, watch out.
Our planet is under attack not just from mega-flares in deep space but
from our own star.
The Sun fires billions of tons of hot gas and electric particles into
space every day deadly solar weapons sometimes pointing straight at us.
What I find amazing is the fact that the Earth is in the middle of a
shooting gallery.
But we have survived this onslaught.
We are protected.
The earth has a magnetic field.
It's incredibly weak, but enough to keep us safe.
Think of an ordinary magnet that you use on your refrigerator.
That has more magnetism than the Earth's magnetic field.
Without our magnetic shield, every CME would strip away Earth's
atmosphere, and we'd be fried by solar radiation.
How do we know? Because it happened to one of our neighbors.
Look at Mars.
Mars is an example of what happens to a planet without a magnetic
field.
Mars is a frozen desert with an atmosphere only 1% the atmospheric
density of the Earth.
It's because it lacks a magnetic field.
Over billions of years, these particles have actually stripped away
Mars' air, and that's why it has a very thin atmosphere now.
Here on Earth, we have a magnetic field, and we have air.
This is not a coincidence.
So we can breathe because of our magnetic field.
From Earth's surface, safe beneath our magnetic umbrella, we see the
power of our violent Sun in the northern and southern lights.
Trillions upon trillions of electric particles strike the earth every
second.
The magnetic shield funnels them to the poles.
They energize gas molecules in our atmosphere, making them glow -- a
chemical light show.
Oxygen shines green.
Nitrogen, blue or red.
The aurorae are evidence of a battle between magnetic fields.
The Sun's field creates CMEs.
Earth's field shields us from them.
Magnetism is nature's most mysterious force.
Only now are we beginning to understand how it shapes the cosmos.
Mega-flares make magnetism visible.
They shine a light on the incredible power of magnetic fields fields
that play a fundamental role in the Universe.
They impose order on chaos.
They weave their way through the spiral shapes of galaxies fields
hundreds of thousands of light-years across, yet 100,000 times weaker
than Earth's.
Smaller magnetic fields exist inside galaxies.
They organize matter into clouds of molecules -- spectacular nebulae.
These stellar nurseries are where new stars are born.
Now we've discovered magnetic fields even permeate empty space fields
created in the Big Bang with just one quadrillionth the strength of
Earth's.
This is a magnetic universe.
What's amazing is this thing that's invisible -- magnetic fields --
play such an important role in every aspect of the Universe, protecting
us from the radiation from the Sun to explosions and red dwarfs, to
magnetars, and to the most energetic, violent processes in the entire
Universe -- gamma-ray bursts.
Magnetism plays a role on every scale of the Universe, changing the
dynamics of objects and making the universe a violent and interesting
place.
Mega-flares light up the cosmos.
They show us things we can't otherwise see from the other side of the
Universe or from billions of years in the past.
A black hole is born.
A star dies.
Distant events and hidden mysteries.
In a flash, flares reveal them illuminating the awesome secrets of the
Universe.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s02e04

Extreme orbits

Space -- a maelstrom of chaos and violence.

Stars gobbling up other stars.
Black holes eating up entire star systems.
Galaxies colliding with other galaxies.
The Universe is a hostile place.
You are blowing up a star.
There's no way to describe that kind of energy.
The hidden mechanism controlling these phenomenon -- orbits.
If you understand all possible orbits, you understand the dynamics
driving the Universe.
Orbits hold everything together and tear it all apart.
Extreme orbits mean colliding galaxies, collapsing dust clouds, the
very creation of life, as well as destruction.
Extreme orbits -- Masters of life and death in our Universe.
This is our solar system.
billions of space rocks, dust, and gas all orbit a single star in a
giant whirling disk It's been this way for 4 billion years.
Everything moves around in an orderly fashion, serene and stable.
But our solar system is unusual.
Elsewhere in our Universe, orbits are nothing like this.
They're unstable, chaotic, even destructive.
Even in the nearby Universe, we see incredibly violent examples of
orbits -- giant planets that hurtle in toward their stars.
We see shock waves of thousands of degrees perpetuate through the
atmosphere.
There are planets that dip right over the surfaces of other stars, huge
stars orbiting each other, multiple orbital systems, where there's just
chaos, and entire objects can be kicked out of the system.
Stars gobbling up other stars.
Black holes eating up entire star systems.
Galaxies colliding with other galaxies.
That's the norm.
Earth is an oasis of water and warmth.
Life flourishes because of how we orbit the Sun.
Earth's orbit is almost circular.
We stay about the same distance from the Sun all year round.
The temperature here is relatively constant.
And Earth's orbit has been stable for the past Without this stability,
we would not exist.
To create DNA out of the oceans takes hundreds of millions, perhaps
even a billion years.
And for that stability, you need circular orbits.
And so without the stability of the solar system and the Earth's orbit,
there's no life on Earth.
We owe everything to Earth's orbit.
We get a gentle ride.
In an otherwise violent Universe, we've hit the orbital jackpot.
Yet, chaos is never far away.
Even within our solar system, there are extreme and violent orbits,
where life could never survive.
Mercury -- the closest rock to the Sun and the smallest planet in the
solar system.
Its orbit stretches into an oval shape.
At its furthest point, Mercury is 43 million miles from the Sun.
But at its closest point, it's just 28 million.
This close in, it's hot.
hotter than a baker's oven.
Also, because there's very little atmosphere on Mercury, you'd choke.
And because there's no air to speak of, the blood in your body would
boil and it would burst your skin.
You would literally explode on the surface of Mercury.
But the temperature can also fall to 300 degrees below zero, three
times colder than the coldest place on Earth.
Mercury has the most extreme temperature variations of any planet in
the solar system.
But it's also proof that orbits don't just loop.
With each revolution around the Sun, Mercury's path shifts.
Over thousands of years, the planet follows a daisy pattern.
At the other end of the solar system, there's Pluto, The further away
an object is, the slower its orbit.
Pluto takes 248 years to complete a single loop.
And Pluto is an anomaly.
Its stretched orbit is on a completely different plane from the major
planets, and it creates an amazing spectacle.
During most of its orbit, Pluto is a frozen block of ice and rock.
But as it gets closer to the Sun, summer begins.
When Pluto warms up, the frozen ices on the surface of Pluto -- these
are water ices, carbon dioxide, even some carbon monoxide, maybe
methane ices -- they evaporate.
And you get a fog, and the fog gets thicker.
And then you get thick clouds, and, suddenly, you have an actual
atmosphere around Pluto that wasn't there before.
This atmosphere is thickest when Pluto is closest to the Sun.
But as the planet heads back into deep space, the temperature plummets
to 400 degrees below zero.
It begins to snow flakes of frozen nitrogen and methane.
As winter comes, these gases slowly begin to freeze out of the
atmosphere.
They may rain down in a snow-like way, but, gradually, they accumulate
sort of a glassy, semitransparent layer, a frozen atmosphere on the
surface of Pluto.
After a bitter winter, Pluto drifts closer to the Sun, and the 248-year
cycle begins again.
Extreme changes like these remind us how lucky we are that earth's
orbit is stable and benign.
But it's a delicate balance.
The smallest change could kill us all.
If Earth's orbit were closer to the Sun, we would be like our closest
neighbor, Venus.
Venus is a pretty good example of what might happen to the Earth if our
orbit shifted a little bit in from where we are now.
Venus has this hugely thick atmosphere that traps all of the heat, and
the surface is close to 900 degrees.
If we moved even just a little bit closer to the Sun, we would become
more like Venus.
Oceans would boil away.
Our planet would become a desert.
Life would be destroyed.
A small shift in the opposite direction, and instead of boiling, we'd
freeze.
You would have snowball Earth, the Earth completely encased in ice.
And that's only by moving the Earth a fraction of its distance from the
Sun.
The polar ice caps would expand.
Oceans would freeze.
A permanent ice age would begin.
The smallest shift in Earth's orbit, and we'd die by fire or ice.
Orbits allow life to flourish.
But they can also cause chaos.
Orbits are even capable of destroying entire stars.
Our planet's orbit makes life possible.
But most orbits are violent.
Space is a cosmic freeway.
Nothing stands still.
Everything moves around everything else, thanks to a single force --
gravity.
Gravity is the universal force of attraction that spreads throughout
the Universe itself.
It's the force that holds stars together.
It's the force that binds the solar system together.
All objects have gravity, so all objects attract each other.
The more mass an object has, the stronger its attraction.
That's why falling apples are pulled toward Earth.
In our solar system, the biggest object is the Sun.
It's 700 times more massive than all the planets put together.
The titanic force of the Sun's gravity pulls all the planets inward.
But something stops them from falling in.
The planets are in constant motion.
They fly through space at incredible speed -- not directly toward the
sun but sideways, creating a tug-of-war between the Sun's gravity and
the planets' speed.
When the two balance out, the planet loops around the Sun.
We call this an orbit.
An orbit is simply the motion, the path of an object around another
object due to gravity.
So you can have circular orbits.
You can have elliptical orbits.
Even if I were to take a ball and throw it in the air and catch it,
very briefly, that ball is an orbit around the center of the Earth.
It's just motion affected by gravity.
Imagine what would happen if the Sun had no gravity.
The planets' speed would shoot them out into space.
On the other hand, if the planets stopped moving, gravity would pull
them into the Sun.
All orbits are a balance between gravity and motion.
We like to think the Universe runs like clockwork, everything neat and
orderly, the planets moving in cosmic harmony.
But that's wrong.
Orbits can be wild and unpredictable.
And the more objects there are, the more unpredictable their orbits
become.
Things can get complicated when you have more than two objects all
trying to orbit around each other.
Then an orbit can actually loop between one object and another.
Speeds can get faster and slower.
An orbit doesn't have to be just one regular path.
The Universe's creativity defies the imagination.
Travel out beyond Pluto, halfway to the nearest star, and you find
these -- comets, chunks of ice and rock.
They float in vast clouds, frozen remnants from the dawn of our solar
system.
Every so often, one falls towards the Sun.
They can start a trillion miles out and fall right above the surface of
the Sun.
So when they're really far away, they're hardly moving at all.
When they're whipping past the Sun, they're moving really, really fast.
And so, these can be some of the most extreme orbits in the solar
system.
They can be so elongated, they're almost a straight line.
Comets travel at up to a million miles an hour.
They're cosmic missiles guided by gravity and speed.
Comets show us how destructive orbits can be.
Many plunge into the Sun or crash into planets.
If a comet were to hit the Earth, perhaps 5, 6 miles across Watch out.
It would be a planet-buster.
It would be an object sufficient to wipe out all life as we know it on
the planet.
But most comets miss.
They fly in from deep space and out again on million-year orbits.
But move beyond our solar system, and orbits become even more violent.
Death spirals rip apart entire planets shred stars, and even tear holes
in space.
The Universe is unimaginably big, so there should be other Earth-like
worlds out there.
Scientists looking for habitable planets thought they would find orbits
just like ours.
They were wrong.
Now we're on HD 154088.
They were wrong.
Now we're on HD 154088.
And there it is.
Looks good.
We have discovered hundreds of planets outside our solar system, but
they're not like Earth at all.
These are strange, alien worlds with unfamiliar orbits.
What we're finding among extra-solar planets is an incredible diversity
of these orbital shapes and sizes.
Some of the orbits are extremely tight around their host star, the
planet going around in just hours or days.
So we're seeing interactions and shapes and sizes of orbits that are
like nothing we ever imagined.
Some worlds are so hostile, life as we know it would be impossible.
This is WASP-18b.
It's a hot Jupiter, a class of huge planets that closely orbit their
stars.
WASP-18b is 50 times closer to its star than we are to the Sun.
It's so close, it orbits in less than one day.
If you had said, "What's the weirdest, least-likely orbit you could
possibly imagine?" I would have said, "take something like Jupiter and
plop it down right next to a star, 5 million miles away.
" And it turns out, I would be totally wrong.
That is an extremely common thing that we see in the Universe.
In fact, most of the planets that we're discovering around other stars
appear to be in orbits like that.
This cosmic duel produces incredibly powerful physical effects.
WASP-18b burns at 4,000 degrees.
Thermal hurricanes blast across its surface.
And both star and planet are distorted by vast gravitational forces,
the same forces that cause the tides on Earth.
Everybody is familiar with the idea of tides.
In the course of a day, the level of the oceans get higher and then
lower.
Well, that's from the influence of the Sun and the Moon, from the
influence of orbits, things that are going around us or that we're
going around.
If you bring things closer together, tides become more extreme.
Planets can actually get pulled into different shapes.
WASP-18b was formed in a cold region of space far away from its star.
Over millions of years, it spiraled into its present position.
It's locked in a gravitational battle that can only end one way.
Less than a million years from now, it will be consumed by fire.
The key conclusion you have to draw is -- when you see the Universe
today, it won't be that way tomorrow and it won't be that way the week
or the millennium or a billion years later because of gravity.
Our search for Earth-like planets reveals a destructive Universe, from
the deadly missile-like orbits of comets to the searing paths of hot
Jupiters.
There are even planets that don't seem to orbit anything at all.
Scientists have recently detected tiny fluctuations in the light from
distant stars.
The only explanation? A massive object between us and them.
These rogue planets don't orbit a parent star.
They are planetary orphans, all alone in space.
Planets, by definition, go around stars, so, boy, were we shocked to
find rogue planets.
Rogue planets are a contradiction in terms -- planets without a mother
star.
Scientists think every rogue planet did once orbit a star until gravity
hurled them away.
New solar systems are chaotic places.
Planets tug on each other and dramatically change course.
Some planets even spiral out to wander the galaxy alone.
The presence of rogue planets shows us that gravity is not just this
attractive force which binds the solar system together.
It can also fling entire planets into outer space.
A recent sky survey suggests our galaxy contains more rogue planets
than stars.
We've discovered orbits we didn't even know were possible.
Gravity and motion keep our Universe in constant turmoil.
Vast orbiting suns cannibalize each other.
Violent vortexes distort space itself.
And powerful forces flick a star like a spinning top.
Gravity causes chaos on an epic scale hurling planets to their
destruction or firing them off into space.
But the cosmic roller coaster gets even more extreme.
Orbits become so violent, they rip chunks out of stars.
This is HM Cancri, a binary star system They're white dwarfs -- small
but incredibly dense.
One teaspoon of white-dwarf matter can weigh 5 tons.
The stars are just five times closer than we are to the Moon.
They orbit at more than a million miles an hour.
We have two white dwarves an infinitesimal distance apart, rotating
around each other in 5 1/2 minutes.
This is a world's record for an astronomical body in space.
The forces are immense.
Gravity rips superheated gas out of one star and slams it into the
other.
Scientists believe this orbit is so violent, it warps the fabric of
space itself.
In the process, the stars lose energy, falling even closer.
Eventually, they'll collide creating a supernova.
A supernova is one of the most violent, energetic events in the
Universe today.
You are blowing up a star.
There's no way to describe that kind of energy.
Some supernovae are so powerful, they are second only to the Big Bang
itself for energy and sheer power.
They are so magnificent, they can outshine an entire galaxy of 200
billion stars.
Supernovas can create one of the weirdest objects in the Universe a
pulsar.
Pulsars are intensely magnetic stars.
They fire out beams of electromagnetic radiation that sweep across
space.
There are few things in the Universe more dramatic than a pulsar.
Imagine a ball about 10 miles across rotating hundreds of times a
second with a density that's almost unimaginable.
of this material would have as much mass as Mount Everest.
You would feel a gravity that is millions, millions of times what
you're feeling sitting on the surface of the Earth.
You wouldn't just be crushed flat by this.
You would be crushed into a paste that is only a few atoms thick.
Anything that orbits a pulsar too closely risks being torn to shreds.
This is the black widow pulsar.
It rips through our galaxy at 600,000 miles an hour.
The shock wave is so vast, our telescopes can't detect it Traveling
alongside it, a brown dwarf bigger than a planet, smaller than a star.
The pair are locked in an orbital dance of death.
The black widow, in some sense, is like a vampire, sucking the
lifeblood from this brown dwarf star, eating away at its hydrogen and
helium fuel.
Radiation blasts the brown dwarf's gases into space.
A pulsar just 10 miles wide is destroying an object bigger than
Jupiter.
Eventually, the brown dwarf will evaporate.
A single pulsar has immense destructive power.
But two pulsars together can change the shape of the Universe.
This is the only known double-pulsar system in our galaxy.
Orbiting at 700,000 miles an hour, their speed and mass make them spin
chaotically.
It's incredible to think of the enormous forces, gravitationally, that
these two stars exert on each other, causing the whole geometry, the
architecture of the system to change and spin around like a top on the
table.
The gravity of the heavier pulsar makes the smaller one wobble
erratically.
It whips around so violently that the whole star almost tips over, just
like a spinning top.
It can't last forever.
the two pulsars will merge to form a vast gravitational abyss the
Universe's ultimate monster -- a black hole.
A black hole -- the most extreme object in the Universe.
At its center, the laws of physics break down.
Time comes to an end.
Gravity is infinite.
A black hole is a bottomless pit of gravity caused by the death of a
star.
There is nothing in the Universe more mysterious than how black holes
work.
If you want to talk about extreme orbits and extreme gravity, you're
talking black holes.
That is at the top of the list.
Nothing has stronger gravity than a black hole.
It is the mass of something like the Sun or more compressed down into a
ball that's only a couple of miles across.
black holes were dismissed as science fiction, but not anymore.
Now we see them at the center of galaxies, wandering through outer
space.
Black holes, we now know, are central to the evolution of the Universe.
We now think there may be 100 million black holes in our galaxy alone.
An encounter with any of them leads to oblivion.
This is one of the largest and hottest stars in the Universe.
It's 20 times more massive than our Sun and 10 times hotter.
Stars like this never live long, but this one is locked in a diabolic
waltz, trapped in the grip of a black hole.
The gravity here is so powerful, the star orbits at half a million
miles an hour.
The black hole sucks the star's outer layers into a vast, swirling
disk, a disk so hot it blasts out X-rays a million times more powerful
than our Sun.
This configuration -- a star orbiting around a black hole -- is extreme
and it's unstable.
First of all, the black hole is eating away at the atmosphere of its
companion star, but the star itself is unstable.
It will one day undergo a supernova and perhaps leave a black hole in
its wake.
And then it will have two black holes rotating around each other, one
of the rarest sights in the Universe.
Eventually, these black holes will merge to create a new, larger
monster, and the cycle of destruction will continue.
But this black hole is small.
Other black holes take violence to a whole new level.
In 2011, astronomers witnessed one of the biggest explosions ever
recorded, a flash of radiation brighter than 100 billion suns -- a
gamma-ray burst.
It was a spectacular event.
The burst came from a supermassive black hole at the center of a
distant galaxy.
It had been dormant, but something had shocked it back to life.
If you pass by the event horizon, an imaginary sphere surrounding the
black hole, that's the point of no return.
It's like the ultimate roach motel -- everything checks in, nothing
checks out.
Several stars were orbiting the black hole at a safe distance.
Then one of them got too close.
The sleeping giant suddenly awoke.
Immense gravitational forces stretched the star to its breaking point
until, finally, it was torn apart.
Debris swirled around the black hole, heated to millions of degrees.
Two giant jets of gamma rays blasted into space at the speed of light.
A black hole has torn a star apart, swallowed up half of the material
of the star, and ejected the other half in an event that is among the
most violent things we have ever seen in the history of astronomy.
The event was so violent, we saw it from Earth, Black holes can suck in
planets and rip apart stars.
But gravity doesn't always pull things in.
Any high-school student knows that gravity sucks.
It pulls.
It never pushes.
But it's actually more complicated.
That's true when you just have two objects.
But the minute you have more than two objects, strange things can
happen, and gravity can actually push you away.
You can get very close to a body, but if you come in at just the right
angle and just the right speed, instead of colliding together, one
object can slingshot the other one away.
Recently, scientists discovered stars hurtling away from our galaxy at
incredible speed.
Normal stars don't do this.
So what could accelerate a star to hypervelocity? The answer was a
surprise.
You can only eject stars at these very, very high velocity, so close to
700, 800, You could only eject these with interactions with a
supermassive black hole.
Each hypervelocity star was originally one of a pair of stars orbiting
a supermassive black hole.
When they got too close, gravity pulled them apart.
The black hole catapulted one star out of the galaxy at 2 million miles
an hour.
Eventually, the other was sucked in and destroyed.
The interesting thing here is that you can get a complete
redistribution of stars, so you have stars that are in the center of
the galaxy, and, suddenly, they're ejected out into intergalactic
space.
And it's out here, in deep space, that orbits are at their most
powerful, smashing entire galaxies together to create the structure of
the Universe itself.
Across the Universe, extreme gravity is a force of destruction.
The orbits of planets and stars can be chaotic, unpredictable, and
violent.
But on a truly cosmic scale, gravity is no longer just a destroyer.
It also creates new worlds.
These are galaxies -- giant spinning clusters of stars, gas, and dust
Galaxies orbit each other in the same way planets orbit stars.
Gravity pulls them together.
Their speed keeps them apart.
But, ultimately, gravity always wins.
Entire galaxies smash together.
One of the most spectacular events in the Universe is when galaxies
collide.
You're talking about hundreds of billions of stars two of these things
slamming into each other.
Collisions between orbiting galaxies take place over millions of years.
Gravity slowly pulls them together.
And you get these two galaxies that merge like two fluids mixing
together.
And you get long tidal tails as they pass through each other, but then
gravity brings them back together again.
And in the end, you get a full-fledged, more mature, larger galaxy than
you had originally.
On this intergalactic scale, gravity and motion are no longer
destructive forces.
Now they trigger the creation of life itself.
You would think a galactic collision would be incredibly destructive,
and in one sense, it is, but in another sense, it's a very creative
force.
Colliding galaxies smash vast gas clouds together.
Huge shock waves rip through them, squeezing the gas.
Then something amazing happens -- the birth of countless stars.
It's incredible to think about two galaxies that gravitationally
attract each other and collide.
What could be more destructive? But, in fact, there is a power of
construction in such mergers, because as two galaxies come together,
the gases are compressed, and sometimes, the gases are compressed so
much that you get the birth of stars and the associated planets around
those stars.
And so, in the titanic collision between two galaxies, you can get the
birth of stars and planets and perhaps eventually life on those
planets.
Sometimes, these collisions trigger a chain reaction two spiral
galaxies in mid-collision creating stars and planets.
But this time, there's a difference.
Some of these new stars are massive, unstable, and short-lived.
They explode.
Each explosion blasts out new shock waves and triggers the birth of
even more stars.
Astronomers call this a starburst.
It's the ultimate example of gravity's creative power.
A starburst galaxy is one that is creating stars at a much higher rate
than we usually see in normal galaxies.
And so, it's amazing that you can have such a beautiful, creative
process coming out of something so violent and destructive.
Gravity and motion, the two forces that give birth to every new star,
also weave together the fabric of the Universe itself.
Our cosmos is not random.
It has structure.
The Universe is a vast three-dimensional tapestry.
Each of these threads and filaments contains billions of galaxies.
It's the scaffolding that holds everything together, the cosmic web.
And we think about scaffolding of a building, it's just sitting there,
static.
But, in fact, this scaffolding is quite dynamic and quite amazing
because all of the constituents are moving around at very high speeds,
crashing into one another -- galaxies, stars, black holes, supernovae -
- all in this tremendous cosmic dance.
The cosmic web is incomprehensibly vast.
Each thread is full of motion.
Galaxies form, orbit, and collide, countless billions in a constant
stream.
Every filament is a galactic freeway with an endless flow of traffic,
each point of light a galaxy.
It's rush hour 24/7, and sometimes, there's gridlock.
Every billion light-years, several filaments join to form a knot.
Whole clusters collide to form some of the largest structures we know
of -- superclusters.
This is one of them -- Abell 2744.
Five orbiting galaxy clusters crashed together in the single biggest
cosmic pile-up ever discovered.
Gradually, the five clusters merged and fused to form a single giant
supercluster The incredible power of orbits can literally tie the
universe in knots.
Structures in the Universe have evolved over billions of years through
their orbits and their mutual gravitational attraction, and they've
built up into larger and larger structures.
And it's all thanks to these same attractive forces that bring them
together but can also tear them apart.
Again and again, we discover orbits dominating the cosmos.
The atom is the basic unit of chemistry.
In the same way, the orbit is the basic unit of the Universe itself.
If you understand all possible orbits, you understand the dynamics
driving the Universe.
Orbits have created a cosmos full of richness and complexity.
Orbits are changeable.
They're chaotic.
Things that we never thought were possible are, in fact, possible.
From the smallest scale to the largest scale, it's the gravitational
interactions and collisions that actually make our Universe the
beautiful place that it is.
And behind it all is a curious paradox.
Extreme orbits mean variations, collisions.
That seems very destructive.
But, also, extreme orbits mean colliding galaxies, collapsing dust
clouds, the very creation of life, as well as destruction.
Orbits are the driving force behind this never-ending cycle of creation
and destruction.
They're at the very heart of how the Universe works.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s02e05

Comets

Comets are a celestial mystery.

They are messengers from deep space itself -- time machines from the
early Universe.
Comets could unlock the deepest secrets of our cosmos.
If we can establish a correlation between amino acids on comets and
life on Earth, that would be one of the most significant findings in
science.
They threaten our very survival.
We're talking about something the size of a mountain, so the amount of
energy that this thing would release upon impact is devastating.
Yet without comets, we might not be here.
We may owe a great cosmic debt to comets because they may have been
responsible for bringing the chemicals that we require for life to the
Earth.
A dramatic streak of light across the sky, a passing comet is an
astonishing sight.
They're beautiful, these fuzzy, glowing balls with the tail coming off.
It's really something.
You just don't get to see an object like that very often.
Comets are extraordinary.
If you get to see a comet for the very first time, it'll stick with you
forever.
The journey of a comet as it sails through the solar system is the most
fantastic of all astronomical objects.
It loops in toward the Sun from the depths of space -- an odyssey that
can last millions of years.
Many pass by the Earth so often, they're almost like old friends.
Every comet is a frozen mass of rock and ice several miles across.
But all we see is a glowing ball of light And a long, sweeping tail.
Yet comets are more than cosmic fireworks.
They could help unlock some of the deepest mysteries in science.
We're trying to figure out, as scientists, where we came from, and that
means everything from the beginning of the Universe to the beginning of
the solar system to how life started.
Comets really fit into that.
They really give us clues about how the solar system formed.
If we can't understand comets, we don't understand how we got here.
Comets may even be the source of life itself.
We may owe our existence to the fact that comets, billions of years
ago, came to Earth and brought the necessary ingredients for life.
They can also cause enormous destruction.
Comets could kill us all.
If a comet were to hit the Earth, watch out.
It would be a planet-buster.
It would be an object sufficient to wipe out all life as we know it on
the planet.
Learn about comets, and just maybe we will learn how to survive them
and begin to understand how the Universe works.
When we study them, we're learning what the solar system was like when
it was first forming.
And we can learn about what other solar systems were like, as well.
And, hopefully, that will teach us a tremendous amount about how stars
form and how planets form and how comets themselves were originally
formed.
Comets date back to the birth of our solar system They were made by the
same force that created the solar system -- gravity.
It began in a maelstrom of chaos.
A giant cloud of gas and dust collapsed to form a whirling disc.
Close to the Sun, it was burning hot.
But further out, it was cool enough for gas clouds to condense and
freeze.
Ice crystals fused with grains of dust.
They slowly pull together into larger and larger masses.
Over time, these sort of snowballed, like a snowball rolling downhill,
picking up more and more and more material.
Eventually, they formed gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.
But not all the debris in the disk turned into planets.
Trillions of lumps of dirty ice were left behind -- the comets.
You could almost think of comets as sort of the frozen leftovers of the
formation of the solar system.
They're almost unchanged to this day.
They're pristine time capsules, and if you could crack one open and see
what was inside, you could literally see what the solar system was
first made out of.
That's remarkable.
But the comets did not stay put.
Several hundred million years later, the solar system plunged into
turmoil once again.
Encounters with debris pulled the gas giants out of position.
The giants' immense gravity then hurled comets in every direction,
flinging trillions of tons of material from the dawn of the solar
system into the cold outer reaches of space.
Some comets settled in a region from the Sun -- the Kuiper Belt.
But most were tossed even farther out to form a giant sphere around the
entire solar system.
We call it the Oort cloud.
This is a region of our solar system that's farthest away from the Sun.
The Sun is just a tiny little dot, one of many stars.
And the whole area of space around you is virtually empty.
There's nothing there -- very little.
And just occasionally, you'll find the odd comet floating out there in
deep freeze -- cold, dark, and very much alone.
In this remote ice cloud, there are more than a trillion comets.
They can take millions of years to orbit the Sun.
But they don't always stay here.
The orbit of every comet is a delicate gravitational balance.
The smallest nudge can tip the scale.
Most comets spend their entire life-span billions of miles from the Sun
motionless, inert, simply waiting for something to happen.
But then, perhaps, a random collision takes place.
Perhaps a passing star nudges it, and then the gravitational force of
the Sun inevitably pulls it toward the inner solar system.
Gravity, the force that created the comets, then flung them to the edge
of the solar system, now pulls them back in.
Our comet begins its epic odyssey to spread life or death across the
solar system.
More than a trillion comets circle the Sun at the frozen edges of our
solar system.
But many do not stay here.
The smallest gravitational disruption can knock them out of their
orbit.
It could be a nearby star going by.
It could be us going through a denser part of the galaxy.
Anything that just gives a little gravitational hit to a comet can
cause it to fall in towards us.
Our comet has been disturbed.
Now the Sun's immense gravity takes over.
You could think of the gravity of our solar system sort of like being a
hillside.
At the bottom, there's the Sun.
And comets are way at the top of that hill.
When they get dislodged, there's only one way for them to go.
They have to fall down in towards the Sun.
Our comet accelerates towards the Sun, but its path is far from
straight.
Gravity from the planets can throw comets off course or out of the
solar system completely.
If they escape these obstacles, comets continue their journey toward
the Sun.
Now they begin one of the most remarkable transformations known to
science.
A chrysalis to a butterfly.
They become the most spectacular things the Universe has to offer.
As it passes Jupiter, our comet begins to change.
As it starts to move a little bit faster and starts getting closer and
closer to the Sun and it starts feeling the heat of the Sun, that's
when things really start to change.
heat brings our comet to life.
Frozen gases start to vaporize.
Grains of ice and dust rise from the surface.
As the comet continues to approach the Sun and gets warmer, more and
more gas is released.
The comet becomes a fuzzy ball.
There's a solid part in there, but it's surrounded by a much larger
sort of cloud of material.
This cloud of dust and gas forms an atmosphere, or coma, around the
comet.
And it also creates the comet's huge tail.
It's all driven by the Sun, and it's not over yet.
There's something called the solar wind.
It's actually a huge wave of charged particles originating from the
Sun.
This fills our solar system, and as a comet begins to move further and
further in towards the Sun, the solar wind gets stronger.
Like a cosmic hurricane, the solar wind blasts gas molecules from our
comet out into space.
They form a second giant tail.
The solid part of the comet might only be a few miles across, and the
fuzzy part might be a few thousand or tens of thousands of miles
across.
The tail that gets swept back as that material is blown off by the
solar wind can be millions or tens of millions of miles long.
Our comet hurtles through space at 50,000 miles an hour.
It's about to enter the most violent phase of its journey.
water ice begins to vaporize.
The ground would start to shift and quake, and as the material beneath
my feet is literally thawing, we'd have great big jets of carbon
dioxide and water ice starting to come out, and that would not be a
very good place to be standing.
The surface cracks open.
Gases explode.
Debris fires in all directions.
The force of these eruptions makes the comet tumble erratically.
Every jet that turns on is literally like a little jet engine attached
to the comet.
Like a dragster on a racetrack, our comet explodes to life.
Incredible speed, irresistible energy, and a vast plume of debris.
Our comet transforms into a cosmic hot rod, but speed and energy are a
volatile mix.
Our comet could blow apart at any moment.
The cloud around our comet is now bigger than Jupiter.
Its tail stretches for 100 million miles.
An object 4.
5 billion years old emerges from the dark.
Every arrival of a new comet is like a gift from the Universe.
We've never seen this little bit of the solar system before, this
little building block, this little baby picture.
It's completely new to us.
It's a chance to study the origin of our solar system, and what we're
learning is a revelation.
Comets are far more hostile and alien than we imagined.
With modern telescopes, we can study comets in more detail than ever
before.
But to really understand them, we need to get close to the very heart
of a comet -- its nucleus.
One of the holy grails of comet science is to really understand what is
in a comet's nucleus.
What is actually on the surface? What is the chemical composition? What
are the characteristics of the rocks and the materials -- the volatiles
that are on that surface? The nucleus is the fundamental building block
of the solar system that we, as scientists, really want to investigate.
That's where the mysteries really are.
There have been more than a dozen missions to comets in the past three
decades.
Every one of them has been a revelation.
We've learned about the chemistry of them.
We've learned about the physical interaction they have with the Sun.
We've learned about their physical surface, their terrain, and how
they're different, even if you were to go from one spot on a comet to
another.
So, we're really learning that these things are worlds unto themselves.
Scientists thought comets were white like a snowball.
That changed in 1986, when the Giotto Space probe beamed back these
images of Halley's Comet.
For the first time in history, we had a snapshot of the very center of
that comet, that comet that entered human history on many occasions,
and we found a cold, dead world.
We found an object shaped like a peanut.
Halley was no snowball.
A thick layer of black dust covered its surface.
There were pits and hills, and Halley was 9 miles long, far bigger than
anyone expected.
Scientists thought that all comets were the same.
They were wrong.
In 2004, the Stardust probe flew into the tail of comet Wild 2 and
captured thousands of tiny dust particles.
When Stardust brought those samples back on Earth, we realized that, in
fact, every comet is a unique object.
Just like every planet is different, it looks like every comet is
different.
It has its own history to tell.
Different materials went into its formation.
Different heat sources were injected into its interior.
Different chemical processes and geologic processes occurred.
Each one is a unique world waiting to be explored.
Some comets are truly strange.
These are real images of Hartley 2, a comet so weird, it snows.
It's so strange.
We were able to see that there are golf-ball-sized chunks of dry ice
that are following the comet around up to a million miles away from the
nucleus.
This thing is just making a big mess.
Hartley 2 is just amazing! It looked like you were in the middle of a
snow globe and you shook it up and there were all these little things,
kind of like flies buzzing around food, just kind of floating out
there.
That's just not right.
Hartley 2 is a hyperactive comet.
It tumbles faster and spits out more debris than most others its size.
Comets are alien worlds.
On comet Tempel 1, there are smooth plateaus Craters, and cliffs 60
feet high, layers of rock lie on top of each other like a stack of
pancakes.
Each comet seems to have its own unique history.
Tempel 1 gave scientists their biggest breakthrough.
In 2005, the deep impact space probe slammed a projectile into its
surface.
The explosion dug out a crater Talk about a spectacular 4th of July.
I mean, can you imagine anything better? We actually blew a hole in a
comet.
I mean, that's got to be one of the more amazing things that NASA has
ever done.
The material the impact ejected allowed us to see inside a comet's
nucleus for the first time.
It was completely unexpected.
We found things like rubies and peridot, gemstones -- tiny little
things inside the comet.
And we found all kinds of organic molecules, the very sorts of things
we're made of.
Scientists now believe that comets play a critical role in our
Universe.
Where do the ingredients of life come from? Where were they all mixed
together? Where did all this liquid water come from? Comets could hold
the key to understanding the nature of life itself.
But opportunities to study them up close are rare.
Our comet is now moving at incredible speed toward a place where no
spacecraft could ever survive -- the Sun.
gravity hurled comets to the edges of our solar system.
The same force can pull them back in.
Our comet passes Earth and enters the most violent stage of its
journey.
It rockets toward the Sun at 100,000 miles per hour.
The surface of the comet is now sizzling, sizzling with activity.
Blistering temperatures are being created.
Enormous geysers of ice crystals and gas being shot off the surface.
Jets are erupting all over the place, it's tumbling, the rotational
state is changing, and the very surface is kind of cracking up
underneath our feet.
Inside the comet, pockets of gas explode and fling huge rocks into
space.
It's losing mass.
It's shrinking.
And as we get closer and closer to the Sun and more and more of the
volatiles are starting to come off of its surface, this can actually
change the rotational state of the comet.
It can make it tumble.
It can actually even push it in its orbit.
It can actually change the orbit of the comet.
Comets can shed 50 tons of ice and gas every second.
Ormous pressures build up inside the nucleus.
It could become unstable.
It could even break apart into pieces at any time.
As comets reach their closest point to the Sun, their existence is on a
knife edge.
Many will not survive.
We've been able to actually see images of comets just getting swallowed
up by the Sun, and you can actually see them just pelting in there.
And the whole body, whether it's a mile across or 10 miles across, just
gets completely and utterly destroyed.
A solar observatory recorded these extraordinary images.
They show small comets called "sun grazers" diving towards the sun.
Here they're exposed to immense gravity and torched by the ferocious
heat of the Sun.
Many are vaporized.
Even in deep space, vast explosions can tear comets apart.
In 2007, comet Holmes was heading away from the Sun when something
extraordinary happened.
In less than a day, it grew half a million times brighter.
The cloud around it ballooned into space.
It's actually relatively common for a coma -- the fuzzy part around a
comet -- to expand large enough to be bigger than Jupiter, But that can
take days and weeks and months to build up.
To have a single event, something that happened, boom, all at once,
some catastrophe to create this shell around comet Holmes that could be
bigger than Jupiter is amazing to me.
We had never seen something like this before.
In fact, the coma of the comet was actually larger than the Sun itself.
Briefly, it was the largest object in the entire solar system,
something that was unprecedented.
Without warning, comet Holmes blew apart -- the largest cometary
explosion ever recorded.
The debris stretched for a million miles.
What caused it is still unclear.
One theory is that perhaps comet Holmes slammed into an asteroid of
some sort, creating this gigantic megaflare in outer space.
Another possibility is perhaps the comet was unstable and perhaps there
was an explosion caused by expanding gas and ripped the entire comet
apart.
At the present time, we simply don't know.
The life of all comets hangs by a thread.
Our comet survives its encounter with the Sun but it's paid a price.
Its geography has been totally rearranged.
Huge chunks, mountaintops' worth, of rock have disappeared.
An object which could be perhaps 10, 20 miles across has lost literally
hundreds, perhaps thousands of tons of rock and ice on its journey.
As our comet leaves the Sun behind, activity on its surface subsides.
On its outward journey, a comet gradually begins to shut down.
It becomes cooler, less active, the jets begin to turn off, the coma
begins to blow away.
And you're left with this little ball of ice and dirt.
It returns to the depths of space, dormant once again.
But the Sun is just one of many challenges.
Comets must also survive the gravitational pull of the planets.
Our gravity is way too small to have any effect on this comet.
But Jupiter is a very large planet.
It has 300 times the mass of the Earth.
If the comet passes within even a few million miles of Jupiter, that
can change its orbit.
The consequences can be catastrophic.
In 1994, a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 flew too close to Jupiter.
Scientists watched the planet's immense gravity tear it apart.
The remains headed straight toward Jupiter.
Many people thought that the impacts wouldn't do anything to Jupiter,
that Jupiter would just sort of swallow it up without a burp.
And that's not what happened at all.
smashed into Jupiter's atmosphere.
Each impact released more energy than all the world's nuclear arsenals
combined.
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was not a particularly massive comet, and it
wasn't even a very dense one.
It actually had the consistency of cotton candy.
You could have pulled bits of it apart with your fingers.
But this rather tenuous little icy creature created unimaginable
destruction.
The impacts hurled plumes of debris thousands of miles high and scarred
Jupiter's atmosphere with dark lesions.
The event rocked the scientific community.
To actually see it for ourselves, to actually see the immense
destructive power by an object that's really not that much bigger than
a hill was really pretty terrifying.
Even though we knew the math, to see it for ourselves was amazing.
The Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact really woke astronomers up to the fact that
impacts can happen now and they can happen here.
If a comet just a few miles across hit our planet, the result would be
catastrophic.
Tidal waves would devastate the land.
Debris would rain from the sky.
Life as we know it would end.
Yet comet impacts can also be a creative force.
Across the Universe, comets cause massive destruction.
They could be moving than a rifle bullet.
And we're talking about something the size of a mountain.
So, the amount of energy that this thing would release upon impact is
devastating.
But they're not always destructive.
They have another side.
Scientists believe they can shape entire worlds.
This is Titan -- the largest of Saturn's moons.
It's the only moon in our solar system with a thick atmosphere.
Rivers and lakes of liquid methane cover its surface.
Titan was transformed by comets.
Radar images reveal a moon shaped by a blizzard of comets that rained
down over millions of years.
Each comet vaporized when it hit, releasing gases from inside its
nucleus.
Gradually, they built up a rich organic atmosphere and this strange
liquid landscape.
Comets turned a space rock into an earth-like world.
Comets, in some sense, are the ultimate engineers of the solar system.
Cometary impacts could give us the chemicals which give us the
atmosphere not just of Titan but even, perhaps, the Earth itself.
So, if comets have the power to reshape entire worlds, what part did
they play in the history of our own planet? To find out, we need to get
closer to a comet than ever before.
We need to land on one.
In March 2004, the Rosetta mission launched.
The Rosetta mission is named after the Rosetta stone because just like
the stone gave linguists the keys to the ancient language, we're hoping
that the comet will give us the keys to understanding the ancient solar
system.
November 11, 2014, will be a landmark in space exploration.
For the very first time, a spacecraft will touch down on the surface of
a comet.
Previous missions to comets were basically flybys, and they basically
gave us tantalizing evidence that there was a greater mystery yet to be
solved.
Now we're gonna land on a comet.
We're gonna be up close and dirty with a live comet streaming through
outer space, and this is unprecedented.
Rosetta is around the size of a car.
It's flying through space at 20,000 miles per hour.
It's heading for this a comet with a nucleus orbiting the Sun every 6
1/2 years.
A robotic lander will drop down to the surface, beginning the most
detailed study of a comet ever attempted.
It's going to look at what the surface looks like.
It's going to take samples.
It's going to look at the terrain.
It's going to be able to actually probe inside the comet and see what
it's made of and how it's put together.
We're hopefully going to learn more from this mission about one comet
than we have about just everything we've known about comets for
centuries.
Rosetta should answer some very simple questions.
Is it porous? Is it like a sponge? Is it like a bunch of tubes? Is it
like a snowflake, you know, with this sort of fairy-castle structure?
These things will help us to understand how the heat flows within and
maybe what causes certain portions of it to become a jet and other
portions not.
But this is just the beginning.
For an entire year, Rosetta will study the comet on its epic journey
'round the Sun, using technology so advanced, it mimics the five human
senses.
We've got instruments that can see.
We've got a kind of an ultrasound experiment, instruments that are the
equivalent of your hands.
So, we'd like to understand everything possible about this comet's
journey around the Sun from when it's quiet to when it's at its most
active.
But we'll have to get there first.
Just to reach the comet, scientists must overcome enormous technical
challenges.
Rosetta must hit a target just 3 miles wide, traveling at 34,000 miles
per hour.
Landing on it will be even harder.
Comets have very little gravity.
There's not anything that you know is gonna pull you down to the
surface.
And there's no atmosphere, so you can't unfurl a parachute and just
sail down until you touch down.
You've got to figure out a way to get your lander to actually reside
and rest on the surface.
Technicians have an ingenious solution.
The lander is equipped with shock absorbers and a harpoon.
When it makes contact with the surface, at the same time, the harpoon
will be released down into the substrate, and it will have prongs that
will open that will prevent it from coming back up.
Rosetta will attempt to solve some of science's deepest mysteries.
We would very much like to know why is it that Earth has liquid water
and so much of it compared to any place else that we've ever seen.
So how is it that the water got here? Now, there is a theory that says
that comets delivered the water to the Earth long ago, but the question
is, can we actually prove it? To find out, the lander will collect
water molecules to compare with water from Earth.
But scientists hope to go even further.
We're on the brink of making an extraordinary discovery.
We may find proof that life itself has an extraterrestrial origin, that
it was brought to Earth by comets.
Life has existed on our planet for at least But we still don't
understand its beginnings.
We used to think life originated on Earth itself, that volcanic gases
and water vapor formed oceans and an atmosphere.
Lightning added the creative spark for early life to begin.
Now we think that's wrong, and the evidence is in space.
In 1997, comet Hale-Bopp appeared, one of the biggest and brightest
comets ever recorded.
Scientists found it was packed with water, gases, and carbon -- the
basic ingredients for life.
That discovery raised profound questions.
We're all used to the idea that life originated here on Earth, and it
probably did -- at least, complex life.
But where did the building blocks come from? Where did the water that
makes up our body, the organic molecules that make up the very essence
of life -- they actually may not have been intrinsically part of the
Earth to begin with.
They came from somewhere else.
Hale-Bopp suggested that the raw materials for life might have an
extraterrestrial origin.
Since then, scientists have found further evidence.
Astrobiologist Dante Lauretta discovered that dust from comet Wild 2
contained minerals that could only form in heat and liquid water.
We had the sulfide minerals, we had iron oxides, we had carbonate
minerals -- which are the same kind of materials that marine organisms
use to build their shells -- unlike anything we thought was possible to
be formed in the early solar system.
Scientists have even found that comet Wild 2 contains amino acids.
That's incredibly exciting, because amino acids are the building blocks
of proteins, and proteins are essential biomolecules for all life on
Earth.
These discoveries have transformed our understanding of comets.
Many scientists now believe they're more than just frozen time
capsules.
Perhaps they play a central role in the history of our planet.
We have learned from a study of a single comet and the results of the
stardust mission that they are complex chemical laboratories where the
ingredients of life could form.
These materials likely did not arise naturally on the surface of the
Earth from processes on our planet.
Instead, they had to be delivered by these messengers from the outer
solar system.
The idea that we may owe our existence to comet impacts is astounding.
But not everyone is convinced.
There's pretty good circumstantial evidence that a comet might have
been important to life, but we don't really have -- if we're C.
S.
I.
, if we're the comet science investigators trying to prove it, we
haven't got the proof lined up yet.
It's quite possible that what we have out there has nothing to do with
life as we know it on Earth.
Scientists hope the Rosetta mission will resolve the issue.
If we can establish a correlation between amino acids on comets and the
amino acids we have on Earth, life on Earth, that would be one of the
most significant findings in science.
The story of life on Earth began 4 1/2 billion years ago.
When our planet formed, it was a barren, hostile world.
the solar system plunged into turmoil.
Gravity ripped comets from their orbits and hurled them in all
directions, many into the inner solar system.
They rained down on the early Earth for 300 million years.
They released gases and organic material, creating an atmosphere and
the oceans.
Finally, life could begin.
It's a dramatic story.
But is it true? Only time is gonna tell, if we keep studying these
mysterious objects, whether or not we can really pin down exactly the
mechanisms and find out how it all got started.
In 100 years' time, hopefully, we'll look back and say, "wouldn't it be
cool to have been living at that time, "to be a witness, to be one of
the first to make these incredible discoveries"? In the meantime, the
search for proof continues.
I can't say for sure if comets brought all of these raw ingredients to
the Earth and that we evolved from these materials, but it's certainly
possible, and it's absolutely poetic to think that we came from out
there.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s02e06

Asteroids

Asteroids are the Earth's nemesis.

They've blitzed our world for billions of years.
This takes a few seconds to create.
day for anybody living nearby.
Yet asteroids are also a valuable resource -- giant boulders rich with
valuable metals, icy miniature worlds with more freshwater than Earth.
Ultimately, asteroids may be a stepping stone by which we can one day
leave the entire solar system.
Asteroids are planet builders.
Without them, our world would not be here.
We owe our very existence to these things.
They are the givers and takers of life.
The night sky is full of stars, galaxies, planets, and asteroids.
"Asteroid" actually means "star-like.
" Even in the very best telescopes, they look like nothing more than
just points of light in the sky.
They're cosmic boulders, and there are trillions of them, from the size
of a car to giants hundreds of miles across.
Together they tell the story of how we came to be.
The Earth was made by asteroids.
the solar system is a vast, cosmic whirlpool.
Dust sticks together to create asteroids.
In our own solar system and in every solar system, the first objects to
form -- the first large rocks -- before planets form, are essentially
asteroids.
There are no planets yet.
Instead, trillions of rocks and stones swirl around the newly born Sun.
It would've been a very strange place, kind of like a merry-go-round of
all these objects orbiting around the Sun.
And there are millions of these asteroids that are just in different
sizes and different shapes.
These ancient asteroids will shape the solar system and build the
planet we live on.
Asteroids are so much more than just rocks in space.
They're the building blocks of our very own planet.
Billions of small asteroids must clump together to make a planet.
But asteroids move at thousands of miles per hour.
Getting them to stick is hard.
We're here at the stock car race to see what the early solar system may
have looked like.
High-speed car collisions cause damage.
Parts smash off.
Asteroid collisions are the same.
To join together, somehow they must collide and stick.
Stock cars show how this happens.
They move fast but all in the same direction, just like the asteroids
in the early solar system.
When collisions happen, they're relatively gentle.
Instead of smashing apart, they join together.
These are planets in the making.
They're going around almost at the same speed, and they begin to stick
together, and that's how planets begin to form.
Asteroids gather into rock piles, like two cars locked together.
As more asteroids collide, the rock piles grow.
Building whole planets this way would take billions of years.
Yet the planets formed in just a few million years.
How? When the rock piles reach mountain size, gravity speeds up the
process.
Gravity started to become important when they were about the size of
one of the Rocky Mountains, like Pikes Peak behind me.
It was when they were several miles across that they had enough mass
that their gravity could start to draw material in.
Now, if the Earth weren't here, and it were just Pikes Peak over there
a few miles away, I would very slowly start to drift toward it, faster
and faster, accelerating the whole way until I actually impacted it.
The gravity would draw me in.
It would pull on me until I actually hit the mountain itself.
Large asteroids are mountains in space.
The early solar system is full of them.
Their gravity pulls other asteroids toward them.
The larger an asteroid becomes, the more rocks it pulls in and the
faster it grows.
At that point, the events happen very quickly.
It would actually draw that stuff in and grow very rapidly.
One of these early space mountains keeps on growing until there are no
rocks left to pull in.
It's no longer an asteroid.
It's a young planet -- the Earth.
All of the planets, even the Earth, they owe their existence to the
fact that there were asteroids back then.
This is how all rocky planets form -- asteroids join together until
there are no more left.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are all overgrown asteroids.
But beyond Mars, something went wrong.
No rocky planets.
Instead, billions of rocks and boulders that never joined together --
the asteroid belt.
Out here, construction came to a halt before a rocky planet could form
-- because of Jupiter.
The gas giant had already formed nearby.
Jupiter is humongous.
It's the 800-pound gorilla.
It dominates everything gravitationally.
Jupiter's gravity causes havoc.
It flings asteroids in every direction.
Giant boulders scatter from their regular orbits onto extreme chaotic
paths.
The stock car race ends, and the demolition derby begins.
Once Jupiter got involved, the solar system began to look like a
demolition derby -- things colliding with each other, going in all
sorts of different directions.
A cosmic pileup -- rocks smash into each other from every direction,
violent, chaotic collisions.
These rocks don't clump together.
They shatter and create the asteroid belt.
Violent collisions still rock the asteroid belt today.
In 2010, the Hubble Space Telescope captured this -- the aftermath of a
hypervelocity collision.
Asteroids can both create and destroy.
If many of them come together gently, you get planets.
Too much violence and you get the asteroid belt -- billions of rocks
and boulders, a graveyard for a planet that never formed.
The asteroid belt is a mysterious realm, full of danger and full of
promise, a new frontier just waiting to be explored.
Asteroids are as diverse as planets or moons.
Some are metallic some rocky some icy.
Some even have their own moons.
They come in all shapes and sizes From boulders all the way to
miniature worlds.
And they're everywhere.
Distant solar systems have their own asteroid belts.
The star Epsilon Eridani is just 10 light-years away.
It has not one but two asteroid belts.
Another star has a belt than our own.
If you're actually living on a planet in that solar system, the
asteroid belt would look like a -- much brighter than the Milky Way, a
big streak across the night sky.
Asteroid belts are the scraps left over after plans have formed, so
they tell us a lot about their solar system.
Our asteroid belt is full of variety -- millions of strange asteroids,
each with a story to tell.
Yet we have barely explored it at all.
That's about to change.
The first mission to the asteroid belt is under way -- the Dawn Probe.
Its goal? To explore a mysterious, distant realm.
We're gonna learn more about the main belt asteroids from this one
mission than we will have since we discovered the asteroid belt in the
first place.
In July 2011, Dawn arrived at its first target and sent back these
pictures.
Vesta is the second-largest asteroid in the belt.
It almost became a planet.
Then Jupiter's massive gravity stunted its growth.
Today it's a miniature world.
One of the common misconceptions about the asteroid belt is that things
are fairly small.
But some of the largest asteroids are really more correctly thought of
as minor planets.
They're several hundred miles across.
Vesta even has a mountain three times higher than Everest.
Mark Sykes is co-investigator of the mission.
It's just a real excitement because you're seeing a new world for the
first time, and you know just enough to be dangerous in trying to
explain what it is that you're seeing.
Vesta is like a snapshot of the infant Earth when it was just as wide
as Arizona.
We're seeing perhaps what an embryonic, early terrestrial planet like
Earth looked like in the first few million years of its history.
The Dawn Probe has already found that Vesta has an iron core like the
Earth -- evidence that the Earth's core formed when the planet was
still young.
This stunted world offers us a window on the Earth's distant past.
We're seeing things that we didn't necessarily expect, but that's what
makes it fun.
After Vesta, the Dawn mission will head into the asteroid belt's outer
reaches to explore an icy, primeval world four times bigger than Vesta.
There, Dawn aims to settle another mystery about the Earth's past --
where did our oceans come from? The asteroid belt is ancient, violent,
and remote -- hundreds of millions of miles from Earth.
But not all asteroids stay in the asteroid belt.
They can roam all over the solar system.
The Moon's surface records a violent past -- a massive, cosmic
bombardment.
We see evidence every night when the Moon comes out.
What do we see? A pockmarked, barren world -- evidence that there was
an intense rain of asteroids and debris that came from outer space,
completely disfiguring the surface of the Moon.
Millions of craters cover the Moon, including the largest in the solar
system -- itself scarred by thousands of smaller craters.
A storm of asteroids blasted the Moon And if that happened to the Moon,
it must also have happened to Earth.
The Earth is a much bigger, more massive target in space.
For every one of those craters you see on the Moon, you've got to
imagine here on the planet Earth.
The impacts back then must have been horrendous.
Every few weeks, a gigantic object hurtling from outer space gouging
out a huge chunk of the planet Earth.
We call it the late heavy bombardment.
For 200 million years, fireballs rained from the sky.
The impacts trigger earthquakes bigger than any in recorded history.
rip through Earth's primitive atmosphere.
But asteroids also bring a new substance to Earth.
Some asteroids contain ice -- frozen water that melts on impact.
Each asteroid brings a little more.
But could asteroids really bring enough water to cover 2/3 of our
planet? One of the questions we have is how did water get to the Earth.
Because the original Earth, we think, was very hot and very dry.
NASA's Dawn Probe aims to find out.
The asteroid belt still contains icy asteroids to this day in the
coldest, most distant part.
In 2015, Dawn will arrive at the solar system's largest asteroid --
Ceres.
Ceres is 1/3 the mass of the entire asteroid belt and four times as
large as any other known asteroid.
A lot of it looks like pure ice.
Ceres has a rocky interior and ice-rich mantle.
It's far enough away from the Sun -- it's cold enough -- that it's
stable.
Ceres is just 600 miles wide, yet there may be more frozen water here
than all the freshwater on Earth.
The Dawn mission will find out for sure.
If Ceres really does hold so much ice, it could help explain why the
Earth has so much water.
When asteroids bombarded the Earth 4 billion years ago, massive icy
bodies like Ceres could've brought vast amounts of water.
Water itself, in the form of ice, came down from the heavens to create
the lush oceans of the Earth.
And not just the oceans.
Clouds, rivers glaciers may all have come from space.
The Dawn mission may uncover something even more significant on Ceres.
It may find an ocean underneath the ice -- an inner mantle of liquid
water, melted by heat from the dwarf planet's core.
Life as we know it depends on water.
Wherever we find water, we may find the spark of life.
If there is a liquid-water ocean underneath the surface today, that
begs the question of whether there could be life there.
Extraterrestrial life could've started in the asteroid belt.
Ceres could be home to basic life-forms flourishing in a subsurface
ocean.
If asteroids like Ceres can support life, that could reveal how life
started on Earth.
asteroids bombarded the young Earth.
They brought water, and they may have brought life.
From the asteroid belt to Earth's new oceans Primitive organisms that
thrived and ultimately evolved into all the Earth's creatures -- a
planet that brims with life.
Our earliest ancestors may have arrived from the asteroid belt.
Perhaps these little worlds could be incubators of life throughout our
solar system, maybe even in other solar systems around other stars.
Asteroids may bring life to worlds throughout the Universe.
They may also bring death.
Asteroids are crucial to life in the Universe.
But once life gets started, asteroids can also end it.
Asteroids really have two sides to them.
They're sort of creation and destruction all wrapped up together.
Planet Earth is right in the firing line.
We've come to realize in recent years that we live in this kind of a
cosmic shooting gallery.
Astronauts witness this firsthand.
When I flew on Apollo 9 and I went outside the spacecraft, it's very
likely that I was hit by, you know, a very, very small asteroid.
And, you know, it will make a hole in a space suit.
Most objects in the Earth's vicinity are tiny, but they move at
thousands of miles per hour.
So, the suits are very, very well-built, the result of which is they're
very heavy.
But, you know, we've never had one penetrated yet.
The Earth, too, has built-in protection from small asteroids -- the
atmosphere.
When asteroids hit the atmosphere, they burn.
I can remember, one night when we were looking down at the dark Earth,
and I kept thinking I saw an occasional flash of light, but I wasn't
sure.
And then suddenly, we're realizing, of course, you know, we're looking
at shooting stars.
Most people don't realize that on a given night, if you lie in the
grass and look up at the night sky, you'll see shooting stars, many of
them each hour.
Most shooting stars are the size of grains of sand.
These burn up.
But larger space rocks can punch right through to the ground.
Here's the proof -- meteor crater in Arizona, gouged out by an asteroid
just 150 feet across.
You can see the huge force that excavated this, and you can also see
the layers of material that were turned over as the crater was
excavated, and so some of these rocks around here are kind of upside-
down from where they started.
There have been millions of impacts like this in Earth's past.
There will be more.
Imagine a city where meteor crater is now.
You can see a fireball coming through the sky very quickly.
You know, this thing is moving at eight miles a second, and so it
wouldn't take very long for it to move across the sky and strike the
ground.
Heat from the fireball scorches the surface.
But most damage comes after the impact.
Once it strikes the ground, this takes a few seconds to create.
So, a very short time, very large amount of energy, and very
devastating effects.
The asteroid is obliterated.
A mighty shock wave generates winds six times more powerful than a
hurricane.
You have the blast that comes out, probably for several miles, and
large debris that would crush buildings and homes.
If it hit today, the asteroid from meteor crater would be a city
killer.
But the meteor crater asteroid was small.
It was likely a fragment from a much larger asteroid.
Whatever it is that hit in meteor crater wasn't very big.
It was probably 50 yards across, so not even as big as a football
field.
There are millions of much larger asteroids.
These would cause even more carnage -- country killers and worse.
Asteroids over a half mile wide could end our civilization -- worldwide
killers.
We know because it happened already.
There are traces everywhere.
There's evidence of giant impacts all over the world, and it's right
underneath your feet.
And in fact, in some places, it's pretty easy to spot.
Like here in Southern Colorado.
So, this layer of light-colored rock, that's the KT boundary.
And it's called a boundary because it marks the boundary between two
different time periods.
Everything that was put down here underneath the KT boundary had
dinosaurs in it.
Everything above it -- no dinosaurs.
So it really marks that point in time when the dinosaurs went away.
The layer is rich in an element called iridium.
It's rare on the Earth's surface but common in asteroids.
So, if a giant asteroid came in, smacked into the Earth, blew out dust
everywhere, the iridium inside the asteroid would've settled down into
a layer all over Earth, and that's exactly what we see right here.
The clear fingerprint of an asteroid.
There must have been some perfect morning before the asteroid impact
when the land of the dinosaurs was still very much as it had been for
millions of years.
Then there would be something sighted up in the sky, something very
bright, very hot.
The asteroid is six miles long, big enough to devastate the planet.
The asteroid that came in and formed this layer here was very massive
and was moving very fast, and so when it impacted the Earth, that
energy was turned into boom -- a very, very big boom.
It has the force of 5 billion Hiroshima bombs.
Large pieces of Earth blow out into space, then rain back down -- a
storm of fireballs.
Wildfires rage across the globe.
In the KT boundary layer is a layer of soot, and that's an indication
that there were global fires, that everything on Earth was basically on
fire after this happened.
The Earth plunges into darkness -- an impact winter -- mass extinction.
Basically you can think of this as every environmental catastrophe all
happening at the same time.
It was an incredibly bad day for planet Earth.
A chilling reminder of the threat from space.
Asteroids this big will hit us again.
We will go the way of the dinosaurs.
We will be survived, most likely by the bugs, the cockroaches.
They will be the ones who will inherit this Earth.
But hopefully that's gonna be a long time from now.
Is mankind doomed? Or can we dodge fate? Asteroids built our world.
They brought water.
They killed the dinosaurs and made room for new species.
But asteroids are also a threat.
We know absolutely for certain that there will be large impacts in the
future, so it's not a question of "if," it's only a question of "when.
" Large meteor impacts happen once every 60 to 100 million years.
We're due for one soon perhaps.
If we want to survive, we need to prepare.
We must find the asteroids, determine if they're heading for Earth,
then stop them.
That's not easy.
But it may be possible.
Happily, there's a difference between us and dinosaurs.
We have telescopes, and we can get advance notice of an impact.
Asteroids are much smaller than stars and planets.
It's hard to see them coming.
To track asteroids, you need a giant telescope like the Arecibo
Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Right now I'm on top of the largest telescope in the world, and this
place may actually be our best defense against getting hit by one of
these near-earth asteroids.
The vast bowl is 1,000 feet across.
And it's not only the world's biggest telescope, it's also the world's
biggest radar dish.
When you think about using radar to keep track of all the airplanes
that are up in the sky, well, this one is so powerful, it can actually
track near-earth objects millions of miles away.
Unlike a telescope, radar can directly measure an object's distance and
reveal exactly where it is.
That's perfect for tracking asteroids.
In 2004, astronomers spot a stadium-sized asteroid heading toward
Earth.
Its name -- "Apophis," after the Egyptian God of destruction.
The day it might hit us -- April 13, 2029, Friday the 13th.
Apophis was the first near-earth object of the modern era that had
astronomers honestly scared.
There seemed to be a one in 30 chance of something catastrophic
happening.
Arecibo springs into action against the biggest threat from space ever
detected.
Apophis could devastate entire countries.
But the asteroid's path is still uncertain.
It might hit, or it might just miss.
Only Arecibo can tell us for sure.
The Arecibo telescope was able to reduce the uncertainty of Apophis by
98%.
It told us that there was no chance this thing would hit us in 2029.
It will be close.
Apophis will pass closer to the Earth than the Moon, closer even than
some communications satellites.
We have powerful tools to detect asteroids.
Someday, we'll find one that will hit the Earth.
How can we protect ourselves? The obvious strategy is to destroy the
asteroid before it destroys us.
But that could be risky.
You don't want to blow it up because you may end up breaking it up into
two or three or five pieces, which then end up hitting all around the
Earth and wiping out many, many people.
Exploding an asteroid could cause more harm than good.
Better to make it miss completely.
When an asteroid is headed for Earth, their future paths cross.
And they'll both reach that point at the same time.
Imagine the Earth is a freight train and the asteroid is a car, both
heading for a railroad crossing.
If they reach that crossing at the same time, they will collide.
The best way to avoid the impact is not to swerve away from the train,
it's to hit the gas or the brakes.
If you can cross the tracks before the train gets there or wait for the
train to pass and then cross them -- that's what we want to do with
asteroids, just to make sure that the asteroid and the Earth aren't at
the same place at the same time.
By simply slowing down the car, we're gonna miss.
That's the way to avert a collision.
But asteroids don't come with brakes.
We need another way to change their speed.
One approach is to use the asteroid's gravity.
For a small enough asteroid, all you need to do is park a large
spacecraft next to the asteroid.
A spaceship would hover above the asteroid's surface.
You can thrust with your spacecraft to keep it from falling onto the
surface of the asteroid, and so it's like a little gravity tractor --
using gravity as the tow line to move the asteroid out of the way.
Over time, the gravity between them would slow down the asteroid just
enough for it to miss the Earth.
Asteroids could shape our future in another way.
We could turn them from a deadly threat into a precious resource.
Asteroids are a creative force.
They build planets.
They bring water.
But they're also destructive.
Asteroids are both a boon and a threat.
Early on, they bring the materials for life.
Later on, they can destroy life.
Asteroids bring violence and death.
But life may not always be in danger.
Ultimately, if life becomes intelligent enough, it can send objects out
to deflect or destroy the impending asteroids.
We now have the technology to divert asteroids.
That means we can treat them not as a threat but an opportunity.
We could mine them.
Many of them are just ripe for the taking in these wonderful mineral
resources.
And so the asteroids, in some ways, are literally gold mines in the
sky.
They're not just gold mines.
They're zinc mines, aluminum mines, platinum mines.
Just one average-sized asteroid could contain minerals worth thousands
of billions of dollars.
But first, we have to reach the asteroids.
On April 15, 2010, President Obama announced a new plan.
By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow
us to begin the first ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep
space.
We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in
history.
Ironically, the easiest asteroids to reach are the same ones that
threaten the Earth.
As they pass by, a spaceship could rendezvous with the asteroid.
Yet even when asteroids come so close, asteroid mining may be too good
to be true.
The reason why we're not mining the asteroid belt today and letting the
space program pay for itself is because of cost.
It takes an enormous amount of rocket fuel and expertise to bring back
an asteroid from outer space.
But perhaps we don't need to bring the minerals back to Earth.
We could use the resources of asteroids to build settlements out in
space.
You don't have to build a space station.
It's already there.
You don't need shielding because you can simply drill right into the
soil and use the rocky material as shielding against radiation and
micro-meteorites.
So, in some sense, think of an asteroid as a ready-made space station.
Low gravity makes it easy to come and go.
There's plenty of water, and all the construction materials that
colonizers could ever need.
So, one day, when we have colonies in the asteroid belt, and we need to
build cities there, that's where we're gonna find valuable deposits of
metals in the asteroid belt itself.
A vast band of cities in space strung across a billion miles.
And not just cities but factories to turn metal from the asteroids into
spaceships.
Perhaps asteroids could actually provide the metal -- the real
structure -- to build our spacecraft.
So somewhere up there, between Mars and Jupiter, there may be the
makings of our future spaceships.
Ultimately, asteroids may be a stepping stone by which we can, one day,
leave the entire solar system.
Asteroids made the Earth.
Perhaps they even brought life here.
And in the future, asteroids could help humans escape the Earth and
colonize the galaxy.
So, in a way, asteroids are drawing us out into space, whether to
protect ourselves or to expand where we live.
Advanced civilizations all over the Universe may use asteroids as
stepping stones to the stars.
Mankind may soon enter the age of asteroids.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s02e07

Birth of the earth

Our world formed through a series of devastating cataclysms It could

have literally blown the Earth to bits, and then we wouldn't even have
a planet today.
An apocalyptic planetary collision, millions of brutal cosmic strikes,
and the most powerful blast in the Universe, a supernova.
Our atoms would have been scattered into outer space.
Yet, these catastrophes created the planet we know today.
The Earth is an incredibly special place.
It seems like everything has worked out just perfectly.
Could other planets have formed the same way? If so, the Universe could
be full of earths and full of life.
Our planet is extraordinary.
It provides everything life needs -- trillions of creatures, plants,
and us.
Well, you look down at the Earth from space and everything that we know
of that's life is down there on that planet, that beautiful planet that
you now are going around every hour and a half, and that's almost
overwhelming -- just the beauty of the Earth.
It's unique in our solar system, but is it unique in the Universe? It's
important for us to understand the conditions that led to the formation
of the Earth because then we can look for those conditions around other
stars.
And if we find those conditions there, then that would suggest that
other earths could be forming elsewhere in the Universe.
Could there be other planets like ours among the stars? To find out, we
must travel back in time and discover how the Earth was made.
Rewind the clock and this is what you see.
This speck of dust will become the Earth by combining with countless
others.
They're all part of a giant cloud called a stellar nursery.
The first step of planetary formation is about to start an event that
will transform the cloud into thousands of infant solar systems,
including our own.
The same process is happening today, in the Eagle Nebula.
Our own solar system formed inside clouds of gas and dust like these.
There are these three trunks of gas, and they're nicknamed the "pillars
of creation," and they're trillions of miles long.
These are huge structures.
The clouds look dense, but they're actually very sparse.
These gas clouds are incredibly tenuous.
You'd have to compress, basically, a mountain's volume worth of this
stuff, squeeze it down just to make a little, tiny rock like this.
To compress the gas and dust into dense stars and planets takes a
supremely powerful event -- one that can only follow the death of a
giant star.
In 2007, the Spitzer Space Telescope captured this image -- a ball of
hot gas behind the Eagle Nebula evidence that a huge star has exploded
and sent a vast wall of gas racing toward the pillars.
There's a wave of hot material approaching the pillars of creation, and
this may be a shock wave from a supernova, a dying star.
Supernovas briefly outshine entire galaxies.
Superheated plasma blasts into space at 70 million miles per hour.
A mighty shock wave speeds toward the pillars of creation.
When it hits, it will demolish them.
It will also create new worlds.
Supernova shock waves smash into the pillars, compressing the thin gas
and dust into dense clumps.
Each is a new star, a new solar system.
Molecular cloud minding its own business gets blasted by a supernova
explosion, crushing the cloud down into stars and planets.
Wind back 4 1/2 billion years, and our solar system starts the same
way.
A supernova crushes a massive dusty cloud into a protoplanetary disk.
A thin nebulous cloud becomes a dense whirlpool of gas and dust -- a
solar system in the making.
One star is destroyed.
A new star is born -- our sun and its planets.
This is the first link in the long and unlikely chain of events that
made our world.
For Earth to even be here, we had to beat astronomical odds.
A host of different factors have to line up to get a planet just like
the Earth.
You have to have the right distance, the right size, the right kind of
moon.
On Earth, all the conditions are just right for life.
To get a world like ours, you need a lot of aces.
Somehow, our solar system hit the jackpot.
But the big question is did it happen anywhere else? One of the
Universe's most violent events triggered the birth of our planet.
A sparse cloud crushed into a dense swirl of dust.
Some of this dust will become planet Earth.
But how do tiny dust grains create entire worlds? A supernova explosion
triggers a chain of events that will eventually create the Earth the
formation of our solar system.
A hot ball of gas grows in the center.
This will become our Sun.
The dust that swirls around it will form the planets.
But first, the grains must stick together.
So, we have this interesting conundrum, right? So, this disk consists
of gas and dust particles.
They're about the size of, let's say, particles in smoke, all right?
We'll say cigarette smoke, right? So, these are small things.
And, somehow, we have to get from those little grains to what we see on
the Earth.
Gravity is a powerful attractive force.
It shapes galaxies and solar systems, but specks of dust are far too
small to pull on each other.
Somehow, they clump together to form planets.
So, if gravity doesn't bind them, what does? In Germany, scientists are
on the case.
Okay.
They can simulate how dust behaves in space inside a huge tower.
Here, we do free-fall experiments.
So, the whole experimental setup, including our dust aggregates, are in
perfect free fall.
It is simulation of space, but a very good one, indeed.
I think this is the closest you can get to space on Earth.
Researchers place dust in the container and load it into a launch
capsule.
At the base of the tower, they lower it into a super-powerful catapult.
This launches the half-ton capsule from zero to over 100 miles per hour
in a quarter of a second.
the capsule reaches the top of the tower, then plunges back down.
A drum of polystyrene balls, All this gives just 10 seconds of zero
gravity, just enough time, they hope, for the dust to stick.
Three, two, one, and go.
Moments after the capsule launches, the dust inside becomes weightless.
The grains clump together, just like the early solar system.
These images reveal how dust particles came together to form the Earth.
The force that binds the aggregates together is not gravity.
They are too small for gravity to be efficient.
We think the force that binds the aggregates together is electrostatic
force.
It's the same reason that when you pull your clothes out of the dryer -
- you know how the clothes sometimes stick to you? That's the same
effect that allows one dust particle to stick to another.
Dust particles join to form balls of fluff.
The little static charges that they have can make them stick when they
hit, and you get something sort of like the dust bunnies that I have a
lot of underneath my bed.
These cosmic dust bunnies are planets in the making.
They start out smaller than a pinhead, then grow.
The dust is now in clumps, but it's still just balls of dust.
Turning dust balls into rocks takes a whole new process a cosmic
electric storm.
Space clouds build up charge just like clouds here on Earth, generating
huge bolts of lightning.
Balls of dust can turn into solid rocks by an energetic event, like
lightning.
The electric bolts smash through the dust balls and heat them to 3,000
degrees Fahrenheit.
In minutes, they cool and fuse into solid rock.
Meteorites today still carry these ancient rock balls inside them.
These tiny globules were once the building blocks of planets.
To form the Earth, these tiny balls must collide, stick, and grow.
Rocks begin to build up by accidental collisions, which can take a long
time.
Eventually, the protoplanets, as we call them -- the baby planets --
get the size of asteroids, kilometers across.
The baby earth is now the size of a few city blocks, big enough for a
new force to take charge -- gravity.
At that point, a single asteroid will gravitationally attract a
neighboring asteroid.
And, so, those two asteroids that would have passed in the night are
gravitationally attracted, and they hit each other.
Once gravity starts to rear its head, things really speed up because
instead of just randomly plowing through material and getting bigger
that way, now it's starting to draw material in.
Gravity pulls rocks together, then holds them there to produce bigger
and bigger piles of rubble.
So, this formation process, which was taking a long time to get to the
size where gravity kicks in, suddenly gets kicked into overdrive, and
the planet grows very rapidly.
But planets are more than just overgrown rock piles.
These rocks are lumpy and inert.
How did the Earth become round and full of life? The early solar system
is a construction site for planets.
Dust sticks together to form rocks.
Rocks join to form asteroids.
But most asteroids look nothing like Earth.
And when you look at a close-up of an asteroid, it looks like some kind
of distorted peanut, like a potato that's been sort of bashed.
You can see giant craters and oblong shapes.
The young Earth is one of billions of misshapen space boulders.
To become a planet, it must first become round.
That process only starts when it's several hundred miles across, when
its own internal gravity begins to change its shape.
Once you get enough material, enough mass, the gravitational force
becomes stronger.
Any giant mountain will be crushed down by the force of gravity.
The gravity is so strong that it can actually break rocks, and the
rocks, itself, can act like a fluid, making an object round.
Huge outcrops of rock crumble and fall.
The immense self-gravity of the early Earth crushes it into the most
efficient shape -- a vast, round ball of rock a lopsided pile of rubble
transformed into a miniature world.
The Earth has a new shape, but it's still just a ball of rock.
Its structure will also soon change.
Cosmic rocks and boulders still rain down from space.
Each collision heats the ground.
There's a huge amount of energy stored in an object that's moving
rapidly.
And when that hits the Earth, all that energy is dumped into the
material, and that heats it up and melts it.
And the Earth became molten and stayed that way for a long time.
The young planet is no longer solid rock.
It's a seething molten mass just like this blast furnace at the
Severstal plant in Detroit.
Believe it or not, this process behind me makes life on Earth possible.
They feed in ground-up iron ore, a mixture of rock and metal just like
the early Earth.
Put iron ore in a furnace, and the heat melts everything.
This molten iron is at 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's about the temperature of the surface of the Earth Imagine an
entire planet molten.
In the distance, you would see thundering volcanoes spewing out lava.
It would be a scene right out of Dante's "Inferno.
" Iron is heavier than rock.
Now molten, they separate.
This is amazing.
We're witnessing a process which created the very crust of the Earth
billions of years ago -- the crust that we walk on every day.
Molten rock rises to the surface and cools to form the crust.
Molten iron sinks underneath.
Inside the Earth, it sank all the way to the planet's core.
The rocky surface is where we live.
But without Earth's molten iron core, none of us could survive.
This process separated the iron from the rocky minerals.
As the iron descended to the center of the Earth, it eventually created
a magnetic field, and that's why we're here today.
The molten iron swirls inside the Earth's core and generates a powerful
magnetic field around the planet -- a cosmic shield against deadly
radiation from space.
But the young Earth is still small -- far smaller than the Moon today.
This newly-formed world must grow.
It must also avoid being blown to pieces.
Thousands of protoplanets are hurtling around the solar system, and
some are heading straight for Earth.
It's 100,000 years since our solar system formed.
The young Earth already looks like a planet.
It's round.
It has an iron core and a rocky surface.
Yet, our baby planet is just a few hundred miles across.
It has a long way to go.
It must grow and it has competition.
Thousands of other protoplanets shoot through the solar system, often
colliding at over 20,000 miles per hour.
You can find proof of this ancient destructive era in modern-day
Arizona.
Not meteor crater itself -- that's just 50,000 years old -- but the
asteroid that gouged it out.
That was Mark Sykes and Marvin Killgore think the asteroid came from a
violent event in the early solar system.
The asteroid flew through space for billions of years, then it hit
Earth.
They aim to find a fragment of the asteroid, a remnant from the period
of planetary formation.
About six miles from here is meteor crater, and that was an impact and
it spewed a bunch of pieces out.
They're convinced the original asteroid was rich in iron, so they've
come prepared with some impressive metal detectors.
Does it work? Oh, yeah.
That's the sound we're listening for.
But even with a quad-drawn metal detector, meteorites are hard to find.
Yeah, are you pretty convinced there's nothing there? Yeah, I don't
really -- I'm not detecting anything.
They find metal but no meteorites.
My great discovery of the afternoon has been this bolt and this piece
of wire.
It takes hours of searching and many false alarms.
Then, with the light fading, the detector sounds again.
How about that? Success at last.
This meteorite is over 90% iron and nickle.
It could only form right in the core of a protoplanet.
The protoplanet it came from must have smashed apart in a brutal
collision.
Well, in the early solar system, it was a pretty violent place, and
these protoplanetary embryos would smash into each other.
They would shatter each other, exposing the interior cores like this.
It was a very tumultuous time.
Entire worlds reduced to chunks of rock and metal and scattered into
outer space.
In the early solar system, these vast collisions are common.
The young Earth is in danger.
The period's name is the "Titanomachia" -- literally the "War of the
Titans.
" All rocky planets, the Earth included, go through this destructive
phase.
Sometimes, they shatter completely.
Sometimes, one consumes the other.
All the big guys are sort of competing with one another in a very
violent way, actually, to see who comes out on top by eating all their
neighbors.
The battle lasts over 30 million years.
Finally, thousands of protoplanets have combined into a few full-size
planets -- Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and a fifth planet, Thea.
It's racing toward earth -- our planet's last giant impact.
Thea is the size of Mars -- big enough to destroy the Earth.
If that thing had hit us straight on, it could have literally blown the
Earth to bits, and then we wouldn't even have a planet today.
If this Mars-like object had a direct hit with the Earth, perhaps there
would have been another asteroid belt where the Earth is today.
But Earth is in luck.
Instead of a head-on crash, Thea strikes a glancing blow.
It's the most violent event the Earth has ever known.
The impact turns the Earth back to a molten world, a vast magma ocean
The Earth barely survives.
And the encounter changes our world forever.
Material blasts out into space -- enough rock to build a mountain as
wide as America and 10,000 miles high.
There would have been so much energy, so much catastrophe.
Huge amounts of material blasted off and went into orbit around the
Earth.
The debris forms a huge ring around the Earth.
This gathers together to form two rocky bodies, both orbiting the
Earth.
Something the size of Mars hit the Earth about 4 billion years ago.
Lots of material would have been thrown off.
We now think that it may have formed not only one moon but two.
For millions of years, two moons dominate the Earth's sky.
Eventually, they drift together and collide.
Two moons merge into one -- the massive moon we see today.
There's no other planet that we know of that has a moon as large as
ours in comparison to the size of the planet.
We're almost a binary planet -- two worlds going around each other.
Without this large moon, we might not even be here.
The moon plays a key role in the survival of life here on the Earth.
And the reason is that the Moon, in its orbit, stabilizes the Earth.
The Moon keeps the Earth spinning at the same angle.
That steadies our climate.
The fact that the Earth's axis stays in the same direction as it goes
around the sun produces the seasons, but regular seasons -- things that
life can depend upon as it evolves.
Earth is neither too hot nor too cold for life thanks to our distance
from the Sun and our massive moon.
The Earth is not covered in ice or steam but in liquid water.
Yet, that water must come from somewhere.
The newly formed earth is dry.
To get water, our planet must, once again, face disaster.
It's half a billion years since the Sun first ignited.
Four billion years from now, the first humans will set foot on Earth.
The Moon has just formed, and the Earth is a desert.
One of the more amazing ideas in astronomy is that the Earth started
out hot and dry.
There was no water here originally.
As the planets formed, the Sun's intense radiation vaporized the water
in the inner solar system.
Farther from the Sun, temperatures were cooler.
So in the outer solar system, ice and water collected on comets and
asteroids.
While closer to the Sun, the young Earth was dry.
So, things changed.
What happened? How is that now we have this wonderful water cycle?
Well, the water probably came from somewhere else.
Well, if you want to have a solar system that has a lot of water in it,
you have to bring it from the outer parts down into the inner parts,
and you can do that through comets and asteroids.
Comets and icy asteroids contain huge reserves of water, but they're
hundreds of millions of miles from the young Earth.
Then something changes -- an event that tosses the asteroids and comets
right across the solar system.
Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus take a cosmic roller-coaster ride.
So, this is an event that happened when the solar system was young.
Think of it as more of its teenage breakout years where it just started
to party for a while.
The young planets have not yet settled into stable orbits.
As their orbits shift, Jupiter and Saturn fall into an intricate dance.
Every time Saturn orbits the Sun once, Jupiter orbits twice, so they
always line up at the same spot.
Each time, gravity tugs them in the same direction.
First, they destabilize each other and then the entire solar system.
The whole thing just goes kaplooey.
The analogy I like to use is when a bowling ball hits pins, it just
goes "bam!" All over the place.
That's what this would have looked like.
Planetary pandemonium.
Neptune and Uranus switch places.
Saturn races outwards.
The giant planets scatter billions of asteroids and comets onto new
paths.
Many head for Earth.
These asteroids and comets would have been scattered all over the
place, right, some of them hitting the Earth and Moon.
Cosmic missiles bombard the Earth.
We believe that every square inch of the Earth got hit by a comet or an
asteroid during this period.
It would not have been a fun time to be here.
The bombardment lasts hundreds of millions of years until, finally, the
gas planets settle into the stable orbits we see today, restoring
order.
But Earth itself has fundamentally changed.
Those comets and asteroids were not just made of rock but of ice,
frozen water.
Comets, we know, are made out of ice.
They're dirty snowballs in outer space, and even asteroids can bring
water and ice to the Earth.
Our oceans are full thanks to the cosmic hailstorm.
So next time you're drinking a glass of water, realize that you're
probably drinking comet and asteroid juice.
The arrival of water is the final step to create a habitable planet.
A sequence of catastrophes has created a world that's perfect for life.
But has it happened elsewhere among the stars? Or are we alone? How did
we get here? Planet Earth only exists because of a chain of
extraordinary events, a lucky throw of cosmic dice.
Five billion years ago, the odds would have seemed extremely slim that
a planet like Earth would form in a rather unremarkable arm in the
Milky Way galaxy.
It's like trying to throw two sixes but with dice that have thousands
of sides.
We know it happened once, else we wouldn't be here.
But what are the odds it happened elsewhere? That other planets have
life? Life like ours needs a planet with the right temperature and
size, a stabilizing moon, a protective magnetic field, and just the
right amount of water.
The conditions must be perfect.
Yet, amazingly, there may be countless earth-like planets out there,
waiting to be found.
Thanks to the sheer scale of the Universe, we may find one any day now
with the Kepler Space Telescope.
Geoff Marcy is mission co-investigator.
It has only one goal, and that's to discover earth-size planets around
other stars that you see in the night sky.
Earth-size planets are hard to spot.
Before Kepler, astronomers took 20 years to discover around 500
planets.
Most were gas giants hundreds of times bigger than Earth.
Since Kepler, that number has exploded.
Kepler has already discovered a couple thousand planet candidates.
Many of them are members of multi-planet systems -- two, three, four,
five, and even six planets all orbiting the same star.
So, we're finding an absolute avalanche of planets out there among the
stars.
Kepler has found one planet only twice the size of Earth and the right
temperature for life.
We don't know yet if this planet has other earth-like attributes, like
liquid water.
But even if it doesn't, there are many more planets out there.
Kepler has found only a tiny fraction of them because it only looks at
a small part of the sky.
It's not even looking at the whole sky.
It's looking at a very tiny slice of stars in the galaxy.
And, in fact, if you were to look up, you could cover it with just your
thumb.
In the whole of our galaxy, there are 200 billion stars.
Many will have planets.
Based on our knowledge from Kepler and other searches, something like
half of those stars, perhaps even more, harbor planets.
That means at least 100 billion planets have formed in the Milky Way.
Earth-like worlds may be rare, but it seems a safe bet they're out
there somewhere.
So, the odds of getting an earth-like planet are extremely small --
much smaller than getting a double six at craps.
But if you have a lot of dice, you're guaranteed to get sixes.
And if you have a lot of planets, you're guaranteed to get earths.
There are so many planets in our galaxy, even if the chances are one in
a million, there should be thousands of earth-like worlds.
Our Universe, at large, has hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of
which is more or less like our Milky Way.
So, the number of planets in our Universe is virtually uncountable.
Alien earths must be everywhere.
Now, we haven't discovered even one of them yet.
But statistically speaking, it is a rock-solid certainty.
There are millions of billions of planets like the Earth out there.
And with that many earth-like planets, surely, some of them will have
intelligent life.
I would bet everything.
I would bet my house that there is another Earth out there somewhere.
There really can be no doubt that, elsewhere in our Universe, there are
other smart critters who are asking themselves, "Gee, I wonder if there
are any other intelligent species out there in the Universe?" The story
of the birth of our planet reveals that we cannot possibly be alone in
the Universe.
The question is not "Are we alone?", "it's how far away are our
neighbors?" "And when will we meet?"

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s02e08
Journey from the centre of the sun

The sun, our nuclear powerhouse.

Our star, its light powers our worldand us.
Without light, we would not be alive.
Starting deep inside the sun, We follow the brutal journey Of a single,
tiny package of light -- A photon.
The ride that any photon takes to get to my eyes When i look up at the
sun is an amazing one.
From its ancient birth in the sun's core To its escape from the
surface.
The light reaching me from the sun Was produced before there was even
human civilization.
It's an incredible idea.
Join our photon On its incredible million-Year journey Through the most
hostile environment in the solar system To bring light and life to
earth.
Captions paid for by discovery communications The universe, home to
billions of galaxies each made of billions of stars.
And, in an unremarkable corner of our galaxy, the milky way, Lies the
sun, our closest star a dazzling sphere of intense light, Too bright
for the naked eye.
But strip away that glare, and the sun transforms Into a giant ball Of
super heated gas dominating our cosmic stage.
The sun is really the star of the show.
The sun is the parent of the whole solar system.
It provides its children, the planets, With everything they need.
We depend on the sun for energy, for light, for warmth.
We would not exist without the sun.
The sun generates heat and light, The energy source for all life on
earth.
All of the energy that my body uses, Literally what i'm doing to talk
to you right now, Came from the sun.
The sun truly is the creator of all of the life around us.
The sun is a constantly exploding Nuclear bomb, violent and essential.
Our entire existence is powered by the energy Emitted in those nuclear
reactions in the sun.
We are here because of the light from the sun.
We are here because of those nuclear reactions, And no aspect of our
existence could persist If it wasn't there.
Light is one of the basic building blocks Of the universe.
I find light to be probably The most amazing thing in the universe.
It's so important in everything.
I mean, it's everything.
It's everywhere.
So, it's such a fundamental part of everything that exists.
Fundamental and fast.
The fastest thing in the cosmos traveling at 186,000 miles per second.
The sun is about So, going at 186,000 miles per second, That's about
eight minutes.
But those eight minutes Are just the brief last leg of its incredible
journey.
It may have taken the light as much as a million years To escape from
the sun's raging interior which means the light we're seeing right now
Was created long before Our ancestors left the plains of africa.
When i first learned this fact, I was already a practicing scientist.
I had never really thought about that, And on first glance, it just
blew me away.
Right now the light reaching me from the sun Was produced before there
was even human civilization.
And yet, the minute it gets to the surface of the sun, It races away
and is here eight minutes after that.
It's an incredible idea.
The ride that any photon takes to get to my eyes When i look up at the
sun is an amazing one.
That ride starts deep in the belly of our star.
If we could open up the sun, We'd see layers of dense hydrogen gas
Hundreds of thousands of miles deep.
And at its center, the core, the sun gives birth to light forged in one
of the most violent reactions In the universe, nuclear fusion.
The specific nuclear reaction that powers the sun is fusion, Fusion of
hydrogen into helium.
You take two hydrogen atoms, you ram them together, And what's left
over is a helium atom.
It sounds simple enough, But it's not.
It's actually hard to get two atoms to fuse.
Two photons have the same charge.
They're both positively charged.
They want to repel each other.
Protons don't like to get close together.
They have to come together with a huge amount Of energy or velocity To
get close enough to begin to fuse, And that's very, very rare.
To force protons together Takes immense amounts of heat and pressure
generated by the invisible hand of gravity.
The sun contains 99.
8% of all the matter In the solar system.
That's a lot of mass.
All that mass pulls the sun together With unimaginable gravitational
force.
With gravity crushing things down, Things get close enough together and
nuclear fusion happens.
In this nuclear compactor, Hydrogen atoms slam together quadrillion
times each second.
Some of these collisions are so powerful that atoms fuse, Releasing
energy.
When the protons come together to bind together, They lose a little bit
of mass, And that mass gets converted into energy.
And every second of every day, About five million tons of stuff is
being converted to energy.
It's amazing.
Each collision creates a tiny burst of energy, A packet of light
impossibly small and incredibly powerful.
Somehow, our photon will deliver its energy to earth Where it will
power the planet and make life possible.
But right now it's nothing like the light we see.
It has massive amounts of energy, and it's deadly.
The light we see from our star is old much older than the eight minutes
it takes To get from the sun to earth.
That short leap across space is the end of a long, hard journey That
starts deep inside our sun.
When we look at the sun, We say, "how beautiful, how elegant, and how
simple.
" Light is formed in the sun, And it shines and lights up our world.
Well, not so fast.
It's actually very complex.
The journey starts In the immense heat of the sun's core.
Crushed together by the sun's enormous gravity, Atoms smash into each
other and fuse releasing a tiny packet of energy, photon of light far
smaller than an atom with no mass.
Photons travel faster than anything else, And they never stop moving.
Photons don't just come from the core of stars.
So, where does light come from? The short answer is, matter makes it,
And the amount of light that it creates Depends on its temperature.
Every piece of matter in the universe Above absolute zero degrees
Produces light, including humans.
We humans are emitting light all the time Because we're alive, we're
warm, we're not at a zero temperature.
So, in fact we are emitting infrared radiation, Often called heat
radiation.
But all matter emits light.
Even someone as cool as me, i'm creating light right now.
The light we see Can be split into the colors of the rainbow.
Each color is photons of light With slightly different amounts of
energy.
And what we can see Is only a fraction of the light spectrum.
Our eyes are actually imperfect detectors.
We know about visible light, The type of light that our eyes are
sensitive to, But that's only a small range of energies.
Light comes at higher and lower energies than we can detect.
Using special cameras, We can see the infrared light that humans emit.
This infrared light Has less energy than the visible light we see.
Some light is too energetic to see, Like ultraviolets, x-Rays, and
gamma rays.
The vast, hot sun generates all forms of light.
But in the nuclear furnace of the sun's core, Every photon starts out
as a gamma ray, The most energetic form of light in the universe.
And when a nuclear reaction happens, It emits an amazing amount of
energy, The energy much, much bigger than visible light -- Gamma rays,
we call them.
Literally almost a million times Or at least 10,000 times the energy of
the light we see.
Gamma rays can transform and even kill.
There's a reason why gamma rays Turned bruce banner into the hulk.
Gamma rays are a very dangerous form of light.
They can travel into your body And when they interact with the matter,
They can break apart atoms.
Fortunately for us, Our gamma-Ray photon can't head straight out of the
sun.
If the sun were not this hot ball of gas, Then upon being created, A
photon would immediately escape from the sun And it would be a gamma-
Ray photon, A very energetic photon, not very good for life on earth.
After its birth as a gamma ray, Our photon starts to race out from the
sun's core At the speed of light.
But it encounters an obstacle course of epic proportions.
A journey that should take seconds Slows to a cosmic crawl.
It takes on average about 100,000 years For a photon to make it from
the middle of the sun, Where it was created, to the outermost edge,
Where it gets emitted into space -- 100,000 years.
If it had traveled in a straight line unimpeded, It would have taken
two seconds.
What could possibly slow a photon Moving at the speed of light?
Something slams on the brakes -- Huge, hot, dense.
So powerful, it doesn't just slow light, It transforms it.
In the sun's core, Nuclear fusion releases a tiny bundle of energy a
photon of light.
It races outwards at 186,000 miles per second.
At that speed, it should take two seconds To travel through the sun's
interior to the surface.
But something turns seconds into an eternity.
The sun is so dense That to get through all of the different layers of
gas, This poor little piece of light takes hundreds of thousands, If
not a million years, to get to the surface.
So, when you're looking at the sun, You're looking at the light Emitted
from reactions a million years ago.
Our newborn photon Leaves the core at the speed of light Only to run
smack into a dense soup Of hydrogen atoms, a photon's nightmare, That
stretches for over 400,000 miles.
If you're a photon born in the center of the sun, You have a heck of a
journey ahead of you.
It's actually pretty hard For light generated in the core of the sun to
get out Because there's a lot of sun in the way, And it's extremely
dense.
The radiation zone surrounds the core of the sun.
The zone is made of hydrogen gas, But not a gas as we think of it.
The sheer weight of all the material above Compresses the radiation
zone until it's denser than lead And nearly impossible to pass through.
A photon produced in the center of the sun Knows where it wants to go.
It wants to go to the edge where it's cool, And it wants to get out.
But it's got 400,000 miles Of all these opaque gases blocking its way.
These gases aren't just dense -- They're hot, Superheated to over 12
1/2 million degrees fahrenheit.
The gas in the radiation zone Is transformed into what scientists call
plasma.
Plasma is the fourth state of matter.
Atoms in normal matter have a nucleus with orbiting electrons.
In plasma, the atoms have been torn apart And the electrons ripped
away.
Here on earth, we're familiar with the three main states Of matter that
we're taught in school -- Solids, liquids, and gases.
You know, we have the atmosphere as a gas, the oceans are water, The
ground that i stand on is solid.
But in fact, most of the universe, Including stars, consists of plasma.
Compared to the rest of the universe, Earth is a calm place.
Most of the time, It's not hot or violent enough here to create plasma.
The best place to witness the power of plasma on earth Is inside a
lightning strike.
Temperatures inside a bolt can reach 53,000 degrees fahrenheit, Enough
to momentarily rip a few atoms apart.
The plasma lasts an instant.
Then the electrons rebind and it's gone.
But in our massive sun, The plasma lasts for billions of years And
makes up The entire 200,000-Mile-Deep radiation zone.
Worse for our photon, The plasma is electrically charged, forming a
cosmic trap.
And a plasma is opaque to radiation Because light interacts much more
strongly With electronically charged objects Than with neutral objects.
So, when you have a neutral atom, Light in general can pass by.
But when you separated the charges And you have positive and negative
charges Located everywhere, the light can't make it through.
Our photon, in the form of a gamma ray, Has entered the radiation zone
And smashed into a charged plasma particle.
For a fraction of a second, The particle absorbs the photon, then spits
it back out, And the photon collides with another particle.
Every time it goes a little bit of a distance, It basically slams into
an atom, Is absorbed and readmitted in some random direction.
So, instead of just flying out, It's bouncing around countless,
countless, countless times Until finally, it reaches the edge of the
star.
It's an atomic game of basketball With a court representing the
radiation zone.
The players stand in for the particles and the plasma And the ball is
the photon.
So, the basketball Is being thrown from one player to another seemingly
randomly.
It's not making a lot of progress down the court, But it is gradually
making progress.
Gradually over time, it is going From the hotter parts of the core
outward Toward cooler temperatures.
That's where it wants to get.
It's a random-Looking process, But it's directed in a certain direction
with time.
The photon wants to go straight up the court -- Its quickest route --
But is bounced and thrown around the radiation zone, Slowing to a
crawl.
This bruising process transforms the photon.
When a photon, a little packet of light, Is created in the center of
the star, It's actually a gamma ray, super high energy bit of light.
And it can't go very far because as soon as it does, Boom, it hits
another atom and gets absorbed.
Every time it does this, It loses a little bit of that energy.
Over several hundred thousand years, Sometimes even a million, the
photon keeps bouncing Through the dense radiation zone.
Each collision saps a tiny bit of energy, Transforming it from a lethal
gamma-Ray photon To a lower energy x-Ray.
Nearly a million years after its creation in the core, The photon has
made it through the radiation zone, But its quest to escape is not over
yet.
It's about to hitch a wild ride On the sun's ferocious internal roller
coaster a place so violent, it makes the sun roar.
A photon, nature's energy-Delivery system, Has spent up to a million
years In the maze of the sun's interior On its journey toward the
earth.
The photon has fought its way through 3/4 of the sun's radius.
Battered and sapped of energy, It is morphed from a deadly gamma ray to
an x-Ray.
But now it enters the mysterious boiling layer of the sun, The
convection zone.
The convection zone lies between the radiation zone And the sun's
surface and is 125,000 miles deep.
We can't see the convection zone directly.
This region of the sun is still opaque to our telescopes, But we can
hear it.
Nasa's solar dynamics observatory listens to the sun.
The sound it picks up is too deep for humans to hear, But if you speed
up Into a few seconds, this is what you get.
It's the sound of chaos.
Since we can't see into the sun, Its sound is vital to scientists.
When a gun fires, the bullet rushes out and smashes into air, Creating
waves of turbulence.
When we hear the gun firing, These waves vibrate our eardrums.
What we see here is sound.
The sun works the same way on a much larger scale.
When we see these waves moving across, What we're looking at is when
material moves up From inside the sun and it makes noise.
It just, like, ran into a surface.
It just ran into a wall, and it generates sound.
And we see that sound moving all around the sun.
Sound waves crashing through the plasma Create ripples in the sun's
surface.
And all we see are these ripples.
Those are the actual sound waves of the sun, And they move around the
entire sun.
They move down inside the sun.
They move back up to the surface.
By tracking the sound, Scientists can see the invisible.
They pick up sound waves Smashing against the sun's surface And
resonating throughout the solar interior revealing a violent, boiling
convection zone.
The sun can be said to be ringing.
You have this hot gas rising.
You have cool gas falling.
You have all this turbulence.
You have so much action going on that it causes the sun to ring.
Columns of gases rise and fall, Churned by heat from below.
If you look at water boiling, Bubbles of gas or water are rising up
because they're hot.
And then they cool off, and then they sink back down.
And if you look at a pot of boiling water, That's the same phenomena
that's going on the sun, But with hot plasma instead of water.
At the bottom of the convection zone, Photons smash into atoms in the
plasma, Heating them to a boil.
But this time, the photons are absorbed by the atoms.
The hot atoms ride the boiling current to the top, Dragging the photons
with them.
So, it's almost like this conveyor belt of material.
Photons are actually hitchhiking a ride on the atoms That are traveling
upward through this heat transfer.
So, it's a much easier ride in the convection layer Than it is in the
radiation zone.
It's as if our photon were now in the hands Of a single player making a
fast break.
In the convection layer, it's a direct path.
One player can actually hold on to this basketball or photon For a lot
longer in a direct path.
By not passing, The atom takes the ball quickly up the court.
The photon's journey through the convection zone Takes just one week.
But in that time, the photon is transformed.
The bottom of the convection zone Is around The top -- Just 10,000.
So, as the photon rises up, it cools, losing energy, Changing from an
energetic x-Ray to visible light.
So, it starts as a high-Energy x-Ray At the bottom of the convection
zone, moves its way up, It loses a little bit of that energy.
By the time it leaves there, It's closer to the kind of light that we
see, Which is visible light.
At the top of the convection zone, The atom releases the photon, Which
shoots out as visible light.
This cools the atoms, Which fall back down to absorb more photons, Heat
up, and rise again.
The photon is now just below the sun's surface.
But the churning convection zone unleashes another force -- A force
that powers huge storms, Detonates bombs, and threatens to stop light's
escape.
In the sun's core, Nuclear fusion has created a photon, a packet of
light.
It has battled through the radiation zone, Been dragged up through the
convection zone On columns of hot plasma, hurdling towards its escape.
On this million-Year journey, The photon has changed from an invisible
deadly gamma ray To the kind of life-Giving light we see here on earth.
Finally, it has reached the surface -- The visible shell of the sun,
the photosphere.
The photosphere, Which is basically the visible part of the sun, Or the
surface, is what we see when we look up at the sun.
We're seeing visible light coming from that very layer, The
photosphere.
The ball of blinding light we perceive Hides a spectacular and savage
world.
The sun from a distance looks quiet and serene, But if you take a
close-Up of the surface of the sun, You see that it's churning with
activity.
It's beautiful and terrifying at the same time -- Huge storms of
material bubbling and boiling.
It looks like a witch's brew, Except the bubbles in the witch's brew
Are larger than the size of the earth.
The surface of the sun is a turbulent barrier.
And once again, our photon gets taken hostage.
At kitt peak observatory in arizona, Solar astronomer matt penn studies
this solar surface To discover how photons of light get trapped.
There's a bunch of cirrus today, But hopefully, we'll get some data.
Using the mcmath-Pierce telescope, He focuses the sun's light to scan
the photosphere in detail.
So, what we've got are a few small sun spots On a disc of the sun.
We've got two sun spots, two large ones.
They're heading off to the edge of the sun, To the limb of the sun.
But they're all accompanied by a smaller sun spots, Groups of smaller
ones, following them.
Sun spots mark areas where light is trapped.
So, a sun spot forms a dark spot By removing energy from that part of
the sun.
It's blocking the convective flows that transport the heat And the
light from inside the sun to space.
So, what we see then is a cooler region That appears dark to us.
A powerful force stops our photon dead in its tracks, Preventing its
light and energy from leaving the sun's surface.
That force is magnetism.
Sun spots take shape where intense magnetism From deep inside the sun
blasts up through the photosphere.
The magnetic fields are so strong that it actually Stops the convective
motion of hot inner material From flowing to the surface.
So, you actually get what looks like a cool spot On the surface of the
sun.
They can be huge, The largest over 10 times the size of earth.
The magnetism that generates these sun spots Forms field lines covering
the sun.
On our solid earth, the whole planet Rotates together, including its
magnetic field.
But the sun is a big ball of gas, And the same rules don't apply.
You see, there's nothing solid about the sun.
It's a big ball of gas.
It turns on its axis, But the equator rotates faster than the poles.
The sun twists itself up, And the magnetic field twists with it.
It rotates faster at the equator than at the poles, Twisting and
tangling its magnetic field With each rotation.
The result -- Magnetic mayhem.
So, when these fields emerge from the surface of the sun, They have all
this stored energy in them.
They're, like, all twisted and knotted, Like rubber bands you just
twist and knot With all this energy in it.
If you ever twist and twist and twist a rubber band And pull it
straight, You can tell, you can feel that tension in it.
Where the magnetic lines twist, Flows of plasma containing our photon
Can't reach the surface.
So, what happens is you have these packets of gas Which reach the
surface, cool off, But are trapped right there by the magnetism.
A patch of the sun goes dark Where light can't escape.
A sun spot is born.
But in that tangle of magnetic lines, Something eventually has to snap.
The magnetic fields are very unhappy.
They don't like the state that they're in, And all they want to do is
unravel.
Huge loops of magnetic energy Arch out over the sun spots.
Twisted and unstable, desperate to spew their energy, They create a
magnetic bomb primed to explode.
And so, if one magnetic field with stored energy Sees another magnetic
field, those two look at each other And say, "hey, if we connect, we
can get rid of a lot of energy.
" They do so, they reconnect.
Baddow! It's a huge explosion, and we call it a solar flare.
And this can be equivalent to millions of nuclear weapons Exploding
simultaneously.
Solar flares erupt outwards into space At up to 4 1/2 million miles an
hour releasing massive amounts of energy.
Magnetic fields are throwing plasma From the surface of the sun.
Suddenly, there's a large outpouring of light.
After nearly a million years, Our packet of light finally makes its
escape.
It's free, Catapulting out along with trillions of other photons, But
their journey is far from over.
Most hurdle onwards to the far reaches of the cosmos, To strange, new
worlds.
After a nearly million-Year journey Through the most hostile
environment in the solar system, Tiny parcels of light -- Photons --
Finally burst from the sun's surface.
They're free.
They basically are free to leave this arduous journey That they've been
on in the sun.
And then they fly out at the speed of light.
So, it's kind of a "breaking out of prison" type of feeling For those
poor photons.
They speed out into empty space At 186,000 miles per second.
And just 8.
3 minutes after it leaves the sun, Our photon reaches earth.
The next time you look at a star in the sky, You might consider the
amazing journey The photons have taken on their way to reaching your
eye.
They were created by nuclear reactions Deep in the core of the stars,
and then they bounced around And got degraded into lower energy
photons.
And then in the convective zone, They were carried by mass motions of
gas.
And finally, at the edge, they were set free.
And they traveled unimpeded and finally reached your eyes.
Our photon finally arrives, Smashes into a leaf, and passes on its
energy.
This is photosynthesis, The fundamental link in our food chain.
Finally, carrying energy born inside the sun's core, Our photon and
billions like it Ignite the primal fires of life on our planet.
The sun's light creates our fuel, drives our weather, Churns our seas.
Every single day, enough photons hit the earth To power our
civilization for 27 years.
The sun's light is more than just warmth and heat.
It provides everything we need to survive.
Without light, we are nothing.
All of the energy that powers our biology, The thing that makes our
planet warm, that makes life possible, That all comes from the sun.
Trillions of photons hit the earth every second, Each delivering life-
Giving energy.
But for the unimaginable number who pass us by, The journey is far from
over.
Around 80 minutes after leaving the sun, They reach saturn.
After four hours, neptune.
Once a photon leaves the surface of the sun, It's free to travel as far
as it can, And as far as it can can be literally across the universe,
Billions of light years away.
They shoot past the outer reaches Of our solar system in just 18 hours.
Here, the sun is a dim speck in the distance.
But the photons keep on going, out into deep space.
In 1,200 years, some of the photons Reach the red dwarf star system
kepler-62, A solar system with potentially habitable earth-Like
planets.
In our galaxy, There are billions of earth-Like planets.
If there is life out there, can it see the light from our sun? If
aliens exist out there, They could easily see the light from our sun.
If they're sufficiently nearby, The sun might be a naked-Eye star in
their sky Or with telescopes, They would be able to detect the sun Even
from vastly greater distances.
So, there's a distinct possibility That aliens are studying our sun
right now without realizing That we're here trying to study the
universe, as well.
Hurdling on, The photons pass the horsehead nebula in 1,500 years And
the pillars of creation in 7,000.
At these distances, the light from our star Is too small to be seen
with the naked eye, But it would be visible with a powerful telescope.
And with the biggest telescopes That we can create here on earth or in
space, We can actually see the light from stars At the other end of the
universe, Over 10 billion light years away.
And so the light from our sun is traveling across the universe.
So, the light from our sun, The light from the earth, travels
essentially forever.
The next time you're out under a clear sky And you look up, You might
want to wave because somebody out there Might be able to see you and
wave back.
Our tiny star is visible across the universe If someone is looking.
There isn't a single place in our visible universe That you wouldn't be
able to see the sun from, And maybe that's heartening.
Maybe there's some evidence of our existence At the other end of the
universe.
Won't get there for billions of years, But at least maybe we won't be
forgotten.
A journey that started deep inside the core of the sun With a photon, a
million-Year struggle To finally escape the sun's grip.
Once free, our photon Brought energy, heat, and life to our world.
Light from our sun joins light from trillions of other stars Journeying
through the universe, Spreading energy throughout the cosmos.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s03e01

The end of the universe

The universe was born to die.

But how and when will it all end? That's the reason i became a
cosmologist.
I wanted to be the first person that would know How the universe would
end.
Two cosmic heavyweights wrestle for control.
The winner seals our fate.
The tug of war is gravity, Which is trying to shrink it down, And the
expansion of space and time itself.
Will gravity triumph? The universe will get smaller and smaller, hotter
and hotter.
Or will expansion get the upper hand? Even the electrons around your
atoms will be ripped apart.
The end is coming, And it could be sooner than you think.
Captions paid for by discovery communications The universe is
everything All space, all time, all matter.
The earth is a speck by comparison, A grain of rock orbiting just one
of the 200 billion stars In our home galaxy, the milky way.
In turn, this enormous structure is just a drop In an ocean of galaxies
that stretch For 90 billion light years.
And all of this, From the biggest galaxy to the smallest atom, Will one
day die.
We don't see evidence of anything being eternal.
Eternity doesn't exist.
Even space and time will come to an end.
The universe has been expanding since its birth, Gradually burning
through the fuel that lights its stars.
But what happens when the fuel runs out? Will it all just fade away?
Stars die out, use up their nuclear fuel.
We have an empty, cold, desolate universe.
Just dead remnants of stars -- Black holes, neutron stars.
Eventually, they decay away, And you're left with a thin haze of very
low energy light.
That's it.
We used to think the universe Would cruise gently into old age.
But over the past few decades, Astronomers have revealed a very
different And disturbing picture.
The universe isn't cruising.
It's fighting for its life.
It may seem peaceful here on earth on a nice, sunny day, But in fact,
above us and all around us, Throughout the universe, a battle is
raging, And it has raged since the beginning of time.
Two deadly forces grapple for control.
The first, expansion, pulls galaxies apart, Cooling the universe and
threatening it With a frozen extinction.
The second, gravity, tries to crush everything back together,
Annihilating the universe in a dense ball of fire.
Will gravity or expansion win? Or will it end in a tie? These two
colossal forces yield three endgames.
One is the big freeze.
Expansion wins, and the universe just expands forever.
The second is that there is a delicate balance Between the expansion
And the amount of gravitational attraction, And the universe gets to a
particular size, And it pretty much stays there.
And the third outcome is that The gravitational attraction wins, And
the expansion stops, And the universe begins to get smaller Until,
eventually, it goes back to a big crunch.
So far, the universe seems balanced On a tightrope between expansion
and contraction.
But will it keep its equilibrium until it runs out of steam, Or will
something tip the balance? I don't think there's any bigger question
than, Where is the universe going? To predict the future, cosmologists
have always looked To the past, back to the beginning of expansion, The
beginning of gravity, the beginning of everything.
an infinitely dense, Hot speck ignites and suddenly expands outward --
The big bang.
All energy, all space, and all matter the building blocks of the
universe we see today, Are created and set in motion.
Think of it.
Everything you see around us Concentrated into a primordial fireball
that exploded, Sending all the galaxies into motion.
That outward blast, the birth of expansion, Is still going on today.
Without it, we wouldn't have a universe big enough For stars and
galaxies to exist in.
Expansion is an astonishing force of nature.
It works by inflating the fabric of space-Time.
Space between galaxies expands, And it pushes the galaxies apart.
Space carries objects with it like a surfer on a wave.
It's going on in every part of space.
Even inside your body right now, There's a pressure for space to
expand.
Expansion generated the vast, moving stage On which today's universe
plays out.
But left unchecked, it could have been a force For utter annihilation.
If the universe had been expanding much faster, It would have emptied
out so fast, You wouldn't have had time to make galaxies, Planets,
people.
The fact that we're here Means that something must have put on the
brakes.
It was, of course, our universal glue -- Gravity.
Gravity and matter go hand in hand.
The more massive the object, The more pull it exerts on everything
around it.
It draws atom to atom, particle to particle building stars, nebulas,
Galaxies -- The hardware of the universe we see today.
But gravity is a double-Edged sword.
Too much, and the early universe would never have gotten Out of the
starting blocks.
If it had been expanding more slowly, It would have re-Collapsed into
another singularity.
And again, you wouldn't have had the time to make galaxies, Planets, or
people.
So we live in the goldilocks universe.
We live in the universe that lasts long enough That we can be here, but
expands gently enough That we have time to form.
The universe has lasted for 13.
8 billion years, Thanks to the opposing forces of gravity and
expansion.
But just how stable is this balancing act? Does our universe have just
the right amount of stuff in it To keep it from runaway expansion Or
catastrophic collapse? In the 1920s, scientists did the math, And the
results were anything but reassuring.
The more matter you have, the more gravity you have.
If you have lots of matter in a very dense universe, Perhaps the
universe begins to re-Collapse.
Or, if you have very little matter, The universe would freeze to death.
So what is the critical density, the border between the two? It's
approximately five hydrogen atoms per cubic meter.
So think of a cubic yard, and put just five hydrogen atoms Inside, and
that is the tipping point.
If you put more than five atoms, Then the universe will begin to
collapse.
If you have less than five atoms, Then the universe just keeps on
going.
If we thought the universe was balanced On a tightrope before, the
critical density question Showed us that the rope was more like a razor
blade.
Yet, when astronomers took additional measurements, They liked what
they saw.
The universe appeared to contain just the right amount Of matter to
stay at the critical density.
More and more, the indirect evidence And the theoretical arguments
suggested That the universe must be exactly at the boundary Between a
universe that would collapse And one that would expand forever, That we
were teetering on the hairy edge of expansion.
The universe seemed so perfectly balanced That it would head quietly
into old age.
Then, in the 1970s, astronomers made an observation That shocked them.
The cosmos was filled with invisible stuff, And its gravity could cause
a catastrophic collapse.
The universe is balanced on a tightrope.
On each side of the drop lies an early death -- A big freeze, fueled by
the runaway stretching of space, Or a big crunch, the result of gravity
overcoming expansion.
believed we'd stay balanced Between these fates for eternity.
Now things have changed tremendously, Because we've discovered
something we never knew about In the 1970s, astronomers are stunned.
Some unknown form of matter, invisible to telescopes, Dwarfs what we
thought was out there, Not a fraction more, but five times more.
We used to think that gravity came from stars And objects you can see -
- End of story.
Now, we realize that that naive picture is actually wrong.
Astronomers make the discovery, Studying the clockwork nature of our
universe.
The huge gravity of the sun holds the earth And all the other planets
in a delicate circular dance.
The sun's mass controls the speed of these orbits.
If it were more massive, the planets would orbit Much more quickly.
And if it were smaller, it would take much longer For a planet to
complete an orbit.
Galaxies run like clockwork, too.
The vast mass at the center pulls the outer stars Into circular,
planet-Like orbits.
Astronomers make precise measurements Of these galactic orbits in the
1970s.
The results change everything.
The galaxies were spinning too fast.
Way too fast.
Even accounting for the supermassive black holes At their center, nine-
Tenths of their mass was missing.
By rights, the galaxy should fly apart.
By rights, the earth should have been flung Into intergalactic space
billions of years ago.
We should have no milky way galaxy, and yet, Our universe is full of
galaxies.
An immense additional source of gravity Must be holding galaxies
together.
But no matter where astronomers point their telescopes, They see
nothing.
Not a glimmer, not a shadow.
Whatever this new stuff is, it doesn't emit light, Reflect light, or
even block light.
They call it dark matter.
What we've learned is that most of the matter in the universe Is not
ordinary stuff.
It's not atoms.
It's not particles we've yet detected in any experiment Done here on
earth.
It's some new kind of particle that we call the dark matter.
Dark matter fills the universe, Outstripping normal matter by 5-To-1.
Vast filaments spread out throughout the cosmos, And bright galaxies
cluster where dark matter is thickest.
Dark matter provides the scaffolding that underlies How the matter in
the universe structures itself, Where it goes, and what it does.
So, dark matter dictated How the universe unfolded.
It seems as if out of the hot big bang, Dark matter condensed first,
before atoms, And dark matter began to become clumpy.
The clumpiness then began to attract atoms As they were formed later,
and that formed galaxies.
And in some sense, the dark matter therefore Provides kind of a womb
that allows the birth of our galaxy.
Dark matter holds the universe together, But it also threatens to
destroy it.
One of the most amazing discoveries Of the past few decades is dark
matter, The fact that there's much more matter in the universe Than we
were aware of.
And all of that matter has a lot of gravity.
So all this new matter, all this new gravity Must be slowing down the
expansion of the universe.
Dark matter may even tip the cosmic scales In favor of gravity,
Defeating expansion and pulling the entire universe Towards a death by
fire.
It's called the big crunch, And this is how it would play out.
For a fraction of a second, the universe stalls, Poised between
expansion and contraction.
Then, gravity kicks off a cataclysm.
When you looked out, the very first things As it began to turn around
that you began to see Is that galaxies, instead of moving away from us
on average, Would begin to be moving towards us on average.
The whole universe would look like it was coming to get us.
As space contracts further, The density of matter increases, gravity
gets stronger, Temperatures soar as the crunch gathers momentum.
Galaxies begin to collide, Gas clouds begin to collide, Planets slam
into the earth.
Black holes will execute a death dance around each other.
Temperatures, of course, will continue to skyrocket.
Matter, space, and time implode Until everything in the universe is
compressed Into a tiny speck of infinite mass, heat, and pressure.
For the last stages of the big crunch, Galaxies will collide and form a
primordial atom.
And then, life as we know it will be impossible.
We're back to where it all began, Back at the big bang.
The universe that we live in will cease to exist.
But some believe a big crunch could herald a new beginning.
We don't know what the end point of a big crunch would be, Because the
laws of physics break down.
It's possible, and indeed, philosophically very pleasant, To imagine
that that crunch would somehow end up evolving Into an expansion again,
and you could have a cyclic universe Which goes on forever.
Perhaps at that point, we will recreate another big bang.
It's conceivable that as everything comes together In the crunch,
something sort of keeps it from just continuing And pushes out in a
hot, dense, smooth state, And from the other side, it looks like a big
bang, And a new universe has been created.
Our big bang might have been someone else's big crunch.
But just when scientists came to terms With dark matter's big crunch,
the universe threw them Another, even bigger curve.
Some ghostly force seemed to be sending us hurtling toward A completely
different death.
My postdoctoral scholar showed me the results.
I nearly fell off my chair.
Gravity and expansion battle for control Of our universe for 14 billion
years expansion pushing it outwards, Gravity pulling it in.
With dark matter in its corner, Gravity seems to be the inevitable
winner.
The extra mass will drag the universe into a big crunch, Until a
stunning discovery Revolutionizes our understanding of the universe.
Around 1990, two teams of researchers decided to measure The expansion
history of the universe To determine whether it's been slowing down so
much That it'll eventually have a big crunch, Or whether it hasn't been
slowing down much And will eternally expand.
Astronomer alex filippenko was on one team.
Saul perlmutter led the other.
We realized that it was possible for the first time To go and actually
make a direct measurement Of how much the universe had been slowing
down in the past.
Both teams want to measure The speed of distant galaxies.
But because the galaxies are too dim and too far away, They look for
something brighter.
Billions of light years from earth, a star detonates.
This is a supernova, A dying star's brilliant final gasp.
It burns brightly, 5 billion times brighter than the sun, But briefly.
Perlmutter and filippenko have a window Of just one or two weeks to
measure How much the galaxy it sits in is slowing down As it moves away
from us.
The teams look for supernovas for eight years.
They measure 42, and the results seem impossible.
We plotted the points on the graphs, Andit didn't make any sense.
They were not slowing down at all.
They were actually speeding up.
What both groups found stunned the world.
In the last 4 or 5 billion years, The universe has actually been
speeding up in its expansion.
An accelerating universe, Propelled by something mysterious.
For so long, we've been arguing whether the universe would Expand
forever or collapse back in on itself, But nobody thought the answer
was going to be That the universe was accelerating, Going faster and
faster all the time.
The acceleration bewilders the scientists.
It seems to defy the laws of physics.
Imagine i've got a baseball And i throw it straight up.
And instead of slowing down once it leaves my hand, Which is what
normally it will do, It begins to slow down at first, But then it
starts speeding away.
Somehow, it's getting energy.
The new energy seemed to be coming from nothing, The vacuum of space.
The word "vacuum" to a scientist means completely empty space, No
particles there at all, no temperature, No energy to speak of.
But there's an intrinsic energy in space and time.
Empty space has energy, and that energy produces A gravitational
repulsion, a kind of anti-Gravity.
Without a clue what this force is or how it works, All scientists can
do is give it a name -- Dark energy.
We could have called it we-Don't-Know energy.
We could have called it anything.
But we don't know what it is, and dark or not, It's the biggest mystery
in physics.
Nasa calibrates its finest space telescopes To measure how much dark
energy is out there, And the result is mind-Blowing.
It dominates the mass of the universe by nearly 3-To-1.
And the more space expands, The more dark energy there seems to be.
Dark energy is the energy of nothing, And it's repulsive.
Therefore, as this dark energy repels galaxies, There's more of it,
there's more vacuum.
And so there's more repulsion, And perhaps that's the reason why the
universe is accelerating Right now rather than slowing down.
Dark energy seems to kill the big crunch theory, But scientists aren't
yet sure how dark energy, Expansion, and space are connected.
If a volume of space doubles in size, Does the dark energy inside it
double, too? Or does it increase more? A 1-To-1 relationship leads to a
steady expansion.
The universe ends in a big freeze.
But if dark energy increases above and beyond expansion, A new, even
more terrifying end awaits the universe -- A big rip.
In a big rip scenario, the expansion is so great That even the galaxies
begin to expand internally, Which means that literally Our bodies are
going to be ripped apart.
Scientists calculate Just how the big rip will play out.
One by one, the galaxies in the night sky will blink out As space pulls
them away from the earth Faster than the speed of light.
dark energy overcomes gravity On smaller and smaller scales.
First galaxies start to rip apart, Then insides of galaxies will begin
to rip apart, And then solar systems will begin to rip apart then
planets and then rocks, people, atoms.
The end will be mercifully quick.
In the space of a few minutes, All the stars and planets in the
universe will be destroyed, Their remains pulled apart into ever-
Smaller pieces Until finally, when the universe has Less than a second
to live, The subatomic particles that made all matter Will be
destroyed, And all that remains will be individual photons Becoming
scarcer and scarcer As the space between them expands.
All you're left with is very low energy light That gets stretched and
stretched Until it might as well not exist at all.
The last thing to go -- The empty vacuum of space itself.
It'll be pulling on the universe so hard, It could tear the fabric of
the universe apart.
Reality could dissolve.
Will the universe end with a big rip, Or a big freeze? The answer is
locked inside the mystery of dark energy.
Solve that, and the fate of the universe becomes clear.
The end of the universe is coming.
But how will it play out? For a time, a big crunch was the likely
answer.
Dark matter, the invisible bulk of the universe, Causes space to fall
in on itself.
Galaxies collide.
Planet merges with planet.
Everything becomes hotter and hotter, denser and denser.
The universe is like one giant star.
Dark energy kills the big crunch theory.
It acts like rocket fuel for the expansion of space Between galaxies.
They're not just coasting.
They're getting pushed outward.
Only two possible fates remain -- A big rip or a big freeze.
Both scenarios rely on dark energy.
For the universe to be torn to shreds in a big rip, Dark energy must
increase exponentially in the future.
But a big freeze requires a steady increase In dark energy, Pushing
galaxies away from each other.
We can't write the last chapter of our universe Until we understand the
nature of dark energy.
May 2009.
The european space agency launches the planck satellite To search for
the birth of dark energy.
Its ultra-Sensitive telescope peers through space and time Back through
billions of years, Towards the beginning of everything, to capture
this.
This is our universe as it appeared Over 13 billion years ago, after
the big bang.
So what planck has done is take a picture Of the early universe And
told us about what the early universe is like And given us our most
detailed and accurate picture Of that moment in time.
The universe in this picture Is a hot soup of protons, electrons, and
photons.
Hydrogen atoms have just started to form, And it's the light from this
genesis of matter That we see here.
Blue areas are colder.
Reds are warm.
Eventually, those hot spots, Those red spots you see in the map, Are
going to form large superclusters Made up of hundreds or thousands of
galaxies.
Each one of those galaxies will contain billions of stars.
Gravity and expansion alone Appear to drive the formation of these
embryonic galaxies.
Dark energy doesn't seem to have switched on yet.
So, when did dark energy take control of the universe? Astronomer
brenda frye is part of a team Using massive ground-Based telescopes
Like this one at kitt peak, arizona.
She peers back in time to capture the universe Through its childhood as
it was growing.
Right.
So this is an aluminum plate, And into this plate are drilled 640
individual holes.
Each one is put at a very specific place on the mask Which will
correspond to one particular galaxy in the sky.
During each observation, The light from 640 individual galaxies is
collected Using fiber optic cables.
The speed and relative position of each galaxy is measured To pinpoint
exactly where it is in space.
So far, the team has accurately mapped Around a million galaxies in 3d,
And this is what they look like.
Each one of these fuzzy patches Is a fully grown galaxy Containing
around This is a very basic measurement, And we think that this will be
able to help us To get a grasp into the nature of dark energy.
Scientists compare this adolescent universe To its baby pictures.
It shows dark energy emerging When the universe is half as old as it is
today.
About 8 billion years after the big bang, This expansion of the
universe begins to accelerate, And we're in the middle of this
acceleration.
The data also shows that as space expands, Dark energy increases in
lockstep with it.
If you had a box and you put some dark energy in it, And then you went
and you weighed that box now you take the box, you make it twice as
big.
You don't open it.
You don't put anything in it.
You weigh it again, it's gonna weigh twice as much.
This remarkable observation means That we should be safe from a big
rip.
Dark energy will continue to increase gradually.
The universe is heading for a big freeze, And scientists can finally
calculate a timeline For the end of everything.
It now seems that we live In an almost perfect universe, With just
enough gravity to hold the galaxies together And just enough dark
energy that it will expand forever Without ripping itself to shreds.
Cosmologists can finally envision the end of it all.
it was debatable.
But now, it appears that the universe most likely Will suffer a deep
freeze.
If you look at the data, it stares out at you.
In a big freeze, Dark energy pushes galaxies further and further apart,
But they remain intact.
The stars inside them fade away.
Every star you see in the sky, including our sun, Is burning through
its nuclear fuel.
The gas will run out, stars will stop being made, And the ones that
exist are it.
Those are the last ones.
A hundred trillion years from now, The biggest stars will be the first
to go extinct.
Big stars burn bright and die hard.
The star's core collapses, Unleashing a supernova.
Then gravity crushes the dead star down To a single dense spot.
The bright star is now a black hole.
Sun-Like stars go next.
As their supply of hydrogen runs out, They swell to a bloated fireball
Over 200 times their current size.
And when the core has no more hydrogen, It's going to bloat up into a
red giant star.
Now, red giant stars are so big, they will actually Eat up their own
planets.
We know of examples of red giants That go all the way out to where the
orbit of jupiter is In our solar system.
Its fuel exhausted, The sun-Like star gives in to gravity And shrinks
to a white dwarf, A dense ball of matter Just a few thousand miles in
diameter.
It will glow with heat for a further 10 billion years Before cooling to
a black dwarf, A ball of compressed carbon, perhaps even diamond.
As the biggest stars die, The universe will slowly turn red.
The blue stars will blow up, And then the slightly less blue stars will
blow up, And then stars like the sun will fade away and die, Leaving
just the red stars to exist.
Red stars are the smallest And coolest in the universe.
They burn their fuel slowly.
But, after another Even these smallest of dwarf stars Will use up their
fuel.
Stars as we know them will cease to burn energy, And the night sky will
turn black.
Black holes, the corpses of dead stars, And cold clouds of gas and dust
are all that remains.
The age of stars is over.
The age of black holes begins.
Black holes become the fundamental building block Of the universe.
A galaxy will basically be a supermassive black hole In the center,
with smaller black holes orbiting it.
In some ways, it's kind of a ghost universe.
It's the corpses, the zombie stars, That will take us into the future.
Zombie galaxies filled with black holes Continue to evolve.
They sweep up the dead remains of stars.
Black hole merges with black hole.
They'll eat each other and they'll get bigger, And maybe they'll fall
into the supermassive black hole And it'll get bigger.
The universe will still be an exciting, dynamic place, It's just that
the time scales you're talking about Are now trillions of years Instead
of thousands or millions of years.
Any material that evades the pull of a black hole Eventually dies away
as its protons disintegrate.
A proton, one of the fundamental building blocks Of atomic matter, of
what makes us up, Can just spontaneously fall apart, And it turns out
this takes a tremendously long time.
But even that will go away.
All that will be left is a sea of black holes.
Scientists used to think black holes were immortal, But even these will
one day die.
Now we're talking about time scales Of unimaginable length --
Quadrillions of years into the future.
But on that time scale, Even the black holes begin to evaporate.
They'll get smaller and smaller and smaller, And then, poof, they'll be
gone.
The universe will end When the last remaining black hole dies.
As it gets smaller, the evaporation rate Increases exponentially.
Before long, it reaches a size A billionth of a trillionth of a
trillionth of an inch.
At that instant, the laws of physics break down, And the last black
hole explodes in a flash of gamma rays, Leaving nothing.
And it will die in a sudden burst of light, The last burst of light In
the entire history of the universe.
The big freeze is coming.
The universe will suffer a cold, slow, dark death Which will play out
Over trillions upon trillions of years.
But quantum physics leaves the door open For an alternative end, An
event so powerful, so destructive, That it could destroy everything we
see in the blink of an eye.
And it could happen tomorrow.
The end of the universe -- It's coming.
Dark energy accelerates the space between galaxies, Pushing everything
we see to a long, cold, And very slow death.
Unless, that is, something bizarre happens first.
A monster called phase transition Is lurking in the shadows, And it
could annihilate the fabric of space and time At any moment.
When we cool down water, it turns into ice.
The properties change.
If you lived in the water, when it changed to ice, Your world would be
very different.
Water phase changes into ice when it loses energy.
I once left a water bottle in my car overnight.
It was still liquid, but the moment i touched it, The slight
imperfection, The little bit of ice that it formed, spread, Poof, and
filled up the whole bottle.
That rapid change to something new Is called a phase transition, And
bizarrely, the same thing could happen to empty space.
We've really come to understand That we shouldn't take for granted
thatvacuum, What we call nothing, is actually stable.
It could be that the energy stored in empty space Is just waiting to be
released in a phase transition.
If it is, the laws of physics will change.
A spontaneous glitch in the fabric of space-Time Could trigger a phase
transition of space, A tiny bubble of new universe that spreads out,
Overwriting the old.
We know it can happen, because it's happened before.
At the moment of the big bang, The universe that's first created Is
completely different to the one we see today.
Hot and without form, There's no matter, no time.
The laws of physics are different.
Suddenly, less than a trillionth of a second later, A glitch triggers a
phase transition.
A tiny bubble of the universe we live in today forms, And it races
outward, Destroying everything it touches Like ice spreading through
water.
The energy that spills out creates the space and time That we exist in,
The building blocks of matter and the forces that govern them.
All that energy was released, producing all the matter And radiation we
observe in the universe today.
The old universe gives up its energy To create the new.
But it holds some back.
The vacuum of space still has energy bound to it.
Perhaps this is the dark energy we see today.
Physicists believe that someday in the future, A brand new glitch in
the fabric of space-Time May trigger another phase transition, One that
wipes us and everything we see Out of existence.
This is a way to destroy an entire universe, Because within your
universe Are the seeds of its own destruction.
It would spread out at the speed of light in a death bubble, Ruining
all the galaxies as it passes through, And ultimately completely
destroying our universe.
Nothing can survive the expanding phase transition.
Planets, nebulas, galaxies -- All are ripped apart As the boundary of
the bubble reaches them.
Inside this bubble, protons are unstable, Atoms begin to rearrange in a
new form of matter.
As these bubbles begin to expand, A new universe is being born In the
corpse of the old universe, And the beginning of a new law of physics.
And so, the expanding universe we now see May end in a phase
transition, but we won't know what hit us, 'Cause the laws of physics
will change, And we will essentially most likely disappear At the
instant it happens.
This bubble will expand at the speed of light, And as the bubble passes
you, All the atoms of your body rearrange themselves, And you would
never know it.
You would have no warning, because the bubble itself Is expanding at
the speed of light.
You can't predict precisely when it could happen.
You only have a probability.
So what you really are predicting is a rate.
Does it happen once a year? Once every 10 billion years? Once every
googol years? Or whatever.
It's very possible that these bubbles get nucleated And grow about once
every So it hasn't happened yet because we got lucky.
It's unlikely it would happen the next year or the next day, But the
laws of physics absolutely allow it.
A phase change may happen, or it may not.
The universe plays its cards close to its chest.
And, like dark energy and dark matter, There may be more surprises to
come surprises that will only add to the mystery and wonder Our
universe holds for us.
Whatever the universe is up to, We still don't know enough.
We're in an age of discovery right now.
Perhaps there is something else out there That we don't know about.
So, i'm not going to draw any conclusions Until things are conclusive.
We don't understand the nature of dark energy.
And without that understanding, virtually anything is possible.
The future is still uncertain, And that means there's still a mystery.
And for me, that's the most exciting possibility of all.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s03e02

Jupiter

Jupiter, A cosmic colossus reigning over the other planets.

Take the planet earth, now get 1,000 of them, And that's the size of
jupiter.
Hidden beneath its swirling clouds Lie the secrets of our solar
system's foundation, Of our planet's violent youth when the biggest
thing in the solar system Is moving this far this fast, It changes
everything around it.
and the birth of life.
If it wasn't for jupiter, right where i'm standing, There might be
gigantic meteor impact crater.
Now, scientists are unlocking The giant planet's secrets and
discovering that jupiter, More than any other planet, shapes our solar
system's Past, present, and future.
Without jupiter, most certainly, We wouldn't be here to talk about it.
Captions paid for by discovery communications Jupiter Named after the
roman king of the gods, the god of the sky, It looms between the four
inner rocky planets And the three frozen gas giants beyond.
It is our largest planet by far.
Jupiter is the king of the planets, And that's because it is the
biggest of the planets.
It has a storm on it that's actually four times Bigger than the earth
itself, And it's been raging for hundreds of years.
It has dozens of moons, this gigantic magnetic field.
Everything about jupiter is just huge.
It doesn't do anything small.
If you were looking at our solar system from afar, You'd look and you'd
say, "Our solar system is made of the sun, Jupiter, and assorted
rubble.
This vast planet Contains the clues to our solar system's formation,
Its evolution, and its eventual death.
Jupiter is a cosmic time capsule.
If only we could open it.
In the roman myth, jupiter, the god, Drew a veil of clouds around him
to hide his mischief, And that's, to some extent, What's happened when
we look at jupiter.
We're seeing not the surface of a planet, But the edge of a cloud.
This shroud of gas hides jupiter's deepest secrets.
One of the big mysteries of jupiter Is what's at the very center.
What is its core? And this is something that we actually don't know
yet.
But we do know that what's happening inside jupiter Gives the planets
its power.
If we want to know more about what's going on In this king of the
planets, We're going to need to be able To part those clouds and peer
inside.
Simple physics tells us Its massive atmosphere is the stuff of
nightmares.
Because it's a gas giant, the atmosphere, As you get deeper into it,
just gets denser and denser And the pressure gets higher and higher.
From the cloud tops to the planet's center Is 43,000 miles.
That's a three-Day, nonstop journey in a jumbo jet.
The decent would be a hellish roller coaster ride.
And we know this, because we've tried.
The galileo probe orbited jupiter for years Looking at the cloud tops
of the planet And the moons that orbit it.
But at the end of the mission, they decided they could do One more
scientific experiment.
December 7, 1995.
Nasa's galileo space craft drops a 750-Pound titanium probe Into
jupiter's atmosphere.
It slams into the cloud tops at over 106,000 miles an hour.
Even though jupiter looks calm and serene from a distance, As you get
closer, You realize that there are ferocious winds, There are lightning
storms, And there are pressures that would crush any instrument.
The planet is 1,000 times the mass of the earth, And that means as you
go inward, The pressures and densities become very large.
The probe sensors reveal that hydrogen Makes up 90% of jupiter's
atmosphere.
Temperatures soar to over 300 degrees.
Winds rage at 400 miles an hour.
It's hotter and more turbulent than scientists ever imagined.
entering jupiter's atmosphere, And just 95 miles down, the probe
vaporizes, Leaving most of jupiter's secrets beyond our reach.
We can't reach the planet's center, But at the national ignition
facility outside san francisco, Scientists can recreate conditions deep
inside jupiter.
There are a lot of other facilities Where we can generate, say, States
that are found at the center of the earth Or some of the other
terrestrial planets, But this is the only place You can recreate the
deepest interior of jupiter.
The team takes hydrogen, The most common element in jupiter, And
freezes it, increasing its density.
Then, they fire up the world's largest laser.
Multiple laser beams race through a series Of amplification chambers,
Intensifying by a quadrillion times, Until, perfectly synchronized, the
beams converge.
For 20 billionths of a second, The laser bombards the hydrogen with
1,000 times more energy Than the entire united states uses at any given
moment.
It turns out that at those very extreme pressures, A hundred million
atmospheres of pressures, Chemistry is just completely different.
Instead of really distorting the chemical bond, Now, you're distorting
how the atom itself behaves.
Matter behaves in a fundamentally different way Than we experience it
here on earth.
The atoms break down, Transforming the hydrogen gas into a liquid -- A
liquid metal concentrated deep inside the planet.
Essentially, you would have This very dense structure, And it perhaps
would look like this massive ball Of mercury at the center of jupiter.
Under immense pressure, The liquid hydrogen emits energy as heat,
Pushing temperatures at the edge of this metallic sphere Up to 11,000
degrees.
What lies inside remains a mystery.
There could be a little rocky planet Underneath all of that gas and all
of that liquid.
It could be more of a ball of super compressed ice.
There probably is something solid down there.
It's the processes happening inside jupiter That give the planet its
power -- Power to shape the solar system since its earliest days.
Apart from the sun, Jupiter is the biggest influence in the solar
system.
But this monster is shrinking.
Is jupiter losing its power? A thousand times more massive than the
earth, Jupiter could swallow all the other planets In the solar system
twice and still have room for more.
But this giant is getting smaller.
Gravity is still bringing All of the gases and liquids together.
And that heats up the interior of jupiter.
This heat rises up to jupiter's surface And escapes into space.
The planet cools and shrinks, Making the gas giant a third smaller
today Than when it first formed.
As the planet cools, The shrinking slows from an inch a year in its
infancy To just a few fractions of an inch today.
And scientists calculate it could continue shrinking For 1,000 billion
years.
Even then, it will always be the solar system's Biggest, most powerful
planet.
Jupiter is shrinking too slowly for us to see, But we can see the
effect of this rising heat.
This is actually one of the reasons jupiter Has the spectacular weather
-- All of those beautiful bands of clouds.
On earth, the sun's heat drives our weather.
Switch off the sun, and our weather would stop.
But jupiter's weather would keep on going.
Its weather doesn't come from the sun.
It comes from deep inside the planet itself.
Heat rises up through the boiling soup of gas, Churning its cocktail of
volatile chemicals, Creating jupiter's spectacular swirling clouds.
And the whole time, the giant planet spins.
At 29,000 miles an hour, Jupiter rotates faster than any other planet
In our solar system.
Jupiter rotates on its axis about once every nine hours, Compared to a
24-Hour day for us.
So, huge, super-Heated clouds from the interior Get smeared out by the
rotation, And we have the beautiful cloud tops of jupiter.
This marriage of heat and motion spawns a monster.
Jupiter's red spot is a gigantic cyclone, Larger than the size of the
earth, And has been rotating stably with winds in excess Of 250 miles
per hour for over three centuries.
Imagine a storm that lasts for 300 years.
On earth, cyclones die when they hit land, But jupiter has no land to
stop its storms, Almost unlimited heat to fuel them And a rapid
rotation.
Jupiter is basically stoking The fires of the great red spot.
We're used to storms growing and then going away on earth, But if
they're spinning the right way, Because jupiter is so big and spinning
so quickly, They feed into each other, and it keeps the storm alive.
Long after the other planets freeze and die, Jupiter will still be
pumping out heat, Driving its monster storms, Thanks to its immense
size.
And the secret of its size Lies in the infancy of the solar system.
Just over 4.
5 billion years ago, In the disk of dust and gas leftover From the
sun's formation, the first planet forms.
Jupiter began to form early on and began to gobble up Water, frozen
comets, meteors, and grow.
When you imagine a litter of animals, One of them usually wins.
And the one that wins is the one That begins to eat the most first.
The same thing happened with jupiter, in some sense.
Jupiter forms at the right time And in the right place -- Just inside
the frost line, The point 325 million miles from the sun Where water
vapor turns to ice.
Close to the sun, Rocky planets cannot grow very big.
A little bit bigger than the earth, And the planet falls apart.
Further out, however, Ice is a glue that can hold rock together.
And so you have massive rocky ice planets Big enough to capture
hydrogen gas and become a gas giant.
Close to the sun, Gas is too hot and energetic to stick to anything.
Out here, gas is cold and sluggish.
So, when gravity pulls gas towards jupiter's core, It sticks, And
jupiter balloons.
And as it grew, its gravity grew, And therefore, its ability to gobble
up more increased.
So it was the lucky winner By starting early and eating often.
The planet eats everything in its reach Until it becomes the giant we
see today.
But 4.
5 billion years ago, jupiter is in the wrong place.
It's spiraling towards the sun and a fiery death.
The biggest planet with the biggest influence, Jupiter is unique in our
solar system, But not in our galaxy.
October 1995, scientists discover The first planet beyond our solar
system.
is a giant gas planet, Similar to jupiter in every way except one.
The first exoplanet found orbiting a star like the sun Was a huge
surprise.
It was called a hot jupiter Because it's something roughly the size of
jupiter, But it was tremendously close in to its star, Much closer,
even, than mercury is to the sun.
Since that first discovery, Astronomers have identified hundreds of gas
giants Outside our solar system.
Many orbit extremely close to their parent star.
The planet wasp-33 b, Orbits so close to its star That its surface is a
scorching 5,800 degrees.
It's the hottest planet ever observed in the universe.
Now, we know that planets like that can't form there.
It's just too hot to be able to coalesce from all the gas.
These hot jupiters must have formed farther out.
How do you get a jupiter-Like planet That close to a star? Somehow, you
need to be able to build a big planet And then move it in.
And this had us asking all kinds of questions.
If we see it going on elsewhere in the universe, Is that how our own
solar system worked, too? So now, when we look at jupiter, We think,
"all right, that's where it is today, "But it doesn't mean it's always
been there.
"It could have moved all over the place, "And it just ended up where it
is -- Where we find it today.
" The question is how? How did this giant planet end up where it is
today? And what effect did a migrating jupiter Have on the other
planets? In 2011, walsh and his team re-Imagined the solar system.
They set jupiter adrift, and in the process, They solve one of the
solar system's greatest puzzles.
We would build our models, would get a venus Right where the venus is
supposed to be, Would get an earth right where the earth is supposed to
be.
But where mars is today, We were usually getting a venus or earth-
Massed planet.
No matter what we did, no matter how we changed the model, We were
always getting a really big mars.
All of our simulation Showed that mars, where it is in the disk, Should
be at least ten times the mass that it is.
Something came in and literally ate mars' lunch.
And that something was jupiter.
Four and a half billion years ago, Jupiter forms 325 million miles from
the sun, Roughly a third closer than it is today.
The orbiting planet collides With the debris left over from the sun's
formation, And these collisions slow it down.
It loses momentum, And the sun's gravity pulls it closer.
Jupiter spirals inwards, Gobbling up the raw materials that should have
made mars.
So, seeing that result, seeing a great solution To the small mars
problem was kind of the eureka moment.
Like, well, maybe there's a mechanism out there.
We know that planets migrate.
So, let's put these two things together, And maybe this is going to
work.
As jupiter travels inwards, It bulldozes the rocky material that lies
in its path.
On the inward migration, there's a lot of material there.
It actually pushes almost all of that, About 80 % of it, inward.
And when we make the movies in a certain way, It really looks like a
snowplow.
The gas and dust squeeze Into an inner disk around the sun.
As jupiter orbits, It pushes against this disk, creating a bulge.
The bulge races round the disk, pulling jupiter with it.
Jupiter accelerates and tries to pull away from the sun.
But the debris behind jupiter continues pushing inwards.
It's a cosmic stalemate, With the planet trapped between the inner and
outer disks.
Then, something extraordinary happens.
The giant planet changes direction.
As we're building this model, We've had this vision of jupiter coming
inwards, Turning around and going outwards.
And we thought of it as a sailboat, Kind of tacking, coming about,
turning through the wind.
So, the name "the grand tack model," It actually comes from sailing
terminology.
But jupiter is no yacht.
It's a giant supertanker of a planet.
Changing its course is going to take something Seriously powerful.
Enter the solar system's second largest planet, Saturn.
Like jupiter before it, Saturn has spiraled inwards, closing in on the
giant planet.
Amazingly, there was this wonderful interplay Between jupiter and
saturn.
As they ate up all the material around them, There was a gap in the
disk left over.
With less material behind jupiter and saturn, There's less holding the
planets in place, Allowing the force from the bulging disk To fling
jupiter back out, With saturn hitching a ride.
The key for stopping jupiter's inward migration In the grand tack is
saturn.
Saturn growing at the right time and at the right place Allowed it to
migrate close to jupiter and change And stop jupiter's inward
migration.
Saturn saves jupiter from a fiery fate.
And this grand tack Leaves a parting gift, the earth itself, Because
when jupiter migrates out, It leaves behind the rocky debris it
bulldozed in.
It's from this debris that the earth forms.
But beyond mars, jupiter's powerful gravity Pulls on the debris,
preventing it from sticking together, Leaving the rubble scattered as a
band of asteroids.
Jupiter's gravity is so strong that it determines in some ways What can
exist where in the solar system And what can't.
The rocky planets, Our planet, And beyond mars, The asteroid belt, They
all exist because of jupiter's epic journey.
When the biggest thing in the solar system Is moving this far this
fast, It changes everything around it.
Five million years after it first formed, Jupiter reaches its present
orbit.
Its outward movement And the inward pull of the sun's gravity are
finally balanced, But this is still not the solar system that we see
today.
The end point of the grand tack model Was actually the ideal beginnings
Of what we think happened Later on in solar system history.
But from this stable orbit, Jupiter is about to trigger a deadly domino
effect That threatens to destroy the infant earth.
Four and a half billion years ago, Jupiter orbits between the rocky
inner planets And the icy outer planets.
From this strategic vantage point, The gas giant dominates our
planetary system And unleashes hell.
In the early environment of the solar system, Where there was a lot
more junk surrounding the earth And in the inner solar system, the
earth was bombarded, As were all other objects, at an incredible rate.
It's an incredibly violent time in solar system history.
We refer to that timescale about several hundred million years After
the planets actually formed As the late heavy bombardment.
These were very large-Scale impacts And they actually do create melt
pools -- Liquid rock on the floors of these impact craters.
And some of those craters can glow hot For tens of thousands, hundreds
of thousands of years, In some cases.
If you were actually on the earth at that time, There would have been
enormous balls of dust Continuously thrown into the atmosphere.
The sky would be hazy, cloudy, And the terrain would be mountainous
From the rims of craters all around, rocky, And a wholly unpleasant
place to be.
Today, the scars have healed.
Glaciers advance and retreat.
Volcanoes erupt.
Wind and water erase our planet's dust.
But the evidence is still visible if we look up.
Look at the moon.
Every night, you see the moon coming out, And it's pockmarked, Because
for about a billion years After the solar system was formed, there was
chaos.
In 2011, nasa's spitzer space telescope Reveals this kind of
bombardment around another star.
Astronomers see a vast disk of gas and dust Circling a young star
called eta corvi.
This may be evidence of icy comets and asteroids Swarming into its
inner solar system.
Four billion years ago, The same thing was happening in our solar
system.
There was a wave of material, asteroids and comets, That swept in from
the outer solar system.
It turns out it probably came from jupiter and saturn, The outer
planets.
As they were orbiting the sun, They were interacting with each other
gravitationally -- A very complicated dance.
Jupiter goes around the sun three times Every two times that saturn
does.
And so, when they would migrate outwards, They'd be locked in this
resonance.
They'd be very close to each other.
And at some point, as they were moving around, Their gravitational
powers basically combined, Got a little bit better at affecting the
material Around them.
Together, the two inner gas giants Sling the two outer gas giants,
uranus and neptune, Even farther out.
Uranus and neptune swap places.
Neptune slams into the frozen dust and gas In the solar system's outer
reaches, Scattering icy debris far and wide.
In the inner solar system, This debris collides with the asteroid belt.
Billions of comets and asteroids swarm Across the orbits of the earth,
moon, and other inner planets.
If that had persisted, Then life never could have evolved.
Only after a few hundred million years Was it possible for life on
earth to develop.
But this destruction contains the seeds of creation Because the icy
comets deliver a precious cargo.
Jupiter periodically disturbs Objects in the outer solar system,
largely water objects, And directs the towards the earth.
Nowadays, that would be a disaster, But in fact, if you look at the
water on earth, It's quite likely that almost all of the water on earth
That's now here came from ice that impacted upon the earth, Directed
here by jupiter.
Every ocean, every river, Every drop of rain may owe its existence to
jupiter.
The gas giant may have even sowed the seeds of life itself.
The chemical building blocks Of life may have hitched a ride to earth
on-Board a comet.
Without jupiter, life would have never started, And it would have never
survived.
The main bombardment ended 3.
8 billion years ago, But a threat remains.
Every day, nasa's near-Earth objects program scans the skies For
potentially dangerous asteroids and comets.
So far, they've spotted over 10,000.
And it only takes one to cause a catastrophe.
Just three miles wide, This small comet is big enough to wipe out life
on earth.
Luckily, jupiter is in the way.
Jupiter acts, in a lot of ways, Like the protector of the inner solar
system.
By shepherding comets in its vicinity, Ejecting them from the solar
system, Jupiter helps protect the earth itself.
In a sense, the way objects move in a solar system Is a little bit like
a roller derby.
You've got all of these objects moving around the sun In the same
direction, going around and around and around.
But they have gravity, and they can interact with each other.
Imagine this skater in white Is an icy comet racing in from the outer
solar system.
The skaters in black are the gas giants.
The comets veer across the planets' orbits Until it encounters jupiter.
Jupiter moves faster than the comet.
Then, the giant planet's gravity Grabs it and gives it an assist in a
slingshot maneuver.
The comet steals some of jupiter's momentum, Accelerates, and changes
direction.
Jupiter can fling it out of the solar system By giving it that extra
velocity, And it goes away.
It's ejected.
Jupiter slings objects out and stands guard.
Every year, 200 times more comets and asteroids Smash into jupiter than
the earth.
Something had to be there like a sheriff To clean out all the riffraff
and clean out all the debris, And that's the planet jupiter.
If it wasn't for jupiter, right where i'm standing, There might be
gigantic meteor impact crater.
Without jupiter, most certainly, We wouldn't be here to talk about it.
Our lives depend on jupiter.
Because of the incredibly important role That jupiter's played in the
evolution of life on earth, When we look at exoplanets, When we look
for life elsewhere in the universe, We may not need to look just for
those habitable planets.
We may need to look for jupiters or objects Like them that have saved
them, as jupiter saved us.
Jupiter is the secret behind our solar system's success.
It makes life on earth possible and helps protect that life.
It may even nurture life, alien life.
Jupiter dominates its neighborhood For millions of miles, looming over
at least 67 moons, From ganymede, Which is larger than the planet
mercury, To a rock barely a mile across.
The innermost moons are more rocky rich.
The outermost moons are more ice rich.
So, in a lot of ways, A little miniature solar system.
Jupiter is a cosmic puppet master, Controlling and manipulating its
moons And perhaps making one of them home to life.
March 1st, 2007, Nasa's new horizons probe flies past io, A moon
roughly the same size as our own.
Io is one of the most interesting moons In the solar system, And not
just because it looks like a pizza.
It's covered with volcanoes.
In fact, these volcanoes, one way or another, Have been continuously
erupting Since we've been observing io with space probes, For the past
20 years.
This small moon Is the solar system's most volcanic body, With at least
400 active volcanoes.
Together, they pump out Than volcanoes on earth.
Io's orbit is actually slightly eccentric around jupiter.
Sometimes, it's a little closer to jupiter; Sometimes, a little farther
away.
As the gravitational field changes, Io's body, the structure of the
moon itself, Is twisted and pulled back and forth.
And that heat through friction, the interior of the moon, That heat
basically melts it, And that erupts through the surface as volcanoes.
The volcanoes on io are really fascinating.
They're ejecting vast quantities Of sulfur dioxide above the surface of
io.
It's split apart by the ultraviolet light From the sun into sulfur
ions, oxygen ions, And those ions interact With the magnetic field of
the planet jupiter.
Jupiter's magnetic field carries chemicals And charged particles away
from io And onto its neighboring moon, europa, Making this distant,
frozen world One of our best hopes of finding alien life.
When we got up close to europa with spacecraft, We saw it was covered
in cracks and ridges, Which looked very much Like the way ice floes
look here on earth.
And it turns out that's exactly what's going on.
We know, because of seeing the flexure of the ice And the cracks in the
ice on the surface of europa That there's probably a sub-Surface ocean
Deeper than the deepest of earth's oceans there On that little icy
moon.
Jupiter's gravity pushes and pulls europa, Creating friction,
Generating heat and melting europa from within.
Jupiter is so far away from the sun that it's natural To assume that
anything around it is frozen.
The fact that gravity can heat something up enough To produce liquid
water is profoundly important.
All of the indications of liquid water under the surface Have been
indirect -- The way the surface looks, the resurfacing of it.
But very recently, we got direct evidence of water Under the surface of
europa in the form of a geyser -- A plume of water being ejected from
the south pole of the moon.
November 2013, Analyzing photographs from the hubble space telescope,
Scientists spot two giant geysers spewing water 124 miles Into the
atmosphere above europa's south pole.
It's the best evidence yet Of liquid water beneath europa's frozen
crust.
Seeing direct evidence of liquid water on europa Is terribly exciting.
Finding liquid water is very important for finding biology.
We don't know that wherever there's water, there's biology, But we're
pretty sure that without it, It would be a lot tougher.
For life to evolve, It needs water and other chemicals.
And that's where jupiter's magnetosphere comes in, The network that
transports chemicals From volcanic moon io to europa.
Scientists think the magnetosphere delivers sulfur, Carbon and other
minerals, And that its radiation Splits apart frozen water molecules on
europa's surface Into hydrogen and oxygen.
From a biology point of view, what's important is That there's
interesting stuff being made on the surface, And if that stuff could
get carried into the ocean, Organisms might appreciate.
So, europa's geysers are a major discovery.
One of the more exciting aspects of seeing this geyser on europa Is it
means that the liquid ocean Underneath the surface has a way of getting
out, Which means maybe there's a way of stuff From the surface getting
into the ocean itself.
It could be that in this ocean, There's a nutrient-Rich supply of food.
Life needs water.
It needs food and something else.
You also need an energy source.
On the earth, mostly, that's the sun.
It's light coming down and warming the surface.
On europa, though, if you're deep in that ocean, It's probably pitch
black.
But life can exist without the sun.
If you go to the ocean floors on earth, There are places where there
are vents, cracks in the crust, And gasses and all sorts of noxious
chemicals Are coming up, but there's life there.
An ocean that there could be this flow of nutrients From the sub-
Surface into an oxygen-Rich water And life living at this boundary
between them, That's an example right in front of us Of how an
ecosystem could be shaped that way.
Life evolves to match the conditions In which it finds itself.
The conditions under the surface of europa Are very similar to the
conditions At the bottom of the ocean here on earth.
We may find life there, And if we do, it may look quite a bit like Life
under the ocean here on earth.
If there is life beneath europa's surface, It may outlive us all.
This inhospitable world could become a last refuge For life in the
solar system, Because 5 billion years from now, The sun is destined to
die.
Jupiter, more than any other planet, Has left its mark on our solar
system.
The largest planet with the strongest gravity, It shaped our past and
influences our present.
But the planet's future hangs in the balance.
The ultimate fate of jupiter may rest on the fate of the sun.
And in 4 to 5 billion years, The sun will expand to become a red giant,
Perhaps eating up the earth in the process.
We think that the sun's outer layers are gonna Expand possibly even to
the orbit of mars.
The earth is possibly going to be engulfed And completely devoured by
the expanding sun.
And when that happens, of course, It's game over for earth.
Five billion years from now, The inner rocky planets will burn up.
Will jupiter be next? From the perspective of somebody orbiting around
jupiter, The sun is going to turn into this angry, fiery thing.
And yet, Jupiter itself is probably going to be relatively safe.
It may lose some of its atmosphere, But jupiter's a big planet.
It has plenty to spare.
Clearly, the region of the earth will become uninhabitable.
But what's also equally clear is The regions we now think of as remote,
Far away, frozen, become much more attractive.
It'll be warmer, So its moons might actually warm up.
And it has icy moons.
Right now, they're frozen water, but with the warm sun For millions or
tens of millions of years, They may actually liquefy.
And europa may become basically a gigantic water droplet, A self-
Contained ocean orbiting jupiter.
It's an amazing thought.
Perhaps europa will be life's last, Best refuge as the sun dies.
As the sun evolves, Will the moons of jupiter -- Could it be That they
become the prime places That we either travel to, or perhaps, Life once
again begins? In our dying solar system, Jupiter's moons may offer a
safe haven for life.
But jupiter's time in the sun is limited.
After the sun undergoes its dramatic red giant phase, It's going to
collapse down and end its life Almost with a whimper.
It will become a white dwarf.
You wouldn't even be able to see the sun From the surface of jupiter
When the sun undergoes its final stage To become a piece of nuclear
waste Drifting in outer space.
Jupiter and its moons will become dark once more.
As the sun evolves into a white dwarf, Jupiter will probably go largely
unaffected.
Our solar system and the evolution of the sun Won't change its orbit
very much.
And it's just gonna keep trucking along and continue To orbit that old
white dwarf for billions of years.
Jupiter will live on, And with it, the hope of life.
If there's life underneath the ice on europa Somewhere in the ocean
beneath the surface, It's possible that it could still continue, Warmed
by the tidal forces from jupiter Even after the sun has met its end as
a white dwarf.
The thing is europa is already A shell of ice with liquid water That
doesn't really need the energy from the sun.
So, if there's life there, It's not gonna care whether the sun's alive
or dead.
They actually might outlive the sun itself.
Five billion years from now, Jupiter will take center stage.
Jupiter determines more than any other planet, How our solar system
works, Much as a conductor governs the dynamics of an orchestra.
As we unlock the planet's secrets, We're discovering jupiter Is the key
to our solar system's success.
We're talking about a planet That dominates the entire solar system,
Whose gravity determines the very structure Of the solar system itself,
A planet whose evolution helped to clean out the solar system.
So, we see that the past And the future depends on jupiter.
Jupiter has been here Since the solar system's earliest days, And it'll
be here at the end.
Creator, protector, nurturer, and survivor, Jupiter shaped the solar
system that we see today And makes life possible on earth and perhaps
beyond.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s03e03
First second of the big bang

The most momentous second in history, the first.

In that first moment of creation, in the first second, Space and time,
matter and energy, Everything was set into motion.
Space and time burst into existence, Giving birth to the universe.
More things happened in that first second Than will probably happen In
the entire future history of the universe, no matter how long it lives.
This violent first second will define everything, including you.
So that very first second, understanding that Is the key to
understanding the universe itself.
Captions paid for by discovery communications Look up at the night sky,
At our universe an awesome spectacle, Stunning, exhilarating, humbling.
And look at all the world around us, Bursting with life, With natural
wonders, With those we love.
All of this, everything we see, Comes from one miraculous moment the
big bang.
The big bang was more than just a creation of matter.
It was the creation of the universe, Which means the creation of space
and time.
Creating time, space, and everything is a pretty neat trick.
Obviously it happened.
But so far, physics hasn't figured out how.
We don't know why it banged.
We don't know what banged.
We don't know how it's banging.
All we know for sure, All of existence suddenly burst into life.
This is the beginning of the first second When time itself is set to
zero.
It's the moment when everything we see, All hundred billion galaxies,
Each of which contains a hundred billion stars, All of that material
was compressed in a region which was infinitely small.
In its first second, The universe evolves more radically Than in the
13.
8 billion years that follow.
The first second of the universe Was the most important second the
universe ever had.
And it went through more stages in that first second Than it has in all
the time since.
So much happens so quickly That scientists need a whole new concept of
time.
For human beings, one second can seem like a very short time.
But for the universe, an incredible amount can happen.
We measure our lives in hours, minutes, and seconds.
But they're useless at the time scale of creation Because the big bang
unfolds almost instantaneously.
We have taken our understanding Of what the universe was like Back from
one second to a tenth of a second, A hundredth of a second, a
thousandth of a second, A millionth of a second, a billionth of a
second, All the way back to a time where the laws of physics, As we now
know them, break down.
That far back, time must be measured In unimaginably tiny slivers know
as planck time.
One way of understanding How much actually happened in the first second
Is to think in units of the planck time, The planck time being There's
a billion billion billion billion billion Planck times in one second.
There are only a billion billion seconds In the entire history of the
universe.
That's far fewer seconds in all of history Since one second to today
Than there were from the planck time for the first second.
By breaking time up into such tiny fragments, We can imagine the birth
of the universe moment by moment.
In the beginning, space and time are wrapped up In an infinitesimally
small speck of pure energy.
As the planck time clock starts running, This knot of space and time
somehow bursts into life.
The big bang wasn't an explosion in space.
It was an explosion of space.
As the hands of our cosmic clock approach the first planck time, All of
space expands.
The universe emerges everywhere at once.
The wonderful thing is it happened right here At the end of your nose.
And it happened 5 billion light-Years away.
Every single point in space was involved in the big bang.
So it's not as if it's a ball that you can stand outside of.
Everywhere you are is inside of the big bang.
In this very first instant of creation, Some scientists believe that a
single pure force, A super force, rules everything in the universe.
We think that the original universe was a state of perfection, A single
unified force that existed at the instant of the big bang.
As the first planck times pass by, Something causes the super force to
split shattering the state of perfection.
As the universe cools, these different forces freeze out.
That means they behave differently.
Think, for example, in terms of steam.
If i have steam and i cool it, it turns to a liquid.
If i cool it again, it turns to a solid.
So in the same way, as the universe began to cool, The different forces
broke off from each other.
When the super force splits, A new force emerges to drive and shape the
cosmos gravity.
It will mold matter into planets, stars, galaxies.
If gravity were a little bit stronger, Perhaps we would have had a big
bang which would stop, And then it would re-Collapse immediately into a
big crush.
Life would be impossible.
If gravity were a little weaker, Then we would have a big bang that
just keeps on going, And the universe would freeze to death.
But gravity breaks away from the super force At exactly the right
strength To create galaxies, stars, and life itself.
So our universe in some sense is fine-Tuned.
We're just right to have a universe that expands slowly, Making it
possible to create dna and life as we know it.
Gravity may be the perfect strength For our universe, But it's not the
only force that will govern the cosmos.
By the 10 millionth tick of the planck time clock, Another stupendous
event will begin the wildest growth spurt In cosmic history.
The first second of the universe has barely begun.
And the shortest possible units of time, planck times, Are flying by in
their millionths.
The universe is a super-Hot ball of radiation, Billions of times
smaller than an atom, And dense beyond imagination.
Gravity has begun shaping the future of the cosmos.
But as the universe expands, temperature drops.
Another force arrives on the scene, a strong force.
Without the strong nuclear force, The nuclei of the atoms themselves
would all disintegrate.
Three forces Gravity, the strong force, and the fractured super force
Rule the universe as it hurdles towards its next milestone, An event
that sets out the blueprint for the galaxies That fill the cosmos
today.
We think this event happened Because it explains a longstanding
mystery.
Everywhere we've looked in the universe, Its billions of galaxies are
spread evenly, The same number in every direction.
Nobody could explain why.
All of these parts of the universe must have at one point Been in
contact with each other.
It's kind of like having two people Who live on opposite sides of a
country Getting up at the same time, Eating the same breakfast,
dressing the same way, Even when they don't talk to each other.
There must be something common in their past that links them.
This problem needed a solution.
And in 1979, a young cosmologist named alan guth proposed one.
He called it inflation.
This was very exciting.
I suddenly realized that this might be the key To a very important
secret of the universe.
But at the same time, i was, of course, very nervous because it was all
new.
And i was shaky about whether or not it was right.
Guth speculated that the infant universe Went through a phenomenal
growth spurt.
Cosmic inflation was a moment in the history, The very early history,
of the universe When the expansion suddenly accelerated.
It got huge for the briefest moments of time.
Just 10 million planck times after the big bang, A tiny volume of space
suddenly starts to expand Much more quickly than before.
This inflation is so rapid that it turns chaos into order, Spreading
the constituents of our universe Evenly throughout space and fixing
their positions within it.
As the universe cooled down in those earliest moments, It increased in
volume by a factor of 10 to the 90th, In a millionth of a billionth of
a billionth of a second.
It's like a grain of sand Swelling to larger than the sun faster than
the speed of light.
Well, have we violated einstein's laws? Nothing can go faster than the
speed of light.
And here is one of the real subtle points about the big bang.
Space can expand so much that two objects appear to move apart Faster
than the speed of light.
But they're not moving.
It's the space in between them that's growing.
Guth's audacious idea, the inflationary universe, Could push the limit
of our understanding back To the very first moments of the very first
second.
But how could we ever test it? How could we peer into the birth of
creation? Tv static holds a clue.
Comes from light from the big bang.
In 1964, astronomers arno penzias and robert wilson Were listening to
radio signals from space.
But in every direction, They were picking up a background hum.
Puzzled by the hum, they suspected they knew the culprit And swept the
entire receiver free of pigeon dropping, But to no avail.
If anything, the background got even greater.
And according to legend, When they gave a talk at princeton, One
physicist raised his hand and says, "Either you are listening to the
effects of bird dropping Or the creation of the universe.
" What penzias and wilson had stumbled upon Was the afterglow of the
fireball Created by the big bang.
As the universe expanded, it cooled.
After a few hundred thousand years, It was just protons and electrons
flying around.
But at some point, the universe cooled enough That when an electron and
proton got together All over the universe, essentially all at once, The
universe became transparent.
Think of a gigantic fog that suddenly lifts.
Before the fog lifts, You can only see a few feet in front of you.
Then suddenly everything becomes clear.
That's what happened 380,000 years after the big bang.
Ever since that moment, after the big bang, This light has traveled
uninterrupted through space.
Scientists call it the cosmic microwave background.
If you were to write down a handful Of the greatest scientific
discoveries of all time, One of them might be the discovery of dna.
Another one might be The discovery of a cosmic microwave background.
That's how big this discovery was.
The cosmic microwave background First lit up the universe after the big
bang.
But it bears the imprint of a time much earlier than that, A time when
inflation was transforming the cosmos.
If the secrets to inflation are anywhere, they're hidden here.
Scientists needed to take a closer look.
The infant universe Is 1 trillion trillion trillionths of a second old.
It abruptly inflates in the greatest growth spurt in history.
And the universe expands faster than the speed of light.
The secrets to this expansion Are hidden in the cosmic microwave
background, The first-Ever light to shine through the cosmos.
To reveal these secrets, Scientists need the best picture of this light
they can get.
Ignition.
Lift-Off.
May 2009, the european space agency Launches the planck satellite.
It orbits the sun, Scanning the temperature of the entire visible
universe.
It's so sensitive, it can measure the temperature Of the cosmic
microwave background To within a millionth of a degree.
The blue spots in the map are cold spots.
They would evolve and become large empty voids.
The red spots in the map, those are hot spots.
They're gonna form clusters of galaxies.
This map is a blueprint For how our universe is gonna form and evolve.
When we look at this map, we're also looking back in time And seeing
the echoes of creation.
The tiny variations measured by planck Go on to form the galaxies that
fill the universe.
And inflation explains them perfectly.
But scientists need a smoking gun, Something out of science fiction
gravitational waves.
One of the tests is that we might be able to see The gravity waves that
were produced At the very end of inflation.
Gravitational waves stretch and contract spacetime itself.
They travel through the universe like ripples in a pond.
Scientists believe that the violence of inflation Sent these waves
reverberating throughout the cosmos.
If we could see them, it would be case closed.
Scientists would know that inflation was real.
March 2014, came up with inflation, A telescope at the south pole
shakes the world.
Today, scientists announce they have discovered What was going on in
the earliest moments of our universe Right after the big bang.
This is the most exciting scientific result Of my career.
Inflation was an incredibly violent process, Different parts of the
universe All expanding at somewhat different rates, But all faster than
the speed of light.
And this difference in expansion rate Produced gravitational waves.
And these gravitational waves Produced a signature on the microwave sky
That we've now seen.
It's something i am so happy that's happened in my lifetime.
The data is an almost perfect fit for inflation.
What we're finding Is that the very simplest models of inflation Are
agreeing beautifully With what observations are being made.
And that's incredibly gratifying And provides, i think, very strong
evidence That inflation really happened.
Inflation explains why galaxies Are spread so smoothly across the
cosmos.
In the tiniest fraction of a second, It transforms a minute and uniform
bit of space Into the entire visible universe.
And the implications are stunning.
Maybe it wasn't just the visible universe That grew under inflation.
Some scientists now believe that other regions of space, Too distant
for their light to ever reach us, Underwent inflation, too, and are
still inflating now.
One of the profound things about inflation is once it starts, It's hard
to stop it.
Inflation never stops everywhere.
It stops in places.
And every place where it stops, one produces a universe.
Inflation seems to go on Producing other pocket universes, literally
forever.
Indeed, inflation makes our big bang And then goes on and makes lots of
other big bangs And creates this big collection of universes, the
multiverse.
Our universe may be just one Of an infinite collection of universes in
a multiverse Much, much larger than we ever imagined.
And some scientists argue That not only are there multiple universes
out there, They think every possible universe must exist.
People, identical to us, Would live out every possible parallel life In
every possible parallel world a mind-Blowing outcome.
Now that we have such strong evidence for inflation, It's time to take
ideas like the multiverse really seriously.
Let's reset.
The universe is less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old,
And the seeds of its galaxies have already been sown.
But everything is still pure energy.
So where does all the matter, The stuff of stars and you and me, come
from? We're on a journey through the first second of time.
The universe is a trillionth Of a trillionth of a trillionth of a
second old.
The temperature is a thousand trillion trillion degrees.
The infant universe inflates far faster than the speed of light,
Pumping vast amounts of energy into space.
But the cosmos is still just the size of a baseball.
Inflation says that, for a brief period, empty space gets energy.
And it turns out the universe keeps dumping energy into space To
produce everything we see.
And so, apparently you produce an incredible amount of stuff From
nothing without violating the laws of physics.
It's almost magic, but that's the keyword, almost.
It's allowed by the laws of physics.
As inflation ends, the brightest flash in history Floods the cosmos
with radiation.
During the first second of the universe, It was unimaginably hot and
dense.
It was basically a ball of energy.
It's not a place you'd want to stand in.
You'd vaporize pretty quickly.
Everything's zipping 'round at the speed of light.
This universe full of radiation Is nothing like our universe today,
Full of stuff, material stuff.
Because it was so hot, atoms didn't exist.
Matter as we know, it didn't exist.
The universe was a dense soup of radiation.
The earliest universe is a chaos of pure energy.
But how does it transform into a universe full of matter? To answer
that question, we have to turn to einstein And a very famous equation
e=mc squared.
Before einstein, people said "matter is matter, Energy is energy, and
never the twain shall meet.
" Along comes einstein and says, "not so fast.
They really are the same thing.
" Einstein realized that matter is just concentrated energy.
This insight transformed our understanding of the universe And allowed
us to unleash devastating destruction in atomic bombs.
Energy, "e," that can turn into "m," matter, and vice versa.
Even a small teaspoon of matter would be enough To unleash the power of
hundreds of hydrogen bombs.
While atom bombs convert matter into energy, In the big bang, energy
starts to turn into matter.
But it's nothing like the matter that makes up the world we live in.
So what does this primal matter look like? This is brookhaven national
laboratory in long island, Home to the relativistic heavy ion collider,
or rhic for short.
Here, they re-Create the matter That filled the embryonic universe One-
Millionth of a second after the big bang.
In a sense, rhic really is a time machine.
We're reproducing the conditions That existed in the early universe On
the order of one microsecond after the big bang.
Rhic fires gold nuclei around a 2 1/2-Mile circular tunnel at almost
the speed of light.
Then it smashes them together in the giant star detector.
Imagine smashing two cars together in a head-On collision And working
out what the cars looked like By analyzing the debris thrown off.
That's what the team at rhic is doing.
They're hunting for the building blocks of protons By smashing them to
pieces.
Each collision that you see here, You can see that they're different.
Some collisions have more tracks coming out of them.
The curved lines represent In fact, they are the particles that come
out of the collision.
And you can see each collision Generates a different number of
particles Depending on the violence of the collision.
What mike and his team see is a spray Of the most fundamental particles
of all quarks.
Quarks are normally bound inside protons and neutrons.
But give quarks enough energy, and they break free.
We expected these quarks, Once they're liberated from the protons and
neutrons, Not to interact much with each other, Just to stream out into
our detector.
What we found was the most perfect fluid That was ever discovered, ever
measured on the planet.
So it actually flows much more easily than water does.
This was absolutely surprising.
And rhic shows us That the perfect fluid of elementary particles Occurs
at just one-Millionth of a second into the big bang.
But, like everything in the first second, It doesn't last for long.
As the universe expands, it cools.
And something called the strong force makes its presence felt.
The most important characteristic of the strong force Is the
confinement of quarks inside protons and neutrons That we see as today.
When the temperature of the universe Drops to 2 trillion degrees, The
strong force clumps quarks together in groups of three, Making protons
and neutrons, the building blocks of atoms.
The universe begins to take the form we know today.
But as matter is bursting into existence All across the universe,
there's still something missing.
Somehow this matter has no mass.
The universe is hurtling through its first second of existence.
It begins a hundred billion billion times Smaller than a proton.
After surging through a burst of expansion, called inflation, Faster
than the speed of light, the entire cosmos Has grown to about the size
of our solar system.
And matter is bursting into existence.
But this matter is strange.
It has no mass.
The matter in today's universe has mass.
On earth, we feel it as weight.
In space, objects can feel weightless, But they still have mass.
If this astronaut had no mass, he'd be in big trouble.
You can't actually slow something down If it doesn't have any mass.
If somebody doesn't have any mass, It has to move at the speed of
light.
There's no way of stopping it.
So a universe that's full of matter But matter which has no mass Is one
in which it just looks like a big ball of light.
The early universe had no mass, Just elementary particles fizzing at
the speed of light.
But today, our universe is full of planets and stars That clearly have
mass.
So where does this mass come from? Apparently there's some field That
permeates the entire universe, And different elementary particles Will
interact with it in different ways.
And it's the interaction of the particle with the field That gives the
particle its property that we call mass.
Scientists call it the higgs field, after peter higgs, One of the first
scientists to propose it in the 1960s.
The higgs field is invisible.
It stretches throughout space and is accompanied By a fundamental
particle called the higgs boson, Which interacts with particles of
ordinary matter As they pass through the field.
The more an object interacts with the higgs field, The more mass it
gains.
Without the higgs field and the higgs boson, there is no mass.
The higgs field is a beautiful idea.
But does it really exist? There's only one place to find out At the
biggest and most advanced machine ever built, The large hadron collider
at cern.
Joe incandela hopes to prove the field exists By smashing the higgs
boson out of the shadows.
So i actually need all of you, including the cameraman, To go through
when the other door is open.
Just go all the way through.
There you go.
We're going down 90 meters, Which is about 300 feet, about 25 stories.
Took a couple years actually to engineer the layout Of just the cables.
There's enough cables to go from here to moscow.
And this takes us to the detector itself.
So here we are.
Like something out of a james bond film.
Only this is real.
The lhc fires two beams of protons Around a 17-Mile concrete-Lined
tunnel, Which collide at the highest energies ever created by man.
It's equivalent to shooting knitting needles From either side of the
atlantic And having them hit head-On in the middle.
The collisions shatter the protons Into a spray of new particles,
Including, perhaps, the higgs boson.
Joe's team of 3,800 scientists spend 5 years Searching for the trail of
particles The higgs should leave in its wake.
On march 14, 2013, lhc delivers.
It was an electric atmosphere.
I mean, the 20-Year-Old physicists had camped out Overnight in the
hallways to get good seats in the lecture hall.
And the 80-Year-Old physicists, Who had invented the idea back in the
'60s, They were flown in from all over the world.
And, you know, secrecy was important, So it was, like, this is the one
seminar You're not gonna want to miss in your lifetime.
I think we have it.
The discovery of the higgs boson Is one of the final keys to our
understanding of the big bang.
It was a very emotional moment.
I mean, people got choked up.
Thanks to peter higgs And the efforts of scientists around the world,
We understand the key moments of the first second.
We now have all the building blocks to make the universe.
A thousand years from now, when they're writing the textbooks, They
will remember the moment when we found the higgs boson.
All the matter around us, All the human beings and all the people, All
the stars and the planets in the sky And the higgs boson was the
missing piece.
That's what really makes it get up and go.
Without this higgs' mechanism, the higgs field, That formation of mass,
we'd have no atoms.
Without atoms, there's no structure.
We're not here.
That's where this other name for this particle came from, As a god
particle in a sense.
We would not exist without it.
Stars, planets, and people would be impossible Without the higgs field
and the higgs boson.
But these new discoveries may be responsible For much more than keeping
our feet on the ground.
When the higgs field pops into existence During the first second of the
universe, Some scientists believe it may have triggered The splitting
of the super force.
Without the higgs boson, we can't exist.
And we think that a series of higgs bosons were responsible For
breaking the symmetries of the super force So that the four forces
could emerge.
That's why when we found the higgs boson, Champagne bottles were being
opened up In all the physics laboratories.
And we were all having a grand party.
Nearing the end of the first second, Two final forces split off.
Without the weak nuclear force, the stars would not shine.
The electromagnetic force is the force That governs almost everything
that we do, Even the chemistry of our own bodies.
The weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force Now stand
alongside the strong nuclear force and gravity To shape the universe we
live in.
With these four forces, We have a universe that can create our home.
The laws of physics which govern our universe Are, at heart, these
fundamental forces.
These forces drive the evolution of the universe.
We're nearing the end of the universe's first second.
The cosmos, now an inferno of radiation and matter, Has given birth to
the four fundamental forces of nature.
But before the first star has a chance to shine, A mysterious form of
matter threatens to destroy it all.
The first second, The most important second in the history of the
universe, Is nearly over.
The universe is now A fireball of light and matter.
But an almighty battle begins to rock the cosmos.
Fundamental particles, the building blocks of atoms, Fill the early
universe.
But they must survive a war, A war whose outcome will determine our
future Because matter has an evil twin, antimatter.
And the two are mortal enemies.
In many ways, they're opposites of each other.
And what that means is, if you take a lump of matter And a similar lump
of antimatter and slam them together, They will be totally converted
into energy.
And according to einstein's e=mc squared, It's a lot of energy.
Matter and antimatter simply cannot co-Exist.
They annihilate each other on contact.
This cosmic carnage rages as billions of times more matter Than we see
today simply disappears As matter and antimatter collide.
The fate of the universe hangs in the balance.
You have to understand the universe shouldn't be here.
It should have been half antimatter and half matter, And we should have
all annihilated.
We do not understand why we even exist.
At the end of this epic war, Matter wins out by the slimmest of
margins.
But why? The question is, why in the universe, as we see it, There are
so many more particles than antiparticles? The galaxies and the stars
that we see in the sky, These are all made of matter.
They are not made of antimatter.
Somehow, the balance between matter and antimatter Was slightly skewed
from the beginning.
For every billion particles of matter and antimatter That were being
created by energy, One extra particle of matter And that very small
asymmetry of one part in a billion Is enough to account for all the
galaxies and stars We see in the universe today.
Could things have turned out differently? What if antimatter had won
the war? If antimatter had won instead of matter, The universe would
probably look the same today.
In fact, you know what? We'd be made of antimatter, and we'd call it
matter.
Anti-Lovers could sit in cars, anti-Cars, Looking at anti-Moons, making
anti-Love, And it would all seem exactly the same.
So why was there more matter than antimatter? Why was the universe
built out of balance? Professor tara shears at the large hadron
collider Wants to find out.
What we're really interested in Is how different the amounts of matter
and antimatter are And whether they match up to our understanding Of
how different matter and antimatter should be Because that's what we
don't understand.
The lhc results show That the difference between antimatter and matter
Is smaller than expected.
To explain why, scientists need to know What tips the scales in
matter's favor.
I really hope that we're gonna make a measurement here sometime In the
future which is going to just show us the light, Show us what else
there is out there in the universe That's going to make it all make
sense.
We still don't completely understand The first second of the cosmos.
But the fact that we know so much already Speaks volumes about the
determination and ingenuity of our scientists.
As a civilization, we are extending our understanding Of where we are
in the universe.
And that's extremely important.
This is why we really love doing what we do.
The first second is over.
The universe already contains everything we see today.
What we understand from the first second tells us a lot About what's
gonna happen for a long time after that.
The first second of the universe Is amazing in its potential.
Here, we had a universe with just these fundamental forces And these
very elementary constituents of matter.
And what would they yield? They would yield an entire universe.
They would yield the works of shakespeare And the music of 50 cent.
We have gone so much further Than anyone believed we could have.
And i don't see why the origin of the universe Will be any different.
It might take 5 years.
It might take 500 years.
But i really believe that one day We will understand mathematically How
our universe began.
In the next few minutes, The universe cools enough for protons and
neutrons To form the first atomic nuclei.
Another 380,000 years must pass before the first atom appears.
In hundreds of millions of years, Those atoms clump to form the first
stars and galaxies, Like the milky way.
More than 9 billion years after the big bang, Our sun and our planet,
earth, is born their fate sealed in the first second of the big bang.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s03e04

Is Saturn alive?

Dazzling, legendary It's the most beautiful planet in the night sky.
But secretive saturn has been holding out on us.
We learned a vast amount about it, And most of this has been very
surprising.
We thought we knew those bodies.
We had no idea.
Saturn boils with extreme weather And weird lights.
The rings ripple and twist, Bullied by over 60 remarkable moons.
They are individual worlds.
They each have a story to tell.
This is a planetary explorer's dream.
Today, saturn's moons Are the hottest property in the search for alien
life.
If there's one place in the solar system I would put a bet that life
exists there right now, I would choose saturn.
And on saturn's largest moon, We may have already found it.
We've found some curious things on titan, And it might just be evidence
of life.
Captions paid for by discovery communications Saturn, the jewel of the
night sky, Dazzles us with its beauty and scale.
It's huge so big, You could fit more than But don't let size fool you.
One of the most interesting things about saturn Is that it is so big
compared to how much stuff is in it, That it's actually lower density
than water.
The old joke is that if you could find a bathtub big enough And fill it
with water, Saturn would float, but it would leave a ring.
Other planets have rings, But none so vast and glorious as saturn's.
The journey from the outside of the main rings To the inside edge is
66,000 miles Over 2 1/2 times the distance around the earth.
Yet this vast collection of dust and ice particles Is whisper-Thin in
places just tens of feet.
Saturn's rings are made up Of mostly very small particles, of ice and
rock.
Some of the particles are larger, But for the most part, no bigger than
grains of dust.
Racing within the rings And orbiting far outside them are over 60 moons
Made from rock and water ice.
They range in size from tiny snowballs To worlds with active geology,
Liquid water weather systems, and possibly even life, A billion miles
from the warmth of the sun.
It's so cold out there, We just thought there'd be nothing there, And
we were so wrong.
We were so wrong.
Saturn's first shocker Its wild weather.
The storms on saturn are extremely violent, Unlike anything we see on
the planet earth.
In fact, saturn has the second fastest winds In the entire solar
system.
These winds race through saturn's cloud tops At over a thousand miles
an hour, Four times faster than earth's strongest cyclones.
And lightning bolts flash up to 10,000 times more powerfully Than those
on earth.
Everything on saturn is just so very, very much bigger.
I mean, there are weather systems That are as big or bigger than the
earth.
Saturn's ferocious weather is surprising, Because on earth, weather is
driven By the heat energy of the sun.
The sun warms the land, generating wind.
It causes the seas to evaporate, creating clouds and rain.
Saturn lies too far from the sun to feel the same warmth, So the heat
that drives its weather Must be coming from somewhere else.
To understand this mysterious heat source, We need to go back to the
birth of the ringed planet.
The planets in our solar system Emerged from a vast, swirling cloud Of
ice, dust, and gas.
The same ingredients can still be found on earth today In places like
iceland, Where volcanic ash mixes with icy glaciers.
If you wanna build a giant planet like saturn, This pile of raw
material here is a great visual analog.
There's a lot of oxygen and hydrogen in the universe.
That makes water, and that makes water ice, And the stuff initially
that made the solar system Is basically this stuff here.
It's dirty ice, water ice, with a little bit of Little bit of rocky and
metallic minerals left in there Out there in the cold of space.
A vast cloud of dirty ice particles Shrouded in hydrogen and helium
collapses under its own gravity, And at the center, a new star our sun
Sparks into life.
The heat of the new star melts the ice closest to it And blows away the
gas, leaving only rocky debris behind.
But farther out, icy material and gas survive.
A boundary forms a frost line Between the rocky inner cloud and the icy
gas beyond.
Once you fire up that campfire, if you will, What would be left behind
in the inner solar system Is gonna be this stuff Silicate minerals you
make a planet like the earth from.
But far away from the sun, where it's colder, You cross the frost line,
and what's out there Is still cold enough to maintain the ice behind,
And there's a lot of it there.
At first you make sort of a solid core of this material, But when you
reach a critical mass, You've got enough gravitational influence To
start to directly draw in some of the hydrogen and helium In the
interplanetary cloud.
Saturn's huge solid core, Now 10 to 20 times the size of the earth,
Generates relentless gravity and draws in gas.
The bigger this gas ball gets, the more material it sucks in.
Saturn's massive gravity then gets to work On its fledgling atmosphere,
compressing it.
And like any gas under pressure, it gets hot Seriously hot.
Even today, saturn's high pressure atmosphere Heats its core to 21,000
degrees Twice the temperature of the surface of the sun.
And it's this heat rising up Which forms saturn's distinct bands And
drives its extreme weather.
Saturn's actually rotating very quickly.
It's a large planet.
It rotates once on its axis about every 10 hours.
So as the weather comes up from the interior, It gets smeared out into
bands.
That's saturn's north pole.
The bands do something that at first glance, seems impossible.
There is a gigantic vortex A spinning region of air That's shaped like
a perfect hexagon.
You have waves Of pressure, density, and temperature That start to
interact with each other.
And these waves can actually interfere And become one big wave That
goes all the way around the planet.
This giant wave settles Into a long-Lasting pattern, because below,
There's no rocky surface To disrupt the winds that form it.
They form a beautifully defined regular hexagon.
It's one of the most spectacular things about saturn.
It took robotic probes To reveal the weird weather on saturn, But if
these close-Up shots of storms and lightning Took scientists by
surprise, They were nothing compared to the shock of what came next,
Because the rings are alive.
Imagine saturn without its rings Just a pale globe floating in the
darkness of space.
With rings, it's magical.
Undoubtedly, the one thing That captures everyone about saturn is the
rings.
It's inspired fiction stories, and it's inspired everyone Who's looked
at it in the night sky.
When i was 4 or 5 years old, My parents bought a small department store
telescope, And i remember looking down into that eyepiece And seeing
this perfect jewel of a planet.
There's just nothing better than this, And you can just see the rings
Going around the planet just perfectly.
They're just a gorgeous elliptical race track.
From the eyepiece of a small telescope, The rings seem quiet and
serene.
But up close, it's a very different picture.
We know this thanks to a space probe called cassini, And over 10 years
of images like these.
Ice particles jostle for position like stock cars, Traveling inside the
rings At hundreds of thousands of miles an hour.
These particles range in size from chunks of ice As big as houses to
the finest powder snow.
It wasn't until we went to saturn And stayed there with cassini that we
learned Just how fiercely complex it is.
You have the gravity of the planet itself And all of these moons
Interacting with the rings and the moons and the planet.
All of these things are sculpting that entire system On scales that are
both subtle and gross, And it makes this magnificent crown jewel of the
solar system.
As small moons go around and side, The ring particles dance around them
in response.
We see areas of the rings that get raised up As the moon goes by.
Moons will even switch orbits with each other, So there's a lot of
dynamic stuff Going on inside the rings.
Scientists believe that from time to time, Saturn's icy moons break up,
Adding new material to the rings.
This means that the structure of the rings Is constantly evolving.
With cassini, scientists can deconstruct the physics Of this evolution,
and it's teaching us the rules That make the whole universe tick.
All the planets in our solar system Evolve from the same flat disc of
dust and gas Astronomers see similar discs around young distant stars.
But even with our most powerful telescopes, We can't see planets
forming.
They're too far away.
But saturn's rings are right on our doorstep, A veritable snapshot of a
mini solar system Caught in the process of formation.
Looking at the rings, We're looking at the formation of planets or
bodies In an arrested state of development.
It's like you took the beginning stages Of the formation of the planets
but stopped it.
Cassini shows structures forming spontaneously Inside the rings.
They don't even need to be tickled.
They don't need to be disturbed into forming structures.
They form them on their own.
Does this tiny moon, Captured in the process of formation, Show us how
the earth started its life? You get something that just happens to form
Out of random processes, and that mimics what astronomers Think they're
seeing in protoplanetary discs Surrounding other stars in the cosmos
around us.
Cassini sees curious propeller-Like structures Inside saturn's broad a
ring.
They're caused by ring particles washing over tiny hidden moons.
The particles collide with the moons, Sending them into random, ever-
Changing orbits, Sometimes closer to saturn and sometimes farther away.
Perhaps similar forces influenced the earth's formation Around the sun,
Pushing it into closer or wider orbits.
Saturn's rings also help us understand Why planets stop growing.
A walnut-Shaped moon called "pan" Sits near the middle of saturn's a
ring.
With so much ice around it to gobble up, Pan should be huge, but it's
tiny, Only 20 miles in diameter.
If you have a moon embedded in a disc of ring particles, You might
naively think it just secretes ring particles Until it grows into a,
you know, a bigger moon.
But actually we find moons create gaps In the ring around them.
So pan has created the inky gap.
Daphnis has created the keeler gap.
Rather than pulling ring material in, Pan appears to push it away.
As the moon passes The slower moving material outside it, Pan's gravity
flings the particles out Into wider orbits.
The faster material inside pan's orbit is slow.
As it passes, the little moon, causing it to fall away Towards saturn.
This natural cutoff and growth might explain why Multiple planets form
around stars, Instead of single giant planets that eat the whole
buffet.
Of all cassini's discoveries, The most important is also the most
surprising A tiny ice moon that may be home to life.
For most of history, The only moon we've been able to study up close Is
our own.
Multiple deep craters tell a powerful story.
Our moon is dead.
There's no active geology or weather To wipe away these ancient scars.
But what about the moons around other planets like saturn? Are they
dead, too? Our first assumption about saturn Was that the moons would
be like that Cold, dead, lifeless relics from the early solar system.
It wasn't until we invented spacecraft That could go to these moons
that we discovered How incredibly diverse our solar system truly is.
Take enceladus An ice moon barely 300 miles across.
Nobody paid it any attention a decade ago.
But today, it's a geological rock star.
And this is why.
Enceladus orbits inside saturn's outer most ring The e ring.
The e ring puzzled scientists because they couldn't figure out How a
ring so broad and so diffuse Could hold itself together.
The cassini team decided to take a close fly by of enceladus To solve
the mystery.
Did it have something to do With keeping the particles together? What
was the connection between the e ring and enceladus? Well, now we know
that enceladus is actually responsible For the e ring being there in
the first place.
an astonishing sight A hundred geysers shooting ice particles miles
into space From cracks in the south pole.
Enceladus is hurdling its guts into space at a colossal rate.
As enceladus orbits saturn, These icy plumes feed a vast shimmering
halo Around the planet The mysterious e ring.
This icy plume also interacts with saturn's magnetic field, Causing a
plasma cloud of charged particles.
The particles race along saturn's magnetic field lines And slam into
saturn's polar atmosphere, Raising huge ultraviolet auroras.
Geysers explain the e ring, But how can they exist on a frozen moon A
billion miles from the sun? On earth, geysers form in highly volcanic
places Where water comes into contact with hot rocks.
Enceladus, so small, and so far from the sun, Should be cold and dead.
But thanks to saturn's gravity, it's not.
The source of the heating on enceladus Is the eccentric orbit of that
moon.
Sometimes it's a little closer to saturn, Sometimes it's a little
further away.
And that heating on enceladus from that kneading Gravitationally making
the moon stretch and pull Is what warms the interior, Causing the
activity on enceladus that we see today.
The gravitational pull of saturn Reaches deep into enceladus beyond its
water-Ice exterior Gripping its rocky core.
As saturn's grasp strengthens and weakens, It massages this cold, rocky
heart, Bringing it to geological life with frictional heat.
The heat melts the ice around it, Creating a vast subsurface lake At
the southern pole of enceladus.
This water jets out through huge cracks in the surface ice.
On earth, where there's liquid water, There's life.
Could enceladus have what it takes For simple organisms to exist? Once
cassini saw these geysers, the scientists knew They had found something
extremely wonderful.
They actually changed the mission of cassini itself, Changed its
trajectory.
We sent the cassini spacecraft to fly very, very close Over these
cracks where the water was rushing out.
Scientists clung to the faint hope That the water would contain salts
and organic molecules Like ammonia, The building blocks of life here on
earth.
Stunningly, cassini's censors tasted all of them in abundance.
In that plume, there's organic material.
It's not water.
It's a soup.
That's incredible.
All the main requirements for habitability, Energy source, liquid
water, source of biological nitrogen And ammonia, organic material, And
the samples are coming up into space.
There's a big sign free samples, take one.
There could be life that could've evolved there.
Now we don't know.
We haven't seen it.
But the conditions there are as good there now As they were on earth
When life arose here.
The sensational realization that enceladus May harbor life has sparked
intense debate About future missions to find it, Because it has a rival
for those precious research dollars.
Saturn's largest moon, titan, could also be home to life Bizarre life.
And we may have already found it.
More than 60 moons orbit the planet saturn, But one dwarfs them all.
Titan is a colossus, bigger than the planet mercury.
A thick orange haze hides its surface from our telescopes, And when the
cassini mission first appeared beneath Titan's orange cloak, it
revealed a world weirder Than we could ever have imagined.
Titan is an amazing place.
And of all the things going on around saturn, Titan might be the most
exciting of all.
Titan has mountains and deserts, rivers and lakes.
Only the earth can match it for geological diversity.
But here, water ice takes the place of bedrock, Frozen at 300 degrees
below zero.
And instead of water, The rivers on titan flow with methane.
This is a place where it actually rains liquid methane, Liquid natural
gas.
This liquid is filling up rivers and lakes.
This makes titan incredibly special.
It's only the second world in the solar system Where we know there's
liquid on the surface.
And like earth, Titan has a thick nitrogen-Rich atmosphere.
But instead of the oxygen we breathe, Titan's air is spiked with
carbon-Rich molecules That stain it a dull orange.
It's a soup of methane and ethane and propane And acetylene.
Uh, the list of organic molecules is literally Hundreds, hundreds long
that we've detected there.
Titan's complex cocktail Of atmospheric chemicals intrigue scientists.
But it also puzzles them, Especially methane gas, which rapidly decays
in sunlight.
So even a billion miles from the sun, Titan's thick haze should've
lifted long ago.
A vast source of methane must be replenishing The orange smog.
Before cassini, Scientists assumed the whole of titan Was covered in
massive impact craters.
Perhaps crater lakes filled with liquid methane Were evaporating into
the atmosphere, Supplying the missing gas.
To help prove this theory, Cassini carried a hitchhiker all the way to
saturn.
The huygens lander released high above titan's equator Parachuted
through the clouds, snapping photographs as it fell.
As it went through the atmosphere, It took a huge amount of data And
then landed on the moon itself and took pictures.
When we first saw those pictures, It was life-Changing.
There were no craters.
It looked like flowing liquid had once shaped the landscape, But at the
landing site and as far as huygens could see, That liquid was long
gone.
Huygens landed in a spot almost identical To what we're standing on
right now.
If we look all around, We can see this bleak, barren landscape.
We see pebbles and cobbles That have been rounded and smoothed Because
they've come through river channels.
We see plenty of those at the huygens landing site.
Uh, in addition to that, we see lots of sand.
The desert huygens landed in is huge.
It stretches all the way around titan's equator with 300-Foot tall
dunes sculpted by the wind Just as they are on earth.
If the vast crater lakes weren't at the equator, They had to be at
titan's poles.
Cassini scheduled a number of additional flybys To look for any signs
of liquid.
One of the instruments onboard cassini Is basically a radar gun.
It shoots radar waves at titan, and they get reflected back.
After two years of hunting with this instrument, Scientists finally got
the signal They were waiting for.
One of the things it found Is that near the north pole of titan Were
regions that were not reflecting radar, And that sounds a lot like
liquid.
Liquid absorbs that energy and doesn't reflect it back.
Later observations clinched it.
When cassini finally imaged The north polar regions of titan, It it
finally saw these lakes and seas of methane That we'd been looking for,
Only they weren't contained in impact craters like we thought.
Instead they're contained in big lake basins That look just like they
do on earth.
Basin lakes like this one in mono county, california, Form in the
depressions leftover from tectonic activity.
These geological features on titan Could only mean one shocking thing
The moon was alive with geological activity.
If we were sitting on the margins of kraken mare, Which is the largest
sea that we see on titan, Then we would probably see something very
similar to this landscape.
We would look out across a fairly calm surface, We think the winds are
not very strong on titan.
And so we'd have this calm lake of methane and ethane.
And in the distance we would see hills and mountains That have formed
on titan Probably through tectonic processes In much the same way that
mountains are built on earth.
Except on titan, it's so cold, The volcanoes spew water, not lava.
And the mountains and lake basins are solid ice.
At first, scientists thought that methane evaporating From these lakes
generated titan's smog.
But when cassini flew by to measure the lakes again, The levels appear
to be the same.
The lakes didn't look like they were evaporating at all.
Scientists were stumped.
Either the lakes weren't the source Of atmospheric methane Or they were
somehow being refilled.
Planetary geologist, jani radebaugh, Believes a crucial clue to the
missing methane Lies in the formation of rocky deposits called tufa.
They're found here at mono lake, Where clean spring water rises up from
the ground Into the mineral-Rich lake where the two water types react.
This is very exciting because this could be a clue To the missing
methane on titan.
So it's rock that has been formed from the chemicals Contained in two
fluids.
There is water that's emerging at the margin of the lake.
It's interacting with the lake water Which has a very different
chemistry And all of the chemicals that are dissolved Combine with each
other and create this rock.
Radar images of titan's largest lake Reveal rocky structures around the
margins That look just like mono lake's tufa.
Titan's tufa, if that's what they are, Could be evidence of a layer of
liquid methane That sits above titan's frozen core And rises and
springs to feed its lakes Just like spring water rises to feed mono
lake.
So when those methane springs come in, They interact with the lakes and
a rock precipitates out.
So we see these organic rocks Dotting the margins of the lakes.
And almost certainly there's also methane Just bubbling up and emerging
At the margins of the lake as well.
If jani is right, Titan's lakes do evaporate, feeding the atmospheric
smog, But they're constantly replenished By underground methane springs
replacing the lost fluid.
Titan is no dead world.
It's alive with active geology and complex chemistry.
And it might be alive with something else Something really big.
We used to think that saturn was too far From the sun and too cold to
play host to anything dramatic.
We could not have been more wrong.
The planet boils and bangs with active weather Storms, lightning, and
auroras.
The rings constantly evolve.
And the moons aren't the frozen snowballs we expected.
They're shaped by active geology with warm water geysers And lakes of
liquid methane.
And now on saturn's largest moon, titan, Scientists may have uncovered
the first tangible evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Our search for life has been Focused on liquid water follow the water.
I think it's a good strategy.
But i think we are limiting ourselves if we think that That's the only
place to look.
I think liquids may be interesting Even if they're not water.
Astrobiologist, chris mckay, Believes that life on titan May have
evolved to live in liquid methane, Not liquid water.
But titan is so cold, Simple life would play by a very different set of
rules Where bigger is better.
When we go to other worlds, We're gonna be looking for bacteria, And we
assume that they're gonna be very small.
But you could ask the question, why are bacteria so small? Well, i
think the answer is because they live in water.
On earth, bacteria don't need to grow big In order to thrive.
Water dissolves almost everything, So it provides a nutrient-Rich
environment Where small and simple bring success.
You go to titan where the liquid is liquid methane, Liquid ethane, very
different from water.
There's no reason an organism should be small.
In fact, quite the opposite.
It should be huge.
Mckay envisions enormous single-Celled organisms Around titan's shores,
looking like sheets of paper.
Their huge surface area would maximize The uptake of food from the
nutrient-Poor liquid methane.
I predict if there's life on titan Living in liquid methane, you won't
need a microscope to see it.
You'll need a yardstick.
When cassini released the huygens probe High above the cloud tops of
titan, Mckay realized he had an opportunity To bolster his theories of
life on the surface.
His methane-Loving life-Forms must be eating to survive.
Perhaps huygens' delicate sensors Would pick up evidence of ground
level feasting.
As huygens was on its way to titan, I'm sitting in a hotel room writing
up a paper saying, Hey, what if there's life on titan? What would it
eat? And how would we detect it? How would this probe flying through
the atmosphere Detect it? Literally the day huygens landed, I submitted
this paper to the journal, Predicting that if there was life on titan,
It would eat hydrogen and the probe Would be able to measure this
depletion of hydrogen.
So let's look for hydrogen.
Huygens parachutes through titan's atmosphere, Sampling the gases as it
goes.
The upper atmosphere has plenty of hydrogen, So do the middle layers,
But at ground level, there's a surprise result An apparently drop-Off
in the concentration Of hydrogen in the air.
Something or perhaps someone was using it up.
When i heard a report that there was a depletion of hydrogen, I my
heart raced 'cause i thought, If this is if this is hard data For
depletion of hydrogen, I can't imagine any other way besides biology to
explain that.
It's exciting in that it's consistent With what we predicted, But we
have to wait for this to be confirmed By other calculations, by direct
measurements, And so on.
If future missions can confirm methane-Based life On titan, it will
surely be the greatest discovery In the history of science.
Because this low temperature biology must have arisen Independently of
life on earth.
If we discover life, let's say on mars, There will always be the
possibility That rocks and ice and bits of material Could've been
exchanged.
But the chances of that happening from earth All the way to saturn are
next to nothing.
If we find a second example of life in our solar system Especially in a
place like titan Which is so alien to the earth, so cold and so
different, That tells us something excruciatingly important.
And that is that life must be everywhere in the universe.
Robotic missions offer tantalizing hints Of simple life on enceladus
and titan.
But is saturn's realm only fit for giant bacteria Or is it a place we
humans could one day call home? Saturn orbits a billion miles from the
sun.
So far out it takes an hour for its reflected light To reach our eyes.
Yet the future of our civilization May rest on humans one day
colonizing the moons Surrounding this gas giant planet.
It won't be easy, but saturn has something Worth the trouble A magical
source of fuel called helium-3 That can satisfy our increasing hunger
for energy For millions of years.
Some futurists believe that we have to have A commercial incentive to
going to saturn.
Not just to mine the minerals of the moons of saturn, But also to
harvest fuel in the form of helium-3.
Helium-3 is a rare substance that we can use In fusion engines to
provide perhaps unlimited energy.
Helium-3 may very well replace oil as the fuel To take us into the
centuries to come.
With its single neutron and twin protons, Helium-3 is uniquely suited
to a form of energy production Called fusion The same process that
burns in the heart of a star.
When two nuclei are crushed together Under enormous pressure, they
fuse, Creating a new heavier atom and a burst of pure energy.
Best of all, helium-3 doesn't release Any of the harmful radiation
Associated with other fusion fuels.
The only trouble with helium-3 There's precious little to be found on
earth.
Now you could find some helium-3 on the moon, But the major supplies of
helium-3 in our solar system Are located in the atmospheres of the
giant planets.
I call the gas giants "The persian gulf of the solar system" Because
they are the location of its primary energy resources Outside of the
sun.
The gas giants provide A near inexhaustible supply of helium-3.
But how could we extract it? Jupiter has the most.
But the planet's immense gravity and dangerous radiation belts Make it
a no-Go for mining.
Neptune and uranus are way too far away to be practical.
That leaves saturn with relatively low gravity For such a big planet.
And far lower levels of deadly radiation than around jupiter.
If we're gonna have a future human economy based on Using controlled
fusion and helium-3, Saturn is the destination of choice.
Futurists envision winged drones flying through The upper atmosphere of
saturn, scooping up gases.
But where to process this super fuel? The ideal base of operations
would clearly be titan.
With gravity as gentle as our moons And a thick earth-Like atmosphere,
Titan is surprisingly suitable for a human outpost.
We could have huge dome settlements on titan.
They would not have to be strong enough to hold pressure.
They could just be thin, inflatable membranes.
You could have dome cities like you see in science fiction Which are
really not possible in places like the moon.
Walking out onto the surface of titan Would be much easier than on the
moon or on mars.
The pressure on titan is kind of nice.
It's 1 1/2 times earth pressure.
You would need a source of oxygen.
And you need a very warm coat.
But it wouldn't feel as cold as you might think Because the atmosphere
is calm and there's not strong wind.
I think a coat like you might wear in antarctica Might be adequate.
So you can imagine somebody stepping out of the spaceship, Having a
parka on, a mask, like a s.
C.
U.
B.
A.
Mask To provide oxygen, And literally walking out on the surface.
Titan's low gravity and dense atmosphere Could even send us soaring
from place to place.
Let's say you had, you know, It's a little bit of a wing on your arm,
And you started to flap your arms.
Remember it's almost like you're you're on the moon, But with a thick
atmosphere.
And you'd really be able to lift yourself Off the surface, maybe fly,
just a little bit.
When the helium-3 trade route has opened And the earth becomes a fusion
economy, A new generation of rockets Will open up interplanetary travel
to everyone, Taking humans to mars and jupiter, Not in years, but in
months.
And helium-3 might even power adventure tourism To saturn itself.
You can imagine in a hundred years When space travel is easy and there
will Be hotels orbiting the moon and mars And everything, what would be
the one? What would be the place, right, to go? It would be saturn.
I would hope one day that there is such a thing As space tourism and
people can visit places like enceladus.
It should be called The enceladus interplanetary geyser park Because it
would be a phenomenal place to just go visit.
Standing on enceladus would be an amazing sight.
All of this frost condensing back out on the surface Makes an
incredibly brilliant white.
It's got some of the best powder snow for Skiing anywhere in the solar
system.
You could get close enough to actually See the individual rings, Maybe
even see the little moons in the gaps sculpting And pulling and pushing
and prodding, Shepherding those ring particles around.
You could go back over and over again, And it would always be alien and
exotic and exciting.
From a cold, dead jewel in our telescopes To a place alive with magic
and mayhem Saturn and its worlds have come alive And may harbor life
itself.
Someday soon, this planet could remake our universe, And nothing will
ever be the same.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s03e05
Weapons of mass extinction

We live on a volatile planet in a violent universe The universe

constantly wants to kill us.
where planets collide.
The entire surface of the Earth is liquefied that was literally a
vision of hell.
Black holes blast out invisible death rays.
It would be apocalyptic beyond apocalyptic.
Asteroids strike without warning.
It is a real possibility that it could happen in the next 10 minutes.
These cosmic killers have struck time and time again, wiping out entire
species, and pushing life on Earth to the edge of oblivion.
It's happened before.
It's gonna happen again.
And our species could be next.
There will be disasters in the future, and one of them will destroy us.
captions paid for by discovery communications not too hot, not too cold
With water Oxygen.
Our peaceful, plentiful planet nurtures and protects us But this lull
won't last forever.
There are dangers all around and trouble ahead.
When we look around, we think that the universe is rather gentle.
We have warm breezes and mild seasons.
Actually, the universe is violent.
It is chaotic.
The universe is not a happy, safe place.
There are asteroid impacts, and solar flares, and supernova, and black
holes, and colliding galaxies, and all these really amazingly dangerous
and violent events.
And the Earth is in the cross hairs.
During the planet's these violent phenomena have wiped out millions of
species in a series of catastrophic mass extinctions.
Mass extinctions due to impacts and other geologic natural processes on
the Earth have actually wiped out more species of plants and animals on
the planet than exist today.
Mass extinctions are what happens, it just happens periodically, and we
living in the quiet time between mass extinctions.
It's happened before.
It's gonna happen again.
The clock is ticking.
With every day that passes, the next mass extinction gets a step
closer, and with every new discovery, the universe gets a little bit
more terrifying.
November 2012.
Astronomers identify a new planet at least four times more massive than
Jupiter, and it's gone rogue.
Unlike Earth and all the other objects in our solar system, this planet
doesn't orbit a star.
It really is lost in space.
When I was a kid watching science-fiction movies, every now and again
there would be a rogue planet, just some planet wondering space without
a star.
And I thought that was pretty silly, but it turns out that might
actually happen.
When planets are forming, they can interact with each other
gravitationally.
And it's entirely possible that when our solar system formed, planets
were kicked out into interstellar space.
There could be as many as 200 billion rogue planets in our galaxy.
That's as many rogue planets as there are stars in the sky.
And one of them could be heading our way.
A collision with another planet sounds farfetched.
Could it really happen? As a matter of fact, it already has.
a young planet veers into the Earth's orbit.
We have the Earth sitting here, and another planet about the size of
Mars came in and smacked us hard.
The two collided over 25,000 miles an hour, The impact destroys the
smaller planet.
The Earth survives, but only just.
The violence of this is hard to imagine.
Two planets coming together smashing together into one molten mass.
After an impact of that scale, the entire surface of the Earth is
literally liquefied.
Imagine the floor of an active volcano with islands of solid rock and
lava spurting right and left.
The entire surface of the planet would've looked like that.
The Earth itself for a little while would've had an atmosphere of
molten rock.
And it was a, you know, vision of hell.
Debris blasted out at 20,000 miles an hour orbits the molten Earth.
Gravity brings the debris together.
The result -- our moon.
Our moon emerged from the wreckage of the most cataclysmic event in our
planet's history.
From destruction comes creation, because without this lump of cosmic
shrapnel, life on Earth might never have gained a foothold.
The moon's gravity pulls on the infant Earth's oceans, spreading
nutrients from the land into the water.
And it slows the Earth's spin from a 6 to a 24 hour day.
In this calm, fertile environment, one billion years after the impact,
life begins.
If we hadn't had that planetary collision a long time ago, we wouldn't
have the moon today.
So, in fact, this most catastrophic event you can possibly think of
actually may have helped life on Earth form in the first place and
helped us evolve over the next couple of billion years.
But what was a good thing in the past would be a disaster if it
happened today.
Now, you don't want a planetary collision now because that would wipe
out the entire planet.
You can't even describe it comparing it to nuclear weapons.
It would be billions of nuclear weapons.
It's enough to melt several miles thick crust on the Earth all the way
down.
It would wipe out all life on Earth.
That would be it.
It would be like a hard restart for the planet itself.
Could this nightmare become a reality? Right now even the closest rogue
planets we've discovered are still trillions of miles from Earth.
And our neighboring planets have settled into calm, stable orbits.
We're not gonna get a planetary collision any time soon, but all the
gravity of the planets play with each other and change each other's
orbits.
So clearly if you run the clock work of time forward billions of years,
yes, it's entirely possible that we might have another planetary
collision.
You just don't have to worry about it for a long, long time.
a devastating collision made life on Earth possible.
that life threatens to destroy itself.
Our blue planet -- in a hostile universe, it sustains and nurtures
life.
simple, single-celled organisms drift through the nutrient-rich oceans.
But their world is about to be destroyed.
When you talk about mass extinctions, you have at least two types --
one danger coming from outer space, another from our own very backyard
on the planet Earth.
The Earth circles the Sun, but this orbit is unstable.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, it changes, swinging the planet
further out into space and pivoting on its axis.
Tilted away from the Sun, the Earth cools.
something turns this natural cooling into a global catastrophe.
It is one of the most dangerous things in all the universe life.
Tiny organisms populate the oceans.
There's no oxygen around and that's the way most of them like it.
But then a new kind of bacteria evolves -- cyanobacteria.
And these guys create a serious gas problem.
Imagine Earth billions of years ago.
There's no oxygen.
Everybody's happy.
Then cyanobacteria start making oxygen.
It's a toxic pollutant.
If there was a regulatory agency at the time, they would've been
outlawed.
Eventually they polluted the whole world.
They had really precipitated an ecological crisis of global
proportions.
The great oxygen crisis upsets the greenhouse effect that keeps the
planet warm.
Global temperatures plummet.
The ultimate culprit is biology.
Biology makes a mess of the planet, produces oxygen.
The oxygen destroys the greenhouse effect of methane and that freezes
up the Earth.
ice creeps out from the poles.
Instead of warming the planet, sunlight bounces off the ice,
temperatures fall, creating more ice which bounces more sunlight back
into space, and so on and so on until the cooling becomes unstoppable.
The ice marches on.
Temperatures plunge.
The blue planet turns white.
It's a snowball Earth.
And incredibly, this may've happened not once but at least three times
over the following billion years as the planet lurched around the Sun.
But throughout all of this and against all the odds, a handful of
species clung to life, thanks to volcanoes.
Even in an Earth that was covered almost entirely by ice, volcanoes
would've been punching through that.
So you certainly have pockets of water lying about.
And life was able to carry on and get through these cold periods.
And the whole time, the volcanoes that help sustain life have been
pumping out carbon dioxide.
As this greenhouse gas increases, the atmosphere warms.
Until 640 million years ago, the last, great snowball Earth ends.
And the survivors emerge into a new world.
After snowball Earth goes away, things get very interesting.
A lot of opportunities open up for life, water's flowing, ice is
melting, organic material built up that hasn't been decomposing.
So you can imagine that there will be a burst of development.
In the meantime, cyanobacteria have been churning out ever more oxygen.
Other organisms will either learn to breathe it or die.
Many organisms decided that this poison could be useful, it's
energetic, and that allowed them to have an energy source that was so
powerful that they could build huge, complex structures -- poof,
animals.
Snowball Earth is an environmental disaster and an evolutionary
triumph.
Complex life flourishes.
But most of these creatures will never evolve beyond this point.
Something stops them dead.
It is the most powerful weapon in the universe, and it strikes in the
blink of an eye.
In a violent universe, against all the odds, life survives.
But consider this -- at any moment, the universe could pull the trigger
on a secret, deep-space death ray, obliterating all life on Earth.
And until the 1960s, nobody even knew it existed.
- the height of the cold war.
The United States and Soviet union raced to outgun each other,
stockpiling and testing nuclear weapons.
America was worried that the Soviet union would be able to test nuclear
weapons in space.
So what America did is launch the series of satellites to go out into
space and look for the tell-tale flash of gamma rays from nuclear
tests.
On July 2, 1967, the satellites detect a burst of gamma rays, the most
energetic and destructive form of electromagnetic radiation.
Immediately there was panic in the Pentagon.
Perhaps the Russians are testing super-gigantic hydrogen bombs in outer
space.
And we're just caught flat-footed.
But it's not bombs.
It's something far deadlier.
And then the realization sunk in.
"Oh, my god.
"These flashes are coming from outside the milky way galaxy.
They must be billions of light-years away.
" A new source of energy, second only to the big bang itself had been
discovered.
When gamma ray at first were first discovered, people assumed that they
must be fairly close by.
"Of course they have to be close by.
They're the brightest thing that we see in the sky.
" And now we know that gamma ray burst, not only are they not nearby,
they're not in our galaxy, they're not in nearby galaxies, but they're
close to the edge of the universe.
They're as far away as anything else that we observe, and that's
completely ridiculous.
Over distance, light gets dimmer.
The further light has to travel, the dimmer the light should be.
If light from a distant galaxy comes to Earth and it has gamma-ray
energies, then that explosion must've been incredibly powerful, because
it turns out that as light travels through space, the wave length of
the light gets stretched out.
And this stretching caused the light to lose energy.
And since the light rays have traveled a very great distance through
the cosmos to reach us, and they're still gamma rays, they must've
started out with a great deal of energy.
And the amount of energies are unbelievable.
You're talking about the entire energy budget of the Sun over its whole
lifetime emitted over the course of just a few seconds.
These are amazingly violent, amazingly powerful events.
In June 2008.
NASA launches the Fermi space telescope.
Its mission -- discover the source of these huge blasts.
What Fermi does is open our eyes to the universe that's there but gives
us such a different view that we really get a deeper and greater
understanding of what's going on.
If you had gamma-ray eyes, the milky way would be blazingly bright
across the center of the sky.
Your vision would be dominated by these very dense, pulsing stars and
super-massive black holes.
And it's black holes that may solve the mystery of gamma-ray bursts.
When a truly gigantic star dies, one at least 25 times more massive
than our own sun, it collapses to form a black hole.
Scientists believe black holes are one of the few things in the
universe large enough and powerful enough to generate gamma-ray bursts.
Gamma-ray bursts are the birth cries of black holes.
When a massive star explodes and becomes a supernova, the core
collapses and forms a black hole.
Material falls around it, swirls into a huge disk, it gets incredibly
hot.
As it's falling into the black hole it forms a tremendous magnetic
field, as well.
The remains of the star spiral towards the black hole.
Enormous electromagnetic forces fling some of this matter outwards.
Hurtling up and down the black hole's huge magnetic fields, the matter
collides with debris from the initial explosion, accelerating to close
to the speed of light, heating to millions of degrees.
These high-speed collisions unleash unimaginable amounts of energy.
This is the gamma-ray burst.
Gamma-ray bursts are fascinating.
You can study them throughout the universe because they're so bright.
But if you move them in really close to the Earth, let's say within
they become extremely destructive.
The beams are so huge that if a gamma-ray burst occurs, say, by the
time it reaches the Earth, the beam will be wide enough to engulf our
entire solar system.
Basically, if you were standing on the Earth and you looked up, you
would see a flash of light, and before you could even say, "what's
that?" You'd be gone.
The amount of energy in the beam that travels across space is so
intense it would basically light the Earth on fire from that distance.
It would strip off the Earth's atmosphere, it would boil the oceans, it
would melt the rock.
It would be apocalyptic beyond apocalyptic.
This is the worst-case scenario.
But what if a gamma-ray burst hit the Earth from further out? Would we
survive? People ask what would happen if there was a gamma-ray burst
within 6,000 light-years of the Earth.
It's actually not the right question.
There have been gamma-ray bursts that close to the Earth, and there
probably have been extinctions of life on Earth due to gamma-ray
bursts.
after snowball Earth, the oceans are teeming with complex life.
But 440 million years ago, And the killer may have been a single
devastating gamma-ray burst.
The blast penetrates the oceans' upper layers, killing the creatures
that live near the surface.
Creatures living further down survive the initial onslaught, but not
for long Because the blast also damages the Earth's ozone layer,
exposing the planet to the Sun's deadly uv radiation, triggering acid
rain and lowering global temperatures.
Over half a million years, the creatures that survived the gamma-ray
burst get taken out by its after effects.
If a gamma-ray burst has wiped out life in the past, it could happen in
the future.
And astronomers think the next burst could come from a dangerously
unstable star, wr 104.
Wr 104 is the nightmare.
We now have a potential candidate for what may become a gamma-ray
burster with our name on it.
We are literally staring down the gun barrel of wr 104.
It's not one but two massive stars orbiting each other.
The stars will die in a massive explosion, spawning a black hole, and
blasting out gamma rays.
The object is about 8,000 light-years away, so we are within the kill
radius of this object.
So you could be doing your laundry tomorrow, look up in the sky, and
all of a sudden, there's this burst of radiation raining down from the
heavens.
The radiation rips off the Earth's ozone layer, creating a toxic smog
and exposing us to the Sun's deadly rays.
Life as we know it could cease to exist.
Plants would be scorched, animals, which depend upon plant life, will
then begin to die.
Human civilization would have to go underground.
It may sound like the death star destroying the Earth in "star wars,"
but the difference is the death star isn't gonna happen, a gamma-ray
burst might.
Our extinction could happen at any time.
And the fatal blow doesn't have to come from space.
It could come from the very thing that makes life possible - - the
Earth itself.
Our planet conceals a weapon of mass extinction, primed to detonate at
any moment, hidden deep beneath our feet.
Unleashed, the heat inside our planet could wipe out everything in its
path on a massive scale.
after a gamma-ray burst may have devastated life in the oceans, the
survivors have colonized the land.
Among them, a motley crew of monster reptiles - - scutosaurus and
gorgonopsians.
They're successful, strong, and doomed.
Around about the biggest mass extinction that the Earth has ever seen,
the end-permian extinction.
Just over 90% of marine fauna and around about 70% of land fauna
disappeared from the planet.
The killer is a volcanic eruption -- the biggest and most catastrophic
the world has ever seen.
in what is now Siberia, the Earth's crust ruptures, pushed beyond
breaking point by a vast plume of hot magma surging up from deep inside
the planet.
The Earth itself can internally generate some very devastating events,
millions-of-years-long events in the form of major volcanic eruptions
at the continent-scale level.
These are basaltic-volcanism events that flood entire portions of the
planet with basalt lava.
Lava spews for two million years.
There's enough lava to cover the entire United States beneath a
thousand feet.
And the death toll extends around the Earth and deep into the oceans.
The question is why.
The answer lies with the most volcanic country on Earth -- Iceland -
with a similar, smaller eruption just 230 years ago.
June 1783.
A terrible chain of events unfold that will devastate Iceland and kill
up to a million people around the world.
Near the village of laki, a 17-mile-long tear opens up in the Earth's
crust.
These holes and cracks in the ground that you can see, they would've
had jets of magma, jets of lava flying up into the sky.
To give you an idea of scale, the overall the amount of material that
came out of laki is about 3 1/2 cubic miles of volcanic material, and
that's a lot material.
And it's not just the size of laki that makes it so special, it's
actually what's inside this and what came out of this that's the
dangerous thing.
Because it had lots of sulfur gases associated with the eruption and
also lots of fluorine, quite poisonous gases.
Sulfur dioxide spreads out around the atmosphere.
Its droplets form a giant mirror reflecting the Sun's warmth away from
the Earth.
It's clear that even a relatively small eruption like laki can cause
big, dramatic effects in terms of the climate.
In the northern U.
S.
, there was one of the coldest winters ever recorded.
In fact, the Mississippi is recorded to have frozen.
It's been implicated in causing the big famine in Japan.
So, the effects, potentially, for volcanoes that spew these horrible
gases into the atmosphere can be catastrophic on a global scale.
Now picture the siberian eruptions They're 200,000 times larger than
laki and last a million times longer.
They release massive quantities of gas triggering extreme climate
change -- first cooling, then heating the atmosphere.
land-based creatures die, including the mighty gorgonopsians and
scutosaurus.
But worse is to come.
As the oceans warm, they lose oxygen and stagnate.
Toxic algae takes over, poisoning the oceans with hydrogen sulfide,
killing 96% of marine life, and leaving purple sulfur bacteria to
overrun the oceans, turning the water pink.
This is the closest the Earth has ever come to total extinction.
But over 200 million years, the survivors adapt and evolve.
A new group of animals emerge.
They are the largest, most successful creatures the Earth has ever seen
- - the dinosaurs.
But they, too, will face annihilation.
Cosmic killers prowl the universe threatening to wipe out life on
Earth.
They've struck before, pushing life to the edge of extinction.
They will strike again, and it could happen before you've finished
watching this show.
February 15, 2013.
It's another cold winter's day in the siberian city of chelyabinsk when
literally, out of the blue A 14,000-ton, 65-foot meteor tears through
the atmosphere at 42,000 miles an hour.
It explodes in the air unleashing a powerful blast wave, shattering
windows, damaging 7,000 buildings, and injuring 1,500 people.
Now imagine what would've happened if the asteroid had hit the Earth in
one piece.
And we saw what happened over Russia, over in chelyabinsk, with an
object that could have hit the Earth -- could've hit the Earth with a
force of perhaps 20 Hiroshima bombs.
If you watch those videos of that meteor in Russia with the incredible
Sonic boom, you could see how even a small object -- relatively small
in a cosmic sense -- could produce a dramatic event for humans.
The way it works is small objects are hitting the Earth every day,
large objects, every week, larger objects still, every year.
And an object the size of the chelyabinsk meteor strikes, on average,
once every century.
So when the next big one strikes -- not if what will happen? The clues
lie in the past in the extinction of the dinosaurs.
About 65 million years ago, there was a perfect morning on Earth.
I would've loved to have been there to see the giant dinosaurs, you
know, the pterodactyls flying through the air, all of that.
And then something changed, and the Earth would never be the same.
If you would've looked into the sky, you would've seen a relatively dim
light at first coming towards you, getting brighter and brighter, and
hotter and hotter.
It's a six-mile-wide rock the size of mount Everest racing towards the
Earth at 25,000 miles an hour.
The first wave of destruction would've started before this object even
hit.
There would've been shock waves, heat, and winds going across the
entire planet.
Everywhere that was under the path of this asteroid would've been
seared, set on fire.
The oceans would've been boiling underneath it.
The asteroid smashes into the ocean off of what is now Mexico's Yucatan
peninsula.
It strikes with a force two million times greater than the biggest
nuclear bomb ever detonated, and blasts out a crater A super-heated
shock wave roars out at twice the speed of sound.
soar to the edge of space.
Two hours after impact, a 300-foot Tsunami smashes into the coast of
what is now the U.
S.
A.
Reaching as far as North Carolina.
Over the next few hours and days, the debris rains down, setting the
planet ablaze.
In the following weeks and months, smoke from the fires adds to the
dust blasted into the atmosphere.
There was so much pulverized rock, all of the burning materials up into
the atmosphere, you wouldn't have been able to see the surface.
And on the surface, you wouldn't have been able to see the Sun, and it
was like that for a long time.
This ancient apocalypse is a disaster for the dinosaurs but without it,
we wouldn't be here.
Back then, during the time of the dinosaurs, our ancestors were
probably little, furry mammals that were an evening snack for a
dinosaur.
When the dinosaurs got wiped out, these small, little, furry mammals
began to expand in size to take over the niche left over by the
dinosaurs.
So, one life-form replaces another life-form, in this continual process
called survival of the fittest.
We are here because our ancestors survived the extinction event, and,
in fact, flourished because of it.
From our point of view, that extinction event was a good thing, but
we're here for a brief moment.
And there will be disasters in the future, and one of them will destroy
us.
There is a 1 in 5,000 chance that an asteroid, the same size as the
dinosaur killer, will strike within the next 100 years, and it could
happen at any time.
It is a real possibility that it could happen in the next 10 minutes,
but is a tiny possibility.
So, I always say, "you don't need to prepare very much "for winning the
lottery, you know.
"You may have a similar chance to getting taken out by an asteroid in
the next 15 minutes.
" April 2014.
Scientists make a shocking announcement -- since the year 2000, in the
Earth's atmosphere, each one with the force of a nuclear blast, with
some up to 40 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
And we didn't spot a single one of them before they struck.
Even if we had the technology to detect an asteroid before it hit us,
could we destroy it in time? The Hollywood favorite, of course, is to
go out there and nuke it, blow it to smithereens, right? That could
actually work in the case of some particular, you know, last-ditch
effort for asteroids of just the right size.
But a nuclear bomb could just make a bad situation worse.
Transforming an asteroid into large radioactive chunks that rain down
all over the planet.
But there are also techniques, like shining a laser on the asteroid or
sunlight, which would create an artificial cometary jet, if you will,
would vaporize some of the water and the minerals on the surface of
that asteroid to gently push it off to the side.
Another fantastic technique, a very robust one, is something we call
the gravity tractor.
You just park a spacecraft, the mass of a communication satellite, next
to that small asteroid and use the thrusters on the spacecraft to keep
it hovering just off the surface of the asteroid, and that uses then
gravity between the two as a tow line to move the asteroid ever so
gently off course.
Right now these technologies are still on the drawing board.
If they do become a reality, we'd still need months or years to
prepare.
Rogue planets, ice ages, gamma-ray bursts, volcanic eruptions, and
asteroid strikes.
We've survived the worst the universe can throw at us, but our species
will still face extinction.
It's as inevitable as the Sun rising.
In a cosmic battle to the death, we are the survivors, but eventually
the universe will win and we will face extinction Threatened by the
very thing that gives us life -- our creator, the Sun.
We orbit a giant nuclear bomb, the Sun, but, you know, it's not going
to explode.
It's too small to explode, but what happens with the Sun is that every
day, it's a little bigger than it was the day before.
Since the Sun's birth, hydrogen has been fusing into helium in the
Sun's core.
As the helium accumulates, the core gets denser.
With 150 million tons of helium squeezing into the core every second,
the gas compresses and heats up.
Right now the temperature inside the Sun's core is 27 million degrees,
and its getting hotter all the time.
What happens when you heat up a gas? It expands, and so that's what the
Sun is going to do.
As the Sun swells, it will appear brighter.
In 2 billion years, the Sun will be about 15% brighter and that will
lead if the Earth remains in its present orbit inevitably to a runaway
greenhouse effect.
The oceans will evaporate, and the surface temperature of the Earth
could easily be a 1,000 degrees.
So, if we don't do anything, in 2 billion years, we'll be toast.
If we're still here on Earth, we'll perish.
Other tougher species may find a way to adapt and survive, but they'll
be living on borrowed time.
It's gonna fill up the sky.
From horizon to horizon, the sky will literally be on fire.
the Sun runs out of hydrogen and enters the final apocalyptic stage of
its life, bloating to 100 times its current size.
Our life-giving sun is now an angry, red giant.
The red giant stars are so big they will actually eat up their own
planets.
We know of the examples of red giants that go all the way out to where
the orbit of Jupiter is in our solar system.
The sun will not get quite that big, but it'll probably get about out
to Mars.
And eventually, in fact, the Sun will be so large that the Earth will
be located inside of the Sun, which certainly won't be a very pleasant
place to be.
The red giant's bloated body absorbs the Earth, incinerating our planet
until its nothing more than gas and dust inside a dying star.
The death of the Sun is the ultimate mass-extinction event.
There's 100% chance it will happen.
A 100% chance it will destroy our planet and any life left on it.
But life on Earth may not be the only life in the solar system.
As the Sun brightens, you can imagine a wave of habitability going out.
So right now it's on Earth, it'll go to Mars, and it'll go to Jupiter,
and its moons.
Scientists think Jupiter's moon europa may already harbor alien life in
a deep, liquid ocean beneath its frozen crust.
But out at Jupiter, it'll be much warmer but not so warm that it would
destroy everything.
So even when the Earth is gone, if there's life on europa, it may be
able to endure that.
But will our species go on? Can we survive the loss of our home planet?
The universe is like an ecosystem -- living things are gonna survive
based on the law of survival of the fittest.
What decides if you're fit in this universe is if you're able to leave
your planet and go out and populate other planets.
So the only species that are gonna live on forever are the ones that
leave their planet.
We can't control the universe, but we may be able to control our fate.
Inevitably, in the long term, the Earth is gonna become uninhabitable.
It's just the way the universe works.
It wasn't made for us, it doesn't care that we exist, and it won't care
when we go away.
The only people who care about that are us, and we might be able to do
something about it.
In that sense, we have a fighting chance.
Our intelligence is our greatest asset.
It's the end result of four billion years of extinction and evolution.
And it may give us a chance to do something that no other species has
ever done before -- break the cycle of creation and destruction and
live on.
Everything that you and I are is a consequence of the way the universe
works.
The universe is violent, the universe is dynamic, it's constantly
pushing us to change.
And here we are, these incredibly evolved, interesting creatures.
We're a direct consequence of the violence, which, in turn, was our
creation.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s03e06

Did a black hole build the milky way?

The Milky Way an empire of over 200 billion stars.

The Earth is our home.
The Sun is our star.
And the Milky Way is our galaxy.
It's us.
It's our home.
But where did it all come from? Why do galaxies form at all? Something
has to happen.
Something has to mix things up.
So what sparked our galaxy into life? New research suggests an unlikely
hero.
At the center of our galaxy is a massive black hole.
And by massive, I mean really massive.
Even though this thing is terrifying, our galaxy depends on it.
Could this monster, the great destroyer of the universe, actually be a
great creator? Could a black hole have built our home, the Milky Way?
The black hole may be responsible for the beginning of our galaxy, and
it'll definitely ultimately be responsible for its death.
captions paid for by discovery communications look around the universe,
and you'll see galaxies of every kind, a kaleidoscopic array of unique
shapes and sizes.
These grand galactic structures fill the cosmos.
The basic building block of the universe is the galaxy, and there are
hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.
The same way that cells make up your body or bricks make up a building,
galaxies make up the universe.
We should thank our lucky stars for galaxies.
Galaxies are the only place in the universe where stars and planets
form.
We don't see stars out between the galaxies.
This is the only place where the hydrogen is brought together, heated
up, and a generation of life can begin.
There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, but only
one gave birth to us.
I sometimes ask my students to identify where they live.
Well, you would say, for example, "New York City," "the us of a,"
"planet Earth," "third planet from the Sun.
" And then, you would say "the Milky Way galaxy.
" The Milky Way galaxy is our home.
Because we see it from within, all we see is a band of stars stretched
across the sky.
But viewed from outside, we'd see a spectacular giant spiral galaxy
made up of over 200 billion stars.
Our sun is just a dot within one of its enormous arms.
Our Milky Way galaxy is huge.
It's actually one of the biggest galaxies in the universe, as a matter
of fact.
I'd probably put it in the top 10% certainly.
Massive, magnificent.
Our galaxy has long hidden its secrets at its heart.
The greatest question how did it form? At stake is not just the answer
to the origins of our galaxy, but the origins of our solar system, our
star, the Sun, and ultimately, us.
The Milky Way's past and the whole story leads us to where we are now
and who we are now.
So what created the Milky Way, and how did it grow into the majestic
galaxy we see today? To answer that, we have to travel back to the
infant universe, to just after the big bang.
there are no stars, no planets And no galaxies.
How do we go from that early universe that's almost perfectly,
perfectly featureless to this complex and very interesting universe
that we see around us today? The early universe is a thick, uniform
soup of gas with some tiny irregularities.
But it's enough to set gravity to work, pulling gas together.
Gravity keeps on compressing the gas down to a point.
And that's when temperatures rise dramatically to 50-to 100-million
degrees.
At that point, you get ignition.
At that point, hydrogen fuses into helium, and we get a star.
A star is born.
In this theory, not one, but millions of stars burst into life.
Slowly, gravity brings them together.
After a few million years, they form a rotating sphere of stars, and a
galaxy is born.
There's a problem, though.
There's too much gravity.
Something other than just the stars must be holding them together.
But what is it? Turns out, the answer lies at the center of our own
galaxy.
At the very heart of the Milky Way, you see stars orbiting something
that isn't there.
And if you do the calculations, the amount of mass needed at the very
center is about four million times the mass of our sun.
So stars are basically orbiting like planets around this empty object
with four million times the mass of the Sun.
This object must be colossal.
It must be unimaginably dense.
It could only be one thing a black hole, a supermassive black hole.
If the moon goes around the Earth, and the Earth goes around the Sun,
then what does the Sun go around? The sun goes around a massive black
hole at the center of the galaxy.
Within the Milky Way, scientists find their first supermassive black
hole.
But it wasn't the last.
Turns out, they're everywhere.
We know that most big galaxies have a supermassive black hole right in
their center.
That's telling us that these two things are related.
They come as a pair.
Somehow, the black holes and the galaxies and their origin and
evolution are tied together.
Amazingly, the Milky Way, this sparkling expanse of stars, is all
intrinsically linked to the darkest and most enigmatic entity in the
universe a supermassive black hole.
It is an object of tremendous fascination and mystery.
How did it get there? How did it grow to be so large? Is it gonna
continue to grow? To figure out the origins of our galaxy, we must
first find out how it got its black hole.
In the early universe, the first stars burst into life.
But these stars, they're nothing like our sun.
Those first stars were very, very massive.
And one of the things that happens with massive stars is they explode
quickly.
In just a few hundred million years, the biggest burn through their
hydrogen fuel And die.
They would've exploded as incredibly powerful supernovae, exploding
stars.
Their cores would've collapsed to form black holes, and this may have
been the very first black holes that formed in the universe.
These black holes would start small.
Over billions of years, one would eat and grow into the monster that
now sits at the heart of our galaxy.
It's a solid theory, but there's a problem.
Astronomers find super-bright lights in the very early universe.
These aren't stars.
They're called quasars.
Quasars are the bad boys of astronomy.
When we first found them, we were puzzled, because how can an object
emit so much energy? The energy output is sufficient to light up the
entire universe.
These quasars, though smaller than our solar system, somehow outshine
The energy emitted vastly exceeds the energy in a star.
The only process we know that would produce that kind of energy is the
collapse of huge amounts of matter into a massive black hole.
We realized, "oh, my god.
These are, in fact, huge, raging black holes.
" They're much bigger than those made at the end of a star's life.
We're not just talking about a stellar mass black hole, which might
have 5 or 10 or 20 times the mass of the Sun.
We're talking about a true monster that has millions or billions of
times the mass of the Sun.
So where do these black holes come from? They're way too big to be the
result of early exploding stars.
They have to be formed in another way.
The theory that stars formed first, converging to build galaxies, needs
a radical overhaul.
Instead, does the black hole come first? Is it the mother of all
creation, giving birth to the Milky Way, the stars, and us? The Milky
Way, our vast, incandescent galaxy, has a heart of darkness.
But which came first the light or the dark? It's almost sort of like a
chicken and an egg.
Which came first, the galaxy or the black hole? Do you need a black
hole to make a galaxy, or do you need a large galaxy to make a large
black hole? Did the black hole come first? Or did the stars and the
galaxy come first? In one theory, stars come first.
The biggest die, creating a black hole during their death throes.
But the discovery of quasars challenges this.
There are supermassive black holes at the very start of the universe,
far too large to be the remnants of the first stars.
So where do they come from? And could they go on to create galaxies?
Enter the new theory of direct collapse.
In this theory, in the very early universe, you have a giant gas cloud
that collapses straight into a black hole.
It's just like the birth of a star, but the star dies before it's born.
The theory goes like this.
Clouds of gas clump together.
They spiral into a central point, becoming incredibly dense.
At this point in star formation, the core would ignite.
But here, too much gas and dust is piled in.
The mass of it all is so great that gravity becomes unstoppable.
It crushes the gas, making it denser and denser, until it reaches its
breaking point.
Finally, the gas collapses So violently, it rips through the fabric of
space.
A massive black hole is born.
I'm talking about making a black hole that's way bigger than any kind
of black hole that would form at the end of a star's life.
This could explain how the black holes and quasars are so huge so early
on in the universe.
If true, then it might be black holes come first, before stars.
But for now, it's just a theory.
The jury is still out as to how our galaxy first forms.
The chicken-and-egg question is, do black holes cause the galaxies to
coil us around them, or do the galaxies build up and hit some crucial,
critical size, beyond which black holes must form at their center? And
we want to learn about that.
And the only way to learn about that is to look out in the universe and
try and find out.
To prove one of our theories, we need observational evidence.
And a small dwarf galaxy might provide it.
Henize 2-10 is young.
Many of its stars are just a few million years old.
It might provide us a look back at our Milky Way in its infant years.
Henize 2-10 is a very interesting, tiny dwarf galaxy.
Originally, I was studying this galaxy because it has all this star
formation going on.
But when I started looking at all of the data, I was sort of shocked
and very excited.
I found a supermassive black hole at the center of this little galaxy.
Finding a black hole in a galaxy is nothing new, but the real discovery
is the size of this monster black hole.
Our best estimate for the mass of the black hole in Henize 2-10 is a
million or two solar masses.
Now, this is comparable to the mass of the black hole in our own Milky
Way galaxy.
But the Milky Way is whereas Henize 2-10 is only a few thousand light-
years across.
It's amazing to find a black hole that is so massive in a small dwarf
galaxy.
Before this discovery, scientists didn't think such a tiny galaxy could
contain such a colossus.
This is completely unexpected.
Usually, supermassive black holes are found in much larger, much more
massive galaxies.
Amy's discovery is groundbreaking.
In Henize 2-10, the black hole is more developed than the galaxy.
It's evidence suggesting the black hole is older, that it came first.
Could this be the same for other galaxies? How many dwarf galaxies host
massive black holes? Is Henize 2-10 a unique case, or are there lots of
other examples? We've searched through the Sloan digital sky survey and
found over that have supermassive black holes.
Henize 2-10 could be a blueprint for how all galaxies first formed,
including our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
It's fascinating, because it could be the evidence that the big black
holes form first, and then, the galaxies form around them.
Everything we see in our sky the stars, our sun, the planets, our whole
galaxy might all have started as a supermassive black hole.
But how do you go from this to something as glorious as the Milky Way
we see today? Where do the stars come from? the Milky Way may have
started life as a supermassive black hole, a huge sphere of black
surrounded by a maelstrom of gas and dust.
This is our galaxy.
But how do you go from this to the shimmering sweep of stars we see
today? People think of black holes as being gigantic cosmic vacuum
cleaners that suck everything down.
That's not really true.
If you get too close to one, yeah, you can fall in, and you'll never
get back out.
But they can be a force for creation, as well.
How can a black hole be creative? One clue black holes aren't just
black.
Far from it.
You can think of black holes as one of the biggest paradoxes in the
universe.
They're black, so they don't emit any light.
But they can cause some of the brightest things in the entire universe.
Quasars prove that these massive black holes throw out more light than
whole galaxies.
Black holes don't just swallow matter.
They also spit it out.
A supermassive black hole is a messy eater.
It's trying to suck matter in, but it ends up superheating matter and
expelling matter, and sometimes, it will even belch during its meal and
have an outburst.
In the early universe, the supermassive black hole, the beginnings of
the Milky Way, is surrounded by gas and dust.
The black holes feast on the matter.
But not all of it is doomed.
When it eats too much too quickly, it generates so much energy that
even the black hole's gravity can't contain it.
Suddenly, the Milky Way fires off highly energized atoms and light from
the core pumping out up to a trillion times more energy than our sun.
If you were to have a close encounter with a supermassive black hole,
you're gonna have to go through a very dangerous environment.
You'd have to survive the intense radiation.
You'd have to survive the jet.
So how do stars form around such violence? Astronomers find a black
hole which might hold the key to how the Milky Way got its first stars.
There's a really exciting discovery of a supermassive black hole, the
kind we normally only find at the hearts of galaxies, sitting out there
by itself with no galaxy around it.
This thing's shining like crazy, so we know it's gobbling up gas.
He0450-2958 sits 5 billion light-years from Earth, a black hole with a
huge jet.
This jet is smashing into dust and gas and its neighboring galaxy.
You'd think it would destroy the galaxy, but instead, it's helping to
build it.
It's next to a big galaxy, and this big galaxy is forming stars like
crazy.
So we think what's going on is, because of the stuff coming off of the
black hole as it's growing, there are stars being triggered to form in
this galaxy next to it.
The black hole's colossal jet is the spark needed to create a star
factory.
The black hole is emitting radiation.
And when this radiation runs into all the gas in the galaxy, this
causes the gas to clump together, and new stars get made.
Direct evidence that black holes can create stars.
He0450-2958 might be a look back into the Milky Way's past.
Our galaxy's supermassive black hole's violent feasting sparks stars
into life.
These stars are drawn by the black hole's huge gravity and orbit,
building the galaxy.
Well, the black hole could actually stimulate star formation.
So some people believe that the very fact that we have galaxies is due
to the fact that we have a raging black hole at the center which helps
to initiate star formation.
It's possible that the black hole could have created many of the stars
we see in our sky today, including the one star we can't live without,
our sun.
It's kind of amazing that black holes existed as theoretical constructs
that many of the physicists who were involved in developing those
constructs didn't believe in.
Now, we understand that even perhaps our very existence depends upon
them.
They've gone from objects in our imagination to objects on which our
life depends.
Even though this black hole in the center is terrifying to conceive of,
in fact, our galaxy depends on it.
And our own planet and star may have formed because of this system.
the first stars of the Milky Way spark into life.
The galaxy starts to take shape.
The Milky Way is now big enough to throw its weight around.
And in the early universe, the Milky Way is not alone.
Its cosmic neighbors become its prey.
The Milky Way becomes a cannibal.
The young Milky Way is growing.
It already contains millions of stars.
Now, it's big enough to enter its next stage of evolution.
It's time to get violent.
Our galaxy turns on its cosmic siblings.
Galaxies are gorgeous, huge pinwheels spiraling elegantly throughout
the universe.
But there's a dark side to these galaxies.
The process of building up galaxies is one of cannibalism.
The galaxies don't form en masse as large objects.
What they do, like many things, is form by eating smaller objects.
If we could view the infant universe, we would see a battle raging.
Dwarf galaxies collide and merge.
And in this arena, size matters.
It's a cosmic roller-derby match.
The players represent dwarf galaxies which populate the early universe.
If you look at a roller-derby match, you might get a better idea about
what galaxy formation's like.
You've got people skating around the middle of a rink.
There's people slamming all over the place.
It's a very violent process, really chaotic.
And it's exactly the same way around the galaxy.
In a galaxy, you've got this middle that's attracting everything, and
stuff is swimming around it.
Dwarf galaxies smash into one another.
The larger always get the upper hand.
You've got all this stuff slamming together.
Stars are getting thrown all over the place.
They strip mass from each other.
They collide.
And if there are any smaller objects in-between, they get eaten up.
It's billions of years of destructive mayhem.
It's just this crazy, violent dance that just goes on over and over
again.
In the chaos of collisions, the Milky Way grows bigger.
Today, our galaxy dominates our part of the universe.
And even now, it's still devouring other galaxies.
There is a galaxy called Ssagittarius which has left a huge trail of
stars around the Milky Way and is essentially in the process of being
devoured.
There's a giant stream of stars coming off of it.
So it's totally just being ripped apart by the Milky Way itself.
But in this battle, the Milky Way doesn't go unscathed.
This collision could've triggered the formation of the spiral arms of
the Milky Way itself.
So the reason why the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy might be because
it's eating up Sagittarius.
Violence doesn't just build our galaxy.
It sculpts it smashing the Milky Way into shape and rearranging the
positions of the stars, perhaps even our sun.
It's possible that the Sun was actually born much closer to the middle
of the galaxy, and it's migrated out here to the suburbs over the
course of the last couple billion years.
And it's possible that when Sagittarius hit the disk, it created some
spiral arms that then allowed the Sun to migrate out.
The sun and our solar system are now about 26,000 light-years from the
galaxy's center.
For life on Earth, that's good news.
If you're too close to the big black hole in the center, there's a lot
going on that can actually hurt life.
There's high-energy radiation.
There are bursts of star formation, supernova explosions.
We're in a quieter, kind of outlying suburb of the galaxy.
And things there are much more conducive to life.
Our galaxy's cannibalism proves essential for life on Earth.
Through violence, we're able to live, and our galaxy continues to grow.
But can anything stop the juggernaut of our cannibal galaxy? Looking
out at the Milky Way, astronomers find hardly any new stars.
Turns out, something is shutting our galaxy's growth down, the biggest
flamethrower in the universe.
The Milky Way started small.
Over billions of years, it has grown huge, spawning over 200 billion
stars and counting.
But the count is slowing.
So, in the Milky Way right now, there are stars that are being born.
And there's about one star per year somewhere in our giant galaxy
that's being born.
Star formation's not done in the Milky Way, but it's settled down.
In its past, the Milky Way was bursting with star formation.
So what's changed? So, one of the big questions in galaxy formation
today is, why isn't more gas turning into stars? Well, one clue is that
black holes actually might be limiting this process.
In the early universe, our black hole may have sparked stars into life.
Now, it might be stopping stars from forming.
To find out why, we need to look at the Milky Way's supermassive black
hole in detail.
And for the first time, we can, thanks to one of NASA's newest space
telescopes, Nustar.
Fiona Harrison runs the Nustar mission.
Its first target the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Nustar can see the very highest-energy x-rays that can penetrate
through dust and gas.
It enables us to have this view of this black hole.
Nustar's X-ray vision sees only the most violent events.
Black hole tantrums are rare, but Nustar got lucky.
We looked.
And about six hours after we looked, we saw the black hole get a
hundred times brighter.
How long did that last? Only a few hours.
Then it faded away back into oblivion.
But this event was what we were looking for.
We were all just amazed.
There were cheers in the room.
It was just one of the most exciting moments, and so early on in the
mission, too.
It's direct evidence our black hole is still active and still has the
muscle to control the galaxy.
The black hole's power is revealed when it lights up a disk of gas and
dust which spins around it.
As this material is swirling around the black hole in a disk, it rubs
against each other.
And there's also magnetic fields and other forces.
All of this heats that disk to much hotter, even, than the Sun.
Nustar detects that gas around the black hole is heating up to That's
18,000 times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
This superheated gas is bad news for star formation.
The gas has to get cold in order for it to eventually form stars.
And that's because the gas has to get very, very dense so that,
eventually, the gas can collapse into something that's gonna have
nuclear fusion in its core.
So in regions around black holes, because they're so hot, they heat up
the gas around them.
And that totally limits the ability for that gas to turn into stars.
Massive amounts of energy are emitted.
And that actually can not only destroy stars, it can blow the gas away
that would later on form stars.
Star birth shuts down.
Over our galaxy's life, our supermassive black hole drags gas and dust
towards it, the ingredients needed for star formation.
In its infancy, its power slams these gas clouds together, sparking
stars into life.
Now, it blows them apart with its extreme heat, regulating the
population of stars in the galaxy.
The black hole in the center acts a little bit like a valve,
controlling how stars form in the galaxy itself.
There is a remarkable symbiotic relationship between black holes and
galaxies.
Black holes act like cosmic regulators, increasing, at certain times,
star formation and governing the rate at which galaxies evolve.
We're not sure why our black hole stops some star formation and sparks
others.
All we do know is that this regulation might be essential for us.
When it made stars, the black hole might have also helped create our
sun.
Now, it limits star formation, which could bring lethal radiation near
planet Earth.
If we were living in an area where there were lots of young stars and
supernovae blowing up, that would not be so good for life on Earth.
Now the conditions for life are perfect.
Looking up at our night sky, it looks unchanging, eternal.
But in the universe, nothing lasts forever.
Our galaxy is gearing up for its next big change.
So what does the future hold? The answer is that we won't be a spiral
galaxy for much longer.
Our lifetime as a spiral galaxy is about two-thirds of the way into its
final death throes.
The Milky Way has a giant sister out there, too close for comfort.
Their sibling rivalry will set the night on fire and pit two of the
biggest heavyweights in the cosmos in a fight to the death.
Around 13 billion years ago, the Milky Way forms around a supermassive
black hole.
It adds hundreds of billions of stars, settles into a flat disk and is
sculpted into a spiral.
Our galaxy has constantly evolved.
Its future is no different.
And it's going to get violent.
Go out tonight and look at the night sky with a pair of binoculars, and
you can see the Andromeda galaxy.
That is our future.
Perhaps 4 or 5 billion years from now, we will be on a collision course
with our next-door neighbor.
And it could be like a hostile takeover.
Andromeda is heading straight for us.
Collisions are, of course, nothing new.
In its infancy, our galaxy grew by colliding and eating other galaxies.
But this time, it's different.
The original schoolyard bully is going to meet its match.
The Milky Way has always been the biggest thing around.
So any little dwarf galaxy that's gotten near has gotten torn apart,
but the Milky Way just keeps right on going.
Now, there's another really big galaxy that's actually headed right for
us right now.
That's Andromeda.
It's another disk.
And when these two big disks come together, there's not gonna be a disk
left.
Neither of those disks is gonna win.
As the collision nears, our night sky will change completely.
Today, if you look out when it's really dark, you see the big band of
the Milky Way.
It's a beautiful thing.
A few billion years from now, what you would see is not just one band
of stars, but another band of stars that crisscrosses like this.
As it nears, Andromeda grows larger and larger in our sky.
Finally, the galaxies smash into one another.
Stars are torn from their orbits.
The stars don't actually collide.
Stars are extremely small compared to the space in-between them.
But that's not true for gas clouds.
Gas clouds are very large.
They can actually slam into each other.
When they collide, that creates new star formation.
This gas and dust is gonna get set on fire.
There will be a crazy thing going on, and maybe even begin to look like
fireworks in the sky as stars are born.
Huge gas clouds blazing out light from the mass of stars forming in
them.
It would be magnificent.
This is our swan song.
This burst of star formation marks the end for our galaxy.
The Milky Way and Andromeda rip each other to shreds.
When these two beautiful structured spirals smack into each other, that
really orderly shape is going to be destroyed.
And what's probably gonna be left is sort of a big blob of stars that's
called an elliptical galaxy.
Those two galaxies are gonna turn into a ball of stars.
You won't see any bands at all.
It'll just be stars spread across the sky.
The Milky Way and Andromeda are gone.
In their place, a new galaxy, milkomeda.
But it's not over.
Their two supermassive black holes hurtle towards each other.
Those black holes are gonna be hunting for each other.
So you've got two giant black holes, both more than a million times the
mass of the Sun, spiraling in towards each other.
As this is happening, both of them will probably start gobbling up gas
that happens to be around them.
They're both trying to eat all the gas that's around them, and they're
gonna get bright, so it's gonna be a crazy event.
It will be fantastic.
Two fireballs rotating around each other until the black holes at the
center of them finally coalesce.
The black holes merge, forming an even larger supermassive black hole,
a new king to rule over a new galaxy.
But this new galaxy is already dying.
Over billions of years, the stars slowly die out.
There's no fuel left to create new stars and replace them.
What you're left with is basically a dark galaxy.
It's not generating any energy, any heat, any light.
It's just black.
One hundred trillion years after it was formed in the darkness of the
early universe, the voracious black hole returns to darkness.
Here, it's left to feast on the galaxy it built, eating the dead
remains of stars and planets.
The orbits of the stars decay, and they fall in toward the supermassive
black hole.
And it ultimately it's thought galaxies like the Milky Way will just
form one supermassive black hole.
In literature, beginnings and endings are always tied together, but the
same is true for our galaxy's black hole.
It is quite possible that, without the formation of the black hole at
its center, our galaxy would not have coalesced around it and have the
properties it has.
But the ultimate future of our galaxy is to collapse into a massive
black hole.
So, in that sense, the black hole may be responsible for the beginning
of our galaxy, and it'll definitely ultimately be responsible for its
death.
Our galaxy is magnificent.
All this, everything we see in our night sky, could be the result of
one of the most fearsome objects in the universe a supermassive black
hole that could've been our creator and will be the destroyer of our
galaxy and all the galaxies in the universe.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s03e07

Our voyage to the stars

THE EARTH IS IN DANGER.

FUTURE COSMIC EVENTS ARE GOING TO BLAST, BURN, OR RIP US TO SHREDS.
THE UNIVERSE IS INCREDIBLY VIOLENT.
THERE ARE HUGE EVENTS GOING ON ALL THE TIME.
ONE DAY, LIFE ON EARTH WILL BECOME IMPOSSIBLE.
THERE WILL BE DISASTERS IN THE FUTURE, AND ONE OF THEM WILL DESTROY US.
TO SAVE MANKIND, WE'LL HAVE TO FIND OTHER PLACES TO CALL HOME.
IT REALLY HAS TO BE OUR DESTINY TO MOVE OFF THE EARTH IF WE ARE GOING
TO SURVIVE.
IT'S AS SIMPLE AS THAT.
WE NEED AN INSURANCE POLICY.
WE MUST DO IT, AND WE MUST GET STARTED NOW.
WE'LL NEED A LIFEBOAT AND NEW HOMES AMONGST THE STARS, AND THIS IS HOW
WE CAN DO IT.
CAPTIONS PAID FOR BY DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS THE EARTH.
AS FAR AS WE KNOW, IT'S THE ONLY HOME TO LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE.
EARTH IS SUCH AN IDEAL ENVIRONMENT FOR LIFE.
EVERYTHING ABOUT OUR BODIES OUR BIOLOGY, OUR CHEMISTRY EVOLVED HERE ON
EARTH.
WE LITERALLY ARE ON THE PERFECT SPACESHIP.
BUT OUR PERFECT SPACESHIP IS CAREENING THROUGH A COSMIC MINEFIELD.
EVERY 30 MILLION YEARS OR SO, A NATURAL OR COSMIC DISASTER HITS THE
EARTH SO HARD THAT MILLIONS OF CREATURES GO EXTINCT.
EXTINCTION EVENTS TEND TO KILL OFF THE DOMINANT SPECIES.
AND RIGHT NOW, THAT'S US.
IT'S CERTAINLY TRUE THAT IN AN EXTINCTION EVENT, IT'S THE LARGE AND
POWERFUL THAT GET WIPED OUT.
THEY GO.
SO YOU KNOW THAT IF THERE'S AN EXTINCTION EVENT ON EARTH, WE HUMANS ARE
VULNERABLE.
WE'RE IN THE CATEGORY OF LARGE AND POWERFUL.
THE ONLY WAY FOR HUMANKIND TO SURVIVE GLOBAL EXTINCTION IS TO SPREAD
OUR GENES TO MORE THAN ONE PLANET.
WE HAVE NO CHOICE.
IT'S A LAW OF EVOLUTION, GEOLOGY, AND PHYSICS.
THE ALTERNATIVE IS DEATH AND EXTINCTION.
WE'LL HAVE TO BUILD A GIANT SPACECRAFT CAPABLE OF CROSSING INTERSTELLAR
SPACE AND COLONIZING DISTANT WORLDS AROUND OTHER STARS.
YOU WILL ESSENTIALLY NEED A NEW NOAH'S ARK.
BUT IT'S GONNA BE A SPACE ARK, AND IT HAS TO ENCAPSULATE ALL OF THE
DIVERSITY OF EARTH INSIDE THIS ONE SHIP.
THE SPACE ARK WILL HAVE TO BE HUGE, BIG ENOUGH TO HOUSE THE THOUSANDS
OF PEOPLE NEEDED TO CREATE A HEALTHY GENE POOL ON THE NEW PLANETS.
TOO MASSIVE TO CONSTRUCT ON EARTH, THE GIANT CRAFT WILL HAVE TO BE
BUILT IN SPACE, FAR FROM THE PULL OF EARTH'S GRAVITY.
BUT BUILDING A SHIPYARD IN THE SKY IS NO SMALL CHALLENGE.
NASA IS TACKLING IT HEAD-ON WITH A NEW GENERATION OF HEAVY-LIFT ROCKETS
CALLED THE SLS.
I SEE THE SLS AS A CAPABILITY THAT'S GOING TO ALLOW US TO PUT AN
INDUSTRIAL BASE BETWEEN THE EARTH AND THE MOON.
AFTER WE DO THAT, AND WE'RE OUT THERE ROUTINELY WORKING IN SPACE,
THAT'S WHEN WE'LL ASSEMBLE THE CRAFT THAT'LL TAKE US TO THE STARS.
LES JOHNSON'S JOB IS TO PLAN THE FUTURE OF SPACE EXPLORATION.
TODAY, HE'S OBSERVING A TEST-FIRING OF A 120-SCALE MODEL SLS.
WHEN THE REAL DEAL TAKES OFF IN 2032, THE SLS WILL BECOME THE MOST
POWERFUL ROCKET EVER LAUNCHED.
THE SLS IS BIG.
IT'S GONNA GIVE US THE CAPABILITY TO TAKE LOTS OF STUFF UP WITH EACH
LAUNCH, AND IT CAN BE BIG VOLUME.
AND YOU COULD POTENTIALLY LAUNCH THREE OF THESE BIG ROCKETS VERSUS
PERHAPS 15 OR 20 OF THE OTHER ROCKETS WE HAVE AVAILABLE TODAY TO GET
THE SAME AMOUNT OF MATERIAL OUT INTO SPACE.
LES ENVISIONS SLS ROCKETS TAKING PREFABRICATED UNITS BEYOND EARTH'S
ORBIT, WHERE SPACE ENGINEERS WILL ASSEMBLE THEM INTO A COLOSSAL
INDUSTRIAL WORKSHOP.
MINERS WILL THEN FLY OUT TO DIFFERENT BODIES IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM TO
COLLECT THE RAW MATERIALS NEEDED TO BUILD THE SPACE ARK.
WE'LL HAVE FACTORIES ON THE MOON, AND PERHAPS EVEN BEYOND THAT ON GIANT
ROCKS INSIDE THE ASTEROID BELT.
ASTEROIDS HAVE A FRACTION OF EARTH'S GRAVITY.
HERE, IT WILL BE MUCH EASIER TO BUILD MASSIVE SECTIONS AND LIFT THEM TO
THE ARK AS IT BEGINS TO TAKE SHAPE.
THE INNER SOLAR SYSTEM WILL PROVIDE ALL WE NEED TO MAKE THE GIANT
SUPERSTRUCTURE OF THE SPACE ARK.
BUT THERE'S SOMETHING MISSING.
COLONIZING A DISTANT WORLD WILL REQUIRE A PROPULSION SYSTEM FASTER THAN
ANYTHING WE'VE EVER BUILT BEFORE.
SPACE IS HUGE.
OUR SOLAR SYSTEM IS HUGE.
I MEAN, EVEN TO GET TO MARS WOULD TAKE ALMOST A YEAR.
BUT THAT'S NOTHING COMPARED TO EXPLORING THE DISTANCE BETWEEN STARS.
THE NEAREST STARS TO OUR SUN ARE SEVERAL LIGHT-YEARS AWAY.
EVEN LIGHT, THE FASTEST THING IN THE UNIVERSE, TAKES SEVERAL YEARS TO
GET THERE.
THE SUN'S CLOSEST NEIGHBOR IS A TRIPLE-STAR SYSTEM CALLED ALPHA
CENTAURI.
A SPACESHIP BURNING CONVENTIONAL FUEL WOULD TAKE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF
YEARS TO GET THERE.
THE CREW WOULD DIE OF OLD AGE LONG BEFORE THE SHIP ARRIVED.
SO WHAT FUEL TO USE? SCIENCE FICTION APPEARS TO HAVE THE SOLUTION, BUT
IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.
EVERY TREKKIE IN THEIR HEART OF HEARTS KNOWS THAT IT'S ANTIMATTER.
ANTIMATTER IS THE FUEL FOR AN INTERSTELLAR SHIP.
ANTIMATTER IS REAL.
WE CREATE A FEW ATOMS OF ANTIMATTER EVERY YEAR IN HIGH-ENERGY PARTICLE
COLLIDERS.
IT'S THE MIRROR IMAGE OF ALL THE MATTER THAT WE SEE AROUND US, AND IT
HAS AN EXPLOSIVE PROPERTY THAT WOULD MAKE IT THE MOST EFFICIENT ROCKET
FUEL EVER CREATED.
HERE'S THE COOL THING ABOUT ANTIMATTER.
WHEN ANTIMATTER AND MATTER MEET, THEY ANNIHILATE EACH OTHER.
THAT MEANS THAT THE MATTER CEASES TO EXIST.
THEY CONVERT INTO PURE ENERGY.
IT'S A 100% EFFICIENT PROCESS.
SCIENTISTS HAVE CALCULATED THAT A ROCKET POWERED BY ANTIMATTER COULD
REACH 15% OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
THAT'S FAST ENOUGH TO GET TO THE MOON IN 8 1/2 SECONDS.
WE WILL HAVE ALMOST UNLIMITED POWER.
WE COULD TRAVEL ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WE WANTED TO.
OUR SPACE ARK COULD REACH ALPHA CENTAURI IN JUST OVER 28 YEARS, WELL
WITHIN THE LIFETIME OF ITS HUMAN PAYLOAD.
NOW, THIS SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT IDEA, RIGHT? LET'S GET TOGETHER A LOT OF
ANTIMATTER.
LET'S CREATE SOME ANTIMATTER, AND LET'S COMBINE IT WITH REGULAR MATTER,
AND WE HAVE THIS OUTSTANDING ENERGY SOURCE.
BUT ANTIMATTER HAS A HUGE PROBLEM, AND THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT ITS
ADVANTAGE IS WHEN IT MEETS MATTER, IT'S GOING TO ANNIHILATE AND CREATE
ENERGY.
FILL A CONVENTIONAL FUEL TANK WITH A SINGLE POUND OF ANTIMATTER, AND
YOU'LL GET AN EXPLOSION MORE POWERFUL THAN 1,000 HIROSHIMA BOMBS.
ANTIMATTER IS JUST TOO HOT TO HANDLE.
WE NEED A RELIABLE ENERGY SOURCE THAT CAN POWER OUR STARSHIPS FOR YEARS
AT A TIME.
AND THERE ARE ONLY A FEW CANDIDATES THAT CAN DO THIS.
AMONG THEM, FUSION POWER HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE SUN ITSELF.
IN THE SUN'S HOT, DENSE CORE, HYDROGEN ATOMS COLLIDE SMASHING INTO EACH
OTHER WITH SUCH FORCE THEY FUSE, RELEASING ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF ENERGY.
THIS IS NUCLEAR FUSION.
WHAT WE WANT TO DO IN SPACE TRAVEL IS MINIATURIZE IT AND PUT IT IN A
SPACECRAFT AND USE THAT AS YOUR POWER SYSTEM AND AS YOUR PROPULSION
SYSTEM FOR DEEP-SPACE EXPLORATION.
A FUSION ROCKET IS STILL TWO-THIRDS THE SPEED OF ONE POWERED BY
ANTIMATTER.
AND BEST OF ALL, ITS FUEL, HYDROGEN GAS, CAN BE FOUND IN VAST CLOUDS IN
THE SPACE BETWEEN STARS.
IT WOULD SIMPLY AUTOMATICALLY FIRE IN OUTER SPACE USING INTERSTELLAR
GAS.
AND, IN PRINCIPLE, IT WOULD NEVER REQUIRE REFUELING.
OUR FUSION-POWERED SPACE ARK HEADS FOR ITS FIRST TARGET, ALPHA
CENTAURI, AT 10% THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
IT WILL TAKE 42 YEARS TO COMPLETE THE JOURNEY, AND ITS PRECIOUS LOAD OF
HUMAN PIONEERS MUST BE DELIVERED SAFE AND WELL.
BUT THE CROSSING MAY BE DEADLY.
OUR VIOLENT COSMOS HAS A MILLION WAYS TO KILL.
A GIANT SPACE ARK FIRES ITS FUSION ROCKETS.
INSIDE THE SHIP ARE THOUSANDS OF HUMAN VOLUNTEERS.
THEY'RE ON A ONE-WAY MISSION TO COLONIZE A DISTANT PLANET.
ONE DAY, WE WILL HAVE TO MAKE THIS JOURNEY.
IT'S INEVITABLE THAT WE GO OFF-PLANET.
I THINK WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO DO IT TO SURVIVE AS A SPECIES.
THE ARK'S FIRST TARGET IS THE CLOSEST STAR SYSTEM TO THE SUN, ALPHA
CENTAURI.
AND THE JOURNEY WILL BE LONG AROUND 40 YEARS.
KEEPING THE CREW FIT AND HEALTHY IS IMPERATIVE, BUT IT WON'T BE EASY.
A LOT OF THINGS HAPPEN TO THE HUMAN BODY WHEN YOU GO INTO SPACE.
THE MOMENT YOU BECOME WEIGHTLESS, YOU INSTANTLY GET KIND OF A FULL-
HEADED FEELING.
YOU GET DIZZY.
THAT CAN MAKE YOU FEEL NAUSEOUS.
LEROY CHIAO SPENT SIX MONTHS ON THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION, LONG
ENOUGH TO EXPERIENCE THE DAMAGING EFFECTS OF ZERO GRAVITY.
YOUR BONES AREN'T FEELING ANY IMPACT, SO YOUR BODY DECIDES IT DOESN'T
NEED BONES ANYMORE, AND IT'LL BEGIN TO DE-MINERALIZE YOUR BONES.
AND THEN, YOUR MUSCLES, THROUGH DISUSE OF COURSE, THEY'LL NATURALLY
ATROPHY VERY QUICKLY.
THE HUMAN BODY EVOLVED TO LIVE WITH EARTH'S GRAVITY.
WITHOUT IT, BONES LOSE 2% OF THEIR MASS FOR EVERY MONTH SPENT IN SPACE.
THE CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM SUFFERS, TOO.
BODY FLUIDS POOL.
HEART RATE AND BLOOD PRESSURE RISE.
RESISTANCE TRAINING HELPS REDUCE THE SYMPTOMS.
WE'RE SCHEDULED FOR TWO HOURS OF EXERCISE A DAY ON THE SPACE STATION TO
KEEP OUR CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM FIT, TO KEEP OUR MUSCLES AND OUR BONES
FIT.
EXERCISING CAN HOLD OFF THE DANGEROUS WASTING PROCESS.
BUT A 42-YEAR JOURNEY TO ALPHA CENTAURI WITHOUT GRAVITY WOULD BE FATAL.
OBVIOUSLY, WE NEED A PERMANENT SOLUTION TO WEIGHTLESSNESS.
THERE'S NOTHING TO PREVENT US, IN THE NEAR FUTURE, FROM CREATING
ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY.
THE ANSWER IS CENTRIFUGAL FORCE.
IT'S THE FORCE THAT STICKS DAREDEVIL BIKERS TO VERTICAL WALLS AND KEEPS
THRILL-SEEKERS GLUED TO THEIR SEATS IN THEME PARKS.
ROTATION PRODUCES THIS OUTWARD FORCE, AND CREATING IT IN A SPACESHIP
WOULD BE RELATIVELY SIMPLE.
BY ROTATING A SPACE CAPSULE, IT MEANS THAT THE ASTRONAUTS INSIDE WILL
EXPERIENCE ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY.
SPINNING THE LIVING QUARTERS AT JUST THE RIGHT SPEED WILL HOLD OFF BONE
AND MUSCLE WASTING.
BUT AS THEY JOURNEY DEEP INTO SPACE, LOW GRAVITY IS THE LEAST OF THE
DANGERS OUR PIONEERS WILL FACE.
RADIATION IS PROBABLY THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE.
WE'RE GONNA BE EXPOSED TO MUCH HARSHER LEVELS, MUCH HIGHER LEVELS, OF
RADIATION.
THE SUN'S SURFACE SHOOTS OUT A CONSTANT STREAM OF DANGEROUS CHARGED
PARTICLES, PROTONS AND ELECTRONS TRAVELING AT CLOSE TO A MILLION MILES
AN HOUR.
THESE THINGS WILL BREAK YOUR DNA.
THEY'LL CAUSE CANCER, AND THEY WILL KILL YOU.
THE EARTH'S MAGNETOSPHERE AND THE ATMOSPHERE ABOVE OUR HEADS PROTECTS
US FROM THE WORST OF THIS RADIATION.
BUT FAR FROM THE EARTH, THE PIONEERS WILL FACE RADIATION HEAD-ON.
THAT REALLY IS THE BIGGEST TECHNICAL BARRIER TO MANKIND SENDING PEOPLE
OUT FARTHER AND DEEPER INTO SPACE.
IT'S NOT PROPULSION.
IT'S NOT COMPUTERS OR NAVIGATION.
IT'S HOW DO WE KEEP PEOPLE HEALTHY? BEYOND THE BOUNDARY OF OUR SOLAR
SYSTEM, THE RADIATION THREAT GETS WORSE.
CHARGED PARTICLES COME AT YOU EVEN FASTER.
IN SOME CASES, THERE ARE SINGLE PROTONS THAT ACTUALLY PACK AS MUCH OF A
PUNCH AS A 100-MILE-AN-HOUR FASTBALL.
THESE COSMIC RAYS ARE JOINED BY AN EVEN DEADLIER FORCE GAMMA RAYS,
BLASTED OUT BY VIOLENT, COSMIC EVENTS.
ALL OF THE COSMIC PHENOMENA, FROM STARS EXPLODING TO BLACK HOLES EATING
UP LARGE PARTS OF GALAXIES PRODUCE RADIATION AND PARTICLES THAT ARE
INCREDIBLY ENERGETIC.
YOU'VE NEVER SEEN THESE PARTICLES BEFORE.
YOU BODY'S NOT ADAPTED TO THEM.
AND THEY COME AT YOU ALL THE TIME, AND THEY'RE VERY HIGH-ENERGY.
GALACTIC, COSMIC RADIATION WILL RIP THROUGH THE CELLS OF OUR HUMAN
CARGO LIQUEFYING THEIR BODIES.
THE ONLY HOPE IS TO SOMEHOW SHIELD THE SPACECRAFT.
IN SCIENCE FICTION, STARSHIPS CREATE A PROTECTIVE MAGNETIC BUBBLE
SIMILAR TO THE MAGNETIC FIELD THAT PROTECTS THE EARTH.
BUT A DEFLECTOR SHIELD WOULD TAKE A HUGE AMOUNT OF ENERGY TO SUSTAIN.
AND LIKE ANY ELECTRICAL DEVICE, IT WOULD BE PRONE TO FAILURE.
THE SAFEST OPTION IS TO GO LOW-TECH, COATING THE SHIP WITH A THICK
LAYER OF PHYSICAL SHIELDING.
SHIELDING IS NOT A SIMPLE PROBLEM.
IT'S NOT JUST A MATTER OF BRINGING A BUNCH OF LEAD OR ANYTHING LIKE
THAT.
IN FACT, WHAT YOU FIND IS THAT IF YOU DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT, IT
ABSORBS THE RADIATION, AND THEN IT RE-EMITS IT IN A MORE DANGEROUS
FORM.
METALS WON'T WORK.
BUT SCIENTISTS HAVE COME UP WITH A BRILLIANT ALTERNATIVE.
IN FACT, ONE OF THE BEST SHIELDS FROM COSMIC RAYS IS SOMETHING SIMPLE
WATER.
AND IT'S ACTUALLY SOMETHING YOU NEED TO BRING WITH YOU AS YOU VENTURE
INTO INTERSTELLAR SPACE.
THE HYDROGEN ATOMS IN WATER ABSORB HIGH-ENERGY PARTICLES.
AND, IN SUFFICIENT VOLUME, WATER CAN ALSO BLOCK GAMMA RAYS.
THE LIVING QUARTERS OF THE ARK WILL HAVE A THICK OUTER SKIN FILLED WITH
THE SHIP'S WATER AND, OUTSIDE THAT, A SECOND SKIN FILLED WITH THE
SHIP'S HYDROGEN SUPPLY FOR ITS FUSION ENGINES.
OUR ASTRONAUTS ARE NOW SAFE FROM RADIATION SICKNESS.
AND WITH ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY, THEIR BODIES WILL STAY STRONG.
THE DEADLIEST THREAT NOW EACH OTHER.
A COSMIC CATASTROPHE WILL ONE DAY WIPE US FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH.
TO SAVE MANKIND, WE'LL NEED TO ESCAPE TO THE STARS IN A GIANT SPACE ARK
IN SEARCH OF A NEW HOME.
ITS PRECIOUS HUMAN CARGO WILL BE KEPT IN TOP PHYSICAL CONDITION WITH
ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY AND HYDROGEN-RICH SHIELDING.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THEIR MENTAL HEALTH? ONE OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES FOR
PEOPLE IN SPACE ARE THE PEOPLE.
TAKING PEOPLE, PUTTING THEM IN A TIN CAN IN AN INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS
ENVIRONMENT, HAVING THEM GET ALONG WITH EACH OTHER FOR MONTHS OR YEARS
AND STAY ALIVE THROUGH THE JOURNEY IS GOING TO BE AN ENORMOUS
CHALLENGE.
WE KNOW WHEN PEOPLE GO ON SUBMARINES, THAT THEY HAVE TO BE VERY
CAREFULLY TESTED.
AND THOSE SUBMARINES GO OUT FOR MISSIONS THAT CERTAINLY DON'T LAST
YEARS.
WE CAN'T START A NEW CIVILIZATION WITH A CREW RAVAGED BY COSMIC
BOREDOM, INFIGHTING, AND MENTAL ILLNESS.
IT WOULD BE BETTER IF THE ENTIRE CREW WERE UNCONSCIOUS.
ONE POSSIBILITY WHICH, OF COURSE, AGAIN, IS A POSSIBILITY IN SCIENCE
FICTION IS TO HAVE PEOPLE BE ASLEEP DURING MOST OF IT.
COULD YOU PUT PEOPLE INTO AN INDUCED COMA AND THEN WAKE THEM UP IN TIME
TO GO DO THEIR SCIENCE MISSION? IT MIGHT BE AN EASIER THING TO DO THAN
TO SAY, "WELL, NOW YOU JUST SIT STILL FOR THE NEXT 10 YEARS.
" THE CLOSEST WE'VE COME TO SUSPENDED ANIMATION IN TODAY'S WORLD IS
STORING HUMAN EMBRYOS IN LIQUID NITROGEN.
BUT COULD WE REALLY SAVE THE HUMAN RACE WITH TEST-TUBE BABIES? BECAUSE
OF THE ENORMOUS HURDLES FACING SPACE TRAVEL, SOME PEOPLE HAVE ADVANCED
THE IDEA, "WELL, WHY DO WE HAVE TO SEND HUMANS INTO OUTER SPACE? WHY
NOT SEND EMBRYOS OR SPERM AND EGG CELLS?" IN THEORY, WE COULD TRANSPORT
FROZEN EMBRYOS ACROSS VAST DISTANCES OF SPACE, SIDE-STEPPING THE NEED
FOR FOOD OR COMPLICATED LIFE-SUPPORT SYSTEMS.
THEY COULD WITHSTAND THE RIGORS OF SPACE TRAVEL AND WEIGHTLESSNESS, BUT
HOW WILL THEY BE SOCIALIZED? YOU PUT A BABY IN A SINGLE PLACE ALONE,
THEY DON'T LEARN HOW TO READ.
THEY WOULDN'T SURVIVE, IN FACT.
WE'RE VERY DEPENDENT.
WE ARE SOCIAL BEINGS.
WE WOULD HAVE TO DEVELOP INTELLIGENT ROBOTS TO HATCH THE EMBRYOS AND
THEN TEACH THEM WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.
IT'S CONCEIVABLE THAT PERHAPS WE WILL HAVE ROBOT NANNIES THAT CAN
INCORPORATE THE LAWS OF SOCIAL INTERACTION.
COULD A ROBOT REALLY RAISE A CHILD? OR, IN OUR RUSH TO SAVE HUMANITY,
WILL WE WIND UP FORGETTING WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN? RAISING HUMAN
EMBRYOS MAY BE TOO MUCH OF A GAMBLE.
SO COULD WE FREEZE ADULTS INSTEAD WITHOUT AFFECTING THEIR HEALTH? IT'S
A MUCH BIGGER CHALLENGE, BUT NATURE HAS ALMOST SOLVED IT.
A LOT OF ANIMALS ON EARTH WILL GO INTO SUSPENDED ANIMATION OR
HIBERNATION WHEN CONDITIONS GET BAD.
AND IN SOME CASES, THEY CAN STAY THAT WAY FOR A LONG TIME.
THE ALASKAN WOOD FROG SURVIVES WHOLE WINTERS FROZEN IN ICE.
AT SUBZERO TEMPERATURES, ITS METABOLISM SLOWS AND EFFECTIVELY SHUTS
DOWN.
WHEN THE ICE THAWS, THE FROGS REANIMATE AND HOP OFF AS THOUGH NOTHING
HAPPENED.
COULD HUMANS EVER DO THE SAME THING? WHEN YOU FREEZE SOMEBODY ALIVE,
THERE ARE ICE CRYSTALS WHICH FORM WHICH BEGIN TO EXPAND, RUPTURING THE
CELLS, AND TURN CELLS INTO MUSH.
SO HOW DO THE FROGS SURVIVE THE DEEP FREEZE? THE ANSWER IS THEY HAVE AN
ANTIFREEZE IN THEIR BLOOD, AND THAT IS GLUCOSE.
SO EVEN THOUGH THEIR SURROUNDING ENVIRONMENT IS SOLID ICE, INSIDE,
THEIR CELLS ARE LIQUID.
THE PROBLEM WITH HUMANS IS, THAT AMOUNT OF ANTIFREEZE WOULD KILL US.
DEEP-FREEZING HUMANS ISN'T GOING TO WORK.
BUT TO HIBERNATE, WE MAY NOT HAVE TO CHILL THAT LOW.
IN PITTSBURGH, SURGEONS HAVE DEVELOPED A GROUNDBREAKING TECHNIQUE USING
CHILLED SALINE SOLUTION TO RAPIDLY LOWER THEIR PATIENTS' BODY
TEMPERATURE TO JUST A FEW DEGREES ABOVE FREEZING.
AT THIS TEMPERATURE, CELLULAR ACTIVITY STOPS.
JUST LIKE THE WOOD FROGS, THE PATIENTS ARE EFFECTIVELY IN SUSPENDED
ANIMATION.
IN OPERATING ROOMS, WE CAN COOL PEOPLE DOWN AND PUT THEM IN AN
ARTIFICIAL COMA FOR A WHILE.
SO, IT SOUNDS GOOD, AND LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, IT'S WORTH EXPLORING.
WHETHER THROUGH FREEZING EMBRYOS OR PUTTING ADULTS INTO A COLD, DEEP
SLEEP, SUSPENDED ANIMATION MAY BE THE BEST BET FOR KEEPING OUR PRECIOUS
HUMAN CARGO ALIVE ON THE LONG TRIP TO ALPHA CENTAURI.
BUT WHAT IF THEY GET THERE AND FIND THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME? A
SPACESHIP FILLED WITH HUMAN VOLUNTEERS APPROACHES THE TRIPLE-STAR
SYSTEM, ALPHA CENTAURI.
THE CREW HOPES TO FIND THE FIRST OF MANY NEW WORLDS FOR MANKIND TO CALL
HOME.
BUT WHICH, IF ANY, OF THESE STARS WILL HAVE THE RIGHT KIND OF PLANETS?
WE WANT TO FIND A HOME THAT'S AS SIMILAR TO EARTH AS WE CAN POSSIBLY
FIND, BECAUSE WE'RE FINE-TUNED FOR THIS PLANET.
WE'RE JUST FINE-TUNED FOR THIS SURFACE GRAVITY.
WE'RE FINE-TUNED FOR THIS ATMOSPHERE, THIS RADIATION ENVIRONMENT.
THE STARS FILL THE SPACECRAFT'S DISPLAYS, AND SOON, THE OUTLINE OF
PLANETS WILL BE VISIBLE.
THE BRIGHTEST OF THE TRIO IS ALPHA CENTAURI "A.
" IT'S SLIGHTLY BIGGER AND SLIGHTLY BRIGHTER THAN OUR SUN, THROWING
MORE HEAT INTO THE SPACE AROUND IT.
ITS SMALLER, COOLER NEIGHBOR, ALPHA CENTAURI "B," LIES SO CLOSE,
GRAVITY PULLS THE TWO STARS INTO A WIDE, SLOW BINARY ORBIT ROTATING
ONCE EVERY 80 YEARS.
THAT'S BAD NEWS FOR OUR PIONEERS.
PLANETS RARELY FORM STABLE ORBITS AROUND WIDE BINARY SYSTEMS, SO
THERE'S LITTLE CHANCE OF FINDING A PLACE TO SETTLE HERE.
BUT THE THIRD STAR IN THE TRIO OFFERS HOPE.
PROXIMA CENTAURI IS A RED DWARF OR "M" DWARF STAR, TOO SMALL AND DIM TO
BE SEEN FROM EARTH WITH THE NAKED EYE.
YET ASTRONOMERS HAVE FOUND EARTH-LIKE PLANETS AROUND THIS TYPE OF STAR
THROUGHOUT THE MILKY WAY GALAXY.
WE'RE FINDING THAT RED DWARFS ARE IDEAL IN A NUMBER OF WAYS.
IN PARTICULAR, THEY SEEM TO BE ABSOLUTELY TEEMING WITH EARTH-SIZED
PLANETS.
ASTRONOMERS HAVE ALREADY DISCOVERED ONE EARTH-SIZED PLANET AROUND
PROXIMA CENTAURI.
IT ORBITS TOO CLOSE TO THE STAR TO SUSTAIN HUMAN LIFE, BUT THERE'S A
GOOD CHANCE IT MAY HAVE SISTER PLANETS THAT CAN.
IF WE WERE TO LOOK UP INTO THE NIGHT SKY AND LOOK AT THE NEAREST "M"
DWARF STAR SAY, PROXIMA CENTAURI I WOULD EXPECT TO SEE A SYSTEM OF
THREE TO SIX VERY SMALL PLANETS IN EXTREMELY COMPACT ORBITS, MEANING
ORBITAL PERIODS OF ONLY A FEW DAYS.
PROXIMA CENTAURI MAY WELL BE HOME TO A ROCKY PLANET IDEAL FOR LIFE,
WITH A THICK ATMOSPHERE, WARM, LIQUID OCEANS, AND A STRONG
MAGNETOSPHERE TO PROTECT IT THE PERFECT REFUGE FOR MANKIND TO SET UP
OUR FIRST NEW HOME.
BUT WHAT IF WE FIND A PLANET THAT'S A LITTLE LESS THAN PERFECT TOO
COLD, PERHAPS, WITH TOO MUCH GRAVITY OR MAYBE THE WRONG KIND OF
ATMOSPHERE? WE ARE GENETICALLY PROGRAMMED TO THRIVE ON THE PLANET EARTH
WITH A SPECIFIC AMOUNT OF OXYGEN, A SPECIFIC AMOUNT OF CARBON DIOXIDE,
AND A CERTAIN WEIGHT.
HOWEVER, ONCE WE LAND ON A DISTANT PLANET, WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO CHANGE
OUR BODIES SO THAT WE CAN THRIVE IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS.
WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO BE ABLE TO ENGINEER OURSELVES.
WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO BE ABLE TO EVOLVE OURSELVES RAPIDLY.
THAT MAY MEAN TAKING GENES FROM OTHER LIFE FORMS TO GIVE OURSELVES SOME
PROPERTY THAT WE NEED.
THAT MIGHT JUST BE THE BEST SOLUTION.
SCIENTISTS HAVE SEARCHED HIGH AND LOW TO FIND THE ULTIMATE GENES FOR
SURVIVAL IN SPACE, AND THEY MAY HAVE FOUND THEM IN A CREATURE NO BIGGER
THAN A GRAIN OF SAND.
RIGHT NOW AT NASA, WE'RE DOING EXPERIMENTS ON TINY, LITTLE ANIMALS
CALLED TARDIGRADES.
TARDIGRADES ARE TOUGH.
THEY CAN SURVIVE A RANGE OF TEMPERATURES FROM FREEZING TO BOILING
POINT.
THEY CAN LIVE WITHOUT FOOD OR WATER FOR A DECADE OR MORE.
AND, CRUCIALLY, WHEN THEIR DNA GETS DAMAGED BY RADIATION, IT REPAIRS
ITSELF.
A TINY, LITTLE, MICROSCOPIC THING CAN SURVIVE MORE RADIATION THAN WOULD
KILL A HERD OF ELEPHANTS.
SOMEHOW, THE DNA KNOWS HOW TO REPAIR ITSELF.
WE'RE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW WE COULD MODIFY HUMAN DNA TO DO THE SAME
THING.
ONE DAY, DNA FROM THESE TINY CREATURES MAY ALLOW US TO SET FOOT ON A
PLANET BATTERED BY RADIATION FROM ITS PARENT STAR.
AND GENETIC TINKERING MAY HOLD THE KEY TO MUCH MORE, ALLOWING US TO
COLONIZE A MULTITUDE OF HOSTILE, ALIEN WORLDS.
IF THE PLANET HAS A LARGER GRAVITATIONAL FIELD, WE MAY HAVE TO INCREASE
THE STRENGTH OF OUR BONES AND THE STRENGTH OF OUR MUSCLES SO WE DON'T
COLLAPSE EVERY TIME WE WALK ON THE SURFACE OF A LARGE PLANET.
WE COULD EVEN ADAPT TO DIFFERENT ATMOSPHERES.
IF WE WERE TO ARRIVE ON A PLANET THAT HAS A DIFFERENT OXYGEN LEVEL,
DIFFERENT CARBON DIOXIDE LEVEL, WE MAY HAVE TO ALTER OUR METABOLISM
RATE.
WE ARE BEGINNING TO TAKE CONTROL OF OUR OWN EVOLUTION.
WE ARE DESIGNING GENE THERAPIES.
WE ARE FINDING WAYS TO MODIFY OUR BIOLOGY.
THERE'S A WONDERFUL CHANCE HERE TO REALLY TAKE CONTROL OF OUR OWN
DESTINY AND DRIVE OURSELVES TO THE STARS.
WHO KNOWS WHAT THE FUTURE ASTRONAUT WILL LOOK LIKE? BUT I STRONGLY
SUSPECT THAT THEY WON'T LOOK LIKE YOU OR ME.
IF WE FIND HABITABLE WORLDS AROUND PROXIMA CENTAURI, A SHUTTLE FULL OF
GENETICALLY ALTERED PIONEERS WILL BE DISPATCHED TO THE SURFACE IN ORDER
TO START A NEW HUMAN CIVILIZATION.
BUT THIS IS JUST THE FIRST STAGE OF A MUCH BIGGER PLAN.
WE MUST CONTINUE TO SEARCH OUT MORE WORLDS, TRAVELING EVER DEEPER AND
FASTER INTO THE MILKY WAY.
ONE DAY, A COSMIC EVENT IS GOING TO HIT THE EARTH SO HARD, IT WILL WIPE
OUT EVERY HUMAN ON THE PLANET.
IF WE'RE GONNA LIVE ON INDEFINITELY INTO THE FUTURE, HUMAN BEINGS ARE
GONNA HAVE TO LEAVE PLANET EARTH.
OUR ONLY HOPE IS TO BUILD A SPACE ARK THAT WILL TAKE US TO NEW WORLDS
AROUND DISTANT STARS.
LIFE IS FRAGILE, AND THAT'S WHY I BELIEVE WE SHOULD BE AT LEAST A TWO-
PLANET SPECIES.
THE FIRST TARGET WAS BY FAR THE EASIEST.
IT TOOK 42 YEARS FOR OUR SPACE ARK TO REACH PROXIMA CENTAURI USING
FUSION-POWERED ENGINES.
BUT NOW THE ARK MUST MOVE ON TO FIND EVEN MORE DISTANT WORLDS.
THE CREW CAN BE HELD IN SUSPENDED ANIMATION, BUT THEY'LL STILL
DETERIORATE WITH EACH PASSING YEAR.
WE NEED TO GO FASTER, CLOSER TO THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
BUT THERE'S A SMALL PROBLEM THE LAWS OF PHYSICS.
WHAT ALBERT EINSTEIN FIGURED OUT IS THAT IF YOU START TRAVELING NEAR
THE SPEED OF LIGHT, THINGS GET A LITTLE BIZARRE.
AS YOU GET NEAR THE SPEED OF LIGHT, YOUR MASS INCREASES, MEANING THAT
YOU HAVE TO HAVE MORE ENERGY TO KEEP YOU GOING.
BY THE TIME YOU GET TO NEAR THE SPEED OF LIGHT, ALL THE FUEL TURNS INTO
INCREASING THE MASS.
SO ALL THE FUEL THAT, BEFORE, WOULD'VE INCREASED THE SPEED A LOT,
DOESN'T INCREASE THE SPEED AT ALL.
IT JUST INCREASES THE MASS.
EVENTUALLY, YOU DON'T SPEED UP AT ALL.
YOU JUST GET HEAVIER AND HEAVIER AS YOU SHOOT OUT PROPELLANT.
PHYSICS WON'T ALLOW US TO TRAVEL THROUGH SPACE AT THE KIND OF SPEEDS WE
NEED.
BUT THERE'S A LOOPHOLE THAT MAY ALLOW US TO CUT THROUGH HYPERSPACE AND
REACH DISTANT PLANETS A WHOLE LOT FASTER.
EINSTEIN SHOWED US THAT SPACE ITSELF CAN EXPAND FASTER THAN THE SPEED
OF LIGHT.
SPACE AND TIME IS NOT NOTHING.
THERE'S A SUBSTANCE TO IT A FABRIC, IF YOU WILL.
AND YOU CAN STRETCH IT, AND YOU CAN BEND IT.
IN SCIENCE FICTION, GALACTIC TRAVELERS MANIPULATE THE FABRIC OF SPACE-
TIME USING WARP DRIVES, CROSSING THE COSMOS IN MINUTES, NOT MILLENNIA.
IMAGINE YOU'RE IN A ROOM, AND THERE'S A CARPET.
AND YOU NEED TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM.
ONE THING YOU CAN DO IS YOU CAN TAKE THE CARPET AND FOLD IT UP AND
BRING ALL OF IT CLOSE TO YOU, THEN STEP OVER THE FOLDED CARPET AND THEN
LET IT UNFOLD BEHIND YOU.
AND NOW YOU'VE MOVED ACROSS THE ROOM REALLY QUICKLY.
IT WOULD TAKE A COLOSSAL AMOUNT OF ENERGY TO WARP ALL THE SPACE BETWEEN
YOU AND YOUR DESTINATION, FAR MORE THAN WE COULD EVER HOPE TO GENERATE.
BUT MODERN PHYSICS SAYS THE WARP DRIVE IS POSSIBLE, IF YOU ONLY WARP
THE SPACE SURROUNDING THE SHIP.
SO, WE KNOW THAT SPACE EXPANDS, AND SPACE CAN ALSO CONTRACT.
SO, IF YOU HAVE A SHIP, AND YOU CONTRACT SPACE IN FRONT OF YOU AND
EXPAND SPACE BEHIND YOU, YOU COULD CREATE A WARP BUBBLE.
AND IT'S BEEN THEORETICALLY SHOWN THAT YOU COULD MOVE TO UP TO THIS
NEW-GENERATION WARP DRIVE CREATES A WAVE IN SPACE-TIME THAT TRAVELS
FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT, CARRYING THE SHIP ALONG WITH IT LIKE A
SURFER RIDING A WAVE.
MATHEMATICIANS HAVE LOOKED AT THE NUMBERS, AND A NEW-GENERATION WARP
DRIVE WOULD WORK ON PAPER.
NOW NASA WANTS TO GET IT TO WORK IN THE LAB.
IS IT IMPOSSIBLE, OR IS IT PLAUSIBLE? I THINK WE'RE IN THAT CATEGORY OF
STARTING TO THINK ABOUT, "WE'VE GOT SOME PLAUSIBILITIES HERE.
"LET'S GO SEE IF WE CAN'T DO SOME SCIENTIFIC EFFORTS AND SEE VALIDATION
OF THE MATH AND PHYSICS.
" HAROLD WHITE IS PLANNING A FUTURE EXPERIMENT TO SEE IF HE CAN WARP
SPACE ON A MICROSCOPIC SCALE.
HE HOPES TO CONCENTRATE ENERGY INTO A SINGLE POINT IN SPACE AND THEN
MEASURE THE PROGRESS OF LASER LIGHT CROSSING IT.
IF THE LIGHT COMPLETES THE JOURNEY FASTER THAN NORMAL, HE'LL HAVE
SUCCEEDED IN WARPING SPACE-TIME.
EVERYBODY ALWAYS ASKS ME ABOUT, "WHEN'S THIS GONNA BE READY TO BOLT
ONTO A SPACECRAFT?" AND THERE'S A LOT OF SCIENCE WE NEED TO DO FIRST.
WE'RE ONLY JUST NOW STARTING TO LOOK INTO THIS.
WE DON'T KNOW IF IT'S GONNA WORK OR NOT.
WE MIGHT AS WELL FIGURE IT OUT.
IF IT DOES BOOM.
AND IF IT DOESN'T WELL, WE'VE LEARNED SOMETHING INTERESTING ABOUT MATH
AND SCIENCE AND THE WAY THE UNIVERSE WORKS.
A WARP-DRIVE WOULD FIRE US TO PROXIMA CENTAURI IN JUST FIVE MONTHS AND
TO THE 50 STARS BEYOND IN JUST A FEW YEARS.
BUT THAT'S STILL JUST OUR GALACTIC BACKYARD.
A WARP TRIP TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE MILKY WAY WOULD TAKE 10,000 YEARS,
AND A TRIP BEYOND IT TO THE CLOSEST GALAXIES, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF
YEARS.
ON THE SCALE OF THE UNIVERSE, EVEN A WARP-DRIVE SEEMS PATHETICALLY
SLOW.
BUT THERE IS ONE LAST HOPE.
ANOTHER WAY TO GO FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT IS TO DRILL A HOLE IN
THE FABRIC OF SPACE AND TIME.
THIS IS CALLED A WORMHOLE.
A WORMHOLE IS A THEORETICAL TUNNEL, A RIP THROUGH THE FABRIC OF SPACE-
TIME, CONNECTING TWO DISTANT POINTS.
IT'S CREATED BY HUGE CONCENTRATIONS OF MASS WARPING SPACE-TIME.
THINK OF ALICE'S LOOKING GLASS.
YOU PUT YOUR HAND THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, AND YOUR HAND WINDS UP ON
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GALAXY.
IF OUR SPACECRAFT COULD ENTER THIS COSMIC SHORTCUT, WE COULD JUMP
THOUSANDS OF YEARS IN AN INSTANT.
THE ONLY TROUBLE IS ASTRONOMERS HAVE NEVER SEEN ONE, AND ATTEMPTING TO
CREATE ONE WOULD BE FATAL.
TO BEND SPACE AT EITHER MOUTH OF THE WORMHOLE TO MAKE A TUNNEL, YOU
HAVE TO PRODUCE HUGE AMOUNTS OF MASS.
BUT MASS IS ATTRACTIVE.
AND WE CAN PROVE THAT IF NORMAL MASS IS ALL YOU HAVE, THAT EITHER END
OF THE WORMHOLE WILL COLLAPSE TO FORM A BLACK HOLE IN A TIME-SCALE
SHORTER THAN IT WOULD TAKE YOU TO GO THROUGH THE WORMHOLE.
I DON'T THINK WORMHOLES ARE EVER GONNA WORK AS A WAY OF TRANSPORTATION.
BUT YOU KNOW WHAT? TYPICALLY, THOSE PEOPLE WHO SAID THAT SOMETHING
COULDN'T HAPPEN IN SCIENCE TURNED OUT TO BE WRONG.
SO I TAKE THAT BACK.
I THINK IT'S UNLIKELY, BUT IT MAY HAPPEN.
WARP DRIVES AND WORMHOLES ARE DISTANT DREAMS.
FOR NOW, FUSION IS THE LIKELY FUEL TO TAKE US TO THE STARS.
BUT IT MAY TAKE MILLIONS OF YEARS FOR A GIANT SPACE ARK TO COLONIZE
ENOUGH PLANETS TO GUARANTEE OUR SURVIVAL.
THE ONLY WAY TO GO FASTER WITH FUSION IS TO MAKE OUR SPACE ARK MUCH
SMALLER SO SMALL, IN FACT, THERE'D BE NO ROOM FOR PEOPLE INSIDE.
SO IS THIS REALLY GAME OVER, OR COULD WE SAVE HUMANITY WITHOUT HUMANS?
NOT SO LONG AGO, ASTRONOMERS WEREN'T SURE IF THE STARS THEY SAW IN THE
NIGHT SKY HAD PLANETS ORBITING THEM.
PERHAPS THE SUN WAS UNIQUE, AND THE EARTH ALONE IN THE MILKY WAY.
BUT OVER THE LAST 20 YEARS, WE'VE REVEALED A MIND-BLOWING TRUTH.
IT SEEMS THAT A LARGE FRACTION OF STARS IN THE GALAXY HAVE PLANETS.
AND, IN FACT, MANY OF THOSE STARS HAVE MULTIPLE PLANETS.
THESE EXOPLANETS RANGE IN SIZE FROM GAS-GIANT PLANETS BIGGER THAN
JUPITER TO ROCKY WORLDS LIKE THE EARTH.
AND THEY'RE EVERYWHERE WE LOOK.
OUR PLANET EARTH IS NOT UNIQUE.
IT'S NOT EVEN RARE.
THERE ARE TONS, HOARDS, FLOCKS, IF YOU WILL, OF OTHER EARTH-LIKE
PLANETS OUT THERE FLUTTERING AROUND THE OTHER STARS.
SOME STARS PROBABLY HAVE MULTIPLE EARTHS ORBITING THEM.
THAT'S HOW COMMON EARTH-LIKE PLANETS ARE.
LOOK INTO THE NIGHT SKY AND COUNT FIVE STARS.
ONE OF THOSE STARS HAS AN EARTH-SIZED PLANET AROUND IT, MAYBE OUR NEXT
HOME.
APPLY WHAT WE'VE FOUND TO THE REST OF THE MILKY WAY, AND THE RESULTS
ARE STAGGERING AROUND SUN-LIKE STARS, UP TO AROUND RED DWARF STARS,
ANOTHER 22 BILLION, AND GAS-GIANT EXOPLANETS MAY BE HOME TO TENS OF
BILLIONS MORE POTENTIAL EARTHS IN THE FORM OF HABITABLE EXOMOONS.
THERE ARE MANY EARTH-LIKE PLANETS THAT WE'RE GONNA HAVE AS OPTIONS OF
PLACES TO GO, ALMOST SORT OF A MENU SPREAD OUT IN FRONT OF US.
CLEARLY, FINDING NEW EARTHS IS NOT THE PROBLEM.
THE PROBLEM IS GETTING THERE.
THE UNIVERSE IS ACTUALLY KIND OF TANTALIZING US.
EARTH-LIKE PLANETS ARE COMMON.
THEY'RE ALL OVER THE PLACE.
BUT THEY'RE SO FAR AWAY THAT WITH OUR CURRENT TECHNOLOGY, WE CANNOT
IMAGINE HOW TO GET THERE.
A GIANT SPACE ARK, POWERED BY FUSION ENGINES AND FILLED WITH THOUSANDS
OF HUMAN VOLUNTEERS, SHOULD ALLOW US TO COLONIZE HABITABLE WORLDS NEAR
OUR SUN.
BUT TO GO BEYOND THAT, TO THE FAR REACHES OF THE MILKY WAY, WE NEED
PLAN "B.
" ONE RADICAL SOLUTION WOULD BE TO SEND MINIATURE ROBOTS TO DISTANT
PLANETS INSTEAD OF HUMANS.
WHEN I THINK ABOUT HOW MUCH WE'RE LEARNING ABOUT THE HUMAN BRAIN AND
HOW IT WORKS AND THERE'S STILL A LONG WAY TO GO IT DOES SEEM TO ME
FAIRLY INEVITABLE THAT SOMEDAY, WE'LL BE ABLE TO PUT ALL OF OURSELVES
INTO A ROBOT.
NOW, YOU MIGHT SAY, "THAT'S SO SAD, BECAUSE WE WANT TO GET HUMANS ON
THOSE PLANETS.
" WELL, ONE, IF YOU REALLY WANT TO THINK SCIENCE FICTION, WHY NOT
ULTIMATELY TAKE A MACHINE THAT CAN BUILD A HUMAN AT THE OTHER END?
PLANTS SPREAD THEIR GENES BY SOWING HUGE NUMBERS OF TINY, MOBILE SEEDS
INTO THE WIND.
MANY SEEDS WILL BE LOST TO THE ELEMENTS, BUT THOSE THAT FIND WARM, WET
EARTH COME TO LIFE.
IMAGINE FIRING TINY NANO-ROBOTS INTO SPACE LIKE SEEDS, WITH HUMAN
GENOMES BURNED ONTO THEIR HARD DRIVES.
IF THEY FALL THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE OF A WET, WARM PLANET SUITABLE FOR
HUMANS, THEY SPRING INTO ACTION.
THEY'LL LAND AND MAKE SHELTERS FROM THE MATERIALS THEY FIND ON THE
PLANET.
AND, SOMEHOW, THEY'LL ALSO MAKE THE HUMANS THAT LIVE INSIDE THEM.
MAYBE WE'LL SEND THOUSANDS OF THESE NANOSHIPS, AS THEY'RE CALLED, MAYBE
MILLIONS OF THEM, LIKE SEEDS, TO A NEARBY STAR, HOPING THAT JUST A FEW
OF THEM A FEW OF THEM, ACTUALLY REACH THEIR DESTINATION.
THE TECHNOLOGY TO CREATE A HUMAN FROM SCRATCH IS CLEARLY A LONG WAY
OFF.
BUT IT DOES RAISE INTRIGUING PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS.
WHY SHOULD WE ONLY SAVE HUMANS? THERE ARE 8.
7 MILLION SPECIES ON EARTH.
ARE WE THE ONLY ONES WORTH SAVING? AND IF WE CAN'T SEND THE FULL GAMUT
OF LIFE ON EARTH, WHY NOT SIMPLY SEND BACTERIA TO DISTANT WORLDS AND
LET EVOLUTION DO THE REST? AND WHO KNOWS? MAYBE AN ALIEN SPECIES HAS
ALREADY DONE THAT ON THE EARTH.
MAYBE IN YOUR BACKYARD, THERE'S A NANOSHIP FROM A DISTANT STAR SYSTEM,
AND YOU WOULD NEVER KNOW.
WHEREVER WE WIND UP AND WHATEVER WE ULTIMATELY BECOME, THE TIME TO
START PLANNING FOR OUR SURVIVAL IS RIGHT NOW.
THE HUMAN IMAGINATION IS TAKING US ON SOME TRULY AMAZING PATHS, AND
THEY MAY LEAD US TO FIND A WAY WHERE INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL COULD REALLY
WORK.
OUR FATE IS, IN MANY WAYS, IN OUR OWN HANDS.
WE'RE NOT DINOSAURS.
WE HAVE A SPACE PROGRAM.
WE'RE SMART.
IF WE HAVE COLONIES ON OTHER PLANETS, THE EARTH CAN BE WIPED OUT, AND
HUMANITY WON'T BE.
IN THAT SENSE, OUR FUTURE, OUR LONG-TERM FUTURE THAT'S IN OUR OWN
HANDS.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s03e08

The search for a second earth

the earth is not alone in the last few years scientists have found that
our planet is just one of billions out there in the Milky Way galaxy
there's a really decent chance that there are more planets in the
galaxy than there actually are stars we're now scouring these planets
for evidence of atmospheres liquid water and life itself we are going
to know where in the night sky you can point and find another earth we
have a scientific method to actually determine whether there is life on
another planet another earth alien life the truth is out there but are
we ready for it the earth gives us the blueprint for life as we know it
the Sun warms our oceans creating the perfect environment for all
scales of life from the very smallest to the Giants that eat them
Mountains Plains and forests teen with plant and animal species and
it's all cocooned in a thick atmosphere that nurtures and protects for
us it's paradise twenty years ago a group of scientists decided to find
out if there were other paradises out there so-called exoplanets
orbiting the stars that light up our night sky just in the last decade
we've had this explosion and the discovery of these exoplanets which
has revolutionized the whole field of astronomy the early days of
exoplanet hunting turned up enormous jupiter-sized planets by the
boatload these hot gas each iins proved easy to find but hostile to
life as we know it now though new telescopes and technologies have
allowed astronomers to target smaller planets earth-sized ones and the
stunning results have transformed the way we see our place in the
universe we now know something precious that our planet Earth is not
unique it's not even rare there are tons hoards flocks if you will of
other earth-like planets out there fluttering around the other stars
some stars probably have multiple earths orbiting them that's how
common earth-like planets are we owe this exoplanet explosion to a
Space Telescope called Kepler the Kepler space telescope is an
observatory in space that is staring at one spot in the sky it's
looking at roughly 150,000 stars and it's looking for the tell-tale
sign of planets orbiting those stars then every time the planet passes
in front of the star it'll block a little bit of that star light and if
you plot the amount of light you get from the star it drops and then
goes back up as the planet passes in just four years scientists have
detected over a thousand exoplanets just from their shadows but Kepler
has a problem it can't tell if the shadow is made by a giant gassy
planet hostile to life or a potentially habitable earth-like planet
what we're measuring when a when a planet passes in front of its host
star is what is the area of the planet relative to the area of the star
that it's passing in front of it's a it's a ratio basically but Jupiter
sized planets crossing giant stars full Kepler because they block the
same fraction of light as earth sized planets crossing smaller stars to
prove a planet is earth sized you first need to measure the size of its
star using the world's biggest telescopes but that's time-consuming
expensive and it creates a huge exoplanet backlog but astronomer Kavon
Stassen has come up with an ingenious shortcut by turning the raw
Kepler data into sound what the Kepler telescope directly measures and
the data that we use is small changes in brightness that a star
produces due to the flickering arising from the boiling and roiling
motions of gas at its surface what we can do then is take that light
flickering data and transform it in a sound studio for example into
audio frequencies and so then we can represent with sound what we're
actually detecting with light the bigger the star the more its surface
boils with activity making big stars flicker more powerfully converted
to sound this boiling becomes a deafening hiss well let's listen to
some stars okay can we hear the red giant star please I'm gonna bring
up the volume here this is a very large star very low density and so
that large amount of hiss is the result of vigorous boiling and
churning at the surface of this large red giant star can we get the
dwarf star please on smaller stars sunspots dominate the sound profile
creating a low-frequency drone actually sounds like a series of clicks
come but below the clicks lies the faint hiss Kavon needs to size the
star underneath it at a very low level is a little bit of hiss that
little bit of is actually the light flickering that we're interested in
by accurately measuring the level of this background hiss Kavon can
work out the size of the star in this case it's around the same size as
our star the Sun cave-ins work could be the breakthrough exoplanet
hunters have been hoping for it's cheap the results are practically
instantaneous and once you know the size of the star figuring out the
size of the planets casting shadows over it is child's play it feels
like a very privileged time to be a scientist to be an astronomer
working in this area and contributing to the hunt for the next earth
here we are actually discovering these worlds by the hundreds and now
on the cusp of being able to identify the next earth astronomers
suspect there could be tens of billions of rocky earth-like planets in
the Milky Way places where perhaps life has gotten a foothold but life
as we know it requires water how can scientists possibly find this
miracle substance on planets light-years away water divides our living
world those with it prosper those about suffer remarkably the water we
drink today contains the same atoms as the water dinosaurs drank 100
million years ago it's the same water that formed clouds of the earlier
four billion years ago and every organism that has ever existed on
earth has used this single ration of water as the biochemical
powerhouse that keeps it alive on earth all life requires liquid water
to grow and reproduce it's the common ecological requirement for life
liquid water is just so good for getting evolution going molecules can
dissolve in the water actually interact with each other for more
complex chains it does it with charge there's positive charges and
negative charges separated between the hydrogen and the oxygen in h2o
those charges break apart the hydrocarbons the carbon-based molecules
that persist everywhere in nature now that's very rare hardly any other
liquids do that so liquid water is a natural starting place when you
look out into the universe and say what planets could possibly have
life to understand how much liquid water is out there astronomers must
first calculate how common water is in all its forms amazingly they
find it everywhere they look water is incredibly common in its gaseous
form we see water vapor filling the space between the stars we see it
in clouds of material that are actually forming new stars and planets
right now since water is a fundamental building block of stars and
planets exoplanet worlds must surely have it in abundance but if you're
looking for life you need to find liquid water and plenty up to find it
astronomers take their cue from a fairy tale everybody knows the famous
story of Goldilocks and the three bears and the the cup of para girar
one was too hot one was too cold I was just right when it comes to
cooking up life like a porridge you need to have an environment that's
not too hot not too cold just right and traditionally we look for that
at a certain distance around a star at first astronomers based this
magical distance known as the Goldilocks zone on the Earth's orbit
around the Sun but as they found more and more exoplanets they've had
to re-evaluate the boundaries for liquid water there isn't a single
distance it depends on the brightness of your parent star a dim star
you need to be closer a hot star very bright need to be farther away
scientists have calculated just how many rocky planets may lie within
the Goldilocks zone of their stars it comes out to over 30 billion
potentially watering worries even more remarkably recent discoveries
have shown us it's not just planets that can bask in the warmth of the
Goldilocks zone there may be moons paint blue with oceans - most of the
planets were finding our big jupiter-sized planet however a lot of them
were are orbiting roughly where the earth is orbiting the Sun so even
if the planet that we're finding can't support life it could have a
moon a moon with an atmosphere that could support life and the biggest
of these rocky moons may resemble our home there could be billions upon
billions of XA means out there and even perhaps countless paradises
teeming with life David kipping searches for exomoons by looking for
double dips in the brightness of distant stars we look for XA means in
a very similar way to the way that we look for planets by looking for
them transit the host star now if that planet had a moon then we should
expect to have one big dip due to the planet and then one smaller depth
either to the left or to the right due to the new habitable exomoons
may play host to one of the most spectacular sights in the universe
imagine a warm rocky world just like our own with oceans mountains but
in the sky a massive ringed planet with a fiery sister moon shooting
hot magma into space exoplanets and now the vast potential of exomoons
int a galaxy filled with the possibilities for life but a rocky surface
and liquid oceans may not be enough biology needs the breath of life
air backlit by the Sun a halo appears around the earth a pale blue ring
of light our atmosphere and we owe it everything the Earth's atmosphere
provides the gases that fuel the biochemistry of advanced life but it
also protects the oceans from the full fury of the sun's rays
preventing the water from boiling away into space without an atmosphere
there would be no wind no rain no fresh water and probably no life
atmospheres are absolutely essential for life take a look at the planet
Earth and you realize that just like the skin of the Apple the skin of
the apple preserves the Apple well the atmosphere of our planet
preserves the oceans and makes possible the presence of life as we know
it scientists in search of living exoplanets hope to detect the thin
gassy envelope that should surround these alien worlds to do it they're
turning to the power of rainbows in the same way that water splits
sunlight into a rainbow astronomers use instruments to split starlight
into a band of colors called a spectrum it's one of the oldest tricks
and science and one of the most revealing several hundred years ago
scientists first began to take something like a prism and put it in
front of their telescope so he started taking the light from stars like
the Sun and actually spreading it out into a spectrum and what they saw
was kind of surprising so instead of seeing a rain continuous rainbow
of light they saw that rainbow but they saw these dark lines
superimposed on top each chemical elements of the star's atmosphere
absorbs different parts of the spectrum creating signature dark bands
for instance up the top there's a pair of lines in the yellow part of
the spectrum which are due to sodium like a DNA profile for stars
spectral analysis has taught us almost everything we know about stars
today but these same lines may hide a marvelous secret the faint signal
of alien atmospheres and perhaps also alien life so the challenge is
that these planets are very small and very faint so we can't actually
go and directly measure the light emitted from the planet the same way
that you go and measure this lovely spectrum for the Sun instead we
have to rely on more indirect methods so one indirect way of doing that
is to wait until the planet passes in front of the star when the light
of a star passes through an EXO atmosphere the gases that surround the
planet should stamp their own faint lines on the star's spectrum so as
we watch the light from the stars transmitted through that atmosphere
its atmosphere is going to act like a little filter so a part of the
star light is going to pass through that atmosphere and we're gonna see
that in printing extra lines on it which are due to the planet's
atmosphere so that change in the spectrum tells us something about the
properties of the planet's atmosphere the one chemical astronomers most
want to find is oxygen because only life can produce enough oxygen to
be easily detected it's a so-called bio signature the race is now on to
find bio signatures in the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets and while
some groups look for rainbows indirectly others are tackling the
challenge head-on 29 all right we're off then Oppenheimer is part of a
team trying to take direct photographs of exoplanets using massive
ground-based telescopes we're within minutes of taking our first long
exposure and I hope it's good the greatest challenge to imaging
exoplanets is the blinding light of the parent star which shines tens
of millions of times brighter than the planet itself the trick is to
stop the light of the star from entering the telescope sensors by
blocking it using a series of masks and lenses called a coronagraph
right now we're standing right underneath the telescope's primary
mirror and the light comes through a hole in the middle of the mirror
and goes into this crazy box here which is full of optics motors
sensors and electronics that all allow us to precisely control the star
light that's coming through the system using state-of-the-art software
they manipulate the coronagraph to black out the unwanted light under
good conditions we can actually carve dark holes into this image of the
star so that we can see really faint things in those regions
coronagraphs present an intriguing problem though errors within the
optics produce tiny flares of starlight called speckles that look just
like exoplanets but man has come up with an ingenious way to tell
speckles from planets so we've developed a technique where we exploit
an aspect of speckles which is that they change position in the image
depending on what color you take your image at so Ben takes the same
image of the star through different color filters and runs them like a
movie the speckles appear to move across the screen but the planets
stay stuck still allowing Ben to easily pick them out and so I'd like
to point out that there is a little thing right here that if you watch
for you're careful you'll notice that it doesn't move and the speckles
are washing over it this stationary blob is a candidate exoplanet and
below it and to the left is a second they both appear to orbit a star
around 200 light-years from the earth just a decade ago capturing an
image like this through a telescope was unthinkable but today thanks to
the ingenuity of astronomers like Ben we have hundreds and by analyzing
the light for these distant worlds scientists can work out their
chemical composition and potentially the fingerprints of life at this
point we're studying much larger planets gaseous things like Jupiter
that most likely don't have any kind of life like we know it but that's
a first step and we're going to fainter and smaller and smaller planets
as time goes on as we develop this technology in the not-too-distant
future scientists may be able to simply scan a star for earth-like
planets and find the signature of life there we can look right at the
light from a little planet around its distant star and that opens up a
whole range of possibilities for us to not just detect the planet but
to starting the planet I mean this all sounds like science fiction but
there is a reality to this we have a scientific method to actually
determine whether there is life on another planet life is one thing
intelligent life another all together that requires billions of years
and a powerful force field like the one we owe our lives to every day
if an alien astronomer were to file a report on our home solar system
they might make a surprising observation because of all the eight
planets that orbit the Sun they could easily conclude the two not one
were suitable for life it's an easy mistake to make because the Sun has
two planets within its Goldilocks zone the Earth and Mars both planets
have surfaces warm enough for liquid water to pool on but while the
earth is blessed with warm liquid oceans Mars is dry and dead the one
crucial difference between these two planets could be the key to
finding truly habitable exoplanets a magnetic shield our Sun is
constantly hurling deadly radiation out towards us only our magnetic
shield the magnetosphere saves us without it the solar wind would blow
our atmosphere away and without an atmosphere liquid water could not
exist on the surface in order to have liquid water not only do you need
the right temperature but you need the right pressure you know if there
were no atmosphere here right now even at the same temperature we are
today all of the water would boil off into vapor immediately so where
does the Earth's magnetosphere come from and why does it Mars have one
actually in the past both Earth and Mars had magnetospheres but Mars
lost its around 4 billion years ago and with it the potential for life
both the earth and Mars were born into a realm of violence asteroids
smashed into their surfaces turning rock and metal into a molten mass
as they started to cool a solid crust formed on surface but the molten
metal below churned as the planets turn inducing a magnetic field which
rose high up above the surface of both planets at the same time active
volcanoes pumped gas into the space around each planet protected by the
newly formed magnetic field these gases built up into thick atmospheres
creating the air pressure for liquid water to run on the surface for
over a hundred million years both Mars and Earth for warm wet paradises
primed for life to take off then quite suddenly Mars's magnetic
protection disappeared the solar wind blew its atmosphere into space
and its oceans boiled away leaving the dry sterile red rock we see
today Mars is fundamental problem is is that it's smaller than Earth
and because it's smaller the internal core of Mars cooled down and
solidified and once it becomes a solid metal there's no more magnetic
field magnetic field shuts off essentially and the atmosphere therefore
is vulnerable to both energy and radiation from the Sun and the rest of
the galaxy and probably just blew off whatever life was on there at
least on the surface is now completely exposed all rocky planets will
one day lose their magnetospheres as their cores cool and turn solid so
to know if an exoplanet is alive you need to work out if its
magnetosphere is still active but magnetospheres are tough to measure
because they are unbelievably weak the earth has a magnetic field of
approximately half a Gauss which when you think about it is actually
really weak our fridge magnets are about a hundred Gauss they're much
stronger Excel planets are too far away for us to measure such weak
magnetic fields directly but there is an indirect method when electrons
in the solar wind interacts with a planet's magnetosphere they emit
radio waves that beam out into space turning the planet into a giant
radio beacon astronomers like of geniu hoped to use these signals to
spot habitable exoplanets not only that the frequency of the signal
should also tell her how big the planet is if we're looking for the
magnetic signature in the radio waves of a giant planet say a hot
Jupiter we expected to have a strong magnetic field and therefore would
have a high frequency and around 100 megahertz kind of where the limit
of this radio is however a weaker field like Earth's requires us to go
down to lower and lower frequencies so instead of a hundred megahertz
we go down to ten megahertz but hunting for exoplanets at ten megahertz
presents a unique challenge because the Earth's own magnetic sphere
creates a deafening radio roar at that frequency so define alien
Earth's using radio requires a dish in space when we want to look for
magneto spheres of extrasolar planets we really need to get outside of
the earth-moon system in order to get away from all the radio
frequencies that are bouncing around the earth with a slew of new
technologies and upcoming technologies scientists are edging ever
closer to the ultimate prize finding a second earth I wouldn't be
surprised if we have that data about an earth and about life on it
around another star in 10 or 15 years I'm hoping to see that soon using
shadows rainbows and now radio we finally have the tools to detect a
planet just like our own but in the rush to find the Earth's identical
twin are we missing something big what if earth is an outlier a
freakishly lucky place on the very fringes of habitability could there
be another kind of planet out there even better for life for years
astronomers have scanned the heavens for planets that could sustain
life they faced their search on the earth seeking the exact same
conditions an exact same size I think right now there is a huge focus
to finding earth-like planets now whether or not there actually is life
there that is another question altogether but after 20 years of
searching for an earth clone the exoplanet hunters may be about to
switch targets recent observations have revealed a brand new class of
planet it's one that may eclipse our own home we've learned something
in the last few years that really shocked us with the Kepler space porn
telescope we have found hordes of planets that are a little bigger than
the earth we never imagined that there would be such planets in fact in
our own solar system there are no planets between the size of the earth
and the next largest planet that of Uranus and Neptune astronomers call
these mysterious planets super Earths super earths are about three to
five times the mass of the earth and there's nothing like that here we
don't know what they're like it's an entirely alien sort of planet in
just the last few years astronomers have begun to imagine the
conditions on this new class of planet and they've come to a startling
conclusion super earths could be super habitable there are probably
planets out there that are even more hospitable for life planets that
have even more chemicals necessary to create the organic materials that
create life conditions that make it more likely to get life off the
ground imagine a rocky planet twice the size of the earth dramatic
volcanism on the surface betrays a vast heart of fire that beats within
its core we expect that a heavier earth will be more geologically
active that the increased amount of geothermal heat within the super
earth will lead to stronger motions of the magma underneath the crust
belching volcanoes dot the surface of this super earth their gases feed
a super thick atmosphere and help to regulate a super stable climate
many times life on Earth was nearly extinguished for example once upon
a time the earth was snowball earth completely covered in ice maybe in
these other planets there are earth in which snowball earth never
happened that the taught climate was always stable and temperate the
grip of gravity is three times stronger here than we're used to it
pulls mountain ranges down to a third the height they'd be on earth
gravity also flattens the ocean bed making shallower CDs filled with
volcanic island chains and the nutrient-rich waters that surround these
archipelagos provide the perfect conditions for life in these other
planets perhaps they have conditions which would make DNA get off the
ground much earlier and flourish much more quickly finally our super
earth may be protected by a super magnetosphere the magnetic field
strength is a condition both of the mass of the planet as well as its
rotation speed and so it is quite likely that a planet that is a couple
of times bigger than the earths would be able to develop a stronger
magnetic field may shield the planet even better than our magnetic
field shields us having a stronger magnetosphere would be a distinct
advantage for life on a super earth surrounding the Milky Way's most
plentiful kind of star the M dwarf or red dwarf star red dwarf
habitable zones are much closer in than the earth is to the Sun because
their host star is so dim as if you took the terrestrial planets in our
own solar system and zapped it with a shrink ray gun and shrunk them
down to orbital periods that are less than about 30 days meaning that
they're very close to their stars some astronomers believe these
planets are at risk from solar activity such as deadly flares but a
super-earth with a super protective magnetosphere may well resist these
deadly rays allowing life to flourish under a psychedelic sky full of
swirling Aurora's if one was standing on a super earth we would see the
aurora come down to lower latitudes might get different colors if I had
the opportunity to travel to one of these exoplanets I would snap that
up pretty quickly most intriguing of all if life does exist on a red
dwarf super earth it could be home to the longest-lived civilizations
in the entire universe the advantage of the M Dwarfs is that they last
for much longer and if you had a super earth then keeping a strong
magnetic field going for billions and billions of years especially now
around a red dwarf that is going to exist for billions and billions of
years you might be in that perfect system where life can exist and
evolve into even more complex beings than us we're getting so close our
local neighborhood of stars teens with red dwarfs bursting with the
potential for advanced life but they're also cosmic killers out there
lurking in our galaxy prime to wipe out life on a regular basis is
anywhere safe the exoplanet revolution is in full swing the Kepler
space telescope has scanned our local neighborhood of stars for planets
and it's found them by the thousands for a long time we didn't know if
the other stars in our galaxy had planets and for thousands of years
there was no way to answer that question finally now with modern
technology we can do that and to our surprise we found they are
extremely common from Kepler's small sample astronomers believe there
could be tens of billions of rocky earth-like planets throughout the
Milky Way where life may already be thriving but how many of these
countless worlds is held onto this life long enough for intelligence to
evolve the answer surprisingly may depend on a planet's galactic zip
code the universe is not a happy safe place the universe wants to kill
us it's incredibly violent out there they're solar flares and
supernovae and black holes and colliding galaxies and all these really
amazingly dangerous and violent events it's actually kind of amazing
that we're here at all in order to develop advanced intelligent life an
exoplanet may have to avoid these cosmic killers for over three billion
years if we look at the history of the earth the first thing that
happens that's important is the origin of life right away very quickly
but then nothing for a long time you have nothing but microbes stomping
on the earth for the first two and a half billion years the earth was
ruled by single-celled Goom multicellular life has only been around for
a billion years fish for 500 million mammals for 200 million and modern
humans have only walked the earth for the last 200,000 years the lesson
is clear it takes a long time to cook up intelligent life but most
planets in the Milky Way don't have that kind of time astronomers
believe that a planet's position within a galaxy may determine if it
gets hit by global extinction events there's an idea of a habitable
zone for a galaxy and it's an analogy to the habitable zone around
stars stars too close to the galactic center are in the firing line
from their violent neighbors which frequently blast them with deadly
high-energy radiation in the middle of a galaxy we have a lot of bright
stars and young stars and maybe even supernova going off and so there's
a very harsh radiation field that's not good for life fired up by the
supermassive black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way this
cosmic Killzone stretches out around 8,000 light years from the
galactic center and extends out along the densely packed spiral arms
any planets that exist within this zone are likely to have their
surfaces regularly scrubbed clean of life fortunately for us our home
star the Sun sits in a relatively empty quiet zone between two of the
galaxy's spiral arms so there's this idea that there's a band in the
middle of the galaxy that's the Galactic habitable zone where you don't
have too many stars going off you don't have too many supernovae so
it's quiet in that way those might be great places for complex life
these green zones are like the suburbs the Milky Way galaxy they're
sheltered from the worst of the galaxy's radiation it's here that
earth-like worlds will have the luxury of long uninterrupted periods
for life to take hold and develop into more complex forms and
eventually perhaps intelligent life like us the Galactic habitable zone
is no more than a fledgling theory but if it's true it reduces the
number of places where advanced life could flourish in the Milky Way
the good news is those places should be near us and aliens more likely
to be on our doorstep and with our technology getting better every day
it surely won't be long before we find them I think in 20 years time
I'm gonna be able to look up into the night sky and say there really is
another place I could stand like this and feel at home suddenly we
humans will realize for the first time that there are other cultures
other civilizations probably other religions out there among the stars
and we are just one member of a grand galactic tribe to have cousins
that we one day may communicate with seems to me to be potentially one
of the greatest developments that humanity will ever ever experience
and if that isn't worth doing I don't know what is

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s03e09

how the universe built your car

Did you ever stop to wonder where your car came from? I mean, really
came from? Every component has a mind-blowing backstory, an epic
journey through time and space filled with the most violent events
since the big bang.
The history of your car is the history of the universe.
captions paid for by discovery communications How old is your car? My
car is about 5 years old.
My car was assembled in 2001.
The car I drive is pretty old.
It was manufactured in 1991.
But that's just when the pieces and parts were assembled.
To find out how old a car really is, we need to take a trip back to the
beginning of time.
Your car began its life billions of years ago, billions of miles away
in deep space.
The things that make up cars, those atoms, most of them were forged
well before our Earth was born.
You think your car is a clunker? It's actually 13.
8 billion years old.
All right.
Let's do it, sir.
So, what's the stuff that cars are made of? Best way to find out Tear
one apart.
Iron, plastics, oils and rubber are the first to go In another half
hour or so, this baby's gonna be completely stripped.
I can't wait to see it.
Then aluminum, silicon, copper.
And finally, precious metals, like platinum and gold.
Each of these materials is crucial for building a car.
But in the earliest days of the universe, none of them existed.
time and space are created in the big bang.
The early universe is filled with nothing but energy.
After the big bang, it was just a chaotic glob of stuff, nothing like
what you see today.
As the early universe cools, the energy gives way to unstable matter
and antimatter, then protons and neutrons and, finally, atoms.
But none of them are iron, silicon or carbon.
The vast, gassy clouds are mostly hydrogen.
Something had to happen to give us everything else.
And everything was actually made from hydrogen building blocks.
An atom of hydrogen is the simplest and lightest atom in the universe,
just a single positively charged proton bound to a single electron.
The universe then builds up bigger atoms like carbon and iron by fusing
hydrogen atoms together.
Everything starts from simpler origins.
An iron atom is actually lots and lots of simple hydrogen atoms that
were stuck together.
At first, this versatile proton building block doesn't want to stick.
Protons are positively charged.
So as you push them closer together, they're gonna resist coming closer
together.
They really don't want to hang out.
This repulsion makes the early universe a maelstrom of hydrogen atoms
swerving to avoid each other.
But if you can get them to a point where you can shove them together
enough, at some point, they're gonna lock together.
Pushing atoms together so strongly they stick is called nuclear fusion.
It's the first step for turning a universe full of gas into one filled
with the ingredients for planets, people, and cars.
So, how do you get two atoms to fuse? This guy's been doing it in his
garage since he was 14.
Taylor Wilson is obsessed with nuclear fusion.
Yeah, the neighbors know about the radioactive stuff that's in the
garage.
And so does the government.
It's all relatively low level.
That's my watch going off.
I think I'm the only person I've ever met with a geiger-counter watch.
The centerpiece of Taylor's nuclear man cave is this precision-
engineered fusion reactor, which he built when he was still in high
school.
Okay, I'll let in some gas now.
The first ingredient Hydrogen gas.
And it will be flowed into the chamber through this very precise
sapphire leak valve.
The next ingredient High-voltage electricity.
Hmm.
Oh, I wonder what the problem is.
- Power su - You probably want to plug it in.
Power supply is not plugged in.
Okay, let's try that again.
That's embarrassing.
I'm getting power from the laundry room now.
Taylor passes a high voltage through a small, spherical cage that sits
inside the reactor.
The negatively charged cage quickly draws the hydrogen ions inside it.
So it's taking all those ions and sucking them towards the center.
And as they fly in they get confined, and hopefully they collide with
each other and fuse.
The temperature of the atoms inside the cage is now so great that
hydrogen atoms are fusing together, creating heavier helium atoms and a
burst of energy hotter than the surface of the sun.
It's that little, tiny blob of plasma inside those grid wires that's
kind of like a star in a jar.
the universe uses gravity to fuse atoms instead of an electrical cage.
Across the cosmos, vast clouds of hydrogen gas collapse under their own
gravity.
Pressure and temperature build as more and more gas gets sucked in.
Eventually, fusion sparks deep in the core of these giant balls of gas,
and the first stars start to manufacture many of the heavy elements
that make up your car today.
A star is basically a machine for turning lighter elements into heavier
elements.
Fusion takes place only inside the core of these first stars, fusing
hydrogen atoms together to create helium.
And when all the hydrogen in the core is used up, the star finds new
fuel to burn.
After you burn hydrogen to form helium, the core of the star begins to
collapse and get hotter.
And there is enough energy then to fuse three helium nuclei into
carbon.
And then that fuses to form nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, iron.
But this incredible production line of elements can't go on forever.
The heavier atoms you ram together, the less energy you get out.
So you turn hydrogen into helium.
Helium becomes carbon, nitrogen, oxygen.
But every time there's a bit less energy to be had until you get to
iron.
The iron that is in your car is actually essentially a deadly poison
when it comes to a star.
It's robbing that star of the heat needed to keep itself up.
So the star collapses, dies, and explodes at the moment you create iron
in the core.
I mean, literally the fraction of a second.
I'm not kidding.
That's how dramatic and weird the steel in your car is.
The explosion, called a supernova, is one of the brightest and most
violent events in the universe.
It releases enough energy to dwarf what the sun puts out over its
entire lifetime.
And all of the elements that it has created are then dispersed out into
space.
The gassy remains of the explosion are called a supernova remnant, an
expanding bubble of hydrogen gas from the outer layers of the star that
mixes with stardust, the carbon, oxygen, silicon and iron from its
core.
And this same helped you drive to work last week.
This was once in the core of a dying star.
And who knows? Maybe some of the iron atoms in this brake disc were
forged in the heart of the very first generation of stars that
illuminated the universe.
When you're pumpin' iron, you're pumpin' a universe.
The first generation of stars created the materials in a car's chassis,
body, windshield and seats.
But we're still missing key components, like the copper for the car's
electronics.
To create this crucial metal, a new generation of stars must die an
even stranger death.
Picture our universe as the very first stars come to the end of their
lives.
The early milky way is filled with flashes as star after star explodes.
These violent supernovas hurl a rich cocktail of heavy elements into
space, the carbon, silicon, aluminum and iron atoms that will one day
build our cars here on Earth.
But take a closer look at today's cars, and there are many more
elements heavier than iron, like copper in the wiring and gold in the
connectors.
How did the universe create these heavy metals? In the case of copper,
the answer is reincarnation.
Copper is one metal that your car can't live without.
Turns out there's over a mile of copper in the average car.
And the reason why is because copper is an excellent electrical
conductor.
Copper's also used to conduct heat in radiators.
It stops bearings from failing when you need to go fast.
And when you need to stop, copper provides the friction in your brake
pads.
But the story of how that copper came to exist and be on Earth, that's
a truly remarkable story.
Copper begins with the death of a first-generation star.
The expanding supernova remnant slams into neighboring clouds of gas,
creating a shock wave of pressure, giving birth to a new generation of
stars.
There are cycles to the universe.
Stars form.
They live out their lives.
They die.
They blow off winds and they explode, ceding their material into gas
clouds which then form new stars with heavier elements in them, which
will repeat the cycle again.
So if you want to think about it that way, the universe is the ultimate
recycler.
The hydrogen gas that forms these second-generation stars is peppered
with the carbon, aluminum and iron thrown out by the supernova remnant.
The biggest of these dirty stars burn brightly for a few million years.
Then they undergo an incredible metamorphosis.
The star grows suddenly to 100 times its previous size.
Then it cools and turns a ghostly red.
The second-generation star has transformed into a red supergiant.
And it's in these diffuse outer layers that iron-rich stardust is
slowly converted into copper But not by fusion.
That iron nucleus has 26 protons.
That's a serious electric charge.
So it's gonna repel any protons we try to shoot in there.
How do we get more protons in? The way we get those protons in there is
we trick the nucleus.
Instead of shooting in protons, we shoot in neutrons.
Colliding atoms in the outer layers of a star sometimes spit out
neutrons.
Neutrons don't have a charge, so they're not repelled by the positively
charged protons in the iron stardust.
So these neutrons can stick to the other atoms around them.
An atom is a very tiny thing.
It makes a very small target.
But there's a lot of particles flying around near a star.
And if, by chance, a neutron can hit an atom, it can stick.
And that will actually make the nucleus of the atom larger.
Neutron by neutron can hit an atom.
And then that neutron can actually decay into a proton.
The neutron spits out an electron, and what's left is a proton and a
new, bigger atom.
In this case, copper.
Scientists call this magical transformation beta decay.
So you can build up heavy elements very slowly over the course of
thousands or millions of years just by capturing neutrons.
Eventually, the core of the red supergiant runs out of fuel, and the
star explodes, blasting its copper-rich outer layer into space.
Thanks to the life and death of two generations of stars, we can now
equip our car with copper wiring.
But we're still short of some even heavier metals, such as lead for the
battery and gold for the electrical connectors.
To make these truly massive atoms, the universe must create the most
spectacular explosions since the big bang.
To make a car, you need some seriously heavy metal.
Take iridium, a super-tough atom with 77 protons that's used to coat
the tips of spark plugs.
Next on the heavyweight lineup comes gold with 79 protons.
This shiny conductor resists corrosion, making it ideal for exposed
electrical connections.
These connectors here for this airbag assembly are gold.
And so this thing can react really quickly if there is an accident and
save your life.
The biggest atom in a car is lead with 82 protons.
Only lead has the durability to deliver the short burst of high power
needed to start an engine over and over again.
But until very recently, how the universe made these oversized atoms
was a complete mystery.
You can't make gold atoms in a normal star.
You can't make gold atoms in a massive star that's dying.
In order to make atoms this big with this many neutrons, you need a
truly cataclysmic event.
Just a few years ago, most scientists believed that supernovas were
cataclysmic enough to do the job.
But astronomer Edo Berger was not so sure.
If you open any one of these books and flip to the page that tells you
where gold came from, it will tell you that gold came from supernova
explosions.
But nobody had directly observed supernovas producing elements like
gold.
And inside computer simulations, virtual supernovas lacked the energy
to forge these oversized atoms.
Clearly, something was wrong.
But if supernovas weren't powerful enough, what in the universe was? To
form heavy elements requires a lot of neutrons.
And so another possible theory was that the heaviest elements were
produced in the mergers of two neutron stars in a binary system.
Neutron stars are some of the weirdest objects in the universe.
They're formed from the collapsed cores of big stars when they die.
You're taking a couple of times the mass of the sun and squeezing it
down into a ball that's only a few miles across.
The electrons and the protons that are flitting around inside of that
combine to form neutrons.
And what you're left with is an extremely dense ball of neutrons about
the size of a city.
Neutron stars are extremely dense.
If you take just a teaspoon of the neutron star material, it's actually
a billion tons.
If neighboring stars die together, it's possible for the two neutron
stars they leave behind to form a spinning binary pair.
But the partnership is doomed.
What you're left over with is two incredibly compact dramatic objects
spiraling around each other.
Over time they move in together, until finally they can coalesce in the
most violent explosion since the big bang.
The explosion is called a neutron star merger.
The amount of energy in this explosion is crushing.
There is almost no way to describe it.
It's like taking all of the sun's energy that it will ever emit over
its entire lifetime and releasing it in a single second.
Berger suspects this colossal explosion forges iridium, gold and lead.
But to rewrite the textbooks, he needs hard evidence.
It was difficult to, uh, convince the community that this was a
potential channel for the production of heavy elements.
The proof is to actually see this process happening in the universe.
June 2013 NASA's swift satellite spots a short burst of gamma rays from
a nearby galaxy, a sure sign that a neutron star merger has just taken
place.
For Berger, it's the lucky break he's been waiting for.
As soon as we knew that there was a gamma-ray burst nearby, we knew
that this was our one chance for perhaps several years to obtain the
right kind of measurements to test the formation of heavy elements.
Once swift had identified the burst, the hubble space telescope swung
into action to capture images.
We grabbed them right away, and we just looked.
We knew exactly where to look At the center of this red circle.
And what we saw was this source right there in the middle that is the
direct signature of the production of very heavy elements, including
gold.
Berger's theory was right.
But the rate of production was way higher than he'd expected.
Well, in that one event, the amount of gold that was produced was more
than the mass of the Earth.
If we can bring it all here, it would be worth quadrillions and
quadrillions of dollars.
The theory is still very new, but it's possible that ancient neutron
star mergers made all the heavy metals we see in the world today,
including the last remaining ingredients for our car.
But all these elements are still floating free in space.
What's needed now is to pull them all together into one giant
fabrication plant The Earth.
This is what your car looked like before the Earth was born Just a
vast, swirling cloud of gas and stardust, the exploded remains of
ancient stars.
The clouds between the stars of the galaxy are made of everything that
the Earth, your body, and your car is made of.
There's everything that you need floating in gaseous form between the
stars.
Four and a half billion years ago, the gas and dust collapse once more.
It ignites explosively to create a new star our Sun.
Close to the young Sun, all of the lighter stuff got blown away.
What was left behind was the heavier, denser stuff.
There was carbon.
There was iron.
There was gold Everything in between.
Over time, these free-floating elements begin to coalesce.
Dust becomes rock.
Rocks join to form larger objects called planetesimals.
Finally, planetesimals joined to form the Earth.
Our planet is born with all the ingredients to build a car.
But those ingredients are about to go their separate ways.
The Earth is a big planet.
And it's done something that not all planets do It's differentiated.
It melted.
Copper and lead dissolve in sulfur and float to the top of the molten
Earth, making these metals easy to mine today.
But precious metals like iridium and gold sink to the core of the
Earth, and most of the iron sinks with it.
It's kind of a pain, actually.
All the heavy elements that are super useful, like iron, they've sunk
to the middle of the Earth, where we can't reach them.
And there's not a whole lot of it in the crust.
the oceans form, and water dissolves the last remaining traces of iron
from the Earth's surface.
In fact, there was so much iron in the sea that the Earth would have
been green, not blue like it is today.
The Earth's crust seems destined to be practically iron-free.
Then, along comes the most unlikely savior green slime.
I want to show you a couple of examples of rocks that we recently
brought back from South Africa.
Caltech geobiologist Woody fischer traces the history of iron through
the Earth's earliest rocks.
This is an example of a rock that was deposited on the sea floor a
little over And there's not a lot of iron in this sample.
Now what's so interesting is, you go to the same place on the Earth and
what you find is that things have really changed.
And you'll note this very rusty color to it.
This is from the presence of iron oxides.
And in fact the rock itself is incredibly heavy, very dense.
Why does the Earth's geological record change so quickly and so
profoundly? One clue is that the sudden appearance of iron-rich rocks
coincides with the rise of the first simple plants.
This is a micro-organism called a cyanobacterium.
Each of the individual cells that are present in that medium are green,
and they're conducting photosynthesis.
This group cyanobacteria is gathering energy from light, using that to
split water.
And in so doing, they produce copious amounts of oxygen.
In the early oceans, this newly formed oxygen quickly binds to the
dissolved iron, forming a heavy rust that settles on the ocean floor.
For the first time in Earth's history, there was oxygen Free oxygen in
the air.
That combined with the iron.
And the iron basically sank to the bottom of the ocean.
These ancient, rusty deposits formed the iron ore we dig out of the
ground to make cars So in the process of making a car, mining the iron
ore, life was an essential part of that first step.
You have to wait until after these guys evolve in order to be able to
concentrate the raw materials that you need.
The life of early plants brought us iron.
But their death is perhaps even more helpful because without dead
plants, your car isn't going anywhere.
So, what's the final ingredient for getting a car to actually go? You
need to add fuel.
And we, right now, use hydrocarbon-based fuel.
We use oil.
Oil is actually the remnant of dead plant life from billions of years
ago.
It amazes me to think that, as you're driving your car around, what
you're actually running the car on is ancient dead life.
These hydrocarbons are also processed to help make rubber and plastics
for the tires and interior trim.
Now we have almost all of the components needed to complete a car.
All that remains is a spark to bring the engine to life.
But to get that spark, the Earth must pay a catastrophic price.
the Earth's crust had all the materials needed to build a car except
for one crucial group of supertough metals.
This is a spark plug.
And the way it works is that this gap here.
And that ignites gasoline vapor in the cylinder of your motor.
This tip has to survive in very harsh conditions.
So it must be made of a very, very sturdy, robust material.
And the material in this spark plug is a metal known as iridium.
Like other heavy metals such as gold and lead, iridium is born inside
the exploded remains of neutron stars.
And when the Earth forms, plenty of iridium is in the mix.
But it quickly sinks out of reach while the Earth is still molten,
falling to the core under the influence of gravity.
So, where does the iridium come from that we mine today? This exposed
rock face in Colorado reveals a clue, a mysterious layer in the Earth's
geological record that wraps around the entire planet.
There's something particularly interesting about this Clay layer here.
If you analyze the concentration of rare metals like iridium in this
layer, you'll find that there's about as in the other rocks around us
in the crust of the Earth.
It's rather bizarre, actually, to find so much iridium concentrated in
one place here in crustal rocks.
And it turns out that the entire budget of the iridium in the Earth's
crust is pretty much contained in this layer.
When geologists discovered the iridium layer in the late '70s, it
became one of the biggest mysteries in science.
How could so much of this rare metal end up concentrated in such a thin
layer? Only astronomers had measured such high concentrations of
iridium before, inside rocks originating in the asteroid belt.
Billions of years ago, planets were forming all over our solar system.
But there was an area in between Mars and Jupiter where the gravity of
Jupiter pretty much pulled apart anything that tried to form.
And what got left over were a bunch of large, rocky chunks that we call
the asteroid belt.
Now, some of the asteroid belt is made of rock.
Other asteroids are richer in metals.
From time to time, asteroids can get thrown out of orbit by another
asteroid, or by the long reach of Jupiter's gravity.
And sometimes, they smash into the Earth.
Is it possible the iridium layer was simply the scattered remains of a
single, giant metal-rich asteroid impact? like a crazy idea.
Only an asteroid the size of a city would have had enough power to
blast debris around the entire planet.
If you can imagine the magnitude, the enormity of the violence of an
event like that, and to have inches of dusty debris come booming over
the horizon and settling out of the sky and raining on top of you and
burying you in this layer, that should make a pretty big crater
someplace on the Earth.
Although it sounded crazy, the asteroid hypothesis also solved a
longstanding mystery.
The dinosaurs were wiped out around the same time the iridium layer was
laid down.
Could the two events be linked? The puzzle was solved when an asteroid
impact crater was discovered down in the Yucatan.
The crater age turned out to be exactly 65 million years old, the same
age as this deposit.
And the crater's size turned out to be just the size of crater you
would get from the size of an asteroid it would take to make this
layer.
So it turns out that, in a lot of ways, you can think of asteroids as
sort of a cosmic iridium-delivery system for us here on the surface of
the Earth.
And it's not just iridium we have to thank asteroids for.
There were probably several times in the history of our solar system
where there was heavy bombardment, all kinds of asteroids and comets
falling in towards the Earth.
Well, the Earth had solidified to some degree by that time.
So not everything sank down into the core.
So some of the metals we find around us are products of this later era
of bombardment.
The Earth's history is a violent one.
Over the course of time, we have been hit over and over and over again
by asteroids of all sizes.
Some of them have actually delivered quite a bit of heavy elements to
the surface of the Earth.
These asteroid-borne materials include most of the gold, platinum and
nickel we use in cars today.
Asteroid impacts will form little pockets of concentrations of some of
those ore minerals and ore metals for us that we can then mine in
greater abundance on the surface.
In many cases, when you go to a mine to dig up these heavy elements,
what you are doing is tapping into an asteroid impact.
Metal-rich asteroids are the final piece of the puzzle.
We can now reconstruct the journey of every atom of our car through
time and space from the moment of the big bang through generations of
stars to the birth of the Earth and, eventually, the showroom floor.
Over the course of the multiple supernovae in our universe and the
birth and death of stars, we were able to collect all of the materials
needed to assemble these cars.
That's pretty fantastic.
I think we don't fully appreciate how complicated the elements that
make up our car really are and how special they are.
They really are star stuff.
But not every car is like the one we've just pulled apart.
These days, not every car runs on gas.
And electric vehicles require a magical element that's made in space by
cosmic ray guns.
This car doesn't have a gas tank.
It's part of a new generation of electric vehicles.
The key to these high-tech cars are their rechargeable batteries, a
technology that relies on one of the Earth's rarest metals.
This here is a battery pack from an electric car.
And in today's electric cars, the metal of choice is lithium.
And lithium has one of the most amazing stories in the universe.
After hydrogen and helium, lithium is the lightest element, with just
three protons and four neutrons.
Its lightness makes it ideal for electric cars.
If the battery weighs more than the car, then we are just wasting
energy on moving the battery around.
If we can build a light battery, for example a lithium-ion battery,
then we can provide the power without the penalty of having to carry
those heavy batteries along with the car.
Lithium is rapidly becoming one of the most sought-after metals on
Earth.
But it's also a cosmic curiosity.
The big bang creates a trace of lithium.
But as the first stars form, this lithium disappears.
Unlike hydrogen and helium, which are fairly stable on an atomic scale,
lithium is a little bit fragile.
It can actually be broken apart into its components.
As time goes by, these first stars manufacture a little lithium on
their own, but it doesn't last long.
It is so fragile that, the instant it's made, it's destroyed once again
by the conditions in the core of the star.
So, how does the universe fuse together atoms to form lithium?
Surprisingly, it doesn't.
It blasts them apart.
The answer for where lithium comes from is an amazing thing.
It's almost like a Sci-Fi answer.
It kind of comes from ray guns from space.
The ray guns are supernovas.
And their bullets are cosmic rays, high-velocity particles that streak
through space at close to the speed of light.
Cosmic rays are subatomic particles.
They are atomic nuclei that are accelerated to high speed in a
supernova explosion.
If another atomic nucleus gets in the way, it can hit them and shatter
them.
And one of the pieces of shrapnel from this explosion is lithium.
The process is a bit like going bowling, where the bowling ball is the
cosmic ray, and the pins together are some other atomic nucleus.
When the bowling ball smashes into the pins, it sends them scattered in
all directions.
And one of those pins could be lithium.
Cosmic rays are traveling throughout all of space, between galaxies and
in galaxies.
So the cosmic rays that are forming lithium by breaking other elements
apart are literally doing it in the space between the stars.
Almost all the lithium on Earth today was made this way, atom by atom
in the vastness of space, and then swept up into the clouds of gas that
formed our solar system.
Oh, yeah, baby.
For our cosmic car, this may look like the end of the line.
But the production line for the universe, that keeps on rolling.
This is pretty awesome.
These atoms in this car here have been traveling across the cosmos.
They came to us from maybe a billion years after the formation of the
universe.
And now, guess what? They were used, and we're returning them back to
where they came from.
The atoms in our car will not be in our car forever.
In fact, our car will probably be destroyed within a single human
lifetime.
Time to crush.
It'll be recycled into other things on Earth.
But eventually, even the atoms on Earth will be recycled with the rest
of the cosmos.
How cool was that? You could imagine my car gets destroyed with the
Earth, and eventually it makes its way to another planet.
It gets built into some other kind of transportation mode by an alien
race I mean, that's totally possible.
And I think that's kind of a cool idea.
From stars being born billions of years ago to cosmic rays to even the
big bang itself, it's amazing to contemplate all of the things that had
to come together in the universe for us to have cars.
You really are driving around in the end product of something that
started That new-car smell? That's actually old-universe smell because
that smell is traceable all the way back to the big bang.
How you like that? That guarantees the last word in a in a show.
Okay, yeah.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s04e01

Earth, venus’ evil twin

Narrator: Our galaxy, far in the future.

A planet shrouded in turbulence, dense clouds.
Buried deep below, an alien landscape, extreme pressures, and a
scorched surface with sky-high temperatures.
But this is not some distant extraterrestrial world.
It's Earth's future, maybe a billion years from now.
We know this because Earth has a twin Venus.
And Venus has already descended into hell.
captions paid for by discovery communications take a look around the
solar system Eight planets orbiting a central star, the Sun.
Among them is Earth and its neighbor, Venus.
Earth, our home, is an oasis for life.
And Venus, that's the stuff of nightmares.
Plait: Venus and Earth couldn't be more different.
The Earth is this beautiful planet, and there's water everywhere.
It's ice at the poles.
It's water in the ocean.
It's in the atmosphere as water vapor.
But then you look at Venus.
It is the worst place imaginable.
It is so hot on the surface, crushing pressures.
It couldn't be any less supportive of life.
Thaller: To me, the planet Venus is sort of a classic definition of the
word hell.
If you were to transport to Venus and experience the environment there,
you'd quickly want to return back to Earth.
Narrator: The conditions on Venus are among the most inhospitable in
the solar system.
It's just a horrible place.
It's so hot, and there's no water, and the atmosphere is so thick.
And it rains sulfuric acid.
It's going to be a competition between whether or not you're gonna be
cooked to death or crushed to death.
Narrator: Earth and Venus may seem like very different worlds, but they
shouldn't.
They're roughly the same size, same mass and made from the same stuff,
and they started out as twins.
Early Venus and early Earth were very similar.
They were twins, probably nearly identical twins, at their earliest
stages.
Given that Venus is so Earth-like in so many ways, it's really odd that
it is so different than the Earth.
And this makes it one of the biggest mysteries in the solar system.
Somewhere in their two histories, the Earth and Venus took two very
different paths.
Narrator: The result? Two totally different worlds.
Their paths were so different, you could hardly believe that one would
have been related to the other.
But now, the opposite thing's going to happen.
We're gonna catch up with our twin.
We're gonna evolve to be a lot more like Venus in the future.
Narrator: In the future, the two planets' paths will converge, and they
will become twin-like once again.
There is going to be hell on Earth.
The oceans will vaporize.
The land will melt.
Our hospitable blue planet will vanish, replaced by a fiery, molten
world.
We are actually on the Earth at a time when there's water and rain, and
it was so easy for life to take hold.
But that's gonna change.
And take a look in at Venus and have a look at our future.
Narrator: And Earth will surpass the horrors of Venus.
A billion years from now, Earth could be an unimaginably terrible
place.
Narrator: How will this happen? The roots of our home world's
destruction are buried deep in the past of our twin planet.
It's very much true that, in studying the past of Venus, we are also
studying the distant future of Earth.
Narrator: Both planets share a violent birth, scarred by brutal planet
formation, giant cosmic impacts, and rampant volcanism.
Grinspoon: We're trying to reconstruct things that happened in the
ancient, ancient past.
It's almost like forensic planetary geology.
Narrator: 4.
6 billion years ago, hundreds of infant planets begin to form around
the new sun.
Among them, the baby Venus and Earth.
And as they hurtle around the Sun Collisions are inevitable.
Planet formation is like a demolition derby.
In a derby, the cars are racing around a track, going around in circles
at different speeds.
Well, it's the same thing with planets.
The material is orbiting the Sun.
It's going around, and they're all going at different speeds, at
different angels, different trajectories.
And sometimes, boom.
Narrator: In this derby, planet hits planet.
Two become one.
Violently.
You have these large bodies that are hitting each other at really high
velocity.
It's really a very hot, violent mess.
Plait: The amount of energy released in these impacts is huge.
It completely dwarfs all of the nuclear weapons on Earth combined.
And yet, somehow, on these scales, you wind up forming gigantic objects
that we call planets.
Narrator: Earth and Venus become voracious planet eaters.
But two spectacular collisions will set the twins on very different
paths.
Grinspoon: That was the moment Venus and Earth went through this
divergence to what has now become these really dramatically different
worlds.
Narrator: The divergence begins when a Mars-sized object hits Earth.
The impact makes our planet spin faster.
The core spins with it, generating a powerful magnetic field around the
planet.
[ Humming ] The field fends off the worst of the Sun's radiation.
Around the same time, Venus takes a head-on hit from another infant
planet.
This impact explains something very weird about Venus.
Oluseyi: Venus is actually rotating in the wrong direction.
How could that be? Well, what if it got hit really hard by some object?
That could do it.
Narrator: An object so huge, Venus stops in its tracks and begins to
spin backwards.
If you think about how much energy and what size you need to change a
planet's spin, that is an incredibly large hit.
Narrator: But the backspin is slow, Without a fast spin, Venus' core
can't generate a strong magnetic field.
It has no protection from the deadly stream of particles blasted from
the Sun.
Venus does not have a strong magnetic field.
And so it has suffered the full brunt of this wind blasted out from the
Sun.
Narrator: The tale of two planets now splits radically.
Venus will roast under a violent, suffocating atmosphere.
Earth will give birth to oceans, life, and intelligence.
But ultimately, these twins' fates are one and the same.
Earth's future is Venus Pure hell.
Narrator: Venus is a vision of hell.
And one day, we'll meet our twin's fate.
It turns out that what Venus went through in its distant past is what
Earth is going to go through in its distant future.
Narrator: So, exactly how will our blue planet become a superheated
wasteland? Only Venus can really tell us.
Something happened to Venus long in its past to make it a completely
different planet with a completely different personality than the Earth
as we know it today.
Man: Two, three, four.
Narrator: We Earthlings sent our first probe to our sister planet in
1967.
And we've been sending them ever since.
What they found blew scientists' minds Rocks that look like granite.
What makes that interesting is that, to make granite, you need water.
That means that there must have been abundant water for it to have
formed in the first place.
Narrator: Abundant water on a scorched Venus? Hard to imagine.
But Dr.
Lewis dartnell thinks you can get a glimpse of a wet Venus here in
Iceland.
There's the possibility that, maybe, in the early solar system, there
were not one but two planets with oceans, two water worlds Earth and
Venus.
And if Venus did once have oceans, maybe they would've looked a lot
like this here, with a raw, volcanic landscape descending down into the
ocean with the waves lapping against the coastline, and maybe a
overcast and a misty, hazy atmosphere, not unlike what we are seeing
here today.
Narrator: But Venus couldn't hold on to its water.
Plait: All of that water is gone.
It's just gone.
Where did it go? Something happened, either catastrophically or over
time, to basically dry out this twin of the Earth.
Narrator: The culprit was the young sun.
Since its birth, it's grown stronger.
Krauss: Our sun, when we look out at it during the day, seems the same
today as it was yesterday.
But that's on a human time scale.
On cosmic time scale, the Sun has been getting hotter and hotter.
Narrator: Every billion years, the Sun gets 10% hotter, slowly turning
up the temperature on Venus.
Not only that, Venus formed 26 million miles closer to our star.
As it turns out, that distance to the Sun was critical.
It's just an unfortunate circumstance of being in the wrong place at
the wrong time.
Narrator: Earth is far enough from the Sun to hold on to its water.
But Venus can't take the heat.
Grinspoon: The intensity of its sunlight got sort of just a little bit
too much.
It passed this threshold where Venus couldn't hold its water on the
surface anymore.
Narrator: As temperatures rise, the oceans start to evaporate.
Plait: All of that water in the oceans, all of those millions of cubic
miles of water, would become water vapor, basically steam clouds
covering the entire planet, hiding the surface from the outside.
Narrator: Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
The clouds covering Venus trap the Sun's heat.
Temperatures on the surface rise.
But the process can't go on forever because the clouds of water vapor
in the atmosphere start to disappear, ripped away by the solar wind.
Venus does not have a strong magnetic field.
And so the full brunt of the solar wind has been slamming into Venus
for billions of years.
Over time, if a water molecule was in the upper part of Venus'
atmosphere, light from the Sun could break it apart into oxygen and
hydrogen.
And then the solar wind could blow that stuff away.
Plait: Over billions of years, this torrent of subatomic particles
blasted out from the Sun has stripped the water out of the atmosphere
of Venus and has desiccated it.
Narrator: Our twin, stripped of its oceans, is a terrifying vision of
our own future.
Lanza: So, if Venus were, in the past, a lot more Earth-like, then that
tells us that having a habitable world is something that is actually
very precious and maybe is transient.
It's not something that lasts forever.
Narrator: But that is just the beginning.
Without its water vapor to trap heat, the temperature stops rising
temporarily.
Soon, a new force will send surface temperatures rocketing again.
It will become so hot, metal snow will fall.
Narrator: Four billion years ago, Venus and Earth were twins with
oceans.
But soon, the two planets' paths diverged.
Plait: It's pretty amazing how different things must have looked a
billion years after the solar system formed.
The Earth was covered in water, basically on the path towards life and
a future as we see it today.
Venus was on a path away from life, on a path toward becoming the
hellhole that it is now.
Narrator: The growing sun burned off Venus' oceans, for Earth, a
terrible omen.
Thaller: On the planet Venus, we think there could have been oceans,
lakes, water, and rain.
But all of that came to an end.
That tells you that the Earth's environment has to change, too.
Nothing is forever.
Plait: A few billion years ago, when you looked in our solar system,
you might have seen two Earths.
Well, a few billion years from now, in the future, you might look at
our solar system and see two venuses.
Narrator: So we can look to Venus' past and see our future.
We know that temperatures skyrocketed, and the scarred surface hints at
why.
In Hawaii, planetary geologist jani radebaugh studies the islands'
volcanoes.
These volcanoes are a perfect model for early Venus.
What we're seeing out here are lava flows encroaching on the town of
pahoa, come all the way down from the pu'u 'o'o vent which is about 15
miles away.
Oh, there's hot.
You can see that hot stuff.
You can see hot.
Quick, quick, quick, quick.
Right there.
It's really beautiful.
Narrator: Hawaii's volcanic lava fields look like Venus in miniature.
Both produce the same kind of runny lava, building flat, shield-like
volcanoes.
The big difference is there are only five active volcanoes on Hawaii.
Venus is covered in them.
Grinspoon: One thing that really jumps out all around the planet is the
number and variety of volcanoes.
I mean, Venus could almost be nicknamed "volcano world.
" Venus has tens of thousands of volcanoes all over the planet.
Narrator: But it's not the erupting lava that turns up the heat.
It's what comes out with it.
Radebaugh: When you think back to the histories of Venus, I think we
must have seen a landscape very similar to this one, where you have
massive amounts of lava flowing out of the surface, dumping huge
amounts of gases into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, tons of the gas
into the atmosphere every single day.
It would have been amazing to see.
Narrator: Up close on the surface, jani can see the origin of the
gases.
Radebaugh: If we look behind us, we can see volcanic gases gushing out
of steam vents.
We've got carbon dioxide being delivered to the atmosphere.
It's exactly like what has happened on Venus.
Carbon dioxide has been delivered out of volcanoes over and over and
over again throughout its history so that now we have just a
tremendously thick, dense atmosphere.
The net result of all of these volcanic gases pouring out of volcanoes,
major greenhouse gases, is that they have been absorbing heat for
billions of years of the history of Venus.
The temperature has been gradually creeping up until, today, the
surface of Venus is 900 degrees.
Plait: It's like if you go into your kitchen and set your oven to
broil, wait a couple of minutes and stick your head in it, and even
that's not quite hot enough.
It's a crazy, horrible, hellish spot.
Narrator: It's hard to imagine such extreme temperatures.
But probes orbiting the planet revealed just how insanely hot it is.
Scientists studying the images noticed something strange on the
planet's mountains.
It looks like, on the mountains, that there's apparently snow-like
structures.
Narrator: But this is not like any snow found on Earth.
So, if you look at the white-peaked mountains of Venus, you would think
that it was snow, but it's actually metals that have rained down and
deposited on the top of those mountains.
Narrator: Metals like bismuth and lead melt.
Then they evaporate into the atmosphere.
As they rise, they cool until they finally fall like snow on the
mountaintops.
I'm not sure even the imagination of science-fiction authors would have
come up with something as weird as Venus.
I mean, just think about that.
You have possibly metal frost on the top of mountains.
I mean, how weird is that? It's pretty insane.
Raining metals.
Where would you ever think about that existing? On Venus.
Narrator: In the future, metallic snow is forecast for Earth, too.
And our scorching mountain caps will glitter like Venus.
But Venus tells us that things will get even worse.
The atmosphere will grow heavy enough to crush cars.
Narrator: Earth and Venus were born twins, but they took different
paths.
Earth slowly evolved into a habitable world.
Venus was covered in thick volcanic gases, trapping the Sun's heat.
Temperatures rose to 900 degrees.
Extreme temperatures weren't the only problem on Venus' surface.
The thick clouds of gas kept on building up.
A 155-mile-deep layer of carbon dioxide piles up around the planet.
We don't think about gases as weighing anything, but they actually do.
Narrator: Trillions and trillions of tons of gas press downwards.
There is simply so much air on Venus that, on the surface, it's pushing
down with a huge amount of force.
Well, atmospheric pressure on Venus is a monster.
Think about it this way.
All right, car.
It's time for you to be crushed, baby.
If you're on Venus, you're gonna have above your head.
As a result, atmospheric pressure is 90 times that on Earth.
So, on Earth, there's about On Venus, we're talking about So, if you're
driving your car on Venus, this is what might happen.
Narrator: The crusher delivers the same force as the weight of Venus'
atmosphere.
This is pretty serious stuff.
And this is why it's so hard on Venus.
You get down to the surface, you have the crushing atmosphere to deal
with.
Narrator: The extreme pressure and heat make Venus nearly impossible to
explore.
Only one nation has ever gotten a probe to the planet's surface.
Truly, one of the engineering triumphs of the human race was the Soviet
union's venera program.
The Russians sent over a dozen probes to the planet Venus.
And only a few of them were able to survive long enough to even be able
to take pictures from the surface.
Lanza: The venera missions were incredible.
It's such a hostile environment on the surface for electronics.
And they were able to land on the surface and survive.
Narrator: The probe that sent back these images was crushed and burnt
out in 90 minutes.
Some day in the future, there are going to be interplanetary tour
guides taking people to every planet in the solar system.
And you can imagine going to saturn and seeing the rings and Jupiter
and it's panoply of moons.
There are all these great tourist attractions in the solar system.
At the very bottom of that list is Venus.
That is the last place in the solar system I would ever want to visit.
Narrator: The sun's heat and volcanic gases have transformed Venus into
a nightmarish world.
So, why hasn't Earth followed the same path? Our volcanoes also spew
out carbon dioxide.
And we orbit around the same sun.
We're not being crushed and broiled.
That's because Earth formed farther away from the Sun, staying cool
enough to hold on to its oceans.
Grinspoon: Oceans do a lot of things for us on Earth because not only,
obviously, are we water creatures, and we depend on the water cycle for
our existence in so many ways, but people don't realize the oceans also
help to regulate the climate of Earth.
Narrator: Our oceans are full of tiny creatures that eat carbon
dioxide.
Richard zeebe from the university of Hawaii is diving on the island's
coral reefs.
He's studying how tiny marine organisms turn carbon dioxide into rock.
Zeebe: What you see here as this white stuff, this is what we call
calcium carbonate.
And on top of this, where you see these brown layers, this is
essentially the living organism.
This is the coral itself.
It takes calcium out of the seawater and takes carbonate out of the
seawater, combines them and makes this piece of calcium carbonate.
Narrator: There's over of carbon locked up in carbonate rocks.
This helps regulate carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, keeping
temperatures from rising.
If all the carbon that is being locked up in carbonate rocks in these
corals would be put into the atmosphere as co2, that would be certainly
bad news for us.
Narrator: Currently, our carbon cycle helps stabilize our climate.
But in the future, this won't be able to save us.
Forces far greater than the ones at work on Earth will overpower our
systems.
Like Venus, our oceans will burn off.
Temperatures will rocket as our live-giving sun becomes a monster.
Narrator: Venus' hellish landscape is a glimpse into Earth's future.
Thaller: There will be no more rain.
There will be no more oceans.
This wonderful, life-friendly environment we enjoy now just won't be
here in some hundreds of millions of years.
Plait: Earth could be an unimaginably terrible place.
Narrator: Right now, we live just the right distance from the Sun,
where it's just the right temperature for water to exist as a liquid.
But that's going to change, just as it did for Venus.
Grinspoon: Venus started off, probably, in the habitable zone.
And then the inner limit of the habitable zone crossed the distance of
Venus' orbit.
Well, it's gonna cross the distance of Earth's orbit, too.
There is an expiration date to the Earth.
And that's due to the Sun's evolution.
Narrator: Ever since its birth, the Sun has been getting hotter.
That increased heat devastated Venus.
And, in the future, it will destroy Earth.
In 1.
1 billion years, the Sun is 10% hotter than it is today.
The oceans start to evaporate into thick clouds, which trap more of the
Sun's heat.
Catastrophically, very rapidly on a geological time scale, the oceans
will put so much water vapor into the atmosphere that we will get a
runaway greenhouse effect.
[ Thunder rumbles ] Narrator: The clouds forming in the atmosphere trap
more and more heat, driving temperatures even higher.
Spiraling temperatures cause more evaporation, so the clouds get
thicker.
Which led to more heating, which led to more evaporation.
And you can see where this is going.
It's a vicious cycle.
It's a positive feedback.
Plait: All of the ocean's water will boil away, millions of cubic miles
of it.
We have all of this water that will go into the atmosphere, covering
the Earth and shrouding it in, basically, steam.
Narrator: Earth has had oceans for billions of years, but it could lose
them in just 10,000.
Krauss: All of the water in the Earth's oceans will be in the
atmosphere.
We'll have an incredibly dense cloud cover system where the
temperatures on Earth will be approaching Narrator: Like Venus in the
past, Earth will get hotter and hotter.
But unlike Venus, which topped out at 900 degrees, temperatures on
Earth will keep climbing.
Venus lost its water to space, blasted away by the solar wind.
But Earth holds on to its water.
It's protected by our magnetic shield.
But that is no longer a good thing.
[ Humming ] Unlike Venus, Earth has a strong magnetic field which
protects it from the erosion of the solar wind.
That water will stay with us.
The Earth could have a thicker, hotter greenhouse atmosphere than Venus
does today, much worse.
[ Thunder rumbles ] Narrator: This huge volume of water vapor all
pushes down on the surface, around 4,000 pounds.
That's the weight of the average American car pressing down on every
square inch of Earth.
Surface pressure goes through the roof, reaching 270 times higher than
today.
It is ironic to think that the water on Earth will one day help
contribute to its demise after all the water has been the source of
life on Earth.
But, in the far future, it'll become our enemy.
Narrator: And with no oceans and their microscopic creatures to absorb
the carbon dioxide, there's no way back for the Earth.
In 1.
2 billion years, a probe visiting Earth would see an alien world, a
scorched, barren landscape.
The pressure is crushing.
Temperatures reach Molten metals snow down on the mountaintops.
It's so hot, granite rock melts.
The surface liquefies.
At that point, the Earth will become a molten ball very similar to what
it was at the very beginning.
Narrator: Earth and Venus started as twins.
Venus was destroyed by rampant global warming.
Earth will follow the same path, then overtake it.
It is inevitable that the Earth will someday not only be like Venus,
but actually put it to shame.
Narrator: In 1.
3 billion years, Earth could hit 3,600 degrees, four times hotter than
Venus.
It will be the hottest and deadliest planet in our solar system.
For Earth and its inhabitants, it's the end of the road.
We could never survive the extreme temperatures or the crushing
pressure.
Maybe we'll escape to space.
But there's one absolutely crazy way we could stay here Move our planet
further away from the Sun.
Narrator: Earth of the future will become the most inhospitable planet
in the solar system.
Its oceans will boil off, and its surface will melt.
A billion years from now, Earth could be an unimaginably terrible
place.
Right now, today, Venus is the evil twin of Earth.
But in the distance future, Earth could be the evil twin of Venus.
Narrator: Earth's surface temperatures will reach 3,600 degrees with
pressures 270 times greater than today.
Plait: At these kind of temperatures, where rock on the surface of the
Earth is molten, it's hard to imagine any place there could be life.
Narrator: But there is hope.
Astrobiologist Lewis dartnell thinks that some forms of life could
survive such terrible conditions.
We're here on top of a volcanic outcrop in Iceland with this howling
Gale whistling past our ears, the stench of hydrogen sulfide, of
sulfurous fumes, filling our nostrils.
And this is about as close as you get can on Earth to high up in the
venusian atmosphere.
About 30, 35 miles above the surface of the planet Venus, the air
pressure is about the same as on the Earth's surface.
The temperature is pretty similar, as well.
But the cloud droplets are full of concentrated sulfuric acid, many,
many times more concentrated than battery acid.
It's a hostile, horrible environment.
But bizarrely enough, there's good reasons to think that there may be
life, venusian life, high up in the clouds that are kind of high-
altitude aerial biosphere.
Narrator: High above Venus, there are nutrients, solar energy, and
traces of water.
If life can live up there, then perhaps it might survive high up in the
clouds of future Earth.
You can easily imagine these micro-organisms evaporating in water
particles and being transported to the upper atmosphere.
Even though it turned into this toxic greenhouse planet, life could
potentially still survive in that upper atmosphere.
Narrator: But what about us? We couldn't survive the high temperatures
or pressures at the surface.
And a life in the clouds doesn't seem likely.
What's our future? Oluseyi: If there was this life on Venus, clearly,
they weren't advanced enough to stop the changes in their atmosphere
that led to Venus' current state.
The question is, are we? Narrator: Maybe we'll leave our planet and
find a new home.
But there is a more outlandish solution Stay on Earth and move it
farther from the Sun.
Moving the Earth is at least imaginable because, in fact, as objects
exchange gravitational energy, they move in or out in the solar system.
It's happened to our planet.
So I could imagine engineering things where we directed large asteroids
and comets close to the Earth, but not to hit it.
Narrator: The gravity from these large objects would slowly alter our
orbit.
Krauss: Gravitational energy would be exchanged, and the Earth could
slowly move out.
Narrator: Each gravitational jolt would only move Earth a short
distance.
But do it thousands or millions of times, and we could push the Earth
away from the Sun, in theory, at least.
Over a billion-year period, it's possible to imagine.
It would require incredible technology and incredible coordination.
The technology is possible.
Whether humanity as a species could ever coordinate it is something I'm
a little more skeptical about.
Narrator: It's a crazy option, but if we don't do something, Earth and
all of us will die, and we'll become just like Venus.
Earth and Venus were probably born together as identical twins, but
then their paths diverged.
But now, lifetime is gonna send that cycle all the way back, and
they'll die as identical twins again.
Narrator: In the grand scheme of things, they'll just be two charred
twins spinning to oblivion in a backwater of the universe.
On the cosmic scale, life is short.
When you look at how Earth evolved and how Venus evolved, you can see
the difference, even though it's two almost twin planets, how life and
habitability could change over time.
So, habitability isn't always a permanent thing.
Krauss: On human scales, the universe seems the same every single day.
But, of course, that's because human life and human civilization is but
a brief instant in cosmic time.
On cosmic scales, the universe evolves and changes, and that makes the
history of the universe remarkable.
Narrator: Our tale of two planets converges in the end, a cautionary
tale about forces beyond our control.
Maybe a billion years of learning from Venus will ultimately save us
from the same terrible fate.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s04e02

Are black holes real?

Cosmologists are battling over the universe's greatest enigma.

Black holes.
We've never seen them.
It's near impossible to study them.
And their existence challenges everything we think we know about space.
The black hole represents the absolute limits of what we understand
about nature.
The truth is, we have almost no idea what these things are and how they
work.
Black holes are at the very heart of cosmology.
Yet, some scientists question if they're even real.
Black holes present lots of paradoxes, and the simplest way to resolve
the paradoxes would be if black holes didn't exist at all.
Solving the mysteries of black holes pushes our understanding of
physics to the edge of reason.
But it's the only way to discover if black holes really exist.
captions paid for by discovery communications Black holes are the
monsters of the universe Terrifying cosmic beasts that devour all they
encounter.
But black holes scare scientists for very different reasons.
They challenge our theories to the breaking point.
This is at the forefront of theoretical physics.
When it comes to the detailed nature of black holes, it would not
surprise me if we got it all wrong.
The science of black holes is so challenging that some scientists
question whether they exist at all.
Despite their fearsome reputation, we've never actually seen one.
Black holes are everywhere.
They're all over the universe.
They're all throughout our galaxy.
But that doesn't mean that they're easy to find.
They're black, and space is black, and black-on-black is kind of hard
to see in a picture of space.
This is paradoxical because scientists believe black holes are born in
some of the brightest explosions in the universe rising from the
corpses of detonated stars many times larger than our sun.
A star that burns for 10 million years collapses to form a black hole
in a period of seconds.
As it collapses, the outer region of the star hits the core, triggering
a huge explosion A supernova.
We see the bang, but not what's left behind a dead core with the
enormous mass of the star crushed down into an infinitesimal, tiny
area.
From this minuscule high-mass core, a black hole is born.
The flow of gravity is so strong that nothing can escape Not even
light.
But how can scientists claim that black holes exist if we can't even
see them? You could say that about the existence of the atom.
We knew they had existed for decades, centuries before we had actually
seen one in some sort of imaging device.
And so it's the same sort of thing with black holes.
Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
Not seeing black holes but knowing they're there is a possibility, just
like we know that wind is there, even though we can't see air.
Air is invisible, but when the wind blows, its effects can be measured.
It's the same with black holes.
You just need to know what to look for.
While they emit no light themselves, black holes are tremendous sources
of x-rays, and that's because as things get close to a black hole,
they're accelerated by the gravity, and they can heat up to millions of
degrees.
Million-degree gas gives you lots of x-rays.
To find and measure these telltale x-rays, scientists turn to the
NuSTAR space telescope.
In 2017, it spots a burst of x-rays in a cluster called 47 Tucanae, at
the edge of the milky way.
When scientists analyze the data, they realize they're looking at two
objects orbiting each other very closely.
All we see is that there's a star being ripped apart, and gas is
spiraling down to a very dense, very dark object, so something weird is
going on.
As one of the objects accretes matter off the other, it causes it to
emit x-rays, and those x-rays can be used, then, to trace out the
orbits and, therefore, extract the mass.
When scientists work out the size and mass of the two objects, they
find the first is the fading corpse of a sunlike star.
And while the second object is tiny, it has the mass of a giant.
Is this an elusive black hole? What we're talking about here is an
object that is very massive, very small, very dense, with intense
gravity.
But it turns out there are lots of different ways to create an object
like that.
There is another type of ultra-dense object out there in the universe,
called a neutron star.
Neutron stars form in the same way we think black holes form When stars
die, explode, but then collapse down into a tiny ball of matter.
The gravitational attraction of a neutron star is enormous, pulling in
gas, dust, and asteroids.
But light can still escape.
Black holes and neutron stars are kind of cousins, but in the case of a
neutron star, it didn't have quite enough mass to collapse out of
control.
So you can sort of think of it as just barely hanging back from
collapsing into a black hole.
The tiny object discovered by NuSTAR does have enormous mass.
But size and mass alone are not enough to prove it's a black hole.
Cosmologists need more evidence.
They can't see black holes, but is there another way? What if they
could hear them? Think of two massive cars colliding boom! When they
do, they radiate sound, and then we can tell whether or not that
collision occurred and maybe even how far away it was.
It's like that when black holes collide.
So, by listening for a black hole crash could scientists conclusively
prove they exist? Black holes are gravitational giants of the universe.
But we've found only circumstantial evidence that they exist.
To make it a slam dunk, cosmologists are listening for proof in the
hidden world of gravitational waves.
There are gravitational waves going through this room all the time.
Every time I move my hands like I just did, I create gravitational
waves.
The problem is, gravity is so weak that you don't detect those
gravitational waves.
In order to detect those disturbances of space and time, you have to
have cataclysmic events involving massive objects.
Black holes are some of the densest objects in the universe.
So we should be able to hear and measure the waves created when they
collide.
LIGO, the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory, listens
for waves that can come from over a billion light-years away.
In 2017, LIGO heard an enormous crash.
Two very massive objects collided at near the speed of light in one of
the most energetic events that we've ever witnessed in the history of
humankind.
Two ultra-heavy, ultra-dense objects whirl around each other, hurling
powerful gravitational waves through space.
The closer they fall toward each other, the more gravitational energy
they throw out.
Finally, they collide, in one of the most violent events in the
universe.
The smash sends out immense gravitational waves that ripple across
intergalactic space, until, eventually, LIGO detects them.
Listening to a gravitational wave is like listening to a musical
instrument.
If it's making certain tones or certain vibrations, you can figure out
the size of the musical instrument, the type of the musical instrument,
who's playing the musical instrument.
The thing that's really amazing about the LIGO detection is it allowed
us to measure the mass of these objects and how quickly they coalesce
together.
So we actually have an idea how dense they must have been, and with
modern physics, we say, "well, it has to be a black hole.
" But the question is, "have we missed something?" the information
gathered by LIGO is groundbreaking.
But some scientists think that the gravitational waves could have come
not from black holes, but from something even more mysterious.
It's possible that what we identify as black holes in our universe are
really another object like gravastar.
Possible there's a capital "P" on that "possible.
" A gravastar is what scientists call an exotic compact object.
This bizarre theoretical body has exactly the same mass and
gravitational pull as a black hole, but it's made of exotic matter.
A gravastar would be impossible to see with the naked eye, but because
it forms differently than a black hole, it has a strange, incredibly
dense surface.
In the formation of what we think of as a black hole, the catastrophic
gravitational collapse of a dense object, maybe it doesn't go all the
way down to become an infinitely dense point.
Instead, maybe there's some interaction that prevents the formation of
the black hole, and instead, you have a tight, little, dense ball,
which is what we call a gravastar.
So the LIGO data could be the signature of two black holes colliding,
but it also could be the signature of two gravastars colliding.
Right now, we can't tell them apart.
So, for now, gravitational waves have led to a dead end in the hunt for
black holes.
We can't be completely sure that we're hearing them, and we already
know we can't see them.
But what about the mayhem they leave behind? Even though you can't see
the black hole itself, it's going to leave behind a trail of
destruction, and that is something you can see.
By picking apart a cosmic crime scene, can scientists finally solve the
mystery of black holes? This is the hydra "a" galaxy cluster.
from Earth, it's a region of space filled with galaxies and dense
intergalactic gas.
But a dark and massively destructive force is at work here.
And it's blasting holes in the gas that are bigger than the milky way.
Could a black hole be responsible? It's almost as if an intergalactic
bomb has exploded to blow these cavities out.
Some of these cavities are tens or even hundreds of thousands of light-
years across, and to create a cavity that large requires an immense
source of energy, a powerful engine that's driving it.
To discover what's creating the cavities, scientists combine images
taken at different wavelengths.
They reveal something remarkable.
The cavities are being carved out by enormous jets emanating from a
galaxy in the center of the cluster.
As the jets are ejected from the galaxy, they can actually slam into
the surrounding material and form a shock wave, which we can see.
And eventually, that jet inflates a bubble, a cavity, and the cavity
grows as it's inflated with hot, dense plasma ejected from this jet.
These jets are incredibly large and incredibly powerful.
This is like a death star, but for real.
It's much, much more energy than it would take to blow up a planet.
Carnage like this could have been created by the energetics of a
supermassive black hole in the form of a quasar.
Supermassive black holes are millions or even billions of times the
mass of the sun.
They can be voracious overeaters, cramming in huge amounts of matter.
As gas and dust swirl toward the supermassive black hole, it rubs
together, causing friction that heats the material up to millions of
degrees Fahrenheit.
The magnetic field around the black hole forms the material into twin
jets that spin out at enormous speeds for hundreds of millions of
light-years.
A quasar is born.
The jets emitted by black holes are not only incredibly high-energy,
but incredibly intense.
More energy than is emitted in almost any other object is observed from
quasars.
Those quasars are intense enough to vaporize objects that they hit.
They're deadly rays from space.
They almost sound like science-fiction objects.
In order to generate that much energy, what kind of physical process do
you need? And pretty much the only answer we have is a giant black
hole.
Jets are absolutely really, really convincing smoking-gun evidence for
the existence of black holes.
The awesome power of a black hole can explain the vast mysterious
cavities in the galaxy cluster hydra "a.
" So, is the case closed? Can we say conclusively that black holes are
real? Although there's great evidence for black holes, we have to keep
questioning whether they are real.
As a scientist, I'd much rather have questions I can't answer than
answers I can't question.
One question scientists are struggling to answer is how black holes
work.
Are cosmology's greatest minds in danger of flunking out? There's
always going to be details that we still have yet to figure out.
That's true for black holes right now and a lot of the problems are big
ones, like how do they even exist, how do they behave? I mean, we're
seeing that the math doesn't seem to work out, so there is an issue
here.
To show that black holes exist, scientists need to solve the math.
If they can't, they might fail to prove that black holes exist at all.
Cosmologists say the universe is filled with black holes Big and small.
But the evidence for them is not conclusive.
Even if there's 9 out of 10 pieces of evidence for black holes, there's
still one piece of evidence left.
That can open it up to the possibility that maybe black holes don't
exist.
Experts instead look to the theoretical science of how black holes
work.
They're thought to have the superdense collapsed core of a star at
their center.
Around this is a sphere known as the event horizon, a place where the
rules of physics go out the window.
The event horizon, in many ways, cuts a black hole off from the rest of
the universe.
Whatever comes in can never come back out.
It's almost like an invisible line in space.
It's not until you try to turn around and leave that you realize you're
never going to escape.
It's Einstein's theory of general relativity that tells us nothing can
leave a black hole.
This set of rules governs the giant structures of the universe
Galaxies, star systems, and planets.
General relativity is Einstein's theory of gravity.
It is the all-encompassing theory that describes everything we know
about gravity and how the universe on large scales functions.
But the universe functions on small scales, too.
Everything in the universe Including us Is made up of tiny bits of
matter.
These are governed by another set of rules, known as quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics allows you to understand at the smallest levels the
smallest scales of what builds our universe.
Weird stuff happens in the quantum world.
It defies all intuition, and one of the weird things that can happen is
you can have the empty space of a vacuum creating particles.
In the quantum world, tiny particles can pop spontaneously into
existence.
They're drawn to each other like magnets.
But when they collide, they annihilate each other.
So, you've got two particles They can pop out of the vacuum, and they
annihilate very quickly.
That doesn't break any laws.
Now in the vicinity of a black hole, though, things get kind of
complicated.
Gravity is usually too weak to affect the particles in the quantum
world.
But British physicist Stephen Hawking theorized that at the event
horizon of a black hole, the normal rules don't apply.
What Stephen Hawking realized is that if you have a pair of particles
that pop up at the edge of a black hole and one gets sucked into the
black hole, then the other is forced to become a real particle in our
universe.
In order to do so, it takes energy from the black hole, and in that
mechanism, black holes very slowly over time lose mass.
With Hawking's work, we see that the black hole will eventually
evaporate, and that was a complete shift in how to think about black
holes.
According to Hawking, when black holes aren't eating material, they
actually shrink by emitting thermal radiation or heat.
In this process, a black hole will eventually evaporate completely, and
this creates a problem for scientists.
Everything in the universe, from atoms to planets to spacecrafts, carry
information about what they're made of, how fast they're going, and
where they've been.
The laws of physics state that this information can't be lost from the
universe, and that should apply to black holes.
So if an object passes through the event horizon of a black hole, all
the information about that object becomes part of the black hole
itself.
Once they've fallen in, all you can see is a heavier black hole, and
you don't know what fell in if you weren't watching it.
Well, that doesn't violate the laws of physics, but if the black hole
continues to evaporate, evaporate, evaporate with thermal radiation and
then disappear, then all you have afterwards is thermal radiation.
You have no information, even in principle, about what fell in.
And that information is precisely what quantum mechanics says can't be
lost.
The thermal radiation coming out of the black hole contains no
information.
It's a blank slate.
If this continues until the black hole evaporates, then all the
information is completely lost when the black hole disappears.
If that information disappears, then the laws of quantum mechanics are
violated.
And we don't know how to solve that paradox yet.
We're trying to combine quantum mechanics and relativity, and the first
time we're able to do it leads to this giant mess that calls into
question fundamental assumptions about the way the universe works, so
that's kind of a problem.
The problem is known as the information paradox, and if scientists are
going to find an answer to it, they'll have to unify their two theories
General relativity, the rules of the large, and quantum mechanics, the
rules of the tiny.
And so far, that's proved impossible.
I think the single biggest embarrassment in physics is that we have
these two theories General relativity describing the big and quantum
mechanics describing the small That simply don't get along.
Nature obviously knows what it's doing, but we just don't have a
single, unified explanation.
The past few decades, as we've tried to describe black holes fully, the
more work we've done, the more of a tangled mess we get.
It will take at least one brilliant mind to figure this out.
Maybe someone already has.
The classical black hole has a shell-like event horizon beyond which
nothing can escape.
And according to the information paradox, information is lost when a
black hole evaporates.
But here's a radical, mind-bending idea What if black holes have hair?
What Hawking and his collaborators pointed out is that black holes can
have soft hair, and if that's true, that would be a way of
encapsulating all the information that went into the black hole.
Scientists propose that these so-called hairs somehow store the
information of whatever has fallen into the black hole.
The information is then imprinted on the thermal radiation emitted as
the black hole evaporates.
These hairy black holes could solve the information paradox, but
they're entirely theoretical.
These are really new ideas, and people are still trying to figure them
out.
So it's hard to give a really good explanation of something that is
This is theory in the making.
People are working this out now.
Solving the information paradox is pushing science to its limits.
But an even bigger problem is sitting at the heart of a black hole.
The big problem about the idea of black holes is that at its center,
there's what we call a singularity.
At this singularity, matter has infinite density and space is
infinitely curved.
That's not something that really sounds like physics.
Singularities do not exist in nature, and when they appear in the
mathematics, that's a signal that you're doing something wrong, that
you're incomplete.
It's like the ultimate curse word, and mother nature doesn't like it
when we curse.
To complete the math and understand black holes, cosmologists grapple
with one of science's most mind-bending concepts Infinity.
Black holes They're thought to be a fundamental part of the universe.
But scientists are not only struggling to explain how they work,
they're struggling to prove they even exist.
So, black holes have some problems.
Every time we try to think of something, some creative mathematical
solution to describe black holes fully, it breaks down, and we just
can't make any progress.
We can't make reliable predictions, we can't compare to observations.
What is the solution? We honestly don't know.
Scientists are finding that general relativity and quantum mechanics go
haywire at the edge of a black hole.
But inside a black hole, things could be even weirder.
When a giant dying star collapses, the mass of the star falls in and
keeps falling in, crunching down into an infinitely small point.
This is called the singularity.
A singularity is troubling because although it sounds cool and
scientific, it's really just a fancy word of saying, "oh, we have no
clue what happens here.
" the way our physics describes black holes when they form, you're
taking a finite amount of mass and you're collapsing it down.
And its volume should shrink all the way to zero, but that means it has
infinite density and infinite gravity, and that doesn't make sense.
If you make a prediction and the answer is infinite, it tells you
there's something wrong with your prediction, 'cause we've never seen
an infinity in the universe today.
Once again, quantum mechanics is at the heart of the problem.
Have you ever thought about the term "quantum mechanics" and thought
about what those words mean? Well, everything in the universe is broken
up into tiny, little units.
There really is a basic unit of energy, a unit of time, even a unit of
space that cannot be divided any further.
There's a limit to how small things can be.
The smallest unit of space in the universe is what's known as a Planck
length.
If you took a human hair and blew it up to the width of the observable
universe, one Planck length would be about 1/4000th of an inch.
If there is a universal limit on the smallest size, then something
infinitely small can't exist.
Well, if infinity doesn't exist, then singularities don't exist, and if
singularities don't exist, then Einstein's theory of general relativity
is not correct.
The simplest thing to do is to say, "well, let's choose some new
equations.
Let's change Einstein's theory of gravity somehow.
Let's invent what we would call exotic speculative physics.
" This speculative physics has led scientists to invent the idea of the
Planck star.
If you passed one in space, it would look just like a black hole.
But a Planck star doesn't have a singularity at its core.
Maybe things can't collapse down to less than the Planck's length, that
maybe you get stuck with this little Planck-size nugget that stabilizes
things, keeps everything finite.
So, where a singularity is at the center of a black hole, a Planck-
sized nugget is at the center of a Planck star.
A Planck star is just like a black hole, except it plays by the rules
of quantum mechanics.
The problem is, Planck stars are just another exotic theory.
The reason there are so many exotic alternatives to black holes is
because you can write down a gazillion different postulated, mysterious
new kinds of matter and say, "suppose this kind of weird stuff exists.
Then maybe that could explain the data.
" Problem is, there's no evidence that any of that kind of stuff
exists.
Scientists are getting creative as they try to prove that black holes
exist.
They've imagined strange objects and used exotic workarounds.
But one black hole idea is the strangest of all.
What if we are living inside of one? It would be the most mind-blowing
thing ever if we were actually living inside a black hole.
And the crazy thing is, it could happen.
It could be true.
Black holes are full of theoretical holes.
Scientists say they're out there, but we can't see them.
Math says there's a singularity at a black hole's core, but in nature,
these don't exist.
The rules we use to understand the universe simply don't seem to apply
to black holes.
So where does that leave us? Maybe a classical black hole with an event
horizon described by general relativity just isn't the proper
description of the physics.
This lack of understanding opens the door to some outlandish theories
that aim to show black holes can exist.
But one idea stands out as the strangest of them all.
In our understanding of the universe, there are two places where
everything seems to break down.
One is inside the heart of a black hole.
The other is what happened right before the big bang.
And some people have wondered if these two things could be linked.
It sounds crazy, but there's actually a model that you could put
together in which all of our observations of the universe are entirely
consistent with us actually being inside of a black hole.
How would that work? Well, a black hole is supposed to have a tiny,
dense region at its core containing trillions and trillions of tons of
matter.
There is a theory that as matter is crushed into the center of a black
hole, it actually reaches a point where it can be crushed no further.
An event like this could, in fact, lead to a big bang.
When the collapsing matter in the black hole reaches a maximum density
it bounces back, expanding outwards in a cataclysmic explosion.
The matter gradually cools over time to form atoms, building galaxies,
stars, and planets.
If that sounds familiar, it's because it's just like the universe we
see today.
This is one idea for how a universe like ours is formed That, in fact,
we all live inside of a black hole that was created this way.
Within our galaxy alone, there are tens of millions of black holes.
And just think Inside each one of them could be a baby universe waiting
to be born.
That's incredible.
Are we inside of a black hole that exists in a universe that has other
black holes that has other universes which exists inside of a black
hole? It goes on and on and on ad infinitum.
Once again, this is all theoretical, but it's a compelling idea.
I mean, are we actually existing inside of a black hole? I don't know,
but, you know, sometimes when I'm sitting in traffic waiting to get
home, it feels like time is stretched out infinitely.
I don't think that you should lose sleep at night wondering if we're
actually inside of a black hole.
The answer is "probably not.
" But because black holes are just pushing at the edge of what we
understand about nature, they are the perfect illustration of
everything that we don't know about the universe, and that is a lot.
So, what do we know? We can't see black holes.
We can only find circumstantial evidence of them.
They violate the laws of physics that predict them.
They may even be hairy.
So, do they actually exist? So, I will tell you that right now in
modern physics, we have no idea what is going on inside the heart of a
black hole, whether black holes in the true sense really exist at all,
but the wonderful thing is that physics is now taking us down paths
that we would never have imagined before.
Lack of evidence of how black holes work is not evidence against the
existence of black holes.
It's just evidence of lack of understanding.
If you ask me what I believe, I'd have to tell you that I don't believe
in black holes.
I believe in something which behaves like black holes.
It could be that all the objects in our universe that we currently
identify as black holes aren't really black holes, but if I were to
bet, I would bet on black holes.
I think they're the simplest explanation.
Yep, they have a lot of problems that we have to resolve, but I do I
believe in black holes.
Whatever it is that we're seeing, it smells like a black hole, walks
like a black hole, it quacks like a black hole.
It's a black hole.
Right now, black holes are the best explanation for what we see out
there.
But if we can find a way to unify our theories, we might finally prove
they exist and discover a whole lot more about how our universe works.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s06e01

Twin suns

Across the universe, there are stellar systems completely unlike our
own containing two stars instead of one.
Our sun isn't so typical after all.
Even the most fantastical imaginings of Sci-Fi writers, it doesn't even
come close to what nature can produce.
These are binary stars, and they create some of the deadliest places in
the universe.
Any planet that's close by is gonna get cooked.
But some binaries may have an unexpected trick up their sleeve, one
that transforms our search for alien worlds.
When it comes to the occurrence of life on a planet, it may very well
be that having two stars could be a lot better than having one.
Imagine living in the light of two suns.
Are we missing out? Could two stars be better than one? captions paid
for by discovery communications Look at our sky.
You see the same solitary sun rising and setting day after day.
But throughout the galaxy, alien civilizations could be enjoying twin
sunrises and twin sunsets because they orbit two stars instead of one.
Half the star systems in our galaxy are binary stars.
It appears to be a common root of stellar formation and evolution.
So, we can't just focus on the single-star systems and think we have a
complete picture.
The complete picture may include planets orbiting binary stars Alien
worlds rooted in Sci-Fi fantasies that have inspired scientists for
decades.
If there is one single event that can most link to why I became a
scientist, it was going to see the original "star wars" movie, "episode
iv," when I was 7 years old.
And I can remember that scene of Luke Skywalker standing out on the
deserts of Tatooine, and there's a double sunset.
The music swells up, and I can remember my 7-year-old heart kind of
leaping out of my chest.
That's the moment when I realized I wanted to be an astronomer.
Could two stars be even better than one? Living on a planet that orbits
a binary system could be really exciting.
Imagine seeing two stars in the sky every day.
That's pretty cool.
But you know what? Sometimes it can get too exciting.
Some binary systems are not places for Sci-Fi adventures.
They're horror stories.
In some cases, the interactions between binary stars get deadly.
The stars can actually turn on each other.
Binary stars are kind of like siblings.
They're born together and they grow up together.
But sometimes one of those siblings can be evil.
This evil sibling is a pulsar.
It starts life billions of years ago as the big brother in a binary.
But something transforms it into a monster.
When a large star dies, it will end its life as a supernova with a
crazy big explosion.
And a pulsar is what's left behind.
This big brother's death triggers one of the biggest bangs in the
universe.
In the midst of the explosion, the star's core collapses, crushing
material down into a hyper-dense ball.
Rapid rotation and intense magnetic fields jump start twin beams of
deadly radiation, and the pulsar comes to life.
The pulsar has to be one of the most amazing monsters that the universe
has ever thought of.
They're only about and yet they contain the mass of at least the sun or
even sometimes twice the sun.
The pulsar's sibling is lucky to live through the chaos of the nearby
supernova.
But it now orbits a brother from hell in a cosmic no-man's land.
Orbiting a pulsar would be a pretty rough experience for any object in
its vicinity.
Pulsars are spitting out tremendous amounts of lethal radiation from
their poles.
It wouldn't be good to live on a planetary system near a pulsar because
you are gonna be pointed toward a laser of planetary death.
But these death rays can't last forever.
Within a few million years, the pulsar spins itself to death.
With its evil sibling dead, can the other star finally live in peace?
Stars, as I tell students, are a lot like people.
As they age, they tend to expand a bit.
For a single star, it can expand and be as big as it likes.
But in a binary, there's a problem.
Now, this is where the story gets really interesting.
See, you've got your companion star that's swelled up into a red giant.
Some of that red giant material now can get incorporated back into the
pulsar and spin it up into something called a millisecond pulsar.
The bloated red giant can't hold on to its outer layers, and the pulsar
begins to feed.
Matter streams into it, transferring momentum into the pulsar, spinning
it faster and faster until it rotates hundreds of times a second.
The beams re-ignite.
Our pulsar is back from the dead once more.
They're dying and resurrecting over and over and over again.
It's like a zombie you just can't kill.
The red giant extends the life of its zombie brother billions of years
longer.
We know of hundreds of millisecond pulsars scattered throughout the
cosmos.
A terrifying thought.
But it gets even scarier.
Some of them are alone.
What's happened to their sibling? Binary stars are ultimately
responsible for the existence of millisecond pulsars.
They only exist because they've sucked the life out of their companion
stars.
The millisecond pulsars that we see that are all alone may have just
gotten rid of the body.
This is PSR j1311-3430, a rare breed of millisecond pulsar known as a
black widow.
Like its spider namesake, it's deadly, one of the most massive fast-
spinning pulsars in the universe, spitting out 100 times more radiation
than a regular one.
A black widow pulsar is right on the edge of physics.
Any larger and it would be a black hole.
The intense radiation is amazing.
It's hard to fathom that these things exist.
But generally, the rule is the following with the universe, which is
big and old.
If it can happen, it does happen.
The black widow pulsar is the stuff of nightmares.
Its radiation heats the companion star to over more than twice as hot
as the surface of our sun.
It is nothing less than stellar annihilation.
Pulsars are already dramatic, energetic events.
Now you're adding in, "hey, let's destroy a star.
" Black widow spiders famously eat their mates, and that's exactly what
a black widow pulsar does.
It actually uses the material from its companion star to spin itself
up, and then it obliterates it completely.
The companion star vanishes, murdered by its zombie sibling.
It's the ultimate cosmic ingratitude.
Here you have a companion star that's brought the pulsar back to life
after it's died twice, and now its entire body is eviscerated by the
radiation of the pulsar without a speck of dust to suggest it was ever
there.
These black widow pulsars are like the assassins of the galaxy.
Not only do they destroy the star, they get rid of the evidence.
When pulsars are involved, two stars are much worse than one.
But could the opposite also be true? Can two stars create an oasis for
habitable alien worlds? But could the opposite also be true? Binary
stars offer an exciting possibility Alien exoplanets orbiting two stars
instead of one.
These binary stars are everywhere, so the universe could actually be
something like what we see in Sci-Fi movies.
The Tatooine sky could be a real thing.
There could be a planet with life and civilization, and in the sky,
there could be two suns.
What would it be like to live on these worlds? Could two stars be even
better for life? Our home planet orbits a solitary sun in a safe region
where life could evolve.
Today we're familiar with a very stable, well-behaved star Our own sun.
And of course we know there's some solar weather.
Sometimes it throws out high-energy particles that create the northern
and Southern lights, but it's a very reliable star.
It wasn't always that way.
When the sun was much younger, it was more active, it was more violent.
Our young sun rotated over 10 times faster than it does today, causing
its magnetic field to twist and tangle, sending out huge solar flares.
Solar flares can be very bad for the habitability of a planet,
particularly if you're very close to the star, and the reason's because
solar flares essentially represent high-energy radiation.
For example, high-energy protons.
They smash into the atmosphere and they can strip away gas off the
atmosphere.
Picture the early solar system Flares and solar storms attack the
atmospheres of rocky planets.
Deadly charged particles can rip them away molecule by molecule.
Without an atmosphere, liquid water cannot survive, and no liquid water
means no life.
In the very early stages, our solar system was an awful place.
The sun was young and highly irregular and emitting lots of energy in
our region.
It took a long time, probably 500 million years or so before the solar
system calmed down enough to imagine that anything like life could
evolve here on earth.
This is a galaxy-wide problem for planets orbiting one star.
Take Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun.
It's a red dwarf, the most common type of star in the milky way.
And it even has its own planet named Proxima B.
But Proxima Centauri has not treated its planet gently.
If Proxima B has any liquid water, it would have to be extremely lucky.
Proxima Centauri would have caused huge amounts of energy to come out,
and it would effectively strip away Proxima B of any kind of atmosphere
or surface water, thereby removing any chance of there being habitable
world.
The only hope we have left for Proxima B is a strong magnetic field.
This would surround and protect the planet from the onslaught of
violent energy that comes out of Proxima Centauri, and that way, there
could still be an ocean, there could be an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and
perhaps habitable environment, somewhere where life could have started.
But right now for Proxima B, odds are stacked against it.
Earth's strong magnetic field protects us from the sun's worst
outbursts, allowing liquid water to survive.
But other planets, like Mars and Mercury, have not been so lucky.
Solar storms blasted their young atmospheres Until they became thin and
weak, snuffing out any chances for life.
But could binary systems actually make things easier, where planets
orbit around two stars instead of one? Young stars can be very violent
and chaotic, but in the system where there are two stars, the
interaction of those stars can slow down their rotation, and that means
that that violence can be slowed down.
These solar storms can be tempered so they're not as violent, they're
not as frequent, and if any young planet is formed with an atmosphere,
it can keep it.
So, when it comes to the occurrence of life on a planet, it may very
well be that having two stars could be a lot better than having one.
Gravitational interactions can slow down the spin of two close sun-like
stars, giving life the chance to develop.
But not just on one world On many planets throughout the system.
With two stars in the middle of a solar system, you have twice the
amount of heat, twice the amount of light, and that extends the
habitable zone farther out into the solar system.
For planetary scientist Jani Radebaugh, exploring systems like this
would be a dream come true.
To me, it is so thrilling that worlds like this could exist and that
they might even harbor life.
I mean, there could be a Sci-Fi desert planet like this one with twin
suns, my personal favorite and one that I can't wait to visit, or if we
wanted, we could just hop over to another habitable planet and find
something completely different.
Galactic backpackers could explore a variety of Sci-Fi landscapes.
Perhaps alien civilizations are already out there, living on these
habitable worlds.
Two suns could create better star systems than one, but they could also
make things chaotic, shooting entire worlds into space at hyper speed.
But they could also make things chaotic, what would life be like on a
planet in a binary system? Could it be better? Or is planet earth
really as good as it gets? If you're looking for an abode for life in
the galaxy, we tend to, you know, look for a rather cozy existence out
there, but, you know, it's possible that stars can take you on a bit of
a wild ride sometimes.
Over the past decade, we've observed mysterious objects hurtling
through the galaxy.
Scientists call them hypervelocity stars.
When we say hypervelocity stars, we're talking some hyper velocities.
They've been observed moving up to 620 miles per second.
You're talking about something the size of a star, the sun, an
octillion tons of mass or something like that getting flung away way
faster than a rifle bullet.
These hypervelocity stars start off in a binary system, but something
tears them apart Something big.
In order to create a hypervelocity star, you need a very intense source
of gravitational power.
Well, the most intense source we know of is the black hole at the
center of the galaxy.
This black hole is Sagittarius a-star.
It is supermassive Four million times the mass of our sun.
Two stars stray a little too close, and the enormous gravity of the
black hole pulls at them.
But the star closest feels a much stronger tug, and this binary system
gets ripped apart.
It's a little bit like the Olympic hammer throw, where the hammer is
one star in the binary system and the Olympian is the other star, with
the cord connecting the hammer being the gravitational tie between the
binary stars.
If you cut that cord, the other star can go flying off at very, very
high speed.
Once the cord is cut, the binary stars separate forever.
One is trapped in the gravitational grip of the black hole.
The other is flung out of the galaxy, becoming a literal shooting star.
But the star may not be alone.
If a planet is gravitationally bound to a star and that star gets
ejected from the system, if conditions are right, that planet can hitch
a ride with that star.
Where the star goes, the planet goes.
If you're on planet around a hypervelocity star, you would be the envy
of poets and scientists everywhere because you would have the most
breathtaking view imaginable.
You would start at the very center of the galaxy, you'll have this
beautiful view of the supermassive black hole.
Generation after generation on this hypervelocity planet would be
treated to thrilling new views of the galaxy.
By the time you're done as you're ejected, you would see the entire
milky way galaxy, everything, and it would recede away from you as you
moved off into space to who knows where.
Hypervelocity planets just go to show that the universe is way stranger
than fiction.
As we learn more about stars and stellar systems, even the most
fantastical imaginings of Sci-Fi writers, it doesn't even come close to
what nature can produce.
This hypervelocity star and planet go on the journey of a lifetime, but
what about the stranded companion star, stuck in the center of the
galaxy next to a supermassive black hole? It, too, could have a planet
orbiting it, but it's a world living on borrowed time.
If there's a planet orbiting the star that gets left behind by the
hypervelocity star, so the planet is now orbiting the star that's
orbiting the black hole, that's not probably gonna last very long.
Typically, the little guy Pew! Gets shot away.
So it's entirely possible that we have hypervelocity rogue planets,
planets without a star that are shooting out of the galaxy at high
speed, as well.
But it's not a trip you'd want to take.
Because this world is destined to wander the emptiness of space forever
and alone.
The problem with the planet is that it's no longer bound to a star, so
the outer surface would most likely freeze.
Binary stars can create weird environments for planets.
You could get an exhilarating view of the galaxy, or freeze on an icy
wasteland.
But astronomers are finding bizarre new systems where stars are not
being torn apart, they're being driven together, creating a cosmic
event coming soon to our galaxy.
They're being driven together, are two stars better than one? Binary
systems are certainly very dramatic.
There's even one that has two stars so close, they're touching.
KIC 9832227 is a very interesting binary system.
It's what we call a contact binary.
So this means that the two stars are basically in contact, but they're
separate stars.
They share a common atmosphere or envelope.
One's about a third the mass of the sun, one about 1.
4 times the mass of the sun, and they're rotating around each other
every 11 hours.
Scientists from Calvin college reveal an exciting discovery.
These binary stars are moving even closer together.
They do the math and make a bold prediction.
So, this star is different from all other contact binary stars we've
studied because this one, we believe, in the next five years is going
to merge, spiral in together, and explode.
But it's a star close enough to us Only 1,800 light years away That
when it explodes, it'd be bright enough to see with your naked eye.
Two stars crashing together An event known as a red Nova.
If this is true, if you really see it, it would be fabulous, because
not only would it validate this amazing prediction, but we have
something new to look at in the night sky.
If this comes through, this would just be the event of my lifetime.
We don't get to predict too many things in astronomy except, you know,
"a billion years from now, this thing will happen.
" So you have to appreciate what this thing is.
These stars are probably billions of years old.
We're just so lucky to be able to see this right at the end where we
just have a few years left A few years out of a billion-year life span.
It's an amazing cosmic coincidence brought to you by the number three.
Before these stars came into close contact, they may have had a
neighbor A distant third star that set this all in motion.
Whenever you have three objects, the gravitational dynamics becomes
incredibly complicated.
The third star pulls on the binary as the two orbit each other,
stretching them out basically into an elongated orbit.
The two stars resist that, trying to circularize their orbit again.
That back and forth interaction pushes the third star further away,
pulls the two stars closer.
The stars have been shoved together, but their story is about to get
even weirder.
Matter will stream off the smaller star until it is too gravitationally
weak to hold its position Driving their orbits even tighter together,
moving them faster and faster.
Finally, the smaller star will plunge into the larger one, tearing
through it And blasting hundreds of trillions of tons of debris in
every direction.
This would be an enormous amount of energy.
Explosion at its peak will be 10,000 times brighter than the star is
today.
This collision will also be an act of creation.
The cores of the two stars will collide and become one, creating a
super hot blue ball of gas, a newborn star.
Just think about how cool that is.
In the constellation Cygnus, in about five years' time, a new star is
gonna turn on created from two older stars An entirely new way of
seeing a star being born.
Around the star, searing-hot gas will expand outwards, turning red as
it cools, becoming the red Nova.
The explosion will create a brand-new light as bright as the north star
in our night sky.
It's just phenomenal that we get this opportunity.
This is what every astronomer wants to do.
We are at a safe distance from this colliding star duo.
But would we feel the same way if we were on a planet orbiting this
binary system.
This is a very, very energetic event.
Could life survive such an event? I wouldn't want to be there as the
test Guinea pig.
All this energy comes pouring in, and your atmosphere is likely to be
stripped away.
If there are oceans on this world, they're likely to be vaporized, and
there may be very little left other than rock.
A Nova is nothing you want to fool around with.
Any planet that's close by is gonna get cooked.
It's gonna get sandblasted, and then, you know, there it is.
If that's the kind of place you want to be, hey, more power to you, but
I like earth.
Earth has a good thing going these days with our single star.
No collisions, no explosions, no drama.
For two stars to be better than one, we need to find rocky planets in a
binary system.
But so far, we haven't, raising the question Can they really exist at
all? But so far, we haven't, raising the question The Kepler space
telescope has blown the search for alien worlds wide open, discovering
thousands of exoplanets orbiting single stars.
But finding rocky planets in binary systems is proving difficult.
We have found planets orbiting binary star systems, and that's a big
leap forward in our understanding of how the universe works.
Unfortunately, those planets have all been gas giants, and they're not
really good for forming life.
For alien civilizations to exist around two suns, they need solid
ground.
The hunt for the world of our Sci-Fi dreams has so far been fruitless.
We always have to consider that maybe rocky planets around binary stars
just don't exist for some reason that we currently don't know.
And that would mean there would be no Tatooine.
Could paired stars make it impossible for a rocky planet to form.
If you're a planet trying to form around a binary system, the gravity
in the middle is always changing.
Instead of a single star, you have two stars orbiting each other.
These two infant stars start a gravitational tug-of-war.
The material between them is pulled in different directions, making it
harder for bits of rock and dust to stick together.
The system seems too chaotic for rocky planets to form.
The complex gravitational interactions at play destabilize a lot of
potential orbits.
There aren't a lot of opportunities for a young planet that might want
to form to find a stable, long-term home that lasts for billions of
years around that binary system.
It's relatively easy to get ejected or consumed by the stars
themselves.
So, why can't rocky planets survive when gas giants can? As any good
realtor will tell you, it's all about location, location, location.
We think that rocky planets tend to form close in around stars where
it's nice and warm, but further out where it's colder, you have the gas
giant planets forming.
So, if you have a binary star system, it's like a gravitational tornado
whipping out all of that rocky material so that you're only left with
the cold stuff, which can form gas giants further out.
If a two-star system were a city, the gas giants are out in the
suburbs.
A nice, peaceful spot away from the competing gravity of the two stars.
Perhaps one-star systems are better than two.
Gas giants aren't great for life, and those are the planets we're
finding in these binary systems.
The very reason that we're here could be down to the fact that we have
one star rather than two.
But in 2017, a discovery around 2,000 light years away gives us new
hope.
So, as we discover new things in the universe, we tend to give them
catalogue names, which can be very boring and very difficult to keep
track of.
But SDSS 1557 is worth remembering.
We've seen a binary system that is a white dwarf Which is the core of a
star like the sun after it's gotten very old, blown off its outer
layers That's orbited by a brown dwarf, an object which is sort of on
the border between a planet and a star.
What's most exciting about the SDSS 1557 system is that we've found
rocky debris.
We see the basic materials, the basic ingredients are there for forming
planets.
This is a really exciting discovery because we've seen the remnants of
asteroids and rocks orbiting about this ancient binary system, systems
that we thought could've never had surviving rocky-type things around
it before.
This binary system is billions of years old, and through all that time,
the rocky material hasn't been wiped out.
It has survived.
This is a huge stepping stone to finding our rocky planet with two
suns.
The system provides evidence there's rocky material close in around a
binary star system, so it's a signpost that rocky planet formation can
occur around binary star systems.
The odds might be longer, but it's still possible.
Could there even still be a planet in this system? There may still be
planetary objects around SDS 1557.
We just haven't seen them yet, but they may still be there.
The search is still on.
A rocky planet orbiting two stars could really exist.
So, for those of us hoping for that Tatooine out there, that planet
with the double sunset, these debris fields actually give us hope.
Maybe the conditions, at least, are right for the formation of rocky
planets around binary stars.
I think it's out there.
I think finding it is more a question of when than if.
As an astronomer, this is a fantastic time to be alive at the cusp of
discovery.
As a science fiction fan, this is a fantastic time to be alive because
the stuff I read as a kid is coming true.
But perhaps the biggest Sci-Fi fantasy is much closer to home, because
new research is suggesting something stunning Our own sun could have a
twin.
Because new research is suggesting something stunning A new study in
2017 throws into question our understanding of the sun.
For the first time now, astronomers are able to peer inside the clouds
that form stars, and the amazing thing is that the evidence is
suggesting that every single sun-like star forms as part of a binary
pair.
The scientists study the Perseus molecular cloud, a stellar nursery
around packed with stars just like our sun.
Many of them are in wide binary systems, traveling in huge orbits
around each other that span centuries or more.
And all of these binaries are babies, less than 500,000 years old.
The only way to explain these young systems is that they formed this
way Not alone, but in a pair.
Just based on statistics and our understanding of what's going on
inside these star-forming clouds, it is highly likely that the sun
formed with a twin.
Perhaps 4.
5 billion years ago, our sun burst into life with a sibling.
Could this twin still be out there in a distant orbit that we haven't
seen? There was an idea that the sun could have a companion, which was
nicknamed Nemesis, and this thing would've orbited way far out, way
past Neptune in the solar system.
Scientists searched for this Nemesis star, but they came back empty
handed.
We've looked we've had telescopic surveys of the sky, including
infrared surveys where these types of objects would be very bright, and
we've swept the entire sky multiple times and we've seen nothing.
What happened to our sun's sibling is a mystery.
How do we end up with one star as opposed to binary? We really don't
quite understand.
If it doesn't orbit us now, it may have left our system long ago.
Over time, some of these binary stars get closer together and stay
together, and others get ripped apart and lose each other entirely.
It's very possible that our sun, at some point, had a twin that got
ejected.
We don't know exactly when our sister star was torn away.
It could be clear on the other side of the galaxy from us by now.
But after everything we've seen in binary systems, we may be much
better off without it.
I'm pretty happy with having just one sun, so I'm fine to live in this
solar system.
A binary sunset would be more beautiful, but only more beautiful if you
were alive.
And yet binary stars don't just bring death and destruction.
They could also create systems with a series of habitable worlds.
There's so much we don't know about our own environment and how it
compares to other places in the universe.
It seems like we're in a very lucky place.
The sun is very stable, it's a single star, we're in a nice orbit
around it, but maybe there are places out there that are even better.
We just didn't even know to ask.
It's certainly possible that two stars are better for life than one,
but until we find these alien worlds, it remains an open question.
It's hard to say whether we're lucky or unlucky to be on a planet
orbiting a single star.
It's probably a little boring here compared to what it would seem like
in these binary star systems.
You know, from a romantic, visual perspective, I kind of wish we did
live in a binary star system.
Can you imagine somebody living on a circum-binary planet and finding
an earthlike planet orbiting a solitary star.
Would they think, "oh, how interesting that would be.
Can you imagine having one sunset? What would that look like?" I can
imagine them asking themselves the questions we ask ourselves.
So it's just a matter of perspective, you know? Grass is always greener
on the other side of the binary system.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s06e02

Dark history of the solar system

Our system is a strange thing.

It's radically different from all the other planetary systems we see
across the galaxy.
We are an exception rather than the rule.
To understand why, scientists peer deep into our solar system's secret
history and find a dark and violent past of planetary homicide on a
mass scale.
The solar system is a ghost of what it used to be.
You end up with the last survivors being a bunch of freaks.
Our home could be one of those freaks.
The rock beneath our feet could have been from long-dead planets.
And those long-dead planets could help explain why there's life on
Earth.
captions paid for by discovery communications In a spiral arm of a huge
galaxy called the milky way spins an extraordinary planetary system,
our solar system.
For millennia, it was the only one we knew, but all that has changed.
Astronomers have discovered more than 2,600 planetary systems to date,
but none of them are quite like our own.
The incredible thing about astronomy is when you look out into the
universe, and you realize you have completely misinterpreted your own
home.
So one important thing we've learned in discovering planets around
other stars is that our system isn't the normal system.
It's not what we see everywhere.
In fact, as we discover more planets orbiting other stars, we see that
ours is an oddball.
Most other solar systems look completely different than ours.
February 2017, NASA makes a huge announcement about a system in the
Aquarius constellation, Trappist-1.
Trappist-1 is a little unusual.
It's a little bit smaller and cooler than the Sun, but it has seven
planets orbiting it.
And you think, "well, that's not that peculiar.
We have eight.
" But these are seven roughly Earth-sized planets.
There's not a lot of variety there, and they also orbit the star very
close in.
All seven planets somehow orbit closer to their star than Mercury, our
innermost planet, does to our sun.
Perhaps one of the greatest puzzles that have come out of finding
planets around other stars is that they typically have orbits well
inside the orbit of Mercury.
It's really odd, in my view, that the solar system is hollowed out.
There's nothing inside of Mercury's orbit.
Why is that? The mystery of the missing inner planets is like a cosmic
whodunit, turning scientists into detectives asking, "do we really know
how the story of our solar system unfolds?" The whole process is, like,
cosmic CSI.
You're trying to put together the clues to find out something that
happened when nobody else was there to watch it happen.
Like detectives, scientists start with the simplest explanation.
So in some ways, the early solar system is like a pool game.
All the billiard balls represent the pieces, the building blocks, the
planetesimals or the planetary embryos that are going to come together
eventually to build the final system of planets.
In planetary formation, the simplest theory is that the planets all
formed where we find them now.
It's called the classical model.
How does this play out? We start with a few planetesimals that collide
with each other, and they grow a little bit larger in this region of
the solar system.
This process continues, and you grow all the way up to planets, with
each planet in each of the zone of the solar system creating material
just from its neighborhood and no one's really moving around very far.
But this classical model can't explain why our inner solar system is
missing all kinds of material.
The classical model has no natural explanation for why Mercury is the
last thing that we know of, inward towards the Sun, that there are no
planets, no asteroids, nothing inside Mercury, is still a mystery that
the classical model can't easily explain.
The area close to our sun isn't just missing asteroids and small
planets.
It's also missing really big ones.
The very first exoplanets, the very first alien worlds we discovered,
were Jupiter-mass or bigger planets orbiting their starts very closely,
even closer than Mercury orbits the Sun.
Astronomers have so far discovered around 300 gas giants scorchingly
close to their suns.
They call them hot Jupiters But how they form is a mystery.
Gas giants like Jupiter should be born out of the cold, far from their
suns.
It's very hard to imagine hot Jupiters forming where we see them today.
The temperatures, the distances from the star, where we find hot
Jupiters are so hot, it's hard to imagine any material condensing out
of the solar nebula.
This kick-started the idea that maybe these hot Jupiters, as they were
called, may have actually formed farther out, like near where our
Jupiter is now, and in the early solar system they started migrating
inward toward their star.
So what happens when a planet the size of Jupiter moves inward? Can
this help explain the inner solar system's missing mass and answer why
we don't have a hot Jupiter? To find out, Kevin Walsh and colleagues
simulate the first 10 million years of the solar system.
They call this model the grand tack.
The grand tack model is a scenario designed to help understand how the
terrestrial planets could have formed, thinking about what the giant
planets might have been doing in the early solar system.
The planets form within a thick disk of gas and debris that surrounds
the newly-formed sun.
The grand tack model simulates what happens if Jupiter moves in towards
the Sun through this disk.
It's pushing all of the asteroids in its path into the inner solar
system.
All of that material is what is going to come together to form the
rocky planets.
Jupiter's immense gravity pulls in more and more material, forming a
dense wave of debris bulging out behind it.
The pressure of this bulge pushes Jupiter further inwards.
Like a wrecking ball, Jupiter should clear out all the planet-building
material from the entire inner solar system and become a sun-hugging
hot Jupiter, but something checks Jupiter's path of destruction.
If Jupiter had hung around much longer in the inner solar system, we
wouldn't be here, so something must have drawn it out very rapidly.
And what could possibly move a big, massive planet rapidly? And the
answer is another big, massive planet.
Saturn It forms just after Jupiter, and is hot on Jupiter's heels, as
it, too, migrates towards the Sun.
Saturn is pretty big itself.
The combined effect of the two giant planets migrating is that once
Saturn is large enough, it can actually change the way that the gas
disk is interacting with both the planets.
And it can stop Jupiter's inward migration and help to turn Jupiter
around and almost pulls it back to the outer solar system.
Like a sailboat switching direction, Jupiter tacks away from the Sun.
The behavior of the giant outer planets leaves our solar system with no
hot Jupiter and has dramatic effect on the small inner planets, too.
As it's coming back outwards, what has Jupiter done to the inner solar
system? It has removed all of the material in its path, all the way
down to where we find the Earth today.
And all of that material pushed into essentially a narrow band in the
inner solar system is what is going to come together to form the rocky
planets as we find them today.
According to the grand tack model, without Jupiter, the rocky
terrestrial planets of the inner solar system might have never formed.
One of those planets is Earth.
So as much as we owe our existence to Jupiter, we also owe it to Saturn
because if Jupiter had kept moving in closer to the Sun, we almost
certainly wouldn't be here now.
The grand tack may provide a vital chapter in the story of Earth's
formation.
That answers why we're missing a hot Jupiter but doesn't explain why
there's nothing between Mercury and the Sun, nor why we're missing one
of the most common types of planet in the whole galaxy, a giant rocky
world up to 10 times the size of Earth A super-Earth.
The Kepler space telescope leads the charge in the hunt for exoplanets
around other stars.
It's confirmed over 2,000 new worlds.
The single-largest finding to date, over one-third of those planets are
super-Earths.
A super-Earth is a type of rocky planet that has a mass a few times the
mass of the Earth, and as we look around the galaxy, we find them all
over.
Our solar system doesn't have one, and you have to ask the question why
not? What's different about us? In our solar system, planets range in
mass, with Jupiter being the largest and Mercury the smallest.
But weirdly, we have nothing in the super-Earth-size range, which is
between Earth and Uranus.
Why is there such a big gap in masses between the Earth and Uranus,
which is roughly a dozen times the Earth's mass? It's a big jump from
one to a dozen.
Why? In 2015, Konstantin Batygin tries to find the answer to why we
have no super-Earths, and why there is nothing within the orbit of
Mercury.
He reconstructs the grand tack model with one key difference The
simulations start with six super-Earths in our solar system center in a
tight orbit around the Sun, typical of other systems we've observed.
He calls this new model the grand attack.
One of the realizations that has come out of studying the grand tack
scenario is that Jupiter's migration would have really unleashed a
veritable grand attack upon the inner solar system.
The grand attack model ramps up Jupiter's action so it sends swarms of
giant asteroids and planetary embryos into the inner solar system on
tight-knit, overlapping orbits.
The result? Carnage.
Each big body will experience a collision with another big body once
every 20 to 200 orbits.
This is exceptionally fast on cosmic-time scales.
What this means is that you take the entirety of that overlapped
population of bodies, and you smash them up into smaller debris.
Jupiter is like a little kid with a hammer, you know? It just comes in
and is whacking around at everything, and it's making a mess of the
inner solar system.
It's a game of cosmic pool on steroids.
Let's start with our Jupiter, for our model here of the solar system.
It's causing a bunch of very violent collisions between all of this
debris that it's sweeping up.
These huge collisions are making an enormous amount of really small
material, which can drift really fast inward in the solar system due to
the drag from the gas around the Sun.
These planetesimals collide over and over, pulverized to the size of
gravel.
For the smaller debris, hitting this dense gas cloud around the Sun is
like plowing into a headwind.
The swarm of rubble loses the momentum that keeps it in orbit around
the Sun and starts spiraling in, but it hits roadblocks.
So as all this debris rushes inward in a big wave, it gets dragged in
until it gets stuck behind the super-Earths.
Debris builds up until the super-Earths finally give way.
The super-Earths are like a dam that can't quite resist the flow of
water and begins to recede and eventually gets kind of pushed onto the
surface of the Sun, together with the flux of collisional debris.
It's a remarkably swift process.
In just 20,000 years, all the super-Earths crash into the Sun.
After the dramatic evolution of the inner solar system, there's only a
fraction of the original mass left.
The solar system is a ghost of what it used to be.
There's nothing in the first 39 million miles from the Sun.
But slightly farther out, there's a narrow ring of rocky debris, about
10% of the original material swept in by Jupiter, just enough to
rebuild the inner solar system.
A few survivors, small planetesimals start to regroup.
Over millions of years, four small, rocky planets form.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars form from this leftover debris.
The planet that we're standing on may not be an original generation
solar system planet.
It's kind of like building a house with cinder blocks from a house that
sat on that spot but was demolished.
Not only are we breathing the atmospheres of long-dead stars, the rock
beneath our feet could have been from long-dead planets.
So Earth could be second-generation planet formed from the wreckage of
the grand attack.
, But there was one thing the super-Earths took with them to their
fiery grave The supply of hydrogen and helium in the inner solar
system.
When you look at the Earth's atmosphere now, we don't have any hydrogen
or helium in it.
There was hydrogen and helium in the disk where the inner planets
formed, but that became part of the super-Earths, the first generation
planets.
When Jupiter came in and dropped them into the Sun, they took their
hydrogen and helium with them.
So the composition of the the air around you right now may be due to
the fact that we're a second-generation planet.
Coming in second might not sound great, but maybe second place is the
reason we're here.
So, the Earth we now see is Earth 2.
0.
Would Earth 1.
0 have been conducive to life? That's an interesting question.
Earth's atmosphere is a fertile blend of gases that allows life as we
know it to flourish, an atmosphere that might have been completely
different if Earth was a first-generation planet.
It's entirely possible that life, like us, needs to have a second-
generation planet to arise in the first place.
Could our planet be more unusual than we'd ever thought? How special is
the Earth in a cosmic setting? We don't really know the final answer to
this question, but evidence is beginning to point to the fact that the
Earth is actually kind of rare, and we should really appreciate our
planet.
Finding out what happened to our solar system is like studying a cosmic
crime scene.
To reveal the solar system's secret history, we need to look in unusual
places, the last surviving pieces of the violence from which our home
was born.
Our solar system is a celestial cold case, and it's hiding the traces
of its violent past.
What you have now is a crime scene that has dried up, and you're trying
to find little clues as to what happened It's a really, really
difficult problem to solve.
Solid evidence could be hard to find, but sometimes we get lucky.
We don't have a time machine, so it's hard to go back in time 4 1/2
billion years and look at the solar system and see what it was doing
back then.
However, sometimes nature provides, and if you don't have a time
machine, sometimes a time capsule will do just as well.
And in fact, we have time capsules of the early solar system, and we
call them meteorites.
Most meteorites are chunks of asteroids that fall to Earth.
Depending on their origin, they come in different shapes and sizes.
Asteroids really are like space fossils because they were formed but
they've basically remained dead.
They are the leftovers, the remnants of planet formation.
They're the last little bits that haven't become planets yet.
To understand why meteorites are such useful clues, we first need to
know how planets form.
It's a process called accretion.
The cloud of hot gas swirling around the Sun condenses and clumps into
larger and larger bodies.
We find traces of this process inside meteorites, in tiny mineral beads
called chondrules.
Chondrules are literally the seeds of all of the structure in our solar
system.
Most chondrules condense out of the cloud of hot gas around the Sun as
the solar system forms.
Chondrules have been described poetically as droplets of fiery rain
that have solidified.
They are little globules of silicate melt that were produced in the
very earliest history of our solar system.
These globules of melt solidified to form these little spheres.
It really tells us about the process of agglomeration of smaller
objects to form larger bodies.
But some chondrules tell us not only about a planet's birth, but also
its death.
A meteorite called gujba contains two very different kinds of globules.
So a gujba is a type of meteorite that's made up of little spherials of
silicate material as well as spherials of iron-nickel metal, and it's
very unusual in that regard.
These metal spherials that we find in gujba are formed, we think,
around 5 or 6 million years after the solar system forms.
At that point, there was not enough hot gas lingering in the disk to
form the chondrules we see in the gujba.
So how did this globules form? The only way to really produce these
globules is another process, and we think in this case it was some kind
of process like collisions.
Collisions so violent they vaporized the silicates and metals.
Solid turns to gas, and then gas to liquid.
But what planetary body contains enough metal to be able to produce the
droplets we see in gujba? Only something big enough to have an iron
core.
When an object grows large enough, its gravity become strong enough
that it differentiates, and what we mean by that is, heavy stuff is
pulled down and sinks into the center, and lighter stuff floats to the
top, so you have a differentiation of material.
Earth is a classic example of a body that is differentiated.
while heavy metals remain in the crust The crust and the core are
separated by a molten silicate layer known as the mantle.
Gujba is a perfect example of the fact that you had large planetary
bodies that were differentiated into irons and silicates, and they were
colliding at velocities great enough to scatter their pieces out into
the nebula again.
That is just amazing to me, that this really, really violent process in
history that's captured in these tiny little fragments.
Gujba reveals the differentiated planets were commonplace as early as 5
million years after the formation of the solar system.
There were so many of these planets, they often smashed together.
If you go down this path of planet formation by giant impacts, you end
up with the last survivors being a bunch of freaks.
Freaks built from the dead embers of past generations.
And this violent scenario raises the question, just how many planets
did it take to build the inner solar system? Simulations say at least
30, but just four survived.
The secret history of the solar system is hard to interpret, but
astronomers devise radical new solutions to connect the dots.
The grand tack model helps explain why we see no hot Jupiter planet.
The grand attack model provides an answer to the lack of material
within Mercury's orbit and why our solar system has no super-Earths.
These are theories designed to crack the cosmic cold case, but to
understand our red neighbor, Mars, scientists need another simulation,
a 30-planet pileup.
When you look at the action in a solar system, you essentially have our
smallest planet on the inside and then it gets larger and larger as you
go from Venus to the Earth, so you would naturally expect Mars to be
larger than it is.
It should be 10 times bigger than it is, but it's not.
Mars' size isn't its only mystery.
It's also much older than we expected.
Scientists have refined the age of Mars' mantle based on the chemical
composition of a piece of martian meteorite.
The sample blew off from the planet during a violent impact and made
its way to Earth.
It revealed that Mars formed rapidly, within the first 2 million years
of the solar system's birth, well before the Earth.
Mars is small, and Mars formed really, really fast compared to what it
should have.
The Earth is 10 times more massive.
It formed in 100 million years.
Mars formed in 2 million years.
This doesn't make sense.
It's our neighbor.
It should look just like us.
Everything about Mars feels wrong.
These two mysteries might help explain one another.
Scientists think it's possible that around 30 other similar planets
formed alongside Mars within the first 2 million years of the solar
system.
So what happened to this 30-planet pileup? Time for another game of
cosmic pool.
So in this model, we very quickly form This is a pretty jam-packed
system.
The planets are pretty close to each other, and it's just on the hairy
edge of stability.
This colony of Mars-sized planets builds rapidly.
In the early days of the solar system, there's enough gas around to
keep their orbits from crossing each other, but after 20 million years,
the gas has gone, and their orbits start to intersect.
When it goes unstable, it's then a pretty loud and chaotic place.
As Mars-sized bodies collide with each other to build the Earth and
Venus, we get a series of huge, violent collisions.
Over the next 100 million years, the Mars-sized protoplanets annihilate
each other to eventually form second-generation planets, Venus and
Earth.
Yet one planet stood back and watched from the sidelines.
That planet was Mars, and that is the secret to its old age, compared
to Earth.
If Mars is indeed older than the Earth, that would imply that it's one
of the original planetary embryos of the solar system.
Mars is essentially done early.
It is on the outside of this whole process, sitting out not accreting
any more mass and watching while the Earth and Venus form out of the
other big bodies that have been built.
So what prevented Mars from colliding with the rest of the planetary
embryos? The answer Jupiter.
During the grand tack, Jupiter moved to the same distance from the Sun
that we find Mars today, and in the process ate the red planet's lunch.
Jupiter removes all of the material that Mars otherwise would have been
building on for the next tens of millions of years, essentially clears
out a big chunk of the solar system and starves Mars.
If Jupiter were not there, than we would have expected Mars to have
formed a fully-fledged super-Earth planet.
Earth formed from the wreckage of this pileup, but a reminder of this
population lives on, every time we look to the night sky The Moon.
We were convinced we knew how the Moon formed.
Turns out, we were completely wrong.
A distance observer studying our solar system would notice something
strange right away The size of Earth's moon.
Most planet's moons are tiny by comparison.
How did we get a moon so big? For a while we've realized it couldn't
have formed at the same time as the Earth.
It just doesn't make sense.
The standard idea of the Moon's formation is that an object about the
size of Mars collided with the early Earth.
A lot of the debris was thrown into orbit around the Earth, and it
coalesced to form the Moon.
We call this Mars-sized object Thea, but exactly when and how the Moon
formed remains a mystery.
Ever since the Apollo missions, we've been searching for a piece of
lunar rock that can unlock this secret.
Melanie Barboni's team at UCLA is one of the few groups authorized to
analyze these precious lunar samples.
But there's a problem Most moon rock is contaminated and damaged by
violent events in the more recent past.
Asteroids hit the Moon, and there are geological processes that do a
lot of mixing, and it's very difficult to find a pristine sample from
the Moon's very formation.
Melanie and her team have come up with a novel answer to that problem.
Rather than date the entire rock, they isolate a tiny, pristine crystal
within a lunar sample, known as a zircon.
Now we don't want the whole rock, we want only tiny zircon that are
inside those rocks.
These zircons formed just after Thea's collision with Earth.
Once the molten crust of the Moon, it cooled and solidified.
This is much smaller than the grain of sand you find on the beach.
Zircon is the most perfect clock that nature gave us to date the Moon
because it's very resistant.
Here you can see its surface is very smooth.
There is no fractures on it.
Zircons tick off time like clocks.
They contain large radioactive elements that decay into smaller ones.
Scientists can tell how old the crystal is by measuring the radioactive
decay.
The zircons Melanie found rewrite the history of the Moon.
The Moon is around than what we thought.
This means the Moon formed no later than 60 million years after the
birth of the Sun.
This places the formation of the Moon right in the middle of the
destruction of the 30-planet pileup.
It's entirely possible that Thea was once a member of this colony of
Mars-sized objects.
It wasn't just some Mars object that was out in the outer solar system
and came careening in and smashed into us.
It was one of these no-longer-existing planetesimals that slammed into
us and formed the Moon.
But scientists looking for traces of Thea on the Moon draw blanks.
One of the intriguing things about moon rocks is how similar they are,
chemically, to rocks on Earth.
It has the same geochemical fingerprints, the oxygen isotopes, of the
Earth, and all the other chemical isotopes of the Earth.
It looks just like Earth rock.
If the Moon really is the product of one giant collision, well,
whatever hit the Earth, there should be different proportions of that
on the Earth as opposed to the Moon, but we don't find that.
The Moon is identical to material from the Earth, except it's missing
heavy elements, iron and nickel, found in the Earth's core.
Instead, it mainly contains lighter rocky elements found in the Earth's
crust and mantle.
Why? It wasn't a head-on collision.
It was a grazing collision.
Now, that's important because the heavy material was starting to sink
into the center of the Earth, and the lighter stuff was floating to the
top.
And if this were a grazing collision, then that lighter material would
have been splashed out, and that's what would have formed the Moon.
And the Moon is, in fact, less dense than the Earth, which makes sense
if it formed from this lighter material that was near the top.
It looks like you took a blob of the Earth's mantle and just put it
into space around the Earth.
A single head-on collision would leave traces of both Thea and Earth's
core on the Moon, but a glancing blow wouldn't knock off enough
material to form a moon as big as ours.
One way we can end up with the Earth-moon system that we see today and
solve all these problems, is that instead of having one big collision,
there were a series of several smaller collisions.
Each impact grazes off a section of Earth's crust that forms a ring
around our planet.
With each small collision, material would have been thrown into orbit
around the Earth.
Eventually this collisional debris merges to form a small, new moon, a
moonlet.
Now after several of these collisions, you'll have debris from each
collision circling the Earth.
Some of it is still in the form of debris, some of it is in the form of
moonlets.
Eventually they coalesce to form our current moon.
It seems our moon may well be the product of a series of cosmic
collisions in the early solar system.
What we see when we look up in the sky now isn't the moon, but it's
basically the last moon that survived.
It was just the one that happened to be there when all of these impacts
stopped.
The closer we come to understanding our violent past, the more we
appreciate the calm of the present, but as we try to predict our
future, it seems we are destined for chaos once again, as a distant
mystery planet in the outer solar system moves in from the cold.
The birth of our solar system Violent, chaotic, catastrophic.
When we look at the solar system when it was very young, all of our
models pretty much say the same thing.
It was not nice and orderly.
It was a disaster.
And then things settled down.
Life had a chance to take hold and evolve under very stable, very
friendly conditions.
So when you look around right now, you're seeing the story of an
ancient, violent past that has smoothed out into the wonderful
environment we know today.
Our solar system might seem stable, but there is still something very
strange about it.
There is still one enduring mystery, and that is why the solar system
tilted? The eight planets orbit in roughly the same flat plane, but
compared to the spin axis of the Sun, that plane is tilted, making the
Sun look lopsided.
And it turns out, when you look at the Sun's tilt, it's actually tipped
by 6 degrees, the plane of the solar system.
And that may not sound like a lot, but it's actually quite a bit
compared to the tilts of all the planets of the solar system, and this
is an outlier.
It's strange.
What could have done that? The tilt contradicts what we know about how
the solar system formed, a spinning cloud collapses into a disk.
The spinning disk then becomes the Sun and all the planets.
It should all be spinning on the same axis.
So one possible way that you could change the orientation of the pull
of the Sun relative to the plane the planets are in, is if there was
something out there tugging on the planets for a very long time.
Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown claim they've found the missing
something Planet 9, a theoretical giant orbiting off-kilter in the far
reaches of the solar system.
Planet 9 resides on a long and substantial orbit, and it itself is
pretty massive, about 10 Earth masses or so.
If it's orbiting the Sun on a highly elliptical tilted orbit, every
time it gets close to the Sun, it's going to tug on the planets just a
little bit.
But over hundreds and thousands of orbits, it can actually tip the
orbits of all the planets in the solar system, but it won't tip the
Sun.
Over billions of years, the planetary system slowly twists out of
alignment with its original plane.
Planet 9's distant reach may solve the mystery of the solar system's
tilt, but it might also have a disastrous effect on the outer planets
as the Sun starts to die.
the Sun, just like every other star in the universe, has a life cycle.
It was born.
It is currently living its life, and it will die.
As it dies, it will bloat up into a red giant star, and then the outer
layers will begin to drift away.
Now what that means is that the Sun will be losing mass very quickly.
The thing that holds us in orbit around the Sun is the gravitational
pull of the Sun.
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will move away from the Sun as its
outer layers expand, but that's not the case for distant Planet 9.
Scientists think that Planet 9 orbits so far out that as the Sun dies,
it will loosen its gravitational grip on the planet.
Planet 9 starts to feel the influence of other objects more than the
Sun.
It turns out a passing star, for example, could affect its orbit, or
even tides from the galaxy itself, our galaxy's gravitational field can
affect this planet, and drop it into the inner solar system.
This change in Planet 9's orbits could be disastrous for the solar
system.
And if that happens, it could actually wreak havoc on the gas giants
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and distort their orbits, maybe
dropping them into the Sun or flinging them out of the solar system, as
well.
Planet 9 could make the death of the solar system just as violent as
its birth.
Right now we're in this wonderful sweet spot where life can evolve and
take hold between two eras of almost unimaginable violence.
If there is a Planet 9, then it's kind of a rehash of what happened in
the early solar system, when everything was really chaotic because of a
giant planet moving inward.
The same thing could happen again.
Born in chaos.
Perhaps ending in worse.
One thing is clear What we thought we knew of our cosmic home grows
more intriguing with each new clue to this once cold case, now a very
hot one.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s06e03

Death of the milky way

The fate of our galaxy hangs in the balance.

The Milky Way is dying, and we don't know why.
Our galaxy, like all galaxies, has a limited life-span.
After that, it's lights out.
The race is on to find a smoking gun.
It's safe to say right now there are many ways to kill a galaxy.
It's a cosmic crime scene investigation.
Is it murder most foul? Or is it death by natural causes? The suspects
are lined up.
The interrogation is underway.
It's another example of this big universe of ours throwing puzzles at
us that now we have to solve.
What is killing the Milky Way? captions paid for by discovery
communications Earth.
Our home.
Just one of 100 billion planets orbiting 400 billion stars that make up
an immense galactic spiral the Milky Way.
Galaxies are where stars form, and, of course, planets form around
stars, so the story of the Earth, of yourself, of the solar system has
everything to do with the story of the galaxies.
The story of the Milky Way begins 13.
6 billion years ago, just after the big bang.
It's a time when there are no planets and no stars Just a vast, lumpy
soup of superheated hydrogen gas.
Over millions of years, the temperature drops, and gravity compresses
the lumps down, until eventually the hydrogen molecules fuse and ignite
a star.
In time, billions of stars burst into life.
And the Milky Way begins to take shape.
You can think of a galaxy as sort of like a human being.
When you're young and in your adolescent stage, you're vibrant and
active.
That's a young galaxy forming stars in a crazy way, and it's not even
fully formed yet.
At a certain point, galaxy reaches middle age, and a middle-aged galaxy
really is what it's going to be It has its shape But in the long run, a
galaxy will stop forming stars, and eventually, just like we all die,
our galaxy will die.
So, at what stage of life is the Milky Way? Is it a healthy, active
youngster, or is it heading for its deathbed? Scientists can determine
each galaxy's stage of life by its color.
So, we see different colors of galaxies in the universe.
We see galaxies that are tinted blue and galaxies that are tinted red.
When we see a blue galaxy, that tends to be a younger galaxy full of
bright, hot, newly formed stars.
When we see a redder galaxy, that tends to be a dimmer, older galaxy
that isn't forming new stars in the present moment.
All its stars are aged and older and redder, and so the entire galaxy
casts a different hue.
So, what color is our galaxy? It's a simple question, but the answer is
hard to come by, even though we've been looking at the Milky Way for
thousands of years.
The term "Milky Way" is ancient.
It goes back to a time when in the dark sky, people noticed there was
this light band that actually went from horizon to horizon, and that
band turned out to be made of thousands and thousands of stars actually
too far away to see individually.
But it took us a long time to realize what the shape and the scale of
the Milky Way galaxy is.
The amazing thing to think about is that we actually don't know our
home galaxy very well at all.
We actually live in the middle of this disk of gas and dust, and that
obscures our view of the larger Milky Way.
Using visible light, we can't even see to the center, let alone the
other side of the Milky Way galaxy.
The solution is to use a form of light that passes through the gas and
dust Infrared.
This is the Sloan digital sky survey telescope at the Apache point
observatory in new Mexico.
It's mapping the galaxy using infrared and giving scientists
unprecedented insights.
The first sensitive infrared observations really weren't done till the
last 15 years, and each of these new windows on the universe teach us
different things.
In the last 15 years, Sloan has surveyed more than 250 million stars,
analyzing their light to work out the color of the Milky Way.
And what scientists saw shocked them.
Until very recently, we thought the Milky Way was a young, healthy
galaxy, but now there's evidence that we may be entering the pathway to
death.
The Sloan telescope reveals that star production in our galaxy is
falling through the floor.
The Milky Way is dying.
And when it stops forming new stars, its time will be up.
Paradoxically, our galaxy still has star-forming gas in the tank, so it
should be healthy, but something is killing it off.
So, the Milky Way galaxy is this wonderful disk filled with rich
hydrogen gas, lots of dense dust clouds.
It has everything you need there for star formation, but it seems to be
slowing down and even turning off, and right now, we don't really
understand what the culprit is.
With a galaxy killer at large, scientists embark upon the biggest
murder investigation in the history of the universe.
Everything in science, when you're exploring a problem, is a bit like a
crime scene.
You've got the evidence laid out in front of you and we have to figure
out who done it.
Our home in the universe is dying Not the Earth, but our galaxy, the
Milky Way.
It's been producing stars for billions of years, but soon, it will
stop.
Our own sun formed about 4 1/2 billion years ago in the Milky Way
galaxy, and we are not the oldest star by far.
And yet, tragically, we actually seem to be one of the last generations
of new stars in the Milky Way.
Current projections suggest that in about 4 billion years, star
formation may have ceased all together, which is almost just a blink of
an eye in the life cycle of the universe.
To find out why, scientists launch an investigation.
The most crucial question? How is the may dying? To kill a galaxy, you
have to get rid of the cold gas, because that's what stars form from.
There are many ways you can do this.
You can blast it out from the inside.
You can draw it out from the outside.
You can heat it up so it's no longer cold.
You can use it all up, and there's even more ways you can stop it.
What we have to do is figure out which way is happening in our galaxy.
Perhaps the culprit is inside the Milky Way itself.
A clue comes from another galaxy entirely.
This is w2246-0526.
Scientists call it a hot, dust-obscured galaxy, or "hot dog" for short.
This galaxy is It's the most luminous galaxy we know of in the
universe.
It has the light of 300 trillion stars.
The source of the intense light is not its stars, but a mysterious
object at the galaxy's center.
It's a million times smaller than the galaxy itself.
There's only one thing that small and that powerful a supermassive
black hole.
So, supermassive black holes, as the name suggests, are indeed
supermassive.
These are billions of times more massive than our sun.
These are gigantic objects.
The gravity in the supermassive black hole is off the charts.
It sucks in incredible amounts of the hot dog's vital star-forming gas.
And as the gas swirls to form a disk, the intense friction superheats
it to millions of degrees and, in some galaxies, triggers huge jets.
When a lot of material falls onto that black hole, it creates
incredibly energetic jets that can be tens of thousands of light-years
across.
All of a sudden, you have this blowtorch in the middle of the galaxy.
Black hole jets are bad for galaxies because they can shut down star
formation.
They can heat gas up, blow gas out of galaxies, and they could really
kill them.
A supermassive black hole is cooking the hot dog.
What's going on in our galaxy? In 2016, scientists at Harvard
discovered damning evidence that may link the Milky Way's supermassive
black hole to the galaxy's demise.
Just like the hot dog, the Milky Way is surrounded by a vast cloud of
blown-out gas, and the scientists traced the gas back to its source
Sagittarius a-star, our supermassive black hole.
Well, it turns out our supermassive black hole had a bit of a hiccup
about There's evidence that some matter must have fallen into that
black hole, and if it fell in too quickly, it would have gotten
superheated by its own friction, and this would have acted, in a sense,
like an explosion.
And that event was huge.
Our galaxy expelled an incredible amount of gas the mass of the Sun.
Large amount of gas.
This event must have been very catastrophic for the inner parts of the
galaxy.
Luckily, Earth is in the outer parts of the galaxy, where we were able
to survive this event.
Is this the smoking gun? Is our own supermassive black hole killing the
Milky Way? The evidence seems to mount up.
But Sagittarius a-star has an alibi.
It exploded too late.
Sagittarius a-star got very active, very explosive about 6 million
years ago, but that's so recent, it shouldn't have really affected the
star formation rates.
Something else is going on.
There must be another culprit besides the black hole.
Studies suggest our supermassive black hole must have been active
hundreds of millions of years ago to stop all star formation in our
galaxy.
Sagittarius a-star wasn't active at that time, so it's no longer a
suspect.
The hunt is on for a different galaxy killer, and scientists are
widening the investigation.
Maybe the killer isn't inside our galaxy.
It could be that we suffered a hit-and-run.
It could be that we suffered a hit-and-run.
Our universe is a crime scene.
Star production in the Milky Way is breaking down.
Our galaxy is dying, and astronomers are examining the body for clues.
The Milky Way's disk is made up of three sections A nucleus, home to
the galaxy's supermassive black hole a dense, central bulge and the
spiral arms Full of gas, dust, and billions of stars.
The spiral arms should be flat, but they're rippling.
Is this a clue for the cosmic detectives? Today, we look at the edge of
the Milky Way, and we see mysterious ripples in its gas, and we wonder,
what's the origin? Something must have caused it to happen.
Something like that just doesn't happen on its own.
The real question is, why? Whatever caused the ripples didn't hang
around.
Is this evidence of a galactic hit-and-run? January 2016.
Astronomers studying data from the vista telescope discover something
incredible three nearby stars.
On their own, nothing special, except they've recently left our galaxy,
and they're traveling at 350,000 miles an hour.
So, we've discovered these stars that are careening out of the galaxy
at super-high velocities.
Could these three stars somehow be responsible for warping the Milky
Way's disk? Well, absolutely not.
The Milky Way is so much more massive than just three stars.
Three stars alone can't warp a galaxy, but those three stars can be
indicative of more stars.
They can be indicative of the presence of, say, a dwarf galaxy, and
that can warp the galaxy.
Dwarf galaxies are abundant.
But a tiny fraction of the size of a major galaxy, like the Milky Way.
So they're difficult to detect.
But these three bright stars show there's a dwarf galaxy hiding beyond
the edge of the Milky Way.
And scientists can study the trio of stars to rewind the clock and
track back the past movements of the dwarf galaxy.
Simulations suggest that millions of years ago, this dwarf galaxy
punched through the plane of the Milky Way.
As the fast-moving dwarf galaxy hurtles towards the Milky Way, millions
of stars seem set on a collision course.
Catastrophe looks inevitable.
But appearances can be deceptive.
When galaxies collide, the first thing you might imagine is that the
stars collide, but actually, that doesn't happen.
Galaxies are mostly empty space.
If you took the Sun, which is really big It's a million miles across
And shrunk it down to the size of a piece of pollen, the galaxy itself
would be twice the size of the pacific ocean, and the nearest star to
the Sun would be a mile away.
Those tiny pieces of pollen are never going to hit each other.
The distances involved are staggering.
And at the moment of impact, most of the stars from the two galaxies
miss each other entirely.
But that doesn't mean the Milky Way is safe.
Even though the stars just pass each other, they do gravitationally
interact as they come close, and this gravitational interaction sets
them on a course that is different than if they were to live by
themselves.
In much the same way that taking a stone and dropping it into a still
pond creates ripples in the water, a galaxy like this slamming into the
Milky Way can create ripple effects throughout the disk.
The ripples in the Milky Way stretch across tens of thousands of light-
years.
Still, this hit-and-run isn't enough to kill the Milky Way.
It only causes a flesh wound.
But what if this dwarf galaxy isn't acting alone? What if it has
accomplices? There are a lot of dwarf galaxies out there, and it turns
out collisions between these dwarf galaxies and big galaxies, like the
Milky Way, are common.
They happen all the time.
Right now, there are several dwarf galaxies that the Milky Way is
swallowing up.
In fact, a really fun thing is that we're actually closer to the core
of one of these galaxies The Canis Majoris dwarf galaxy Than we are to
the core of the Milky Way.
So some of the stars that you see around you in the night sky are
actually stars from a different galaxy.
So, what happens when all these dwarf galaxies come together and start
pulling and tugging on a larger galaxy? Cosmologists believe there
could be hundreds of dwarf galaxies surrounding the Milky Way.
A collision with just one of these dwarf galaxies may have rippled the
Milky Way's spiral arms, but a gang of dwarf galaxies could have a far
bigger and far more deadly effect.
Dwarf galaxies and the way they interact with big galaxies, like the
Milky Way, can inflect tremendous change in our universe.
When they slam into a galaxy, they can change its structure.
The Milky Way would not look anything like it looks today without those
dwarf galaxies.
Repeated dwarf-galaxy collisions could have radically altered the shape
of the Milky Way itself.
Their gravitational disruptions could have created a distinctive and
possibly fatal feature in the middle of our galaxy The galactic bar.
The center of the Milky Way is elongated.
Instead of it being shaped like a sphere, it's more shaped like a bar,
and the bar is made by stars actually orbiting in this sort of
elongated way.
And this bar can be bad for the health of the galaxy because what they
do is help to funnel gas into the core of the galaxy.
The loss of this gas could be a way of stopping star formation.
The bar-shaped bulge at the center of the Milky Way sweeps our galaxy's
star-building gas into the galactic nucleus.
Here, it gets gobbled up by our galaxy's supermassive black hole.
Without the star-building material, no new stars can form, and the
galaxy dies.
So, is it case closed? Are dwarf galaxies killing the Milky Way? Is the
murder weapon a galactic bar? So, it's possible that the formation of
these bars helps turn off star formation in the very core of the
galaxy, but that's just the central regions of the galaxy.
That doesn't explain what's going farther out in the spiral arms.
So, if star formation really is shutting down in the Milky Way, it's
not really the fault of the bar.
Dwarf galaxies cause the Milky Way grievous bodily harm by creating the
galactic bar.
But they're off the hook for attempted galactic murder.
The investigation continues, and it could be about to take a dramatic
twist.
It might not be that the galaxy's being murdered.
It could just be eating itself to death.
It could just be eating itself to death.
The Milky Way is being killed off.
And the perpetrator remains at large.
Scientists investigating the crime are running out of suspects.
But the hunt for clues continues, so astronomers are examining the
dying body of the Milky Way.
Our galaxy is a hazy disk of stars surrounded by a halo of superheated
gas.
It's over 100,000 light-years across.
But it hasn't always been so big.
When you think about things so vast, so gigantic and ancient as
galaxies, you're kind of tempted to think that they're very stable
objects, that they don't change much over time, but we now know that
our own galaxy is the product of many smaller galaxies that came
together over time, and there are other galaxies still colliding with
us.
We see galaxies eating each other all the time.
They collide, and if one galaxy is very big and one galaxy is very
small, the little galaxy falls into the big one, gets torn apart, and
becomes a part of that bigger galaxy.
The Milky Way might be dying, but it's still a monster foraging through
the universe, swallowing smaller galaxies whole.
It consumes their stars.
But it also has a taste for their star-building gas.
And it doesn't have to collide with other galaxies to feed off of them.
Now, the lifeblood of a galaxy is hydrogen gas.
That's what actually creates new stars.
So as a dwarf galaxy passes by the Milky Way, the tremendously massive
halo of the Milky Way, all of that gas, can draw off material from the
dwarf galaxy, adding it to the Milky Way.
So in this way, the Milky Way drains away the lifeblood of other
galaxies.
In some sense, you could say it's a vampire because a vampire sucks the
life out of other things so it can remain young.
In its 13 billion-year life, our vampire galaxy has feasted.
Consuming the lifeblood of its galactic victims, the Milky Way has
grown fat.
But could this monstrous feeding frenzy be a factor in the Milky Way's
demise? Once again, crucial evidence comes from the Sloan digital sky
survey.
Their telescope maps the stars in our galaxy, but it also maps the
galaxies in our universe.
Looking at distant galaxies is like looking back in time.
Because the farther away they are, the longer their light takes to
reach us.
We see the most distant galaxies not as they are now, but as they were
Billions of years ago.
So, when you look at these galaxies, you're seeing them as they were
when they were very young, and you're seeing these galaxies as they are
more recently, so you can actually look at the evolution How galaxies
change over time as the universe ages.
While studying the data, scientists make a dramatic discovery.
They find spiral galaxies, just like the Milky Way, dying all over the
universe.
And what connects them is their mass.
There seems to be an upper weight limit for the sizes of spiral
galaxies.
Up to about a trillion times the mass of the Sun, we see spiral
galaxies that continue to form stars, but once they pass this
threshold, galaxies tend to die and run out of stars.
While devouring the star-building gas of smaller galaxies, the Milky
Way may have grown obese, and now it could be choking to death on its
own dinner.
But how? Once a spiral galaxy is sufficiently big, it's going to have
an incredible gravitational force, so any gas that it pulls to itself
is going to come in at an incredibly high speed.
That gas is going to be superheated.
The superheated gas moves so quickly that it's prevented from falling
into the Milky Way.
The gas is too energetic for our galaxy's gravity to pull it in.
Instead, it stays in the halo around the Milky Way, and our galaxy's
food supply is choked off.
Eventually, our galaxy will starve.
This will only happen if the Milky Way is over the star-building weight
limit.
But how exactly do you weigh a galaxy? One basic way we can weigh a
galaxy is measure how fast the stars are moving within it.
So the faster the stars orbit around the center of the galaxy, the more
massive the galaxy is.
This method of weighing the Milky Way relies on gravity.
Fast-moving stars need more gravity to hold them in their orbits, and
more gravity means more galactic mass.
When scientists use this information to run the math, the horrible
truth is revealed.
We've passed kind of a critical level.
The Milky Way is far too massive for its own health, and we've entered
the beginning of the end.
We're running out of gas, and I mean this literally.
Gas clouds form stars, and as they form stars, they're used up, and so
our gas tank is getting closer and closer to empty every day.
The investigation into the killing of the Milky Way is closed.
The verdict? The greedy Milky Way is killing itself.
Over millions of years, star formation grinds to a halt, and the galaxy
dies.
But could the galaxy be resurrected? We seem to be telling a very sad
story.
We're talking about the demise of the Milky Way galaxy The end of star
formation But maybe it's just a little bit too soon to write the death
announcement yet.
Hope could be just over the horizon.
In space and astrophysics, really anything is possible.
In space and astrophysics, really anything is possible.
The shocking case of our dying galaxy has been solved.
There was no killer.
Turns out, the Milky Way is eating itself to death.
But is this really the end? Could salvation be heading our way? Even if
star formation is turning off in the Milky Way now, we know that it's
on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy.
They're moving toward each other at hundreds of thousands of miles per
hour.
A collision sounds like something that's always destructive, but that's
not necessarily the case.
The Milky Way's collision with our giant galactic neighbor Andromeda
won't happen for another 4 billion years.
By then, star formation in both of these galaxies will have stopped
completely.
But a giant meet-up could change all that.
As an isolated galaxy, the Milky Way is already in its wind-down phase.
It's not producing as many new stars as it used to.
But there is one way to generate a new round of star formation, and
that's through a galactic merger event.
When Andromeda gets close enough, the mutual gravity between the two
galaxies will start to stretch them out, pulling them out like Taffy.
Stars will be pulled out into these long, looping streamers, and then
the galaxies will physically pass through each other.
Eventually, the two galaxies will draw back together again and merge
into one gigantic galaxy, and at that point, all of these gas clouds
will flash into star formation.
As the galaxies merge, they'll be reborn.
Two dying spiral-shaped galaxies become a single living elliptical
galaxy called Milkomeda.
Imagine you're living in the far future of the galaxy and you see the
night sky while the Milky Way and Andromeda are colliding.
It will look like a very different place.
Rather than one band across the night sky, you might have two as the
two disks come together.
It will be a miraculous sight, but a very, very different place than we
have today.
Our sky will light up for the first time in billions of years.
Star formation will flare across the galaxy.
But is it too soon to celebrate? This new round of star formation
during the merger of our two galaxies While it's very cool for a little
bit, once it's over, that kind of sends the new galaxy into a death
spiral.
When new stars are born in this new galaxy, many of them are going to
be hot, large, blue stars.
Eventually, those young, hot stars are going to start to die, and when
they do, they're going to explode violently as supernovae.
And those supernovae are going to start blasting gas out of the galaxy.
All of the gas is gone.
There's no more stuff to form stars.
And that's what kills a galaxy.
It'll take hundreds of millions of years for Milkomeda to run out of
star-building gas.
And then our new elliptical galaxy will starve.
But the final blow is still to come.
Another issue to consider is what happens to the two supermassive black
holes at the cores of the two galaxies.
Well, initially, they're going to orbit each other, stirring up a lot
of turbulence, and they're going to combine.
And because there's a lot of new, hot, fresh gas, our new galaxy is
going to be a quasar.
And that quasar is going to turn up the heat, it's going to turn up the
turbulence, and this means star formation is going to be shut off.
The combined power of the supermassive black holes help create a quasar
that tears through the galaxy.
It releases ferocious beams of radiation that blast through Milkomeda's
star-forming gas.
It's only just been reborn, but our newly enlarged galaxy is once again
dying.
Vast galaxies, like Milkomeda, seem doomed from the start.
Their size creates too many problems for star formation.
Or so we thought.
The more galaxies we see, the more we realize there's a lot out there
we haven't discovered, and there's a new class of galaxies only
recently identified.
These galaxies are more than 10 times the mass of the Milky Way.
And, intriguingly, they're still forming stars.
Apparently we've missed something.
Apparently we've missed something.
the Milky Way is no more.
After colliding with Andromeda, it's reborn as a giant elliptical
galaxy called Milkomeda.
Scientists thought galaxies this big were doomed.
But is hope on the horizon? The Sloan digital sky survey has spent a
decade studying over a million galaxies.
It's discovered a rare but enormous kind of galaxy A super spiral.
These super-spiral galaxies are spiral galaxies that are incredibly
super, and by "super," I mean they have four times the size, and
they're weird because they exceed the supposed weight limit for spiral
galaxies.
So they shouldn't have new stars, but they do.
They're very healthy galaxies.
Scientists have found just 53 super spirals.
Super-spiral galaxies show that in rare situations, massive galaxies
continue to produce new stars.
So, is this a lifeline for Milkomeda? When we think about two galaxies
colliding, a lot of our computer models suggest that they really mess
each other up.
Things get very chaotic.
But over time, could they settle back down into a spiral shape? And, in
fact, that may be what happens with super spirals.
One of the clues is that many super-spiral galaxies have double cores.
Instead of there just being one supermassive black hole, there are
actually two orbiting each other.
The fact that we see spiral galaxies with two cores makes it possible
that you could have a collision and still survive as a spiral galaxy.
So maybe there's hope that even the Milky Way will be a spiral once it
collides with Andromeda.
Picture the scene Milkomeda drifts through the universe not as an
elliptical galaxy, but as a super spiral.
This shape means the galaxy is far more stable.
The damaging heat and turbulence generated by Milkomeda's supermassive
black holes can't disrupt star-building gas way out in the spiral arms.
Far from dying off, our galaxy lives on Larger than ever before.
But that isn't the end of the story.
Tens of billions of years from now, could the galaxy continue to grow?
Our local group of galaxies Milky Way, Andromeda, Triangulum And then a
collection of dwarf satellite galaxies Is gravitationally bound
together, and eventually, we're all glued together into a single
massive object.
What does this mean? This means we might be part of one of the largest
structures in the universe.
During its billion years of life, the Milky Way changes beyond
recognition.
It suffers countless collisions, feasts on many smaller galaxies, and
gives birth to innumerable stars.
We talk about the life cycle of galaxies How they're born, how they
live healthy lives making new stars, and eventually how they die away.
It's really not as depressing as that.
Everything in the universe changes.
Galaxies like ours are in a constant state of flux.
So when it comes to the Milky Way, death really isn't the end.
What we see in our universe is that there's always a process of birth
and rebirth, so the future of the Milky Way is that it's going to keep
on doing what it does.
Galaxies are ever-changing.
the Milky Way was nothing like what it is today, and certainly, it'll
be a very different place.
Look, I live in this galaxy.
I hope that it can find a way to rejuvenate itself through collisions
or some other process because that gives me some hope that it'll go on
for a long, long time.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s06e04

Uranus and Neptune

Our solar system is home to giants.

Gas giants Jupiter and Saturn seem to dominate, but two ice giants
determine the fate of the rest Neptune and Uranus Distant planets
unconnected to us, or so we thought.
We now know the fate of the ice giants is entwined with our own.
They've gone from being these cold, dull worlds to actually having in
them the very secret of why you and I exist at all.
Their story is of epic migration, brutal destruction Uranus got jabbed
and then knocked on its side.
Of worlds more alive than anyone imagined.
They hold the key to the history of the solar system and perhaps to
life on Earth.
captions paid for by discovery communications Uranus and Neptune
Mysterious giants lurking in the cold outer reaches of the solar system
The farthest planets from the Sun.
Uranus and Neptune are sort of the sentinels of the outer solar system.
They're out past Jupiter and Saturn, well over, like, 2 billion, Their
size and location are a puzzle to planetary astronomers.
Uranus and Neptune are somewhat of a mystery because, in a way, they
shouldn't exist, or at least they shouldn't exist where they are.
Scientists can't understand how these giant planets grew so big so far
from the Sun.
The mystery starts with the birth of the solar system.
In the beginning, the Sun ignites from a disk of gas and dust.
The rocky cores of the first planets start to grow.
They collide with the debris in the disk as they orbit the Sun.
But the inner planets have a size limit.
To grow into a giant planet, you need gas.
Heat from the infant sun blasts these lighter gas molecules beyond a
point astronomers call the frost line.
Out here, it's cool enough for gas molecules like hydrogen and helium
to stabilize.
Jupiter and Saturn take shape first Sweeping in the abundant gas and
quickly becoming gas giants.
But Neptune and Uranus are different.
Jupiter and Saturn are about whereas Neptune and Uranus are more like
20%.
So what does this difference in gas tell us about their formation? We
suspect that Uranus and Neptune came a little bit later when there was
not as much gas to be swept up.
Uranus and Neptune have less time to suck up as much hydrogen and
helium before these gases disappear.
But they're also forming farther out, where it's cold enough for other,
heavier gases to freeze.
These are swept up by the growing outer planets.
Out where Uranus and Neptune are, tons of ice, tons of frozen gases as
we might think of them Methane, ammonia, water, and so that's what
makes up their composition predominantly.
They may be smaller than Jupiter and Saturn, but these heavy ices mean
they grow dense.
They become ice giants.
But there's a problem.
They're too big.
The disk of gas and ice around a newborn star does not last forever,
and material in the far reaches of the solar system is spread thin.
As you move further out in the solar system, the time scale for two
bodies to find each other and collide and accrete slows down because
the periods around the Sun are much longer, and it just takes a very,
very long time.
Neptune and Uranus orbit the Sun incredibly slowly, too slowly to
collide with enough icy material to grow into the giants we see today.
So when we look at Neptune at this very distant orbit, we don't have
enough time in the solar system to build a planet like Neptune.
We just don't think we could build Neptune where we find it today.
So what happened? It turns out, where we see them now is probably not
where they started out.
One thing we've learned about solar systems is that things are in a
delicate balance, and planets migrate.
They move around.
They don't form in one place and stay there forever.
So what has enough power to move a giant planet like Neptune? An even
bigger one Jupiter.
One way for planets to move is by gravitationally interacting with each
other, so they feel each other's gravity.
They can tug.
They can pull, and that effect can lead to planets slowly migrating
around in their planetary systems.
The closer two planets are, the greater the effect, and in the early
days of the solar system, the giant planets are much closer together.
On top of that, they may have orbited in a different order than we see
today Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus.
So what causes Neptune and Uranus to swap positions? The answer lies
with Jupiter and Saturn.
The two biggest giants lock into a gravitational dance.
There's always this interplay between them.
Think of Capoeira dancers, balancing and moving together in a careful,
orchestrated way.
Over millions of years, a rhythm slowly builds.
These giants push and pull each other into more elliptical orbits.
But the gravitational dance reaches a climax.
The stretched orbits become unstable.
The giants move off course.
As Saturn and Jupiter twist out from the Sun, they fling Neptune out
beyond Uranus.
As Neptune moves out through the solar system, it pushes debris ahead
of it.
These are the leftover icy fragments from planet formation.
Neptune snowplows these bodies out.
They because the Kuiper belt, the band of thousands of small bodies of
ice and rock just beyond Neptune's orbit.
You can think of the structure of that Kuiper belt as, like, blood
splatter on the wall at a murder scene.
It's the record of this really violent of Neptune migrating outward
across the solar system.
But Neptune's movement doesn't just fling these small icy bodies out
into the Kuiper belt.
It also sends some of them crashing in towards the Sun.
Some bombard the early Earth.
It's the most violent time on our planet since the birth of the solar
system itself, the Sun flared into life.
It's called the late heavy bombardment.
During the late heavy bombardment, you had rocks literally falling down
from the sky constantly.
This would've been a terrible time for life.
And yet, this cascade of icy bodies also brings something essential for
life.
One characteristic of the outer solar system bodies is that we often
find organics.
Organics provide the basis for all living organisms we find today.
They're carbon-based molecules that form on the surface of dust grains
in the early solar system.
The rocky inner planets sweep up these organics as they grow But the
scorched surfaces of the young planets are too inhospitable for many of
these delicate molecules to survive.
Yet organics remain intact on the small, icy bodies of the outer solar
system that Neptune tosses towards the early Earth.
Neptune was the solar system's cosmic delivery service.
As far away as Uranus and Neptune are, the existence of ice giants in
the outer solar system may have been critical for the existence of
Earth today.
And the ice giants may have done more than give life on Earth a
kickstart.
They may have prevented our planet from being completely destroyed.
The ice giants Uranus and Neptune, distant giant worlds that may have
delivered the elements of life to Earth.
Without them, our planet itself might not exist at all.
These ice giants are fascinating worlds, but they may be even more
important than that.
They might be the reason we're here.
Around 4 billion years ago, the young Earth is under threat from our
solar system's bully, Jupiter.
Positioned between the rocky inner planets and the giant outer ones,
Jupiter dominates the solar system.
When you have a behemoth like Jupiter in your solar system, what it
does determines in part what everything else does.
As Jupiter and Saturn lock into their gravitational dance, they migrate
out, away from the Sun.
Jupiter's immense gravity should pull Earth and Venus along with it.
Earth and Venus' orbits should stretch and overlap with each other.
It's a collision waiting to happen except It didn't.
So by the fact that we're talking about this here on Earth suggests
that Earth and Venus didn't have an impact early in the solar system
when Jupiter and Saturn were migrating.
Something appears to have protected us.
Scientists think something yanked Jupiter into a different orbit before
it had a chance to pull Earth and Venus on a collision course.
But what could cause such a large jump in Jupiter's migration? This is
where the ice giants enter the story.
Getting Jupiter to make a big jump in its migration is not easy, and so
the best way that the models have been able to actually recreate this
jump is to have Jupiter actually eject something the size of Neptune
out of the solar system entirely.
Jupiter has a lot of gravity, and if you get too close to it, you're
going to be accelerated as you fall in towards Jupiter, and it's
possible that you can eject a planet completely out of the solar system
this way.
It's basically slingshotting it.
But a planet the size of Neptune is heavy, even for Jupiter, and
slingshotting it out of the solar system gives Jupiter a kickback.
Jupiter is knocked into a new orbit, and Earth is saved.
But which ice giant sacrificed itself for us? Neptune is still in the
solar system, and so is Uranus.
If you use computer models to basically predict the behavior of the
planets, what you find is that if you start with Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus and Neptune, you can't save the Earth without ejecting either
Uranus or Neptune, but they're there, so we know that's not right.
However, if you add a third ice giant, a fifth giant planet out there,
then that actually makes everything work.
You can save the Earth, have the planets in their present
configuration, and that ice giant gets ejected from the solar system.
Imagine our solar system starting with three ice giants.
One swings too close to Jupiter.
Our solar system's bully throws its victim clean out of the playground.
Jupiter is pushed into a new orbit by the ice giant's gravity.
Earth is saved from Jupiter's deadly gravitational pull, and the solar
system becomes the safe and orderly place we see today.
So we have a funny story here.
This ice giant that may have existed billions of years ago yanked
Jupiter back into the outer solar system, preventing it from destroying
the Earth, but in the meantime, it sacrificed itself for us, getting
ejected from the solar system.
We have to thank it for our existence, but it's not there anymore.
We humans are really lucky.
Had the dinosaurs not gone extinct, we wouldn't be here.
Had this planet not been ejected out of our solar system, we wouldn't
be here.
So where is this missing ice giant now? The answer is pretty amazing.
It could be clear across the other side of the milky way galaxy.
The Sun moves around the milky way galaxy at about half a million miles
an hour, and in the history of the Earth, we've been around about 20
times.
We could've lost that planet anywhere across the milky way.
But is this third ice giant really lost or just hiding? January 2016
Astronomers at Caltech make an astonishing announcement.
They claim to have found evidence of a mysterious ninth planet
disrupting icy bodies far out in the Kuiper belt.
Simulations suggest that if this so-called planet nine exists, it is
similar in size to Neptune and Uranus.
Could this be Earth's savior? Could the solar system's primordial
missing sacrificial ice giant be planet nine? Yes, it could.
Perhaps this third ice giant wasn't ejected from the solar system after
all.
One type of ejection is where you just take something and you throw it
out of the solar system, but another more gentle kind is when you don't
quite make it all the way out, and instead you go on a very, very long
period orbit around the young solar system.
Planet nine is thought to be so far out, it takes up to 20,000 years
for it to travel around the Sun.
Perhaps it's been observing the dramatic, dynamical evolution of the
solar system unfold from its frigid Whether planet nine is a long-lost
sibling or not, ice giants played a huge role in taming Jupiter.
They made our solar system the haven it is today.
But they are not peaceful places.
Somehow, out in the deep freeze, Neptune is tormented by wild weather,
mysterious superstorms and maybe even diamond rain.
Uranus and Neptune Their location at the edge of our solar system makes
them very difficult to study.
The ice giants Uranus and Neptune are very mysterious to us.
They're very far away, so they're hard to observe with telescopes here
at the Earth.
As a result, these planets have long been overlooked.
The only time we've glimpsed these distant giants up close was when
voyager 2 flew past them in the 1980s.
The results amazed Heidi Hammel, part of the voyager 2 imaging team at
the time of the Neptune flyby.
One of the most wondrous and frustrating things about planetary flybys
is that you learn so much that you open a whole Pandora's box of
questions.
One observation instantly intrigued scientists.
Neptune has the fastest winds in the solar system.
Here on Earth, our winds are actually driven by different temperatures
from sunshine.
Neptune is so far away from the Sun that it receives almost no energy
from our star.
Neptune is 3 billion miles from the Sun.
It's really cold there, so why does it have such fast winds? The less
energy a planet receives from the Sun, the quieter we expect its
weather to be But Neptune isn't tranquil at all.
It's covered in massive violent storms.
There are storms that are rivaling the size of the inner planets.
That's a pretty big storm.
One of the largest ever recorded on Neptune is known as the 1989 great
dark spot, a single vast tempest, large enough to swallow the Earth
whole, riding on a jet stream with a mind-blowing wind speed of 1,500
miles per hour.
Hands down, Neptune holds the record for the fastest wind speeds in the
solar system.
The fastest tornado winds on Earth are only a few hundred miles an
hour, and that does devastating destruction, so it's hard to imagine
what winds on Neptune would do.
A probe entering Neptune's upper atmosphere would record freezing
temperatures, minus-370 degrees Fahrenheit Too cold to generate the
wind we see.
though, the probe is smashed by Neptune's relentless jet stream winds.
And the deeper you go, the warmer it becomes.
Neptune has almost three times as much heat coming from its interior
than you would expect from a ball of gas out at Neptune's distance.
The strange thing about these high-speed Neptune winds is that they're
not powered by heat energy from the Sun.
In fact, they're powered by heat energy from Neptune's own interior.
So where does this internal heat come from? When planets form, it's a
very violent, very energetic event, and the planets are actually
extremely hot, and it takes billions of years for that heat to leak
away, so Neptune, it turns out, probably still has a tremendous amount
of that heat that is trapped inside of it, and as that bubbles up,
that's what's actually heating the atmosphere and driving this
tremendous weather.
So how does Neptune retain so much heat? The secret lies deep below the
atmosphere.
As you go down and down and down, you'll just find the pressure gets
more and more intense until you are eventually essentially crushed.
That atmosphere will get thicker and thicker like a fog until suddenly
you would realize that instead of an atmosphere, you are in an ocean.
Neptune has a super-dense fluid mantle made up of methane, ammonia, and
water.
Really, an ice giant is not a solid ball of ice, but rather a moving
ocean of swirling liquid material.
This swirling liquid traps the heat, acting like a blanket, insulating
the core.
This is the secret to Neptune's wild weather, and the intense interior
heat and pressure in Neptune's methane-rich mantle may create another
extraordinary effect.
The pressure is so intense that the methane breaks up, and methane is
made of carbon and hydrogen, so if you take carbon and you compress it
a lot, you could get diamond formation, and so it is entirely possible
that literal diamonds are raining down in this ocean of the mantle
fluid on Neptune.
From superstorms to diamond rain, Neptune is strange, dynamic beyond
expectation, but Uranus is the real mystery, the victim of a cosmic
one-two punch with seasons unlike anything else in the solar system.
January 1986 Voyager 2 approaches Uranus at over 40,000 miles per hour.
Astronomers have been waiting for this moment for 8 years, but on
voyager's arrival, all that's revealed is a bland, pale, blue ball.
That was a little bit disappointing from my perspective as a scientist
studying the atmosphere of the planet.
everything changes.
Telescopes reveal huge storms raging across the planet.
Why the enormous difference? The answer lies in the planet's extreme
axial tilt.
If Neptune and Uranus are siblings, Uranus is definitely the wonky
sibling.
All the planets are tilted with respect to the solar system.
The Earth is 23 degrees.
Jupiter is just a handful of degrees, but Uranus is actually on its
side.
It's tipped 98 degrees.
Uranus' tilt is almost four times more extreme than any other planet in
the system.
It's lying so its poles are horizontal, and its rings and moons are
vertical relative to the plane of the solar system.
Earth's tilt gives it seasons.
Uranus' extreme tilt gives it extreme seasons.
Twice a year, its poles are pointed directly towards or away from the
Sun, so each pole has a very intense period of midnight sun and a dark,
cold polar night.
It takes Uranus 84 years to orbit the Sun, so those seasons last for a
very long time.
You get, like, in the northern hemisphere as its going around the Sun
and 20 years of darkness in the Southern hemisphere.
Uranus is kind of like "game of thrones.
" You're waiting ages for winter to come, and then winter lasts 20
years.
A winter's night or a summer's day that lasts for decades.
But what happens in the interim when the orbit of the planet means the
Sunlight hits its spinning equator rather than one of its poles? When
it's off to the side, the whole planet's lit up.
As it spins, every piece of the planet is exposed to sunlight.
Sunlight hits the equator of the spinning planet, pumping energy into
the surface, warming the atmosphere and driving air currents around the
planet.
The result Spring and Autumn storms.
That extreme change in how much sunlight is distributed across that
planet's atmosphere probably has an important role in driving this
remarkable seasonal change we see in Uranus' atmosphere.
Unlike its ice giant sibling, Neptune, Uranus has seasonal storms
rather than constant ones, so why does Uranus roll around the Sun while
other planets spin like tops? It goes against everything we know about
planetary formation.
In some ways, forming new planets in the solar system was a lot like
making cotton candy.
There was a direction that everything was coming together.
If you put a stick down in it, the material would accumulate around it
in a certain direction, so that's why all the planets have roughly the
same orbital axes.
If Uranus started out with a vertical orbital axis, how did it end up
flipped on its side? We know there were a lot of collisions between
planets or planet-sized objects in the early solar system.
It's natural to assume that Uranus probably got hit as a grazing impact
from another giant object, which tipped it over on its side.
But there's a problem with this assumption.
If you hit Uranus with a single impact to knock it over to 98 degrees,
then actually what you expect is that the rings left over would be
orbiting in the wrong direction relative to the spin of the planet.
What event could be powerful enough to flip a planet, but gentle enough
to bring everything in orbit around it along for the ride? A single big
collision is probably not what happened to Uranus because that would've
been too disruptive.
It's kind of like boxing.
Instead of one big knockout blow, it was the old one-two.
One theory suggests that the newly formed Uranus is hit by a
protoplanet the size of Earth.
The blow is only glancing.
Uranus is knocked partway towards its current tilt.
Its ring system survives the impact and stays in orbit around the
equator.
As the second object hits, Uranus is tipped all the way, and the rings
follow.
Uranus got jabbed and then knocked on its side.
Uranus may orbit the Sun sideways, but Neptune's moon, Triton, has an
even stranger trajectory.
It travels around Neptune in reverse.
But weirder than that, it seems to be erupting, and it could even
harbor life.
Wherever we see planets, we expect to see moons.
It seems the larger the planet, the more moons orbit around it.
Jupiter has 69.
Saturn, 61.
Next come the ice giants.
Astronomers have so far detected and 13 around Neptune.
But one stands out completely Neptune's moon, Triton.
Triton is a bit of an oddball because instead of orbiting Neptune in
the same direction that Neptune spins, it orbits in the opposite
direction, what we call a retrograde orbit.
A giant planet and its moons form out of the same swirling disk of gas,
dust, and rocky material.
The lighter gas falls into the center more easily, forming the planet,
while some of the heavier rocky material is left over in the disk,
forming the moons.
Typically, the moon travels in the same direction that the planet is
orbiting, but in the case of Triton and Neptune, that's the complete
opposite case.
We know it couldn't have formed in that orbit around Neptune.
It had to come were somewhere else, and a wonderful clue to where it
came from is the nearby neighbor, Pluto.
Pluto is a dwarf planet in the nearby Kuiper belt.
It's only 200 miles smaller than Triton, but it's not just size that
makes these two bodies similar.
It's their composition.
Triton is actually most similar to Pluto.
It has a similar amount of rock in its interior.
It has a similar surface composition with a lot of nitrogen and
methane.
It really looks like a Pluto-like world, but it just happens to be
orbiting a planet instead of orbiting the Sun.
If Triton is like Pluto, maybe it also started life in the Kuiper belt.
Could it have been captured by Neptune's gravity, pulled into the gas
giant's orbit? It's not easy to capture a moon into orbit around a
planet.
It's not natural for a body to come close to another world and just
spiral in.
You've somehow got to put on the brakes when it's close in.
For Neptune to capture Triton, Triton had to be slowed down, but how?
Again, Kuiper belt objects hold a clue.
Many of the largest are binary pairs, two worlds orbiting each other,
like Pluto and its large moon Charon.
Perhaps Triton was one of a pair as well.
If Triton was in orbit with a partner, each of the pair would travel at
different speeds.
This speed difference is key.
Triton's velocity is just a little bit slower.
As it's orbiting its companion, it's slow enough that it could actually
get captured by Neptune, while that other one would speed off across
the solar system.
Triton's original dance partner is flung out and away.
Triton has a new, much bigger companion, Neptune.
But these unlikely partners are dancing out of sync.
Capture explains the backwards orbit, but there's an even stranger
mystery to solve.
On a moon like Triton, we'd expect to see heavily cratered terrain, the
hallmark of geologically dead worlds.
Instead, voyager 2 reveals a world that's startlingly alive.
I think one of the most amazing discoveries of the entire voyager
mission is that when we flew past Triton, we saw these jets of liquid
nitrogen coming up out of the surface.
We had no idea that this tiny, little cold world out there would still
be alive.
Smooth, icy planes cover the surface.
Geysers of nitrogen punch up through the crust and spew black dust We
thought it was too far from the Sun, too cold, too dead.
It was just going to be an ice ball like all the other moons that had
tended to be, but, no.
It's a fresh, young surface.
Triton's surface is a frosty 200 degrees below freezing.
Where's the heat coming from to drive these surface features? The
answer lies with Neptune's capture of Triton.
Triton's orbit is circular, but it was once elliptical.
As Triton moved closer in and farther away, it would have been
repeatedly squashed and stretched by Neptune's gravity.
That would generate massive amounts of friction inside of Triton.
Might well have completely melted Triton due to those forces, and as
that happened, it would have acted as a brake.
All that friction would have circularized Triton's orbit and left it in
the orbit that we see today.
This change in orbit is what gives Triton its heat.
The surface of Triton froze over, but the moon still retains some of
this warmth deep below the icy shell.
Astronomers think there's enough heat to melt ice into water, forming
an underground liquid ocean on a world 3 billion miles from the Sun.
Liquid water, heat There is only one question, and it's impossible not
to ask it.
Could there be life? If there's a source of energy on Triton, then
perhaps there's a form of life that figured out how to take advantage
of that energy source.
An incredible thought.
If life has carved out a niche, this frozen ball could be the most
distant habitable world from the Sun.
Neptune's moon, Triton, might be alive, but Uranus' moons are even
stranger.
They have a neat trick to cheat death entirely.
Uranus An ice giant with beautiful, shimmering rings and 27 moons And
their position is a mystery.
Half exist within a tightly packed orbit.
It shouldn't be possible for this many moons to be in such close
proximity to each other.
The environment around Uranus is very busy, and the system appears
unstable, and the moons should be colliding, but yet, we see these
nice, well-formed moons.
And what's even more surprising is that in 2003, the Hubble space
telescope revealed two new rings and two new moons Cupid and Mab.
Question is, where did these moons come from? A clue lies in Uranus'
rings.
In addition to the very packed moon system, you also have rings around
Uranus, which is also somewhat unexpected, but these two unexpected
qualities might actually explain one another.
Anytime you see a ring system, you're seeing part of a process.
There was probably a time in Earth's history when it had a ring, you
know, when our moon was being formed.
It seems that the new moons are made up of material from a previous
ring system.
But when scientists model Cupid's future, they discover it's
dangerously close to another moon, Belinda.
In a few thousand years, two of the moons in particular, Cupid and
Belinda, are likely to collide together as their trajectories
intersect.
And this collision will create a domino effect.
When there is a moon collision, that sets up a very delicate
gravitational balance, and it also creates a lot of debris, so one
collision sets off a string of collisions.
We think Cupid and Belinda will destroy not only each other, but all of
Uranus' inner moons.
A runaway cascade of destruction grinds Uranus' moons to pebbles.
All of this will happen in only a few thousand years.
The fact that we are predicting to have a collision within a few
thousand years feels kind of contrary because this system has been here
for billions of years, so it seems a little bit lucky that we're
looking just now, and we think there's going to be a collision in the
near future.
What if this cycle of destruction is a case of Uranian groundhog day?
When you look at the Uranian system, I like to think of it sort of like
a violent hockey game.
Guys are taking big hits.
They can't continue, so what must you do? You have to sub them in and
out.
When you look at this game that's that violent, you know that the guys
you see on the ice are not the guys that started the game.
Whoo! It's a whole new set of players.
Like hockey subs, Uranus keeps its moons fresh by recycling them.
Every time these moons collide, the debris forms a ring system around
Uranus, and then over time, that ring system starts to spawn new moons.
Over time, the rings of debris that surround Uranus form into new
moons, which in turn collide and grind each other to dust.
Uranus, it turns out, is actually very Eco-conscious.
Its moons shatter.
They hit each other, form all this debris, and then the moons reform
from that material, and then the whole pattern, the whole cycle starts
up again, and the moons hit, shatter, and new moons form all over
again.
Ultimately, this eternal cycle of life and death that we see with these
moons might be a story that is actually kind of true of many things in
the universe, when it comes to stars, planets, and maybe even the
universe itself.
Uranus and Neptune, no longer forgotten outposts of the solar system.
Suddenly, these planets are revealed to you as worlds.
It's breathtaking.
It's it's awe-inspiring.
It's humbling, and it makes you proud that you're part of a species
that could actually do that, to get out there and to see these places.
Dynamic worlds with dramatic, often violent histories, stolen moons,
giants flung out into the cold, saving the Earth from destruction.
Uranus and Neptune are puzzle pieces in the solar system.
They are giant planets.
They have a lot to tell us, not just about themselves but about
everything in our solar system, including our own planet, Earth.
Somewhere in the story of the ice giants is the reason you and I are
actually here to talk about it at all, the reason the Earth was able to
form and stabilize and become an environment for life.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the ice giants are the
coolest planets in the solar system.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s06e05
Secret history of mercury

For thousands of years, planet Mercury has baffled astronomers, but now
its secrets have been revealed.
It's a bizarre world unlike any other.
When you look at the family of planets that make up our solar system,
you know, Mercury does seem to be a little bit of a weirdo.
This is one tough world, surviving brutal attacks from comets, the Sun,
and even other planets.
You could see by the surface of Mercury that it has a lot of battle
scars.
The solar system did not treat it well.
And yet, this world has been brought to life with water ice, volcanism,
and tectonic activity.
If I had to describe Mercury in a word, it would be "surprising.
" At first, it may seem that you could write this off as a dull, little
dead rock close to the Sun, but Mercury has a story to tell.
And this story could end with Mercury threatening the very existence of
planet Earth.
Ignore it at your peril because there may come a day when Mercury makes
its presence very well known indeed.
captions paid for by discovery communications completes its final orbit
around planet Mercury.
And the images sent back to Earth during its mission left scientists
stunned.
Our view of Mercury from before and after the messenger probe is like
having terrible vision your whole life and then finally going to the
optometrist and getting glasses that clear everything up, and it
completely opened our eyes to what this planet looks like.
Mercury orbits the innermost solar system, the closest planet to the
Sun around three times closer than Earth, in a scorching environment of
lethal heat and radiation.
Capturing images was a monumental challenge for the messenger mission
team led by Sean Soloman.
Mercury has been among the most difficult planets in the solar system
to study.
The Hubble space telescope is forbidden from viewing planet Mercury
because it's too close to the Sun, and their optics would be severely
damaged.
Messenger looks closer than we ever have before.
It reveals a strange world, just 5% the mass of the Earth, closer in
size to our moon.
At first glance, Mercury and Earth, they're nothing alike, right?
They're both made of rocks.
That's about it.
They're both orbiting the same sun, but when you start looking a little
bit closer at Mercury, you start to see some really surprising
similarities to Earth.
When scientists look at Mercury, they spot something that shouldn't be
there.
Mercury has water on it, which if you were going to make a long list of
all the discoveries about Mercury, I think water would be right at the
top of "what? What? Seriously?" If you thought in advance of the last
place in the world to find water, you'd think of Mercury because it's
so close to the Sun.
It gets even stranger.
The water exists in the form of ice.
There could even be a trillion tons of it, enough to encase Washington,
D.
C.
, in a frozen block 2 miles thick.
So how do you get frozen water onto the closest planet to the Sun? For
me, I think the most interesting thing about Mercury is the fact that
what should be the hottest planet in the solar system is, in some
parts, among the coldest, and I love that paradox because I love the
unexpected.
Mercury is a world of brutal extremes.
The Sun-facing side is blasted by solar radiation With temperatures
rocketing to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead, but the
side facing away plummets to -300.
It's all because of Mercury's almost nonexistent atmosphere.
Planetary scientist Dan Durda demonstrates the effect this has using a
campfire.
So right now, with this jacket on, holding the warmth in, I'm a bit
like a planet with an atmosphere.
The atmosphere of a planet, it's a thermal blanket, a thermal
insulator, that helps make more uniform the temperature of the entire
planet.
So at the moment, I'm pretty warm uniformly, but if I take my jacket
off altogether, well, you know, I can already feel my back cooling off.
Sitting here without my jacket, without an atmosphere, if you will, I'm
like the planet Mercury which has no effective atmosphere, and
therefore the only warmth that it can hold is the warmth radiating
directly on it from the Sun itself.
Any parts of Mercury facing away from the Sun very rapidly radiate that
heat off to space and cool to very, very chilly temperatures.
So could water ice survive on the side of Mercury facing away from the
Sun? The nighttime side is very bitterly cold.
If that were the end of the story, you might be able to have, you know,
frozen water, icy water, on the side of Mercury facing away from the
Sun.
But Mercury doesn't keep one side always locked to the Sun and one side
always facing away.
It actually does rotate.
It rotates three times for every two trips it takes around the Sun.
As Mercury turns, the Sun would vaporize any water ice facing it.
But are there secret hiding places where the Sun cannot reach? To find
the answer, planetary scientist Nina Lanza searches fissures in
Iceland.
So here we can see, at the surface, there's no ice.
It's too warm, but if we look down in this fissure here, it's only
about 20 feet deep, but at the bottom, there's actually some ice.
So if we measure a rock that's been in the Sun, let's say this one, we
can see it's actually pretty warm.
It's about 61 degrees Fahrenheit, but if we aim, now, for the bottom of
this hollow, we can see now, it's about 33 nope.
It's dropping.
It's 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and this is because the Sun doesn't really
get to the bottom of this place, and that's the key.
While this ice is hidden in a fissure, on Mercury the ice survives in
craters on the planet's north pole, forever safe from the glare of
direct sunlight, because these craters sit in a perfect spot.
Mercury's axis doesn't tilt very much compared to the Sun.
The Earth's axis tilts about 23 degrees, but Mercury is pretty much
straight up and down, and that means that as large as the Sun is in the
sky, there are craters on the poles that sunlight never gets to.
They're always cold.
So the surface of Mercury is heated and then cooled as it moves around
the Sun, but there are craters that are always dark and always cold.
Against all the odds, despite everything that suggests this shouldn't
happen, Mercury is a safe haven for this water ice.
The bottoms of these craters are called cold traps because they're so
cold that any water that gets there stays there basically forever.
It can last literally for billions of years.
But where would it have come from? It probably came from comets and
asteroids.
Comets are giant chunks of ice.
So if a comet hits Mercury, that's going to deliver a lot of ice, and,
in fact, we know a lot of asteroids have ice on them as well.
So both of these things could deliver water to Mercury.
Comets and asteroids brought water ice to the innermost planets of the
solar system.
This same water delivery system gave Earth the elements needed for
life.
And though Mercury has pockets of frozen water, the planet can never
use it to develop living organisms.
What Mercury is really showing us is that you can start with the same
basic building blocks for planets, right? You can have essentially the
same materials, but end up with very different environments.
Compared to the other planets, Mercury ended up as the runt of the
litter.
But there's evidence this wasn't always the case.
Could this little world have once been much, much bigger? We have
theories for how the planets first formed in our solar system, but
Mercury just doesn't fit in.
When you look at the family of planets that make up our solar system,
you know, Mercury does seem to be a little bit of a weirdo.
On Earth, we have a relatively small core and a thick mantle and a thin
crust.
So you compare the core of the Earth to the size of the Earth, it's
relatively small.
If you look at Mercury, it's not that way at all.
The core is absolutely huge compared to the planet itself.
Mercury's huge iron core is surrounded by an unusually thin mantle of
rock.
It just looks odd.
It's funny.
You don't expect to get a core that large in a planet that small.
It's almost as if Mercury lost some of its mantle somewhere.
I mean, maybe it left it behind the couch.
Who knows? But it's gone now.
But how can this material just vanish? Mercury could be the way it is
now because it started as a much larger planet and then something
happened to strip away the top layer of it, and the only way we know
how to do that on a planetary scale is with planetary impacts.
Picture the early solar system when Mercury is still forming.
It's completely different from the little world we know now.
Up to four times more massive, twice the mass of Mars, but it orbits in
a shooting gallery.
Impacts are inevitable, and before long, an object the size of our moon
smashes into Mercury in a giant impact event.
This is apocalyptic.
This is the sweatiest nightmare you can have.
You're resurfacing an entire planet.
The energies are vast.
One of these giant impacts probably would have remelted it all the way
through.
What's going to remain after it's done is completely different than
what started in the first place.
It's hard to overstate just how impactful these events are.
Huge chunks of Mercury's mantle are flung into space.
The result? Two-thirds of its mass are now made up by its core, but
where did the rest of it go? Billions of years ago, there was a planet
that we will never know, a planet that was destroyed when the current
Mercury was formed.
Is it possible that some of it may still be out there? The lost mantle
debris could still exist in the innermost solar system.
Scientists call these hypothetical objects vulcanoids.
Vulcanoids can be very valuable for understanding the formation of
Mercury because some of these vulcanoids may be pieces of Mercury's
missing mantle.
But in order to survive, these vulcanoids would have to orbit on a
gravitational tightrope.
You know, like this marshmallow, vulcanoids exist in kind of a
precarious position in the solar system, a little too close to the
fire, a little too close to the Sun, those objects actually would
vaporize away, kind of like that.
If you orbit too far from the Sun, you're going to approach too closely
to Mercury and have gravitational encounters, maybe get flung out of
the solar system or maybe just impact Mercury itself and get eaten, if
you will.
But in-between those two extremes, at just the right distance from the
Sun, a little closer to the Sun than Mercury, but not so close that you
get fried, is this vulcanoid region where objects in orbit around the
Sun could remain gravitationally stable over the entire age of the
solar system.
That's the place to look for this potential population of little
asteroid-like objects.
We know where they should be, but there's a problem.
You may wonder why haven't we seen these vulcanoids if they actually
exist? If they're actually orbiting, why don't we just look for them?
Well, it's because they're really close to the Sun.
Unlike the asteroids or the Kuiper belt objects where we're looking out
away from the Sun from our perspective here on the Earth, we're looking
out into the dark nighttime sky, in the case of the vulcanoids, we're
looking for something very, very close to the Sun, in close to that
really brilliant light source.
Our sun is around Mercury is just 3,000.
When our telescopes see Mercury passing in front of the Sun, it's
little more than a pinprick.
With vulcanoids, we're searching for something thousands of times
smaller than Mercury.
If vulcanoids exist, they orbit in a blind spot, but scientists will
keep searching for them because they could be the last surviving
remnants of Mercury's lost mantle.
If we were to discover vulcanoids, that would offer us an entirely new
population of objects to study.
This material could offer some rather unique insight into the formation
of Mercury itself.
A giant head-on impact has been our best explanation for Mercury's
weird structure.
But now there's a startling new theory for Mercury's missing mantle.
It was stolen, but who is the thief? For years, we assumed that Mercury
lost most of its mantle in a giant head-on collision.
But the messenger spacecraft turned everything on its head.
One of the exciting things that we've learned about Mercury recently by
sending probes to study its surface is that its surface is littered
with material that we didn't think should be there, things that we'd
call volatiles.
The volatiles are chemical elements like potassium.
They're called volatile Because they evaporate easily in high
temperatures, just the sorts of temperatures generated by a giant
impact.
If I had to describe Mercury in a word, it would be "surprising.
" The idea was that a smaller object ran into Mercury and knocked off
material.
Well, that actually would work to make it lose material, but it would
also generate a lot of heat, and because of that, the volatile
materials on Mercury would also have been lost.
But today, we see that they're still there.
So it meant that most of the basic scenarios that have been laid out
for how Mercury was assembled had been disproven.
We had to go back to the drawing board and rethink how Mercury was
assembled and how Mercury evolved.
How did Mercury lose its mantle but retain these volatiles? Mercury is
like a detective case.
We have the body.
We have some clues, but we really have to piece it together.
Planetary scientist Erik Asphaug tackles this giant riddle.
The original idea was that Mercury was hit by something smaller than
itself.
But whatever process made Mercury somehow preserved all these volatiles
that should have vaporized and gone.
Erik has a bold alternative, a hit-and-run collision.
In the hit-and-run collision idea, you actually have Mercury hitting
something bigger than itself without losing all of its volatiles.
Hitting something bigger may sound even worse, but it all depends on
how you hit it.
In the early solar system, there were a lot of players, and just like a
hockey match, things got brutal.
You would have had planetesimals growing through collisions.
The bigger objects would have dominated because not only are they
running into smaller objects, they're drawing them to themselves
gravitationally, and two objects will sweep up most of the matter.
Those two objects became Venus and Earth.
Earth and Venus are the enforcers of the inner solar system, wiping out
most of the competition.
Whoo! Little Mercury is one of the last players left, and it could have
a faceoff with Earth.
Mercury is the little guy in this thing, and this hockey puck is our
volatiles.
The little guy comes in at a high speed and has a head-on collision
with the big guy.
It is catastrophic.
But suppose now, instead of hitting him in a head-on collision, he hits
him in a glancing blow.
So he might knock off a little bit of equipment, but Mercury just keeps
on going and keeps his hockey puck.
A head-on impact would send a shockwave across Mercury, melting the
entire surface.
But a glancing blow is less ferocious.
The more grazing you hit something, the less energy you bring to bear,
the less violent it is.
In the grazing collision is where piece of the surface has grazed off
and blasted into space, and the other hemisphere of the body is largely
unaffected and allowed some primordial material to remain on the
surface.
Most of Mercury's mantle is stripped away, but this grazing impact
doesn't send a shockwave through the planet, and so the volatiles
remain along with enough of the mantle to reshape this world with a
thin outer layer of rock.
Mercury was transformed into the smallest planet in the solar system,
and its lost mantle was stolen by an unexpected thief.
That mantle accretes onto the biggest object around, but the biggest
object around isn't Mercury.
When Mercury's mantle got knocked off in this collision, it had to go
somewhere.
So if you're looking for Mercury's missing mantle, look no further than
right under your feet.
To this day, part of Mercury could be part of Earth, stolen in a hit-
and-run collision.
Mercury was able to survive the formation of the solar system, but it
paid a cost.
It was battered.
Since day one, Mercury has had a tough ride.
It's been pounded by the Sun and planets, and things have not improved
since.
You can see by the surface of Mercury that it has a lot of battle
scars.
The solar system did not treat it well.
The planet has been bombarded and fried, but these events could help
explain one of Mercury's biggest mysteries.
Why is the planet so dark? The solar system is full of beautiful,
colorful planets but Mercury is different.
Its dark gray surface baffles scientists.
One of the most intriguing things is how dark the surface of Mercury
is.
A big mystery in the solar system is why? Why is Mercury like that? The
rocky inner planets all formed in the same region of the solar system
from similar materials, and yet Mercury is darker than all of them.
Some of the darkest surfaces here on Earth are lava fields.
Planetary scientist Nina Lanza visits one in Iceland to find some
common ground.
The surface of a planet records the history of all the processes that
have acted upon it.
So when we look at the surface of Mercury, we can piece together that
story.
Right now, we're standing on a basalt lava flow.
Basalt is a type of volcanic rock that's the building block of all
planets, so we know just by seeing this basalt here, there was volcanic
activity.
On Earth, most basaltic rock is covered by oceans.
On Mercury, the basalt is exposed.
Old liquid lava flows are visible as smooth channels of solid rock.
For a billion years after Mercury's formation, lava explodes from
volcanic vents and leaks out from fissures.
Could the volcanism explain the dark world we see today? Basalt is a
pretty dark rock already, but what's so interesting about Mercury is
that it's actually darker than basalt.
So from the recent messenger mission to Mercury, we had some ideas
about what may be making the surface so dark, and it's really strange.
It's actually carbon in the form of graphite, the mineral graphite,
which is what you find in a pencil.
So that material is all over the surface of Mercury, and it's
incorporated into the rocks.
Carbon doesn't come from basaltic rock, but there is something else
that could have brought carbon to Mercury Comets.
These dirty ice balls contain carbon, and they've bombarded the planet
for billions of years.
The evidence of these attacks is etched into the surface.
It's hard to look at Mercury and not wince on occasion.
It is really covered with craters.
It has been battered and bruised.
It really has just been terribly, terribly mistreated over its
lifetime.
Mercury has been hit often and hard.
Mercury is moving more rapidly around the Sun than the Earth is, so a
head-on impact is going to be faster than a head-on impact of a comet
in the Earth.
So pound for pound, a comet impact on Mercury is much more energetic,
will do much more damage than an impact on Earth.
If you've ever been to, like, meteor crater in Arizona in the United
States, it's around a mile across.
It's this huge crater.
If you were to stick that crater on Mercury, it would disappear.
Mercury has so many craters that are so much bigger than a mile across.
Mercury's biggest impact site is Caloris basin.
Over 1,000 times larger than meteor crater, it's so big there are now
other, newer craters inside it And Caloris basin is coated in carbon.
Comets have a lot of carbon in them, and we know that comets hit
planets.
So it's kind of obvious to say, "where did the carbon come from?" Well,
comets, but maybe not.
In 2016, the messenger team reveals an exciting new theory.
Are the largest impact craters actually exposing something deeper?
Impact craters are windows into the lower parts of the crust of a
planet, and the larger the impact crater, the deeper the impact event
has excavated material from depth and brought it to where we can see it
at the surface.
The craters reveal a twist.
The carbon that makes Mercury so dark had been there all along as part
of the material that first formed the planet.
When young Mercury is hit, parts of the surface are transformed into an
ocean of molten rock.
As this magma ocean cools, it solidifies, forming a crust, and sitting
on top of this crust, graphite, the crystallized form of carbon.
Carbon containing minerals like graphite would end up near the surface
of Mercury at the top of that magma ocean because those minerals are a
lot less dense than the conventional rocky minerals that contain a lot
of, you know, iron and nickel.
Those are more dense.
They tend to sink to the center of the planet.
Those lighter elements like graphite would tend to float to the top.
But volcanism covers the planet in new basalt lava flows coming from
deep below the surface where the carbon didn't sink, and this lava
buries Mercury's ancient crust.
Over time, that carbon is covered up by subsequent lava flows, but
there was this layer of carbon waiting underneath the surface of
Mercury, and as objects hit Mercury and gouged out holes in the
surface, it exposed this hidden darker layer underneath.
Covered by a billion years of lava flows and revealed by giant impact
events, one this is for sure Mercury's surface has been a truly hellish
landscape.
Imagine that we're on the surface of Mercury during that first billion
years when volcanism was very active.
Raining down from the sky, all these comets and meteorites just pelting
the surface mercilessly, and then, beneath your feet, there'll be all
this molten rock bubbling up.
Really an awful place to be in that first billion years on Mercury.
Over billions of years, comets and volcanism reshaped the surface of
Mercury, and this planet is not done yet.
Scientists find giant cliffs stretching hundreds of miles.
It seems Mercury is alive.
Mercury, a small, dark world covered in craters and ancient lava flows,
but scientists find something else on the surface.
Towering cliffs around 2 miles high known as fault scarps.
If you were walking along one of these scarps on the surface of
Mercury, there would be this giant cliff face that would go on for
miles and miles well over the horizon, so you would be walking next to
an almost endless cliff.
The largest fault scarp is enterprise Rupes.
At over 600 miles long, it would span the width of Texas.
We see fault scarps on Earth, evidence of tectonic activity.
Planetary scientist Jani Radebaugh visits a scarp in death valley to
demonstrate.
This long, straight line of shadows behind me formed because death
valley is still spreading apart and the material on the right has
dropped down from the material on the left and left a really sharp
fault scarp.
The fault scarp you see behind me, and the ones we see on Mercury, are
formed by tectonic forces, and this just means that there are forces
inside of the planets, and those forces cause breaks in the crust.
On Earth, transfer of heat from the mantle drives the movement of
continental plates.
These plates move around the surface of the planet, interacting with
each other Building mountains, rift valleys, even continents.
Do the fault scarps on Mercury mean it also has plate tectonics? When
you think about the Earth's plate tectonics, there are multiple plates
of rock that are moving around on a layer of liquid rock below.
Mercury, however, has basically just one big plate.
There's a solid surface that covers the entire planet.
Mercury has a different kind of tectonics.
Over billions of years, its liquid core cools, and as the interior
cools, the planet shrinks around 9 miles.
When something cools, it contracts.
It actually becomes smaller.
Because of this contraction, the rock and the crust wrinkles, creating
massive scarps.
You can imagine, if you take a balloon and cover it in mud and let the
mud dry, and then you let a little bit of air out of the balloon,
what's going to happen? Well, that mud is going to try to contract as
well, but it can't, and so it'll crack and snap like that, and you'll
get these thrust faults, these scarps.
But for Mercury, the story doesn't end there.
We understand that the large fault scarps on Mercury formed a long time
ago when the planet was cooling and the crust was shrinking and
buckling, but more recently, messenger has come very close to Mercury
and has found really small fault scarps.
Unlike the giant mile-high scarps, these small ones are less than 200
feet in length.
What does this mean? These are small scarps, and the thing is, if those
were really old, impacts would have erased them, and so these should be
long gone off the surface.
So that means that they're recent.
They're new.
Right now, Mercury has the record of being the smallest official planet
in the solar system, but is it possible the smallest planet is still
shrinking? Throughout its life, Mercury has been bombarded.
Impacts have cratered the large, old fault scarps.
The small scarps should be covered in impact scars as well, but they're
pristine, which means that they're young, and that means Mercury is
still shrinking.
Mercury is actually still tectonically active.
So the Earth is no longer the only tectonically active planet in the
solar system.
We've seen that Mercury has a surprising history.
The thing is, the planet itself is still cooling, still contracting,
even after all of these billions of years after it formed.
That's amazing.
At first, it may seem that you could write this off as a dull, little,
dead rock close to the Sun, but Mercury has a story to tell.
A story that continues to this day despite everything the planet has
gone through.
Mercury has had it pretty rough.
It's had a tough time over the history of the solar system.
It has been tossed around by planets.
It has been impacted by gigantic asteroids and comets.
It is shrinking.
It's bombarded by solar radiation.
That would tick anybody off, and it's entirely possible that in the
future, Mercury will get its revenge.
Mercury could have a final trick up its sleeve, one that threatens our
very existence.
Messenger completes its final orbit of Mercury and crashes into the
planet's surface, a fitting conclusion for a world with a history of
impacts.
At the end of the messenger mission, our view of Mercury had been
substantially changed.
We suddenly had a picture of a complete world, a place that had
hellishly high temperatures and yet ices of water, an evolution that
didn't match that of any of its sibling planets.
Could Mercury's future be just as unpredictable as its past? Right now,
the future of Mercury looks bright Very, very bright.
It's all thanks to Mercury's massive neighbor.
The Sun is a giant ball of hydrogen and helium, and in the core,
there's a nuclear fusion reaction, but over time, the fuel that the Sun
runs on, hydrogen, will begin to die out.
It will actually burn through all of its fuel.
When that happens, in the final phases of its life, the Sun will bloat
up to become a red giant star, hundreds of times the size that it
currently is.
As the Sun expands, it will engulf Mercury.
Being on the surface of Mercury is bad enough right now.
Now put it inside of a star.
All of that heat bombarding the planet will literally boil it away.
But is there a chance that Mercury could escape this roasting? There's
not just the evolution of the Sun that we have to take into account.
The planets themselves and their orbits are evolving.
They look stable, but over long time periods, they can change
drastically.
The Sun exerts the strongest gravitational pull of any object in the
solar system.
It's why the planets orbit it, but planets can also pull on each other.
Mercury is tiny, making it most vulnerable to these gravitational tugs.
After the Sun, the next biggest object is Jupiter.
We can take computer models and simulate Mercury's orbit as it's
affected by Jupiter to see what happens to Mercury, and depending on
initial conditions, a lot of different things can happen.
But in some percentage of the models, what can happen is Mercury's
orbit changes so much that it actually swings out and can reach the
orbit of the Earth.
Jupiter is often seen as the bully of the solar system.
Here, it's Mercury's bodyguard.
Over time, its gravitational influence stretches Mercury's orbit out
farther and farther, and the little world escapes the Sun's clutches
long before it expands to a red giant.
But this tale has one final twist.
It's easy to dismiss Mercury in the pantheon of planets, but ignore it
at your peril because there may come a day when Mercury makes its
presence very well known indeed.
I'd like to think that Mercury does not bear the solar system any ill
will for all the hard time it's been given over the last 4.
5 billion years, but, you know, that's a long time to build up a
grudge.
Mercury has had such a difficult past.
It's been beat on by the Sun, collided with other planets.
Now Mercury could come in and start wreaking havoc with us, so maybe we
can think of this as sort of Mercury's revenge.
Billions of years ago, Earth could well have collided with the young
Mercury, changing Mercury forever.
And now, it comes face-to-face with Earth once again Smashing into our
planet in one, final impact, wiping out any trace of the world we know
and love.
It would melt our entire crust.
It would wipe out all life on our planet.
So how worried should we be about this threat? The odds of this
happening aren't that high, and if it happens, it's going to happen
billions of years in the future.
So I'm not terribly worried about it on a personal scale, but as an
astronomer and as a scientist, that's fascinating.
Mercury may continue to surprise us, even to its dying day, a world
born in fire that might also go down in flames.
But the fact that it made it this far is nothing short of remarkable.
Living in the toughest neighborhood imaginable, Mercury has made it
through the history of the solar system, beaten, but not broken.
Mercury is one of the solar system's great survivors.
Despite all of the things that happened to it, it's still hanging in
there.
It's been subject to the harshest environment in the solar system, and
it's still around.
Mercury, you know, has been attacked from all sides, right? It's been
roasted by the Sun.
It's been pummeled by impactors, and yet it's still there, still being
a great planet, this plucky, little survivor who's still orbiting
despite everything it's gone through.
This plucky, little survivor who's still orbiting

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s06e06

The quasar enigma

Mysterious lights shine out from the edge of space, brighter than a
trillion suns.
They had to be the brightest objects we've ever seen in the universe,
putting out amounts of energy that we couldn't possibly explain.
So powerful, they can incinerate planets and rip stars to pieces.
These are among the most mysterious and most energetic phenomenon in
the universe.
They can destroy galaxies, but may also be the key to their survival.
These objects are a hotbed of all kinds of crazy physics.
These celestial powerhouses are called quasars, and we may owe them our
very existence.
captions paid for by discovery communications For decades, astronomers
have observed brilliant points of light in the night sky, but there was
something strange about them.
They looked like a pinprick of light, like a star, and so they were
really mysterious initially.
Are they a new type of star, or something else entirely? One of these
strange objects is hiding within the Virgo galaxy cluster.
From Earth, object 3c 273 looks just like a nearby star, but scientists
studying its light made a stunning discovery.
It was tremendously far away.
It not only was not in our galaxy, it wasn't even in any galaxy that
they could see.
It was over a billion light-years away.
If it's that far away and as bright as it was, this must be the most
luminous known object in the universe.
And this is one of the reasons these were so mysterious for so long.
These objects are so bright that, despite the incredible distance, to
us, they look like nearby stars.
They're called quasi-stellar objects, quasars for short.
But what are they? With more detailed observations of quasars, we found
that they don't originate from any random place.
They always come from the core of a galaxy.
A quasar is the ultra-bright core of an extremely distant galaxy.
The reason we can see them at all is the result of their incredible
power.
A single quasar outshines an entire galaxy, hundreds of billions of
stars' worth of energetic output, all concentrated into a single
source.
One of the most energetic events that human beings have ever been
witness to on Earth is the biggest atomic bomb ever exploded.
We're aware of quasars out there that are putting out more energy than
1 trillion trillion of those massive atomic bomb blasts per second.
It is just a huge amount of energy packed into a very, very, very small
volume, and that is almost literally unbelievable.
But if they're so small, how can they produce such vast amounts of
energy? How can you generate something that's so bright, so energetic,
but not be very large? What could possibly power something like that?
Hiding within a quasar must be a very powerful engine.
What kind of object can generate that much energy, that kind of power
to create these things? There's only one thing in the universe that's
both massive enough and dense enough A black hole.
That is the only thing that we know of in the universe that could power
a quasar.
Eventually, stars than our sun lose their lifelong battle against
gravity.
They suffer a catastrophic collapse.
All their incredible mass is compressed into a single point Giving
birth to a black hole.
Black holes are totally unique.
There's nothing else like them in the universe.
They're extremely massive and dense.
They have so much mass crammed in such a small space that they distort
space a tremendous amount.
They create regions called event horizons.
The boundary of these monsters, the event horizon, is a point of no
return.
Anything that crosses that line is never coming back, not even light.
So as light tries to freely fly through space and time, that space and
time is bent back in on itself, and that means light can never escape.
We see black holes across the universe.
They range in mass from regular, three times more massive than our sun,
to supersized Supermassive, in fact.
So we think that quasars represent the largest black holes that we see
in the universe.
We're talking billions of times more massive than our sun.
It is literally almost at the edge of your ability to perceive, right,
our ability to even think about black holes being so massive, that
they're a billion times the mass of our sun.
It's this enormous mass that leads to their enormous gravity.
We think that only supermassive black holes could provide the power,
but quasars outshine their entire galaxies.
Black holes suck things down.
They're black.
How can they possibly be bright? Black holes are voracious eaters.
They drag in gas and dust, which builds up in a ring of material around
the black hole.
We call this the accretion disk.
You could think of it as a giant whirlpool of matter that's trying to
fall onto the supermassive black hole.
Well, it can't all fall in at once, and so there's a lot of friction in
this disk.
This friction increases as the motion of the gas and dust speeds up.
That could be a significant fraction of the speed of light.
If you rub your hands together at a significant fraction of the speed
of light, they will vaporize.
They will get very hot.
And so the material in this accretion disk can actually get heated to
millions of degrees.
When matter heats up, it produces radiation, which we see as light.
The center of the galaxy shines, visible billions of light-years away.
That's where stuff gets dense and hot, and there, you have a quasar.
So even though black holes are the darkest objects in the universe,
they, in turn, power the brightest objects in the universe.
Quasars are so bright, some are visible from the edge of the universe,
or 13 billion light-years away.
That means they burst into life less than a billion years after the big
bang.
How could such monsters exist so soon after the birth of the universe?
Across the universe, we have discovered stunningly luminous quasars.
They're powerful, brighter than their whole galaxies, and that light
has been traveling towards us for billions of years.
As fast as light goes, it takes time to cover the vast distances
between the galaxies, so if you look out into space, you see quasars as
they were millions of years ago or billions of years ago, and the light
has just arrived at your eyes tonight.
Scientists at the Los Campanas observatory focus their telescopes on
the most ancient part of the universe.
They get a huge surprise.
This quasar is only about 600, after the big bang, and this black hole
weighs about 800 million times as much as the sun.
It's the oldest quasar ever found.
It burst into life around 700 million years after the big bang.
Back then, the universe was mostly a soup of hydrogen and helium gas.
We know quasars are powered by supermassive black holes, but
discovering a black hole this big so early in the evolution of the
cosmos, that's a huge mystery.
One of the big questions we have in astronomy is, how did these
supermassive black holes form? How did they form so early in the
universe? This is an interesting mystery.
We see quasars about as far as we can see.
That means these objects existed in the very earliest galaxy.
That means a million or billion solar mass objects were able to
accumulate.
I don't think we really have a good picture of how that can happen.
The mystery lies in how fast black holes grow.
They grow by eating at an astonishing rate.
When you eat, eventually, you get full.
You've had your last bite.
But black holes, they are never done being hungry.
They are insatiable.
A black hole eats everything that gets too close, growing larger and
larger.
But there's a limit to how fast they can grow.
There's not enough time, a billion years after the universe was
created, for them to get to a billion solar masses in It's just too
short a time, so there had to be another process, in addition to all
this eating, that caused the seed to form.
To bulk up to a billion solar masses, we now think these giants grew
from smaller seed black holes.
We know that black holes usually form from exploding stars of around 25
solar masses or more.
That's pretty small.
To be born supermassive, you'd need a supermassive star, a stellar
giant born from the primordial gases of the early universe.
And so you had these huge clouds of mostly hydrogen, a little bit of
helium, and that's basically all that was there, and as material
cooled, it would collapse into these big, big stars of just balls of
hydrogen in space.
These super-giant stars lived fast and died young.
When they died, they formed these seed black holes.
So that's one way you could get a massive seed, is that you just have
the earliest stars collapsing into a black hole when they die.
But there's a problem.
Seems even these supermassive stars couldn't have produced big enough
seed black holes.
There has to be another way to generate a billion-solar-mass black hole
in less than a billion years.
How else could the universe create supermassive black holes from just
thick clouds of gas? One theory of how you get these supermassive black
holes is that you just have one big collapse event.
We call it direct collapse.
It's only a theory, but we think this is how direct collapse would
work.
Huge, super-dense clouds of hydrogen gas clump together.
Gravity builds up, dragging in more gas, becoming more and more dense
until the gas collapses under its own weight.
Instead of forming a star, it crushes down straight to a supermassive
black hole.
A galaxy starts to form around the giant.
Gas streams toward the center, getting hotter and hotter, until a
quasar explodes into life.
They're so bright, we can see them today, All of these are ideas right
now.
Theorists are working really hard to make these models work.
Finding more and more distant quasars will teach us what those seeds
are that form into the quasars.
It might teach us some new physics to create these big black holes that
quickly.
The more we investigate the quasars, the more we discover about the
early universe, but they're also revealing their destructive nature.
Recently, we've discovered galaxies with holes torn out of them.
The culprit? Death rays blasting at close to the speed of light.
The universe is full of galaxies.
From a distance, they look calm and peaceful.
Look a little closer, and you'll see evidence of extreme violence and
destruction Scars extending from their centers out tens of thousands of
light-years.
What could've caused such devastation? This is galaxy cluster hydra a.
Here are the scars, but viewing it in multiple wavelengths reveals the
culprit.
Two colossal jets of energy blasting out from the galactic core,
shooting out from the heart of a quasar.
They tear through the galaxy and out into space, creating voids in the
surrounding gas.
The amount of energy in these jets is staggering, soul crushing, mind
destroying.
Think about how much energy is wrapped up in these quasar jets.
Something can take many, many times the mass of the sun, accelerate it
to speeds near the speed of light and throw it out across hundreds of
thousands of light-years.
These jets seem to launch out from the quasar's core, supercharged
particles twisted into tight beams of energy, moving at millions of
miles per hour, heated to trillions of degrees.
Regular quasars are seriously powerful, but quasars with jets, those
are off the charts.
You're taking the power of billions or trillions of stars and focusing
them into narrow jets, which basically march across the universe like
death rays.
If you're too close to this thing, and you're in its way, yeah, you're
not going to be in its way for long.
It's not just the galaxy and the surrounding gas that suffers.
These jets coming out are more powerful than the death star.
They would destroy not just a planet going through their path but,
like, stars, whole solar systems.
This is exactly what's going on in system 3c 321.
Viewed in visible light, all we see is a pair of galaxies.
But in multiple wavelengths, we see the larger galaxy firing out a huge
death ray, ripping through its smaller neighbor and out into space.
Imagine being in the direction of a jet.
If a jet's coming at you, it's over.
You're in for a deep world of hurt.
Planets would be destroyed.
Stars would explode.
These jets travel incredible distances through space.
So the largest know jet is about And a megaparsec is about So, we're
talking almost from end to end.
Eventually, the jets do stop when they slam into the intergalactic
medium, the thin film of gas that surrounds galaxies.
It can go hundreds of thousands of light-years, striking the
intergalactic medium and setting it ablaze.
The impact sends out massive shock waves like in galaxy Pictor a.
They form these huge, puffy clouds.
They look like sort of cotton swabs.
You had a narrow jet with these big puffy things at either end.
But it seems that quasars with jets are a very rare species.
Only 10 percent have them, and no one really knows why.
The huge jets coming out of quasars are things we can see clear across
the universe.
The amazing thing is we don't even really understand how they're
created.
It's such a complicated process that it's hard to untangle the
astrophysics going on here.
So we think that the formation of jets arises from the accretion disk,
or this spinning disk of gas that's spiraling close to the event
horizon of the black hole.
This is our best theory.
Gas falls towards the supermassive black hole.
It moves faster and faster, getting hotter and hotter.
When you heat gas to extreme temperatures, it becomes plasma, full of
electromagnetically charged particles.
We think, in the regions around supermassive black holes, you have
quickly moving charged particles.
This creates magnetic fields.
As the particles swirl around the black hole, they build up a powerful
magnetic field.
The field builds up intensity and surrounds the black hole.
That strong magnetic field can wrap itself around the black hole, and
any charged particles in the accretion disk will follow the paths of
those magnetic fields.
And where there is a body with a magnetic field, there are magnetic
poles, and that's where things can escape.
It gets wound around, spiraled up, and shoved up into a jet.
The pressures in that discuss are incredibly high, and these magnetic
fields are incredibly strong, and they're wound up tightly by the
spinning black hole, and what you end up with are jets that are
collimated and incredibly powerful.
The jet blasts out from the poles of the black hole at 99 percent the
speed of light.
These quasars are big generators.
They convert gravitational energy into magnetic energy, and that
magnetic energy gets converted into kinetic energy in the launching of
these jets.
They carry so much energy, they can be detected clear across the
universe.
Quasars continue to confuse astronomers.
Now, they're presenting us with another problem.
Quasars should take millions of years to fire up.
But recently, we've detected one that switched on in a cosmic
heartbeat.
So far, we've discovered over 200,000 quasars.
And in June of 2016, we discovered another.
But this one is different.
It ignited in just 500 days In cosmological terms, just a blink of an
eye.
That's incredibly weird, because remember what we're talking about
here.
We're talking about the consumption of galaxy-sized quantities of gas.
How could that be fast? That's a very rapid process.
Usually, when we think of astronomy, we think of astronomically long
time scales where we don't get to see things happen in real time.
So when we see these incredible engines in our universe changing their
complete nature by turning on over the course of a few months or a few
years, that's a little bit frightening.
What triggers a quasar to ignite? Scientists now theorize the quasars
switching on may be a natural part of a galaxy's life.
Galaxies are not fixed things.
They're constantly changing, evolving.
It's also true that suddenly we see these things switch on, and it's
kind of mesmerizing to imagine the situation.
Within a year's time, a galaxy could go from being normal to being
active.
It's thought that most, if not all, galaxies go through a phase of
development that includes forming a quasar, that it's a normal part of
a galaxy growing up.
Quasars can act a lot like a teenager, tantrums and all.
This was when they were shining brightly, eating mass at an incredible
rate.
It's almost like your teenage years, you know? You ate everything in
sight, and things were pretty messy.
You might have undergone a lot of mood swings.
It's kind of like that with a quasar.
When a quasar gets hungry and raids the refrigerator, it can switch on.
So what flips the switch? What turns a quasar on and off? It
fundamentally has to do with gas getting into the centers of galaxies.
When stuff gets in there, a black hole is waiting, and then it gets
bright.
So where does a quasar find enough gas to feast on? To turn on a
quasar, you need certain conditions.
You need a supermassive black hole, and you need a lot of material
dumped on it.
What does this? A galaxy collision.
Galaxies are not locked in place.
They move through space.
Sometimes, they collide.
We think that the supermassive black holes, at their cores, will
collide and merge, and the gas supply from the combined galaxies
streams towards the new supermassive black hole.
It's almost like, when you have these two galaxies merging, that they
have all new food.
It's a brand-new dinner plate, a brand-new buffet of food to eat.
Well, that's a feeding source, right? You're going to start a feeding
frenzy on the black hole that's sitting there.
The gas spirals in, heats up to millions of degrees.
The galactic core lights up.
And a quasar is born.
It seems galaxy mergers provide the best conditions for quasar
formation, but when astronomers studied the rapid ignition of these
unusual quasars, they didn't find evidence of a galaxy merger.
Something else must switch them on.
When we think about the size scales of a typical quasar, we think it
must take years to really turn on.
And if you're thinking about a flow of gas passing through the central
parts of a galaxy to encounter the black hole, to activate the dynamo,
to launch a jet, this should take a healthy amount of time.
This this is big stuff.
So what could speed this up? One idea is that something catastrophic
happens inside the accretion disk, the ring of gas surrounding the
black hole.
An active quasar means that a black hole is eating something, so when
you see a quasar turn on, you know that something went very wrong
around the black hole.
Maybe some of the disk fell in.
Maybe even a star got a bit too close.
Accretion disks are not just gas and dust.
Black holes will drag in anything and everything.
There are stars.
There's gas.
There's gas clouds.
There's stars in formation.
There are stars dying.
A lot is happening there, but basically, what happens is that star
veers too close, and it is basically stripped.
It's pulled apart.
The enormous gravity of the black hole could tear a star to pieces,
giving rise to a sudden surge of energy within the accretion disk.
Or perhaps, an exploding star could be the catalyst for quasar
ignition.
So it could be that a supernova going off in the accretion disk
triggers an avalanche of material suddenly being able to fall in on the
black hole.
In both cases, a sudden rush of hot gas would heat up the accretion
disk, switching on the quasar.
You need to do something violent to a galaxy to let it really feed
enough to create a quasar activity.
Once activated, a quasar can shine for millions of years, blasting out
energy and destructive jets.
We see them across the universe.
It seems the basic ingredients are quite common, even in our own
neighborhood.
Let's put all this together.
What do you need for a quasar? You need a galaxy.
You need a central supermassive black hole.
You need gas, and you need stuff falling into that black hole to create
the quasar phenomenon.
Well, we live in a galaxy, the milky way, and it has a central
supermassive black hole, and there's gas orbiting around near there.
That doesn't sound good.
Jets ripping through the milky way, heat and cosmic winds bursting out
from the core, posing the question Would we survive? We're used to
thinking of our galaxy as peaceful.
But what if it isn't? What if it's hiding a violent past? What's been
discovered recently is kind of fascinating.
There's two large evacuated bubbles emanating from the center of our
galaxy.
The bubbles are full of superheated gas, and they're moving out of our
galaxy at 2 million miles per hour.
These bubbles are huge.
They're on the scale of the galaxy itself.
They're 50,000 light-years long.
They're so big that if you were to map them out on the sky, they would
stretch from horizon to horizon.
These gas bubbles look similar to those seen within distant galaxy
clusters like hydra a.
One big question is, what could've put that gas there? What could have
made this gas so hot that it's able to puff out so far from the galaxy?
One possibility is that this was driven by an active phase in our
galaxy's history.
Far away, in the heart of our galaxy, hidden by gas and clouds, lies a
giant A supermassive black hole called Sagittarius a-star.
Now, it's quiet.
Is it dead or just sleeping? The only thing that could have created
these vast lobes of material above and below the milky way are giant
jets streaming out of the core of our galaxy.
Well, doesn't that sound a lot like a quasar? But unlike hydra a, the
expelled gas doesn't date from hundreds of millions of years ago.
These were blown out within the last 6 million years.
Almost all quasars we see are in the distant universe, which means
they're in the distant past.
But here we have recent activity.
Just 6 million years ago, our central black hole was feeding.
No one really expected that because, for as long as we can remember,
we've thought about our milky way galaxy as being quiescent, that is to
say not really eating too much, sort of like a black hole on a diet.
Something must have broken its diet.
Maybe an unfortunate group of stars strayed too close.
Whatever the delivery method, the sleeping Sagittarius a-star gorged on
its new meal and woke up explosively.
Its jets blasted over a trillion trillion trillion tons of gas out of
the galaxy.
Thankfully, our black hole is much smaller than a typical quasar.
This was only a small outburst, but it's possible our sleeping giant
could wake up again, much bigger and much more dangerous than ever
before.
There's something coming up that means that one day, you may walk
outside, look at the night sky and realize the quasar has turned on.
We know quasars can be triggered by galactic collisions, and we know a
galaxy is heading our way.
Public safety announcement The milky way galaxy is on a collision
course with Andromeda.
It's traveling at us at about 70 miles a second, and in about 4 billion
years, these two galaxies are going to collide.
Both of us have supermassive black holes.
Ours is 4 or 5 million times the mass of the sun.
And Andromeda's black hole is 20 times larger.
Eventually, those black holes will start spiraling around each other,
and they're destined to merge.
The new black hole will be much bigger than Sagittarius a-star, and
this supergiant will have a fresh load of gas to consume.
This will be an incredible explosion for the milky way, maybe even the
biggest explosion it's ever had in its whole life cycle.
A quasar could be born far bigger than anything we have experienced
before.
In the chaos of the merger, our solar system could migrate, moving
closer to the galaxy's core, closer to the quasar.
We will have a front-row seat to not only colliding galaxies, but in
fact, something even more amazing and terrifying, a quasar being
switched on.
The closer we are, the bigger the spectacle.
It would look like a single bright source in the sky, almost like a
second sun.
Along with the beauty will be incredible heat, quasar winds, and,
perhaps, even jets.
What will all this mean for Earth? The atmosphere is going to be
stripped away.
Oceans are going to boil.
Maybe the rock under your feet will melt.
I mean, we're talking about a tremendous amount of energy here.
There would absolutely be no life on Earth.
The newly ignited quasar may be so energetic it blasts trillions of
tons of gas out of the milky way.
Even the basic ingredients for future stars and planets could be at
risk.
That's where stars form, and that's where planets form, and so if you
kick all the normal matter out of the galaxies, you no longer get stars
and planets and humans and civilizations.
That doesn't sound like such a good idea to me.
With their terrible destructive force, quasars seem like bad news for
galaxies.
But we are now discovering there's another side to them.
Quasars are putting out so much energy, they appear to be so disruptive
to their environment, but it could be that, without them, we wouldn't
be here.
For all their ferocious power, quasars might be the ultimate cosmic
creators.
Kicking out unimaginable power, quasars can cause chaos in their local
environment, but it's possible that this might be essential for a
healthy galaxy.
It might even create the conditions for life.
We're discovering that for all their destructive properties, quasars
also have a creative side, so it very well may be that the universe we
see around us was shaped by quasars.
Stars are the essence of a galaxy, but everything in moderation.
Too many stars can actually be a problem.
Having a lot of new star formation is kind of a good thing, but too
much of it can be a bad thing.
When new stars are born, many of them are going to be hot, large, blue
stars, but eventually, those young, hot stars are going to start to
die, and when they do, they're going to explode violently as
supernovae.
There will be new black holes.
There will be jets.
There will be shocks that actually go through the gas of the galaxy.
All of that is, effectively, killing the galaxy.
Large bursts of star formation make the galaxy violent and chaotic.
Stars and planets are wiped out by intense radiation from supernovas
and black holes.
Left unchecked, the galaxy burns itself out.
But some galaxies have a cosmic guardian creating quiet, peaceful
neighborhoods.
Something is controlling star birth.
In order for stars to form, you need cool gas, molecular hydrogen, and
a quasar is anything but cool.
They're cool to think about, but they're really hot if you're near one.
If you're a galaxy, and you're ready to just form a bunch of stars, but
then a quasar turns on in your heart, that's going to impact how those
stars form.
So the fate of cold gas in a galaxy is incredibly tightly coupled to
the fate of star formation throughout that galaxy, and we think that
quasars deposit so much energy into their ambient surroundings that
they can prevent the formation of very, very cold gas by heating it up.
Quasars pump huge amounts of heat into their environment.
One way they do this is through an extreme cosmic hurricane called a
quasar wind.
You have a wind of light.
There's just so much light that's being powered by this spinning disk
of material around this supermassive black hole that that light can
actually push on the dust and the gas in the core of the galaxy and
push it outwards very rapidly, and these winds can be really fast.
It's not the kind of wind you and I are used to thinking about.
It's actually a stream of high-energy particles.
In some cases, these particles can be traveling at hundreds of millions
of miles an hour.
The cool, star-forming material in the galaxy becomes hot and
turbulent.
Instead of having these nice, tranquil clouds of molecular hydrogen
collapsing under gravity, now here comes this big, giant nasty quasar
wind disrupting everything.
It's going to basically warm the galaxy too much, and that galaxy is
going to have what we call quenched star formation, so it's going to
have a lower rate of forming new stars than we would expect it to.
Quasars have another star-suppressing weapon in their cosmic armory.
There's another mode that we think exists, and that is mechanical, or
kinetic, feedback, and that is literally this.
Right? That is momentum injection.
That is a freight train plowing through a galaxy in the form of a jet
launched by the supermassive black hole, and that jet, just like a
truck plowing a snowy street, pushes material out of the way.
They bulldoze the gas to the outskirts of the galaxy.
They blow out tremendous amounts of energy.
They spit out gas, and what happens is it stops the process of star
formation.
There's less fuel for new stars to be made.
Quasars suppress star formation with winds and jets.
But if they continue ejecting gas, they would permanently shut off star
birth, killing their galaxy.
Luckily, they stop before causing fatal damage.
Eventually, the gas in the center of that galaxy is going to run out,
and when it does, it's like a light switch, and you're turning the
quasar off.
Quasars are fueled by cool gas.
Having blown away its fuel, the quasar itself will die.
Gas clouds cool, and stars begin to form again.
But the cooling gas also falls back towards the supermassive black
hole, providing new fuel for the quasar to reignite.
And so the black hole, in a lot of ways, can shut itself off, just like
a thermostat in your living room, where, if the room gets too cold,
your thermostat kicks in.
The heat turns on and gets to a point where the room is now too hot,
and the thermostat kicks off.
When the quasar turns on, it's like you stop star formation, and then
when it turns off, it's like you've turned star formation back on.
Quasars regulate star formation so that not too many stars are formed
all at the same time.
By regulating star formation, quasars control the future star formation
of the galaxy.
So we think as quasars as these incredibly violent phenomenon, but in
actuality, they are much more subtle and elegant than you might think.
In a sense, they're a force for creation, as well, because they are
mitigating how stars are forming in galaxies.
It's very likely that quasar activity is essential for galaxy
development, so in that sense, we have an equilibrium generated by
quasar activity.
You could keep them on an even keel.
Quasars are a rite of passage for young galaxies, graduating from
chaotic star-forming adolescence into mature, stable galaxies like our
own.
The existence of quasars may be essential to the health of a galaxy.
But we think they play an incredibly important role in the evolution of
galaxies throughout cosmic time.
Quasars are the most energetic objects in the universe.
They seem to almost defy the laws of nature, but they're also tools.
They're tools that allow us to understand our own origins.
We can use quasars to help understand the origins of galaxies, the
origins of stars.
Quasars help create stable galaxies, the kind of galaxies that could
sustain life.
We are connected to the universe in a beautiful and fundamental way.
So quasars, even though they're incredibly violent, they're a part of
galaxies, and they're a part of galactic evolution.
Sometimes, in order to create, you have to destroy.
Quasars have shaped the universe.
Without them, we might not even exist.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s06e07

Strange lives of dwarf planets

All across our solar system, scientists are discovering thrilling new
worlds, dwarf planets.
They may be small, but they're full of riddles, oceans of subterranean
water, ice volcanoes, and vanishing mountains.
The whole idea that dwarf planets are small and insignificant and
boring has just been shattered in the last few years.
Dwarf planets defy many of the rules we thought governed our solar
system.
Dwarf planets are very interesting bodies scientifically, but beyond
that, they tell us something about the origin of our own world.
Believe it or not, they may harbor life.
Dwarf planets are rattling the cages of scientists and shaking up our
understanding of how the universe works.
They may have fed the early planets and even seeded them with the
precursors of life.
Dwarf planets just may be the most important objects in the solar
system.
captions paid for by discovery communications Our solar system has
eight confirmed major planets, but we're discovering many other small
worlds called dwarf planets.
We used to think they were just dull lumps of rock, but the more we
study them, the more shocking and intriguing they become.
Naively, I would expect these objects to not be terribly dynamic.
They're probably just, you know, airless, rocky, icy worlds, and
they're just sitting there, and what we're finding out is that that is
not true at all.
There is all kinds of stuff going on.
They're full worlds with really interesting geology and interesting
histories that can tell us a lot about the solar system.
Scientists believe there may be hundreds of dwarf planets in our solar
system.
So far, we've only identified six.
Five of them Pluto, with its moon, Charon; red-colored Sedna; bright,
distant Eris; makemake, and bean-shaped Haumea All live billions of
miles from the Sun, out beyond Neptune in the Kuiper belt.
They're just the tip of the iceberg.
There are probably many, many more dwarf worlds that are out there
waiting to be discovered.
The sixth dwarf planet, Ceres, lives in the inner solar system.
It orbits around in the asteroid belt.
The asteroid belt is a region of the solar system between Mars and
Jupiter, and this is where most of the asteroids are.
This is rubble left over from the formation of the solar system.
In early years of the solar system, small rocks collided with one
another, stuck together, and built the rocky inner planets.
Dwarf planets grew in the same way.
Ceres was actually starting to get pretty big.
It was on its way to becoming a planet before it stopped growing, and
that makes it stand head and shoulders above everything else there.
So why is Ceres called a dwarf planet and not a planet? To be a planet,
it must tick off three cosmic boxes.
First, it needs to be a sphere.
Second, it needs to orbit the Sun and not another body.
Third, it needs to clear its orbital area of orbital debris.
Ceres ticks just two of the boxes.
It is a sphere, but a small one Only 600 miles across.
That's the size of Texas.
It orbits the Sun, but it hasn't cleared its path of debris.
It's surrounded by asteroids, so it misses out on being a planet.
Even though we call these objects dwarf planets, small and dwarf does
not equal insignificant.
But being small does have its problems.
When the molten core of a young dwarf planet cools, so does the heat
engine that drives geologic activity.
Ceres, we thought, would basically be a big, dead rock.
It's a small body.
It should have cooled off long ago.
Nothing very interesting is going on, and when we actually got out to
Ceres, nothing could have been further from the truth.
March 2015, NASA's dawn probe arrives at Ceres.
As the dawn spacecraft pulled up to Ceres, we saw the craters and the
surface that we expected to see, and then all of a sudden, something
totally mysterious rotated into view.
One of the craters had two bright spots, almost like two eyes staring
right back at us.
It was such a puzzle to the science community because what are these
doing here? Are they ice? It looks very fresh.
What on earth could it be? Scientists find over 100 of these mysterious
white spots.
The largest is in a 50-mile-wide crater called Occator.
They are, unexpectedly, made up of a substance we find on earth Sodium
carbonate, a kind of salt.
We believe the salts on Ceres as actually very young.
We think they're as young as 4 million years old, and that's basically
like yesterday in terms of geology.
And that is super weird, right? That's happening not on sort of on a
geologic era.
It's happening now, today.
What could cause patches of salt on a world long-presumed dead?
Planetary geologist Jani Radebaugh believes a clue might be found at
mono lake in California.
All right, I'm here looking at this beautiful lake off in the distance
and standing on massive white deposits.
These white deposits used to be a part of this lake, at one point.
The lake had dissolved a lot of the materials in it, and then as it
receded, it left behind the materials, as it evaporated away, and these
things are, you know, salts.
They're kind of granular in texture, and just to make sure, we taste it
and yeah, sure enough, it's salty.
The salt at lake mono crystallizes as the water evaporates, the only
way it can form.
The researchers believe the same process is taking place on Ceres.
This means there must be liquid water beneath the surface but how, out
in the deep freeze of the asteroid belt? These bright spots are located
in the centers of craters.
They're located around cracks in the surface, and that is telling us
that this material is coming from under the surface and welling up onto
it.
Absolutely nobody expected there to be liquid water beneath the surface
of Ceres.
We cannot explain what is keeping that water warm.
On some moons, gravitational tugging keeps the interiors warm, but
Ceres is not really near anything else that's very large.
So the amazing thing is that we may not even understand how rocky
planets work.
There may be another source of energy, another mechanism for heating
the interior that we haven't even discovered yet.
To find out how Ceres has liquid water, we have to rewind the clock
Debris left over from the formation of the Sun slams together to form
the dwarf planets.
As they take shape, the heavier, rocky material sinks to the center and
forms a hot, molten core.
Slushy water-ice floats to the top.
For a while, it stays liquid, but once the core cools, it freezes and
forms the solid mantel and crust.
That surface should still be solid, so the salt patches remain a
perplexing mystery.
We still haven't answered the question, "how could there actually still
be liquid water on Ceres?" That's still a hard question to answer.
One way this could happen is if it's not actually pure water, if you've
mixed it with something else.
Some scientists have proposed that a salty ocean lies beneath the
surface.
The high concentration of salt lowers the freezing point of the water,
keeping it liquid.
When asteroid impacts fracture the crust, this salty water oozes up
from below.
The liquid swiftly evaporates, but the salt remains, leaving a
brilliant white spot on the surface.
In fact, I'm willing to bet there could be water coming up now,
bringing salts up to the surface, evaporating away into space, and that
means liquid water is very close to the surface of Ceres right now.
Ceres has an even more startling card up its sleeve.
Recent research suggests that it's an immigrant.
It didn't form anywhere near the asteroid belt.
Ceres may have been born alongside hundreds of other dwarf planets,
many billions of miles away from the Sun.
So how did it get here? Most of the dwarf planets we've discovered lie
far out in the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune, but Ceres
orbits between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt.
But its location isn't the only hint Ceres might be an interloper.
Normally, celestial objects are made of the same materials as the other
bodies in their neighborhoods, but that's not the case with Ceres.
The asteroid belt is mostly made up of dry, rocky bodies composed of
the same heavy elements that form the rocky inner planets.
Ceres is very different.
Ceres is essentially an icy world, right? It's made out ices instead of
rocks, and so that's kind of weird, considering where it is.
The ice on Ceres also contains chemical compounds that in the early
years of the solar system, didn't exist in the asteroid belt.
The more we learned about Ceres, the more mysterious it became.
One of the things is that Ceres has quite a lot of ammonia on it, and
we don't find ammonia anywhere near the inner part of the solar system.
But we do find it in the outer solar system.
We've detected ammonia on Pluto, its moon Charon, and out in the frozen
Kuiper belt, where we find the other dwarf planets.
We think that the origin of that ammonia would've had to be in a very
cold part of the solar system, colder than where we find Ceres today.
But how an icy dwarf planet with ammonia came to inhabit a place where
ammonia can't form That's a huge puzzle.
This suggests to us that Ceres perhaps formed in the outer solar system
and then migrated inwards to its present location in the asteroid belt.
We used to think that planetary orbits were completely immutable, that
they simply ran like clockwork and they didn't move around.
Now we know that that's not the case.
In the early stages of planet formation, planets move around through
the gaseous disc that encircles the young sun, much like rafts that are
pushed around by ocean currents.
Ceres' ammonia suggests that dwarf planets rafted around on the cosmic
ocean along with the young planets.
Ceres is sort of a smoking gun that solar systems are much more
dynamic, much more dramatic than we know.
There's mounting evidence that Ceres formed farther out in the solar
system and something brought this little world in.
What could possibly have done that? The answer is the planet Jupiter.
After it first formed, the giant planet migrated in towards the Sun.
Its massive gravity disrupted the orbits of other bodies in the solar
system, including that of Ceres.
The solar system formed out of a disc of gas and dust, and as Jupiter
formed, it would've been plowing through this material.
And if it plows through that material, it's experiencing drag.
As it was losing energy, it would start to move in toward the Sun
relatively slowly.
Ceres formed in the outer edges of the solar system.
It was dislodged from the Kuiper belt and yanked inwards by the
migration of Jupiter, and when Jupiter stopped migrating, so did Ceres.
It settled into a new, stable orbit in the asteroid belt.
Once you realize that something that strange and dramatic can happen,
that a dwarf planet can form far out in the solar system and be brought
in, it makes you wonder how many times that happened before.
Could there have been other generations of dwarf planets that got
thrown in towards the Sun or maybe were thrown out of the solar system
entirely? Scientists believe that squadrons of rocks and icy dwarf
planets may have hurdled into the solar system.
Hundreds set out.
Only one survived.
If there was a population of small dwarf planets in the outer solar
system that migrated inwards, Ceres might be the sole survivor, the
only one left.
So if Ceres settled into its new home in the asteroid belt, where are
the rest of the icy worlds and the water on them? The idea that Ceres
may have moved in from the outer solar system is interesting, but why
should it be important to you? And incredibly, the answer might be
inside your own body right now.
For the longest time, we've wondered where did the majority of earth's
water come from? When you think about where the earth is, how close it
is to the Sun, there shouldn't have been any water here.
Understanding the evolution of Ceres, from where it formed to where we
find it today, could also lead us to understand how the earth can end
up with more water than we would otherwise expect.
When the earth formed, it was too hot for water to exist on the
surface.
Perhaps the squadrons of dwarf planets broke up on their journey,
showering earth with water-rich lumps of rock, enough to fill earth's
oceans.
Amazingly, when we study the chemistry of water, the best match is that
the water in your body right now came from asteroids themselves,
asteroids and dwarf planets that rained down and hit the earth over
billions of years.
Dwarf planets may have brought something else.
February 2017, scientists announce the discovery of organic materials
on the surface of Ceres.
On earth, life uses water and organic chemistry, carbon-based
molecules.
The intriguing thing about the dwarf planets is that they have both of
those.
Pluto and Ceres have organic molecules.
There's liquid water below the surface.
There's a source of energy that warms the interior.
It is not at all impossible that somewhere under these cold, icy
surfaces, there could be life.
Could other dwarf planets host life, too? Sedna and makemake both have
red-colored patches.
The color comes from something called tholins, organic molecules that
could be a precursor to life.
Based on all the interesting chemistry they're doing, these dwarf
planets could be like the test tubes of the solar system.
If there are small bodies strewn all about the solar system that had
liquid water or ice, it could possibly serve as an Incubator for life,
just holding on to it, ready to crash into another body and seed it.
The habitable zone now extends to the entire solar system.
It really expands It greatly expands The stage for the play of life in
the entire galaxy.
Maybe we have dwarf planets to thank for our very existence.
All of a sudden, the smallest bodies in our solar system have become
some of the most interesting things we've ever seen.
The idea of migrating dwarf planets opens up some intriguing scenarios,
including one really out-there possibility.
Some of that water and organic material may not be from our solar
system.
The more we learn about dwarf planets, the more they surprise us.
But there's one dwarf planet whose very existence is a mystery.
It's called Sedna, and no one is quite sure what it's doing in our
solar system.
Sedna may have my vote for the single most peculiar object in the
entire solar system.
Here, we have a world which is about 1,000 miles wide, but it is way
far out in the solar system, way past Neptune.
Sedna is the most distant object we've identified in our solar system.
Standing on the surface of Sedna, looking back at the solar system, the
Sun would look like a really bright star, but not much more than a
really bright star.
Just like Pluto, Sedna has a strange, elliptical orbit.
The difference is, Sedna travels from 7 billion to 93 billion miles
from the Sun, and unlike Pluto, its orbit can't be explained by its
close proximity to Neptune.
The weird thing about Sedna is its orbit.
How could it have gotten that elliptical when it's that far away from
any of the major planets? If you have an object that's close enough to
Neptune, Neptune's gravity can affect its orbit and swing it into an
elliptical orbit.
The problem is, Sedna never gets that close to Neptune.
It doesn't get anywhere near close enough to be in that kind of orbit,
and that means that something else is going on out there.
Sedna cannot be explained using objects that we know.
Everything else, we can understand why its where it is based on, you
know, the eight planets and many, many other small bodies.
Sedna cannot be explained by that, and, you know, that's the sign of a
good mystery.
Something else must have happened.
Looking at models for how you can change the orbits of objects, there's
almost no way Sedna could've formed in our solar system, and then had
its orbit change so that it's that elliptical and goes that far out
from the Sun.
And that means maybe Maybe it didn't form here.
It may be an alien world.
How could our solar system have snagged an alien world? Long ago, it
turns out our sun may have rubbed cosmic shoulders with other stars.
It was born in a stellar nursery Close to many other embryonic stars.
So if the Sun was born in a very dense neighborhood, whereby a lot of
other stars were forming at the same time in the same region, it is
absolutely possible that material could be exchanged between these
stars as they're forming planets.
Sedna may have formed just like any other object around another star In
a nice, circular orbit out past the main planets of that alien solar
system, but if that star got close enough to the Sun, our gravity may
have been able to lift Sedna out and steal it.
It's possible that other dwarf planets were abducted from other systems
and that these alien worlds carried alien water and even alien organic
materials to the inner planets.
It's so tempting to think that we understand something as basic as our
own solar system, our own home.
When you discover something like Sedna, you realize there could be a
lot out there that we haven't seen.
There are objects that are small like Sedna that are just so far away
that they're beyond our limit to detect them, so there could be
hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of objects out there, new parts
of our solar system that are still waiting to be discovered.
Our understanding of the solar system is changing radically.
Newly explored dwarf planets stun us, and even the most famous one,
Pluto, reveals new secrets making us ask, could these worlds be as
active And alive as our own? Dwarf planets all over the solar system
are revealing hidden lives.
In the asteroid belt, salt on the surface of Ceres suggests liquid
water beneath the surface.
Farther out, the new horizons mission found subsurface oceans on Pluto.
We used to think that water could only exist in this Goldilocks zone,
where it's not so hot that the water boils off and it's not so cold
that it freezes, but that's not the case anymore.
We look around, and we find water in the most unexpected places in our
own solar system.
This is kind of a revelation of modern planetary science that so many
of these worlds in the outer solar system may have subsurface oceans of
liquid water.
It kind of boggles the mind to see how far we've come in our
understanding of the interior structures of these worlds.
Finding liquid water so far from the Sun left scientists stunned and
the surprises keep on coming as we study these distant worlds up close.
Makemake, 2/3 the size of Pluto.
Its surface is covered in ethane and methane ice.
The methane is frozen into It reacts with sunlight, forming organic
molecules call tholins.
These color the planet red-brown.
Farther out lies Eris.
It's 9 billion miles from the Sun, and its surface temperature About
400 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.
Eris is an absolutely tantalizing object.
We really don't know much about it at all.
It should be very similar to Pluto, but one of the things we notice is
that Pluto's surface is kind of patchy.
There are areas that are very bright, but also areas that are quite
dark.
Eris, on the other hand, seems to be almost entirely bright.
Eris is one of the shiniest objects in the solar system, reflecting 96%
of the light that hits it.
Scientists wondered why.
A clue comes from its near neighbor, Pluto.
When new horizons flew past, it spotted something strange.
One of the funny little details is that as we flew over Pluto, we
realized that there were things that looked a lot like sand dunes down
there.
Now, that may not sound incredibly exotic.
You know, what's very interesting about a sand dune? Sand dunes may
sound dull, but they can reveal a lot about the mechanics of a planet.
Unlike the dunes we know and love on the earth that are made of sand,
the dunes on Pluto are made entirely of particles of ice.
There's only one thing that can build dunes wind.
Dunes are like a visual representation of the wind that's moving across
the valley and carrying the sands with it and depositing it into these
big, beautiful dune forms.
Our planet is large enough to hold on to an atmosphere.
Air, warmed by the Sun, rises.
Fresh air rushes in underneath, generating winds.
Pluto is so small and so far from the Sun, it shouldn't have an
atmosphere or wind or dunes.
The problem Pluto has, like other small bodies in the solar system, is
that it's really hard for it to hold on to an atmosphere.
It's just too small.
The very thin, light atmospheric gases basically just escape.
Neither Haumea nor makemake have detectable atmospheres, but when new
horizons looked back at Pluto as the dwarf planet passed in front of
the Sun, scientists spotted a thin haze of gas.
Turns out, Pluto has an atmosphere.
But this atmosphere is temporary because Pluto's orbit is elliptical.
Some of the time, it's far from the Sun.
Other times, it's much closer and warmer, creating a kind of winter and
summer.
Pluto's atmosphere depends on the season.
In the summer, it's warm enough to have an atmosphere, and in the
winter, that atmosphere freezes out.
Over the course of just a single orbit around the Sun, the surfaces of
these dwarf planets may change significantly, condensing and coding out
atmosphere when they're far from the Sun, having that atmosphere
revolatilize and redistribute the surface when they're closer to the
Sun.
Pluto is currently in its summer phase.
The extra heat during the long super summer evaporates some of the
nitrogen ice on the surface, creating a thin, wispy atmosphere.
It turns out that even though the atmosphere of Pluto is very thin,
there is wind.
It's really light, but there's just enough wind to be able to carry
particles with it once they start moving.
The seasonal cycle could help explain Eris' brightness.
Eris is three times further away from the Sun than Pluto is, but when
you put a nitrogen atmosphere three times further away, that nitrogen
freezes solid to the surface.
Eris could be an indicator of what Pluto looks like when it enters its
winter.
The gases will freeze, and it'll become even more reflective.
In winter, Pluto's dunes will be locked in place Frozen on the surface,
unlike the icy features of another dwarf planet and the case of the
vanishing volcanoes.
From afar, the dwarf planet Ceres looks uniform and dull but up close,
one huge feature comes into view.
One of the strangest objects that we saw when we began to map the
surface of Ceres was something called Ahuna Mons.
Now, this was a strange, jutting hill, very, very sharp sides, and it
didn't match any of the other terrain on Ceres.
Ahuna Mons is a very peculiar feature on Ceres.
This is a mountain that is standing three miles high, and there's
nothing else like it on the entire surface of Ceres.
Ahuna Mons dominates the landscape of Ceres.
With its steep sides and enormous height, it looks a lot like volcanoes
on earth, but earth is still geologically active.
Ceres is so small, its molten core should be frozen solid.
Planetary scientist Nina Lanza heads to one of the most volcanically
active places on earth Iceland.
She has a drone's-eye view of mount Helgafell, a volcano similar in
shape to Ahuna Mons.
So this volcano is what's called a rhyolitic dome, and so it's a type
of lava that kind of gets squeezed out through fissures, and then forms
this kind of blobby dome feature that gets pushed up by the magma
coming up from beneath.
On earth, red-hot magma bubbles slowly out of cracks in the surface,
building a steep-sided volcano.
But dwarf planets like Ceres are too small to have a hot core of molten
rock to power volcanism.
There isn't molten rock on these smaller worlds that have a lot of ice
on them.
Instead, what's molten is water under the surface, and if the water can
work its way up through cracks and erupt out in the surface, you get a
volcano.
But it's a cold-water volcano.
We call these cryovolcanoes.
Liquid water squeezes up through fissures in the surface.
It quickly freezes, building the mountain.
This volcano, you can see that it's a pretty young feature, and it's
not very eroded.
We expect on earth that wind and water will slowly erode this mountain
away.
With no wind or weather to erode Ceres' cryovolcanoes, once created,
they should remain on the surface for billions of years.
Ahuna Mons is very strange because it's the only tall mountain on
Ceres.
Why should that be? You don't typically get just one of something.
You should have dozens of them, and, in fact, Ceres may have had quite
a few cryovolcanoes in the past, but they're all gone today.
Just to put that into perspective, imagine if this is the only mountain
on earth.
Why would there only be one mountain? What would that mean? This leads
us to ask the question, you know, are the volcanoes on Ceres
disappearing? The idea that volcanoes are vanishing It just sounds
totally science fiction, and really, not realistic at all.
Of course, volcanoes can't just vanish, but actually, in the right
context, in certain scenarios, they actually can.
The key to this magic trick Gravity.
It can flatten solid matter.
How quickly depends on the structural composition of the material.
If you want to build a sand castle on the beach, you can't use dry
sand.
It doesn't stick together, so you want to mix a little bit of water in
there so that when you make the structure, it holds together, but if
you mix in too much water, it just dribbles away.
It viscously relaxes.
It slumps.
Even Iceland's rock volcanoes are slowly slumping under their own
weight.
Strange as it is to imagine this, it turns out the mountain behind me
is actually slowly relaxing back down.
It's just happening very slowly, not on a time scale that we can
directly observe.
It may be that there were many cryovolcanoes on the surface of Ceres.
They no longer show any trace of their existence So if we waited around
a little bit longer until all of Ahuna Mons had slowly relaxed back
into the planet, we'd see no trace of it, either.
Maybe Ahuna Mons hasn't always stood alone.
Maybe it's just the last of its kind.
Ceres continues to confound our expectations, and there are still many
mysteries with the other dwarf planets to be solved, such as how they
got their moons and why Pluto lies on its side.
Just like their larger cousins, dwarf planets often have orbiting
satellites.
We now realize that all of the largest dwarf planets have moons around
them, have a moon.
Most of them have one.
Haumea has two.
Pluto has five.
Four billion years ago, the young solar system was chaotic, filled with
small bodies orbiting the Sun.
One hit the infant earth, forming the moon.
Smash-ups like these happened throughout the solar system.
The dwarf planet Haumea formed from an explosive collision between two
larger objects Which may account for its unusual bean-like shape.
All the dwarf planets suffered huge impacts.
Haumea had this big one that left it spinning.
Eris has a tiny moon, presumably from a giant impact.
Makemake has one.
All these biggest objects have these tiny fragments of moons showing us
their history of just getting battered and pieces being knocked off
everywhere.
Most dwarf planets' moons are tiny, not much bigger than asteroids, but
one moon is very different Pluto's moon, Charon.
Pluto's moon is, if anything, weirder than Pluto itself.
It's Frankenstein's moon.
It looks like somebody tore a moon apart and then just kind of
slapdashed it back together.
One hemisphere is smooth.
One is very rugged.
It's got a canyon that's like a notched carved out of the side.
It is really bizarre.
An impact may have formed Charon and left it tied to Pluto in an oddly
codependent relationship.
In some ways, you can think of the Pluto-Charon system as almost a
binary planet.
There is no other planet in the solar system where the moon is so large
in proportion to it and so close.
Like other binary objects, Pluto and Charon orbit around a central
gravitational point.
Locked in this gravitational dance, Pluto and Charon always show each
other the same face.
One of the really interesting things about Pluto and Charon is that
they're what we call tidally locked.
When Pluto and Charon formed, they were probably both rotating on their
own axes, but the two worlds actually slowed down their rotation and
locked together, with one side constantly facing the other as they
orbit around.
But Pluto's rotation is tipped over like a top spinning on its side, so
Charon's orbit around Pluto is also tipped over.
Almost every planet in the solar system has an orbital axis that points
in roughly the same direction.
Pluto's is tilted down about 120 degrees.
Scientists have long wondered what caused this disparity.
Did Charon pull Pluto over? Or is the tilt a result of the impact that
formed Charon? A clue was revealed when new horizons sent back images
of Pluto's heart.
One of the more endearing features of Pluto as the new horizon's probe
approached it was a gigantic heart-shaped region on the side of Pluto
facing the spacecraft.
Sputnik Planitia, a bright, white heart against Pluto's dark,
pockmarked surface.
When we got closeups of this, it was completely fascinating.
I gasped out loud.
This is how shocking this was, and I remember saying, "oh, my gosh.
There are no craters there!" It is smooth, like it's a frozen-over
lake.
This is indicative of something liquid, something flowing under the
surface of Pluto, and what we're seeing is the top, frozen layer of it.
There are even convection cells where the ice appears to be warming and
spreading out.
That suggests that underneath, there's a source of energy, and
amazingly, there may even be a huge basin of liquid water under that
ice.
Sputnik Planitia may hide a giant, subterranean ocean of liquid water.
It's also a gigantic scar on Pluto's surface.
Most likely, given the shape and size, Sputnik Planitia was formed in a
giant impact.
Something smacked into Pluto.
Could the combination of subsurface water and an impact account for
Pluto's unusual tilt? One theory suggests that an object smashed into
the top of Pluto.
The impact shattered the surface, and water oozed up to fill the
crater.
The liquid water knocked Pluto off balance, and the gravitational dance
with Charon spun this heavy heart out to the opposite side.
One idea is that Sputnik Planitia formed where it is because ices can
accumulate in the floor of a giant impact base.
But it's not yet certain whether that's actually the case or not.
Dwarf planets, once thought to be dead lumps, have come alive with
mysteries.
They've challenged all our assumptions, and yet, we've barely scratched
the surface of these perplexing worlds.
There are many more dwarf planets to discover, and who knows what
surprises they may have in store? We don't know the final count of
dwarf planets because we're still finding them, but I think that there
are probably somewhere between 100 and 200 dwarf planets out past
Pluto.
There are probably many, many more as you go even further out in the
solar system.
Dwarf planets are, perhaps, the most interesting objects we've found in
the solar system.
They're diverse.
They're geologically active.
They contain liquid water.
Just because they're small, that doesn't mean they're insignificant or
they should be ignored.
They are where it's at.
For me, that is just the best, the most exciting.
We have all of these new worlds to study that we didn't even dream
existed just a few years ago.
That's science.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s06e08

Nightmares of Neutron Stars

Neutron stars.
Super heavy, super dense.
Extreme.
Gravitational, magnetic, hot.
Scary.
They destroy planets.
They can even destroy stars.
A cosmic conundrum.
They're very, very massive, but they're also really, really small.
Tiny cosmic super powers long overshadowed by black holes Until now.
Neutron stars have been thrust very much to the forefront of modern
astrophysics.
The world's astronomers know that something is happening.
Something's up, it's new, and it's different.
Neutron stars are the most interesting astrophysical object in the
universe.
Now firmly in the limelight, neutron stars, creators of our most
precious elements and life itself.
Captions by vitac captions paid for by discovery communications 130
million light years form earth, a galaxy called "NGC-4993.
" Two dead stars trapped in a rapidly diminishing spiral.
It's like listening to the ringing of the cosmos itself.
The sound of that collision, if you will, imprinted on the fabric of
space and time itself.
Livingston, Louisiana, the advanced LiGO observatory.
Its mission To detect gravitational waves generated in space.
A gravitational wave is a distortion of space time that's caused by,
usually, some kind of very traumatic gravitational event.
Events such as a supernova, or the collision of black holes, or massive
stars.
2015 LiGO makes history by detecting gravitational waves for the first
time, 100 years after Einstein's prediction.
It's the signature of the crash of black holes.
It's almost like listening to the sound of a distant car crash that you
didn't witness.
But you're so clever, and the sound of this car crash is such a unique
signature, that you are able to use your computers to model exactly the
type of cars that must have collided together.
In 2017, LiGO picks up a different kind of signal.
The unfolding of the August 2017 event was nothing short of
extraordinary.
So, the signal comes in, and the signal is strange.
It has a long-lasting signal.
It's over 100 seconds.
Less than two seconds later, a gamma-ray telescope detected a flash of
gamma rays from that same part of the sky.
And very quickly, the world's astronomers know that something is
happening.
Something's up, it's new, and it's different.
This combination of a long gravitational wave signal and a blaze of
gamma rays Acts as a beacon for astronomers.
When they saw this event, they sent out a worldwide alert to
astronomers across the globe, saying, "hey, we saw something
interesting, and it came from a particular patch of sky.
Then, all the chatter started amongst the astronomical community, and
everyone starting pointing their telescopes at this one part of the
sky.
Within hours, thousands of astronomers and physicists across the globe
are frantically collecting data on this mysterious event.
There is not just the gravitational waves, there is not just the gamma
rays.
There's a visible light, there's infrared light, there's ultraviolet
light.
And all these signals together tell us a story.
And this was the very first time we've seen these two multiple
messengers at once Gravitational waves and regular light.
So, that was a groundbreaking moment for astronomy.
Scientists realize this isn't another black-hole collision.
This is something different.
When you see an explosion in the universe, there aren't exactly a lot
of candidates.
There's not a lot of things in the universe that blow up.
But the length of the signal is the smoking gun.
The collision of two black holes was quick.
This one was the longer, slower, death end-spiral of two neutron stars.
Spiraling in, closer and closer, speeding up.
And then, when they finally collide, when they finally touch, releasing
a tremendous amount of energy into the surrounding system.
The collision throws up huge clouds of matter, which may have slowed
down the light very slightly.
The light and gravitational waves travel for 130 million years,
arriving at earth almost simultaneously.
It's the first time astronomers see neutron stars collide.
They call it a "kilonova.
" And this spectacular cosmic event doesn't just release energy.
The aftermath of this neutron-star collision, this kilonova, created a
tremendous amount of debris, which blasted out into space.
And this may finally have provided us the evidence of where some very
special heavy elements are created.
Through the destruction of a neutron star comes the seeds for the
essential ingredients of life itself.
We breathe oxygen molecules O2.
Water is hydrogen and oxygen.
Most of our body is made up of carbon compounds that include nitrogen,
phosphorus.
One of the big questions in science over the history of humanity has
been, "what are the origins of these elements?" And it turns out that
neutron stars play a critical role in creating many of the heavy
elements.
Most of the elements on earth are made in stars.
But how the heaviest elements are made has been one of science's
longest-running mysteries.
For a long time, we knew there was a problem with making these heavier
atoms Things like gold and platinum, all the way out towards uranium.
And really, the most energetic thing we had in the universe was
supernova explosions.
So, they had to be created somehow in supernovas.
But when scientists ran computer simulations, virtual supernovas failed
to forge these oversized atoms.
In 2016, astronomer Edo Berger explained a potential solution to the
mystery.
If you open any one of these books, and flip to the page that tells you
where gold came from, it will tell you that gold came from supernova
explosions.
But it was becoming clear that the textbooks were out of date.
To form heavy elements requires a lot of neutrons, and so, another
possible theory was that the heaviest elements were produced in the
mergers of two neutron stars in a binary system.
But at the time, no one had actually seen a neutron-star collision.
It was difficult to convince the community that this was a potential
channel for the production of heavy elements.
The proof is to actually see this process happening in the universe.
The 2017 kilonova provides the perfect opportunity.
It generates thousands of hours of data.
Scientists notice a pattern Subtle changes in the color of the kilonova
remnants.
In space, when you have an event that is very bright, it emits a
certain amount of light, and it emits it at certain wavelengths What we
think of as colors.
Different colors in a pyrotechnics display indicate the use of
different chemicals in fireworks.
In the same way, scientists can uncover the elements in the kilonova by
the colors in the explosion.
As the kilonova turns red, they realize it's the result of newly-
created heavy elements starting to absorb blue light.
As we watched this remnant change The explosion change in color, expand
and cool We could estimate what sort of elements were being produced.
The light from the debris shifts from blue and Violet to red and
infrared.
The color change provides clues about the presence of certain heavy
metals.
Well, this neutron-star collision, this kilonova, produced brightness
and a color spectrum that are consistent with models of predictions
that produce gold and platinum.
This model is called "The R-process," short for "rapid neutron capture.
" That is a bit of a complicated term that describes how we make atoms
heavier than iron.
You need a really neutron-rich environment.
And as you might imagine, a neutron-star collision is a very neutron-
rich environment.
If these models are correct And this blows me away This collision, this
kilonova, produced several dozen times the mass of the Earth in just
gold.
The 2017 kilonova not only reveals the origin of key elements, it sheds
light on the neutron star's interior The strongest material in the
universe creating a magnetic field a trillion times greater than that
of earth.
Two neutron stars caught in a death spiral.
This massive kilonova explosion not only sheds light on the creation of
heavy elements, such as gold and platinum, it also provides scientists
with a unique insight into one of the most mysterious objects in the
universe.
Trying to imagine what a neutron star is really like really challenges
our imagination.
It also challenges our theoretical physics.
We have to go to our computer models, our mathematics, to have some
estimate of what this might be like.
Now, scientists don't have to rely on their imaginations.
They can use hard data from the kilonova to work out what makes neutron
stars tick.
There's so much information we got from observing that one single
event, that one colliding neutron star pair.
Now, for the first time, we have an accurate estimate of the mass of a
neutron star, and the diameter.
We can finally begin to piece together how neutron stars really work.
They calculate the diameter is just 12.
4 miles, 1 mile less than the length of Manhattan.
Nailing down any physical characteristic is really important.
And if there's gonna be one, the radius is a big one, because from
there, if you know the mass, you can get the density.
And if you know the overall density, you can start to figure out what
the layering inside of a neutron star is like.
For physicists, the interior of a neutron star is one of the most
intriguing places in the universe.
You have to realize that the conditions inside a neutron star are very,
very different than the conditions that exist here on earth.
We're talking about material that's so dense that even the nuclei of
atoms can't hold together.
With a neutron star, you're taking something that weighs more than the
sun, and compressing it down to be smaller than a city.
It's so dense that, if you tried to put it on the ground, it would fall
right through the Earth.
High density means high gravity Gravity 200 billion times greater than
on earth.
Imagine climbing up on a table on the surface of a neutron star and
jumping off.
You're gonna just get flattened instantly, and just spread out on that
surface.
So, don't even think about trying to do push-ups.
Added to the intense gravity are hugely powerful magnetic fields,
awesome X-ray radiation, electric fields 30 million times more powerful
than lightning bolts, and blizzards of high-energy particles.
This isn't a good neighborhood for a space traveler.
If you were to find yourself in the vicinity of a neutron star, it's
gonna be bad news.
First, you would be torn apart by the incredibly strong magnetic
fields.
Then, the X-ray radiation would blast you to a crisp.
And as it pulled you closer, its intense gravity would stretch out your
atoms and molecules into a long, thin stream.
You would build your speed faster and faster, and then, you would
finally impact the surface, splatter across it.
And that process would release as much energy as a nuclear bomb.
If I had the choice between falling into a neutron star versus a black
hole, I think I'd pick the black hole.
'Cause I don't really feel like being torn apart by a magnetic field
and blasted with x-rays.
On a cosmic scale, neutron stars may be pint-sized, but they sure pack
a serious punch.
The secret to all this pent-up power is what's going on below the
surface.
Armed with the new kilonova data, we can now take a virtual journey
into the heart of a neutron star.
First, we must pass through its atmosphere.
Now, it's not like the Earth's atmosphere, which goes up, like, a 100
miles.
On a neutron star, the atmosphere is about this deep, and it's
extremely dense compared to the air around us.
Below the compressed atmosphere is a crust of ionized iron, a mixture
of crystal iron nuclei, and free-flowing iron electrons.
Now, the gravity's so strong that it's almost perfectly smooth.
The biggest mountains on the surface are gonna be less than a quarter
of an inch high.
A quarter-inch mountain range may sound odd But things get even
stranger as we go below the surface.
This is home to the strongest material in the universe.
It's so weird, scientists liken it to nuclear pasta.
As we dive beneath the crust of a neutron star, the neutrons themselves
start to glue themselves together into exotic shapes.
First, they form clumps that look something like gnocchi, then, deeper,
the gnocchi glue themselves together to form long strands that look
like spaghetti.
Even deeper, the spaghetti fuse together to form sheets of lasagna.
And then, finally, the lasagna fuse together to become a uniform mass,
but with holes in it.
So, it looks like penne.
This is pasta, nuclear style, simmering at a temperature of over one
million degrees Fahrenheit.
Extreme gravity bends, squeezes, stretches, and buckles neutrons,
creating a material 100,000 billion times denser than iron.
But the journey gets even more extreme.
Even deeper is more mysterious and harder to understand.
The core of a neutron star Which is very far away from these layers,
which we call the "nuclear pasta" Is perhaps the most exotic form of
matter.
So exotic it might be the last bastion of matter before complete
gravitational collapse into a black hole.
Data from NASA's Chandra observatory suggests the core is made up of a
super fluid A bizarre friction-free state of matter.
Similar super fluids produced in the lab exhibit strange properties,
such as the ability to flow upwards and escape airtight containers.
Although our knowledge of the star's interior is still hazy, there's
not mystery about its dazzling birth.
Forged into life during the most spectacular event the universe has to
offer The explosive death of a massive star.
Neutron stars Manhattan-sized, but with a mass twice that of our sun.
So dense a teaspoon of their matter weighs a billion tons.
Mind-blowing objects that arrive with a bang.
Neutron stars spark into life amid the death of their parent star.
They're the ultimate story of resurrection, or of life from death.
It's all part of a cosmic cycle.
Stars are born from giant clouds of very cold gas.
Those clouds collapse under their own gravity, and the density of the
core at the center of the collapse starts to increase.
A star is a huge nuclear fusion reactor.
The force of its gravity is so powerful that it fuses atoms together to
make progressively heavier and heavier elements.
The star fuses hydrogen into helium.
Once it exhausts its hydrogen, then, if it's massive enough, it can
start fusing helium at its core.
Fusion continues, forming carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, all the way up to
iron.
Once a star has iron in the core, it's almost like you've poisoned it,
because this extinguishes the nuclear reactions in the core of the
star.
You fuse something into iron, and you get no energy.
All of a sudden, there's nothing to support the crush of gravity.
No radiation pressure pushing out means no pressure keeping the outer
regions from falling in, and that's what they do.
As the star collapses in its death throes, its core becomes the
wildest, craziest, and freakiest pressure cooker in the whole universe.
The ingredients are all in place.
It's time to start cooking up a neutron star.
If we were to scale up an atomic nucleus to be the size of a baseball,
in a normal atom, the nearest electron would be way over in those
trees, but in the extreme conditions that lead to the formation of a
neutron star, those electrons can be pushed closer to the nucleus.
They can come zipping in from any direction.
And if the temperatures and pressures are high enough, they can even
strike the nucleus and enter it, and they can hit a proton.
And when they do, they become converted into more neutrons.
So, in the formation of one of these objects, the protons and electrons
disappear, and you're left with almost entirely pure neutrons, with
nothing to stop them from cramming together and filling up this entire
baseball with neutrons leading to incredibly high densities.
With the sea of electrons now absorbed in the atomic nuclei, the matter
in the stars can now press together a lot tighter.
It's like squeezing 300 million tons of mass into a single sugar cube.
As the star collapses, enormous amounts of gas fall towards the core.
The core is small in size, but huge in mass.
Billions of tons of gas bounce off of it, then erupt into the biggest
fireworks display in the cosmos A supernova.
It's massive.
It's bright.
It's imposing.
Supernova are among the most dramatic events to happen in the universe.
A single star dying One star dying Can outshine an entire galaxy.
And arising out of this cataclysm, a new and very strange cosmic
entity.
When the smoke finally clears from the supernova explosion, you're left
with one of the most real, fascinating, unbelievable monsters of the
entire universe.
Humans have been witnessing supernovas for thousands of years, but
we're only now just starting to understand what we've truly been
witnessing The births of neutron stars.
But while supernovas are big and bright, neutron stars are small, and
many don't even give off light.
So, how many neutron stars are out there? We know of about 2,000
neutron stars in our galaxy, but there probably are many, many, more.
I'm talking about tens of millions in the milky way alone, and
certainly billions throughout the universe.
Neutron stars may be small, but some give themselves away, shooting
beams across the universe Unmistakable, pulsing strobes of a cosmic
lighthouse.
Our knowledge of neutron stars is expanding fast.
But we didn't even know they existed until a lucky discovery just over
50 years ago.
Cambridge, the Mullard radio observatory, Jocelyn bell, grad student,
operating the new radio telescope.
Scanning the sky, doing all sorts of cool astronomy stuff, and sees
what she calls "a bit of scruff" in the data.
This scruff is a short but constantly repeating burst of radiation
originating 1,000 light years from earth.
It's so stable and regular that bell is convinced there's a fault with
her telescope.
She returns to that spot, and finds a repeating, regular signal A
single point in the sky that is flashing at us continually, saying "Hi.
Hi.
Hi.
" Blip, blip, blip.
Boom, boom, boom.
Pulse, pulse, pulse.
Nothing that we know of in the universe, has such a steady, perfectly-
spaced in time, pulse.
It seemed so perfect that it must have been artificial.
It looks like someone is making that, but it turns out, it's not a
person, but a thing.
What she discovered was called a "pulsar.
" A pulsar is a type of rapidly spinning neutron star.
Neutron stars had been theorized in the 1930s, but were thought to be
too faint to be detected.
Neutron stars were hypothesized to exist, but not really taken
seriously.
It was just a, "oh, that's cute.
Maybe they're out there, but probably not.
" The signal bell detected seemed like something from science fiction.
No one had ever seen this in astronomy before, and some people even
speculated that it was an alien signal.
She even called them "LGM objects" "little green men.
" But then, bell found a second signal.
Little green men went back to being fiction, and pulsars became science
fact.
The discovery of pulsars came out of the blue.
Nobody was expecting this.
So, it was an amazing breakthrough Really important.
Pulsars pulse because they are born to spin.
They burst into life as their parent star collapses during a supernova.
Any object at all that is undergoing any sort of compression event, if
it has any initial angular momentum at all, it will eventually end up
spinning.
As the star shrinks, it spins faster and faster.
They spin so quickly because the Earth-sized core of a massive star
collapsed to something as small as a city.
So, because the size of the object became so much smaller, the rate of
spin had to increase by a tremendous amount.
Neutron stars can spin really, really, fast.
Their surface is moving so fast.
It's moving at about 20% the speed of light, in some cases.
So, if you were to get on the neutron star ride No pregnant women, no
bad backs, no heart issues, keep your arms and legs inside the ride at
all times, because they are about to be obliterated.
And as they spin, they generate flashing beams of energy.
This beam is like a lighthouse beam.
You see these periodic flashes many times per second.
So, every time you see it Beam, beam, beam.
These beams are the pulsar's calling card.
They're generated by the elemental chaos raging inside a neutron star.
Although the star is predominantly a ball of neutrons, the crust is
sprinkled with protons and electrons, spinning hundreds of times a
second, generating an incredible magnetic field.
And with this strong magnetic field, you can create strong electric
fields.
And the electric and magnetic fields can work off of each other and
become radiation.
These neutron stars send jets Beams of radiation Out of their spinning
poles.
And if their spinning pole is misaligned, if they're a little bit
tilted, this beam will make circles, across the universe.
And if we're in the path of one of these circles, we'll see a flash A
flash.
Just like if you're on a ship, and you observe a distant lighthouse in
a foggy night, you can see pulsars across the vast expanse of space
because they are immensely powerful beams of light.
But sometimes, pulsars get an extra push that accelerates the spin even
more.
The way you make it spin even faster is by subsequently dumping more
material onto it.
That's called "accretion," and you end up spinning it up even faster
than it was already spinning.
Like stellar vampires, pulsars are ready to suck the life out of any
objects that stray too close.
Gravity is bringing that material in, which means that any spin it has
is accelerated.
It spins faster and faster.
These millisecond pulsars spin at around 700 revolutions per second.
They are the ultimate kitchen blender They will chop, they will slice,
they will even julienne fry.
So, what stops neutron stars from simply tearing themselves apart?
Neutron stars are incredibly exotic objects with immense, immense
forces that bind them together, and so, they can be held rigid even
against these incredibly fast rotation speeds.
They have incredibly strong gravity, and this is what allows them to
hold together even though they're spinning around so fast.
The speed of the spin is hard to imagine.
On earth, a day is 24 hours long.
On a neutron star, it's a 700th of a second long.
Super-speeding pulsars are not the only weird stars that scientists are
coming to grips with.
There is one other type of neutron star, that has the most powerful
magnetic field in the universe.
This magnetic monster is called a "magnetar.
" Astronomers monitoring pulsing neutron stars have noticed something
very odd.
On very rare occasions, they can suddenly speed up.
That's amazing.
I mean, you've got this incredibly dense object, and suddenly, it's
spinning faster.
It happens Instantly.
They'll suddenly change frequency.
It would take an amazing amount of power to do that.
What's doing it? These sudden changes in speed are called "glitches.
" One leading idea for what causes these glitches is that the core
material latches onto the crust, and this affects the way it can spin
around.
Excess material beneath the crust cracks it open, causing the glitch.
This process releases a tremendous amount of radiation, a blast of x-
rays, causes the face of the neutron star to rearrange itself, and for
the rotation speed to change.
But there's another possible explanation.
Glitches could also be caused by starquakes.
Sometimes, the crust gets ruptured.
Anything that basically changes the geometry of the pulsar can change
the rate at which it spins.
So, what could be powerful enough to cause these starquakes? It's hard
to believe that there's any force in the universe that could deform the
matter inside of a neutron star, which is undergoing tremendous
gravity.
But when it comes to a neutron star, if there's one thing that can do
it, it's magnetism.
Extreme magnetic fields within the star can get so twisted they can rip
the crust wide open.
And so, the surface can restructure itself, and constantly reshape.
And just a tiny reconfiguration of the surface of a neutron star, on
the order of a few millimeters, would be associated with an enormous
release of energy.
The neutron star's immense gravity smooths over the star's surface
almost instantaneously.
It's like the glitch never happened.
When it comes to neutron stars, there is no end to magnetic mayhem.
Meet the reigning champion in the universal "strongest magnetic field"
competition The magnetar.
1 in 10 neutron stars formed during a supernova becomes a magnetar.
The thing about magnetars, as is implied in their name The magnetic
field on them is so strong, that even somebody who is used to using big
numbers Like, say, an astronomer Is still kind of in awe of these
things.
Magnetars have a magnetic field one thousand trillion times stronger
than that of earth's.
This amount of magnetism will seriously mess up anything that comes
close.
Any normal object that we are familiar with, if it got close to a
magnetar, it would just be shredded.
Any charged particle with any movement at all, would just be torn from
its atom.
It would be just an insane situation.
Magnetars burn brightly, but their lives are brief.
We think magnetars These intensely magnetized neutron stars Can only be
really short-lived.
Their magnetic field is so powerful that it should decay over very
rapid time scales, only on the order of a few ten thousand years.
It seems their very strength leads to their downfall.
That magnetic field is so strong that it's picking up material around
it, and accelerating it.
Well, that acts like a drag, slowing it down.
So, over time, the spin of the neutron star slows, and the magnetic
field dies away.
During their lives, magnetars operate very differently than pulsars.
They don't have beams.
Their magnetic fields shoot out gigantic bursts of high-intensity
radiation.
But recently, astronomers have spotted one neutron star that's hard to
classify.
It behaves like a stellar Jekyll and Hyde.
So, this particular neutron star is a really weird example.
It behaves both like a radio pulsar, and also a highly-magnetized
magnetar.
It has the extreme magnetic fields, it can have these magnetic
outbursts, but it also has this strong jet of radiation coming out of
its poles.
It's almost like it has a split personality.
When first sighted in 2000, this star was emitting radio waves Typical
pulsar behavior.
Then, 16 years later, it stopped pulsing, and suddenly started sending
out massive X-ray bursts The actions of a magnetar.
Scientists were baffled.
We don't know if this thing is a pulsar turning into a magnetar, or a
magnetar turning into a pulsar.
One theory is that these X-ray bursts happened because the star's
magnetic field suddenly twisted.
The stress became so great, the star cracked wide open, releasing the
X-rays from the fractured crust.
A neutron star is the densest material that we know of in the universe.
And yet, we've seen things that actually make it shift and pull apart.
This neutron star is actually ripping itself apart under the forces of
the magnetic field.
If this is the case, placid neutron stars turn into raging magnetars,
growing old disgracefully.
When you think about the life cycle of a human being, we seem to kind
of slow down over age, become a little more calmer.
Neutron stars do the opposite.
They can be spinning faster than they were when they were formed, and
the magnetic field can get stronger over time.
It's sort of a reverse aging process.
But these strange changes are extremely rare.
Most pulsars are as regular as clockwork.
Pulsars are normally incredibly regular.
You can literally set your watch to the timing of their pulse.
And it's this stability that we may use in our future exploration of
the universe.
You know, if you're a starship captain, what you need is a galactic GPS
system.
Well it turns out, neutron stars may be the answer.
Astronomers often compare the steady flash of spinning neutron stars,
called "pulsars," to cosmic lighthouses.
These flashes are not only remarkably reliable, each pulsar has its
very own distinct flickering beam.
Each one has a slightly different frequency.
Each one has a slightly different rate.
Anyone in the galaxy, no matter where you are, can all agree on the
positions of these pulsars.
The unique signature of pulsars opens up intriguing possibilities for
the future of space travel.
We would basically be using pulsars to be able to sort of triangulate
where we're at.
And because those pulses are so precise, we can use that in a similar
way that we use GPS satellites that are stationed above the Earth.
Using pulsars as navigational aids is not a new idea.
It was recognized by the NASA voyager mission in the 1970's.
Affixed to the surface of those spacecraft is a golden record.
And on the plate that covers that record is a pulsar map, which in
principle could tell an advanced alien civilization how to find earth,
because it uses the position of earth relative to 14 known pulsars, as,
effectively, a way to triangulate the position of our planet relative
to all of these pulsars.
Aliens haven't made contact, but NASA still uses pulsar maps.
NASA recently launched a satellite called "nicer sextant" that exists
on the international space station, that is being used to test these
types of theories.
They've used pulsars to figure out the location of an object orbiting
around the Earth at 17,000 miles an hour, and they were able to
pinpoint its location to within three miles.
That's pretty incredible.
By recognizing their position relative to known pulsars, future space
missions could navigate the universe.
Neutron stars are gonna take us on this incredible journey Something as
necessary as knowing where you are in the galaxy.
We could be many hundreds of light years away, but neutron stars can
actually show us where in the milky way we are.
I read a lot of science fiction, and I love the idea of being able to
go from star to star, planet to planet.
It's kind of weird to think that, in the future, as a galactic
coordinate grid, we might wind up using these gigantic atomic nuclei,
these rapidly spinning, bizarrely-constructed, magnetic, fiercely
gravitational objects like neutron stars.
Neutron stars have come a long way since being mistaken for little
green men.
Once overlooked as astronomical oddities, they've now taken center
stage as genuine stellar superstars.
What's really exciting about neutron stars is that, we're at the
beginning of studying them.
We're not at the conclusion.
We've learned a lot, but there's a lot more to be learned.
From the humble neutron comes the most powerful, the most rapid, the
strongest magnetic field, the most exotic objects in the cosmos.
I love the idea of a Phoenix, something actually rising from its own
ashes.
You think something dies, and that's the end of the story, but
something even more beautiful, even more fascinating, comes afterwards.
I told you at the beginning, and you didn't believe me, but now, I hope
you do Neutron stars are the most fascinating astrophysical objects in
the universe.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s07e01

When supernovas strike

Supernovas -- gigantic explosions that light up the cosmos.

One of the most spectacular things in the universe is the death of a
giant star.
They live fast, and they die young.
Narrator: Inside the star's core, temperatures and pressures are
immense.
We're talking about a billion degrees in the center of one of these
stars.
Narrator: A ticking time bomb that explodes with indescribable energy.
The last minutes of a giant star's life are the most cataclysmic events
that we see in the universe.
Narrator: Dramatic finales blazing across space.
That one supernova is brighter than the hundreds of billions of stars
that constitute the galaxy.
How amazing is that? Narrator: But these stellar deaths also hold the
key to life itself.
Understanding supernovas is understanding our story.
We owe our existence to them.
Captions by vitac -- captions paid for by discovery communications
Narrator: Right now, somewhere in the universe, a giant star is
detonating, creating a huge cosmic explosion called a supernova.
Supernovas are a big, giant dramatic end to a star's life.
Narrator: All stars die, but only the biggest go out with a bang.
For a star to go supernova, we think it has to be at least eight times
more massive than our sun.
It's so easy to think of our sun as this incredibly gigantic thing, but
our sun is absolutely tiny compared to some of the giant stars in the
sky.
Narrator: We can see some of these giant stars with the naked eye, and
the 10th brightest in the night sky is a red supergiant around 15 times
the mass of the sun -- betelgeuse.
Betelgeuse is so big that if you were to place it in our own solar
system, it would stretch to the orbit of Jupiter.
This is one of the biggest beasts in the galaxy.
It's a star also that is on the verge of death.
Narrator: Betelgeuse is less than 10 million years old, but this huge
star's days are numbered.
It's ready to blow.
When it does, we will see a region of sky brighten for 14 days, until
it's nearly as bright as a full moon.
It is going to be one of the most spectacular shows in history.
And it could happen at any moment.
I mean, this is the thing.
I often stand outside in my yard in the wintertime.
I look up at Orion, and I see betelgeuse.
And I'm like, "explode!" Narrator: So what will make betelgeuse go
supernova? To understand a giant star's death, we need to understand
its life.
From the day it's born until the day it dies, a star's life is a
constant battle.
Gravity is pulling in, and energy is pushing out.
The interior of a star is fusing countless atomic nuclei together.
Thaller: Atoms are ramming into each other, getting very, very close.
And if they get close enough, they'll actually stick and form a larger
atom.
Narrator: Every second, a giant star fuses 7 1/2 billion tons of
hydrogen.
That amount of energy is roughly equivalent to about 100 billion atomic
bombs per second.
That's a big-ass explosion.
Narrator: This explosive energy threatens to blow the star apart, but
the star's own massive gravity keeps the lid on.
Straughn: Everything in the universe is a fight between the inward
force of gravity and the outward force of pressure or energy.
Thaller: Every single star in the sky, even our own sun, is an
incredibly dynamic battleground.
In many ways, stars are an explosion that are actually too big to
explode.
Gravity holds it together.
Narrator: This battle between these two opposing forces determines the
life and death of the star.
And this is where size matters.
The more massive the star, the more gravity pushes inward, the harder
the star has to push outwards to keep itself alive.
Very massive stars are like stars on steroids.
They have a lot of fuel to burn.
They're so powerful that they use up their fuel at a rapid rate.
Narrator: Massive stars like betelgeuse are giant factories, fusing
lighter elements into heavier ones.
But the hard work doesn't start until their final years.
For around 90% of their life, they fuse hydrogen into helium, but
eventually, the hydrogen starts running out.
In the core of a supergiant star, there's a sequence of fusion that
goes from lighter elements to heavier elements, and it gets faster and
faster every step of the way.
Narrator: The countdown to death begins.
The inward push from gravity takes over, raising the temperature in the
core.
Helium starts fusing to carbon.
There's enough helium to last about a million years, but it too runs
out, and things start speeding up.
Plait: Carbon gets fused into neon.
That takes about 1,000 years.
Neon fusing into silicon? That takes about one year.
Once it starts fusing silicon into iron, that takes one day.
It gets more and more frantic.
It's kind of like a cooking-contest show, where as the clock is running
down, they're trying to do more and more things, and they get more and
more frantic until, ding, time's up.
Narrator: The star is now in its death throes.
Sutter: Once iron production has started, the clock is ticking towards
the cataclysmic end of this star.
Narrator: A giant ball of incredibly dense iron forms in the middle of
the dying star's core.
This iron sphere is several thousand miles across and unbelievably hot.
It gets so hot there that temperature almost becomes meaningless.
I mean, we're talking about a billion degrees in the center of one of
these stars.
Narrator: This extreme heat is caused by fusion reactions.
More and more reactions create heavier and heavier elements, and with
each step, less and less energy is produced, until iron is created.
Plait: When you try to fuse iron nuclei together, that takes energy.
It doesn't generate energy.
So once the core starts to fuse iron, it's basically stealing its own
energy.
Narrator: The growing iron core sucks more and more energy from the
star.
Gravity continues pulling in, overwhelming the outward pressure from
inside the star.
Everything gets crushed to unimaginable degrees.
All of a sudden, there's no nuclear reaction to support the star
against the crush of gravity.
Narrator: With nothing left to hold it up, the star is doomed.
Gravity wins.
The edges of the iron core collapse.
Trillions of tons of dense iron fall inward at 1/4 the speed of light.
The star now has less than one second left to live.
Things start to fall apart real quickly.
The core collapse is so fast that the outer layers of the star don't
even have time to react.
They're just hanging there.
It's kind of like wile e.
Coyote, when a cliff collapses underneath him, and he doesn't even fall
until he notices.
Narrator: The rest of the star collapses.
A trillion-trillion-trillion tons of gas hurtles inwards, following the
iron.
Thaller: Think about the entire mass of a star that has been held up by
nuclear reactions inside.
All of a sudden, those nuclear reactions go away in a split second.
Everything rushes into the middle.
And that sets off the most dramatic explosion in the universe.
Narrator: The spectacular death blow can outshine all of the stars in a
galaxy.
But there's a problem.
We still don't fully understand how a collapsing ball of iron and tons
of falling gas create a giant fireball.
How this collapsing core triggers a massive explosion is one of the
biggest mysteries in astrophysics.
Narrator: A supernova -- one of the most powerful eruptions in the
cosmos, triggered by the collapse of a massive star.
How do you go from a violent collapse to an incredibly dramatic
explosion? This involves some of the most complex astrophysics known to
humanity, and we don't fully understand the details of the process.
Narrator: We're missing something, because we nearly always spot
supernovas too late.
What you're seeing is, you're seeing the star brightening, and that's
really happening after the fact.
So now the magic key is not finding a supernova but finding the moment
that we call the breakout.
Narrator: The breakout is a giant star's death rattle.
It's the moment after the core has collapsed, when the star blows apart
in a huge flash of visible light.
But in the entire history of astronomy, this moment has only been
caught twice -- one by NASA's multimillion-dollar space telescope,
kepler, and once by a very lucky Argentinean amateur.
Plait: I love this story.
There's an amateur astronomer named Victor buso.
He has a very nice telescope in an observatory in his yard.
And he was taking photographs repeatedly of the same galaxy that
happened to be overhead.
Oluseyi: And he just happened to be looking at the right region of the
sky, and he luckily caught the shock breakout of a supernova.
Narrator: The chances of catching this moment are 1 in 10 million.
What Victor caught was the moment the shock wave reaches the surface.
Narrator: Victor noticed this spot appearing in his photographs.
Realizing he'd captured the first flash of light from an exploding
star, he alerted professional astronomers across the globe.
When I heard of his discovery, I was like, "no way.
How could this guy, using a camera on his telescope for the very first
time, pointing at a single random galaxy in the sky, have found this
exploding star in the first hour of its explosion? It's almost too good
to be true.
" Narrator: Alex filippenko and his team monitored the brightening
light from the star.
Filippenko: What we found when studying the light from buso's supernova
is that the object brightened very quickly for a short time when a
shock wave, a supersonic wave going through the star burst out through
the surface.
And when it gets right to the edge, that huge amount of energy is
released as a tremendous flash.
That is the moment of shock breakout.
Narrator: The monstrous shock wave travels at nearly 30,000 miles per
hour, bursting through the surface of the star and ripping it to
pieces.
Fire! Narrator: We see shock waves from explosions on earth.
They can travel through gas, liquid, and solid, including the layers of
a collapsing star.
Thaller: This observation of the shock wave reaching the surface of the
star was incredibly important, because Victor managed to catch a star
the moment is actually went supernova.
That is something that is a scientific treasure.
Narrator: The shock breakout is like cosmic gold dust, a flash in the
pan that lasts 20 minutes -- just the blink of an eye on astronomical
time scales.
But what sets the shock wave off? Is it just a question of bounce? A
supernova shock wave can be explained with the help of a basketball.
The thing about an exploding star is that the nuclear reactions go out
in the core, and then the outer layers fall in at incredibly high
speeds toward the inner core, and then it rebounds and bounces out.
And what gives it so much energy is the structure of the star.
Narrator: As the dying star burns through its fuel, it creates layers
of different elements -- heavy iron at the core, with layers and layers
of lighter elements above.
So, let's say there was only one layer, and there was a rebound, like
dropping this ball.
It doesn't bounce very high.
But let's say it's organized like a star, where the heavy thing is at
the bottom, the lighter thing is at the top.
And let's see how this rebound goes.
Now, that was a rebound.
Narrator: The tennis ball launches off the basketball because energy
from the basketball's bounce is transferred upwards.
The same thing happens in a collapsing star, but with many more layers.
All the different elements collapse inwards.
They heavier layers hit the dense core first, passing energy to the
lighter ones.
And this creates the shock wave.
But this energy isn't enough to propel the shock wave all the way out
of the star.
The problem is, when we looked at this in detail using computer models,
it didn't work.
The shock wave seemed to stall.
We couldn't get the star to explode.
For 50 years, we couldn't figure out what we were missing.
Narrator: Scientists suspect something else is involved, something
that's almost impossible to detect.
Could there be a ghost in the supernova machine? Narrator: When stars
as big as betelgeuse die, their explosive deaths send shock waves that
travel trillions of miles through space.
But how these shock waves are created has puzzled scientists for
decades.
Time and time again, when we actually went back to our computers and
our theories and looked at how supernovas should work, they just
didn't.
They shouldn't actually explode.
Narrator: In computer models, the bounce from falling gas on a
collapsing core can't drive the shock wave all the way out of the star.
Something crucial is missing.
What we needed from inside the core of the star was a completely new
source of energy, something to actually make that final push to get the
star to rip itself apart.
Narrator: Scientists suspect this energy comes from an enigmatic
particle called a neutrino.
Neutrinos are a type of fundamental physical particle that are still a
little bit mysterious to us.
They're almost like ghost particles.
They travel through us without touching us at all.
Narrator: Like particles of light, photons, neutrinos carry no
electrical charge.
But unlike photons, they can pass through stars, planets, and us.
So where do they come from? Scientists predict the source is the star
itself.
In the middle of the core of the star, you're producing something
called a neutron star -- an amazing, super-compressed ball of matter
only about 10 miles across.
Narrator: As the iron core of a star collapses, the atoms are crushed
together.
Protons and electrons are forced to combine to form neutrons.
This process releases vast quantities of neutrinos.
Despite being one of the most abundant particles in the universe,
neutrinos are notoriously difficult to detect.
But in 1987, scientists got lucky.
A massive star went supernova in a nearby galaxy.
In 1987, astronomers got a wonderful gift.
It was the first naked-eye supernova in about 400 years.
And we had lots and lots of telescopes with which to study it
throughout the electromagnetic spectrum.
Narrator: But the 1987a supernova set off another scientific instrument
-- a neutrino detector hidden deep below a mountain in Japan.
There was a burst of neutrinos associated with the supernova.
This was just a fantastic surprise, a wonderful added bonus.
When you're trying to capture and measure elusive particles that you
don't even know if you're gonna get a signal or not, and you're sitting
there waiting at your detector, and then suddenly, this thing just
lights up? How exciting is that? Narrator: This was definitive proof
that supernovas emit neutrinos.
Neutrinos may be ghostly, but they don't gently drift out from the
collapsing core of the star.
They have to burst out.
The amazing thing about the inside of a supernova explosion is that
it's getting dense enough to trap neutrinos.
All of a sudden now, there's pressure.
Narrator: When scientists add neutrino pressure to the computer models,
the shock wave gets farther away from the core, but the supernova still
doesn't explode.
One more ingredient is needed -- disorder.
Because stars are round, it's tempting to think that a supernova
explosion too will be round.
But supernova aren't perfectly symmetric.
Narrator: Energy from the shock wave and the neutrinos heats up the gas
in chaotic, unpredictable ways.
They cause hot bubbles to rise and then come back down and rise and
come back down.
It's sort of a boiling motion.
This imparts a lot of turbulence into the gas.
Narrator: Researchers add all the ingredients to a supercomputer and
let it run.
This simulation is the result.
When the shock wave stalls on its way out of the core, it creates tiny
ripples in the falling elements above.
The ripples become giant sloshing waves.
Neutrinos bursting out from the neutron star heat the layers of
elements above it, causing them to bubble and rise.
Eventually, the intense heat combines with the pressures of these
violent motions, driving the shock wave out like an interstellar
Tsunami, smashing the star to pieces.
It turns out, stars do explode.
Nature knows what it's doing.
It was the computer models.
They were too simple.
Once the models became more complex, starting taking into account all
the dimensions of a star, the supernova models started to explode.
We think of supernova as effectively simple events -- very violent
events, but simple.
And this is just a beautiful illustration of the fact that when you dig
deep down, these are really exquisitely complex and elegant fluid-
dynamics problems.
Narrator: The shock wave travels through all the layers of the elements
that make up the massive star.
It takes hours for it to reach the outer edge and trigger the first
flash of light, but this flash is just the start of the supernova.
The spectacular light show is just beginning, a light show that will
create elements essential for life.
Narrator: We see the light from supernovas all the way across the
cosmos, but what we're seeing isn't the explosive first flash.
That's just the opening act before the main event.
Supernova are some of the most energetic events in the universe.
The galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars in it, and yet the death
of this one star can outshine those hundred billions of stars.
One of the interesting things about supernovas is that when the star
explodes, it's not at its maximum brightness immediately.
It takes days and weeks.
Narrator: The first flash is the explosive part of a supernova,
blasting tons of matter into space around the dying star.
But it's this ejected debris that makes supernovas shine, often glowing
brighter than the explosion itself.
Heavy elements are formed inside the cores of massive stars, and even
heavier elements are formed during the explosion event itself.
Narrator: As the star rips apart, temperatures and pressures are
immense.
The elements that once made up the layers of the star fuse together,
creating heavier elements.
And some of these are radioactive.
The decay of these radioactive elements actually produces light.
That gives it more brightness over a longer period of time than it
otherwise would have.
Narrator: This cloud of brightly shining matter can last for months and
sometimes years.
These supernova remnants light up the universe like cosmic fireworks.
These are oftentimes beautiful, beautiful things in the night sky,
because they are -- you see remnants of everything that the supernova
has generated in its explosion.
Narrator: But these aren't just pretty light show.
They are crucial for the evolution of galaxies and solar systems.
Sutter: Necessary ingredients -- things like sulfur, things like
phosphorous, things like carbon and oxygen.
And even the elements necessary to build a rocky planet like the earth
itself can only be formed inside of massive stars and can only be
spread through supernova explosions.
Narrator: NASA's chandra space telescope studies one of the most famous
objects in the milky way supernova remnant cassiopeia "a.
" Cassiopeia "a" is a relatively young supernova remnant, not even 400
years old.
Narrator: Ever since its star exploded, cassiopeia "a" has been
expanding.
It is now 29 light years across.
Using x-rays, the chandra space telescope has looked inside this
massive cloud.
New observations of cassiopeia "a" have shown us that the ejecta from
this event has created tens of thousands of times the earth mass of
really important materials.
Filippenko: 70,000 earth masses worth of iron, and a whopping 1 million
earth masses worth of oxygen.
Now, these are elements that are important to life, to earth, to us.
The iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, these were forged in
supernova explosions billions of years ago.
Narrator: The new study reveals something even more extraordinary.
Cassiopeia "a" also holds the building blocks of life.
We see every single atom necessary for DNA in that one supernova
remnant.
One of the really cool things about supernovas is that our very
existence depends on them.
Our DNA molecules are made up of material that was once in the core of
a massive star.
So somewhere out there, some unnamed supernova eons ago, led to you
watching me talking about supernovas.
That's awesome.
Narrator: Supernovas create all the elements needed to build everything
from planets to humans.
Dying stars give us life.
It's a cosmic recycling process.
But what if some stars are faking their own deaths? Narrator: For
thousands of years, humans have wondered about bright, new stars
appearing in the sky, and supernovas continue to surprise us.
Our fascination with supernova has grown with each discovery of a new
event.
The study of supernovas is really going through a revolution.
We're learning more and more.
We're better able to find them and observe them.
Narrator: And it turns out not all supernovas are the same.
Some are the result of white dwarf stars stealing matter from a twin
and growing so big, they explode.
All other supernovas are massive stars collapsing under their own
gravity.
But just to confuse things further, scientists also categorize
supernovas based on whether hydrogen is present.
Type I are missing hydrogen.
Type ii are not.
So, astronomers have these categories for supernova, and that might
make you think that we've got them all figured out, but here's a
spoiler -- we don't.
Narrator: September 2014.
A supernova appears in the great bear constellation and glows brightly
for 600 days.
When scientists check the records, they discover a supernova was
sighted at the exact same spot 60 years before.
A star seemed to be dying over and over again.
This particular star was something we had never seen before, and it
seemed so strange, it was almost impossible.
It actually brightened and faded about five times over a several-year
time span.
And each of these brightenings would have qualified as a supernova in
terms of its total energy.
It's the supernova that would never die.
Thaller: So how could it happen with the same star again and again and
again? This really did seem to be a zombie star.
Narrator: How can a star have multiple deaths? The answer lies in its
sheer size.
We're talking about a very massive star here, about 100 or more times
the mass of the sun, really the upper limit of what a star can be
without tearing itself apart.
Narrator: This star is so big that reactions in the core are off the
charts.
And these energetic reactions produce more than just elements.
It can actually get so hot in the interior that you produce gamma rays.
This is the most energetic form of light imaginable.
Narrator: The gamma rays' extreme energy supports the dying star
against the crushing forces of gravity pushing in, but it also affects
the gamma rays themselves.
Gamma rays above a certain energy can do something weird.
They can transform themselves into matter.
Narrator: This transformation affects the delicate balance between
gravity and energy in the star's core.
The core starts to collapse.
When it collapses, it generates more energy.
This energy leaks out of the outer layers of the star, and we sudden
brightening of the star, a pulse.
Filippenko: And it brightens and fades a bunch of times, each time
releasing some material but not quite exploding.
It's almost supernova levels of energy.
That's what fooled the astronomers at first.
Narrator: Eventually, the pulsations stop.
The star calms down, ready to live another day.
Astronomers still don't know if this "zombie" supernova has finally
died.
Filippenko: We think that we've seen this final explosion of the zombie
supernova, but honestly, we're not sure yet.
Maybe it's currently fading, but next year, it'll surprise us and
brighten once again.
Narrator: But this isn't the only mysterious supernova that has
scientists scratching their heads.
Meet supernova sn 2014c.
Supernova 2014c was a bit of a strange one.
It was initially classified as a type I.
Narrator: Astronomers classify supernovas as type I or type ii,
depending on whether they contain hydrogen.
If you break the light up coming in from a supernova into its
individual colors, you take its spectrum.
If there's the signature of hydrogen in that spectrum, that's a type ii
supernova.
If the hydrogen is missing, that's type I.
Narrator: When sn 2014c was first discovered, hydrogen was missing.
But then later on, hydrogen suddenly appeared, and we realized, no,
this is actually a type ii.
It's sort of a chameleon supernova.
It went from being type I, free of hydrogen, to type ii, full of
hydrogen.
How can a supernova change from not having hydrogen to having hydrogen?
Narrator: The chameleon supernova baffled scientists, until they looked
around it with the nustar X-ray telescope.
It revealed that the star had spewed out a huge amount of hydrogen.
But this wasn't during the supernova event.
This was many decades before.
This star is very massive and relatively unstable.
And it underwent an explosive event about a century ago -- not big
enough to be a supernova, but it expelled all the hydrogen in that
star, so it was a type I.
Narrator: Then the star exploded again, but this event was massive.
Filippenko: The ejected gases from the supernova smashed into the
hydrogen that had been previously expelled by the star before
exploding.
And once the ejected gases crashed in, well, that caused that hydrogen
gas to glow.
And then we saw hydrogen in the spectrum, and it became a type ii.
Narrator: The more scientists learn about supernovas, the more
complicated they become.
Thaller: So, now it seems that we've seen every type of supernova that
must be possible.
And we've seen some very, very strange ones, things that are zombies or
chameleons.
But there has to be something out there that's stranger still.
Narrator: There may be a whole zoo of undiscovered supernovas out there
-- exciting, perplexing, deadly.
And they may have been shaping the solar system, and earth, since the
beginning of time.
Narrator: The death of a giant star -- it's more than just an epic
explosion.
It unleashes a storm of elements that form the universe around us.
There's a wonderful cycle of death and life in the universe.
Individual stars are born, they live their lives, and they die.
When they die, they enrich the universe with new atoms and new
chemicals.
Those go on to form new stars and new planets.
Narrator: Dust blows out from the explosion, forming spectacular
interstellar clouds -- nebulas, the nursery of stars, including our
solar system.
One of the biggest pieces of evidence we have is that supernova
themselves produce some very rare radioactive elements, radioactive
elements that we can still see embedded in the solar system today.
It's sprinkled like radioactive salt.
Narrator: These radioactive elements, found right across our planet,
are only produced in supernovas, proof that earth and the solar system
were created from exploding stars 4.
6 billion years ago.
But supernovas may have affected earth much more recently.
We do have some evidence that there was a particular supernova
explosion that rained down on the earth about 2 1/2 million years ago
and deposited a specific kind of iron.
Narrator: Iron-60 is a radioactive element made during supernova.
It's found in fossils from around this time.
We see it embedded in the crust of the earth itself.
We see pieces of evidence.
Narrator: 2 1/2 million years ago, life on earth changed dramatically.
Africa lost much of its forests to grasslands, various plants and
animals went extinct, and many new species appeared.
But how could a supernova change life on earth so dramatically without
destroying it completely? When a supernova explodes, it produces a
tremendous amount of gamma rays.
And if that supernova is close enough to the earth, you could imagine
it really doing damage to our atmosphere.
Narrator: Some of the incredible amounts of energy found in a supernova
leave the star in gamma-ray beams.
If that beam were to be pointing at earth, then the ozone layer could
be harmed.
It affects our ozone layer, which affects the amount of U.
V.
radiation that can hit the surface, which can trigger mutations, which
can trigger different forms of vegetation, which can kill off algae in
the in the oceans.
There's a lot of potential effects.
Narrator: Mutations drive evolution in all forms of life, from the
simplest to the most complex.
So it's conceivable that, as a result of a relatively nearby supernova,
the mutations led to early hominids and then homo sapiens.
That actually affected the evolution of life on earth, and humans in
particular.
Narrator: Is it just coincidence that ancient humans started to appear
at around this time? Or was our humanity sparked by a supernova?
Supernovas seem to be an example of violent death.
But there were so many steps in the formation of our solar system, the
formation of you, that are intimately related to supernova.
They created the chemical elements and maybe even drove our evolution.
We very likely would not exist if it were not for exploding stars.
Narrator: From the elements in our DNA to the solar system and the
world we live in, supernovas have made us.
Thaller: The reason we study astronomy at all is to actually answer the
question as to who we are, where we came from, and we're going.
And with supernovas, that's all wrapped up into this amazing story.
Literally, you are the death of a star.
Narrator: These epic explosions are unlocking the biggest mysteries of
our existence.
The story of supernova have become more interesting and more complex
with every discovery.
So as we learn more, we discover what it is that we don't understand
yet.
Tremblay: The cosmos is something that can seem so distant and so
unreachable, but stars are the things, the brilliant light to the
cosmos, with which we have the most strong connection.
There are so many things to love about exploding stars.
They are what give rise to the elements of life.
From the most intimate to the most gigantic scales imaginable,
supernovas are the key to all of that.
So, thank you, supernova.
Hats off to you.
Now, please, stay very, very far away.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s07e02

The interstellar mysteries

pace between interstellar space is interstellar The interstellar space

is vast The most unknown and unplanned Astronomers are now exploring
this great abyss They discover amazing things Space between
interstellar is busy and busy There are stray planets that are not
connected to a star Cosmic rays, and interstellar gas withdrawal They
have super-speed stars out there There are the greatest secrets in our
universe Interstellar space is where we originated All are among the
stars drsamehnour yahoo,com How the universe works "Interstellar
Mysteries" We live in a small solar system On the outskirts of the
Milky Way galaxy Eight planets and more than one hundred and eighty All
around the sun In our solar system, the sun is the city's mayor Do what
the sun wants us to do The effect of the sun extends to more Of light
year in each direction Limits the limits of our solar system Somewhere
there ends the effect The sun and other stars begin This is the
interstellar space input Interstellar space is the region Between the
star systems in our galaxy So far we know little about them We thought
for a long time that space Interstellar is completely empty But it
turned out to be a mistake Many things have happened there It is at the
forefront of astronomy One of the biggest signs of space Between the
stars came on our doorstep , October 2017 The Pan Starz-1 telescope has
detected something unusual "Pan Stars" is an observatory in "Hawaii"
Wiping wide sections of the sky Looking for things changing Suddenly, a
visitor came up and roared through the solar system It was going at a
speed of two hundred thousand miles per hour It was faster than we
expected For a body in a solar system His path indicated that his orbit
was not restricted to the sun It was not like any lane or any path Or
any other orbit in our solar system Astronomers reached an astounding
conclusion It turned out that he was not a body of The solar system
travels from a distance But something came from another star I think
everyone was amazed by that Our visitor is between the first star Known
passes through our solar system It is the first object we ever discover
He grew up outside the solar system All that we have seen, every sinner
and all An asteroid has arisen within our solar system Giant giant body
enters our system The sun, something I see only in dreams But I never
thought it would be true "Scientists launched it" Omwa-mua Bahawian
messenger from afar arrives first This object came from interstellar
space to Our Solar System The main question is what is it? The shape of
the body was puzzling It was shaped like a cigar, the longest of its
width This is exceptional, there is no body in our system We measured
it daily and it was so long "Amwa-mua" seemed abnormal It has been
filled with the imagination of scientists What we should remember about
scientists is that we are still Human beings, we read science fiction
and our fantasies I admit that when I first heard about him "Once my
thought went to" Rama "From the story of Arthur C, Clarke" An
appointment with Rama It was a long space ship that came from another
star He reminded me of some of our designs for interstellar spaceships
Which must exceed its width To reduce interstellar gas friction "Could
be" Amwa-mua Spacecraft between stellar? Astronomers including Prof,
"Avi "They took the idea seriously We decided to follow this body Using
the best approaches in the world We monitor any radio transmissions
from it Astronomers searched for signs of any space contact But after
eight hours of listening Over many frequencies we have received nothing
Unfortunately, we did not monitor any submissions A natural body, I bet
all my money on it I was disappointed, I was more eager if We found
evidence of space civilization There are no small green men this time
Amwa-Mua "natural body" But what exactly? Observers first thought he
might be guilty A snowy body with a few rocks These objects exist Away
from the star and easy to extrude But the culprit transgresses this
Proximity to the sun will warm To turn the snow into a gas to be a
toxic effect On "Amwa-mua" did not see Astronomers have done this There
was no mist around him as we expected It is guilty when the snow turns
into gas It was mysterious and I think everyone watching it is an
asteroid When the team tracked "Amwa-mua" across the sky There was an
unexpected paradox When "Amwa-mua" crossed our solar system It was
basically falling into the sun Accelerates strongly after crossing the
sun before it It emerges from the solar system from the opposite
direction But something strange happened when he walked away The sun
did not slow down as we expected It did not slow down fast enough Amoa-
mua took a boost through our solar system but how? We think the reason
is the gas drop In the sense that it was issued a little of The gas was
working as a rocket propulsion engine It is like a weak jet engine on
the surface Give him a little bit of payment over time This weak
payment reveals The true "Amwa-Mua" identity In that case he tends to
be more guilty His gas emission was not enough to see him By pushing
the gas out, this traveler Interstellar may travel from star to star
But knowing the place of his arrival In the galaxy more difficult
Knowing that "Amwa-Mua" is gassing It changes its speed and changes its
path It is difficult for us to do so Amwa-mua may be safe now to get
away quickly But faces the solar system Bombardment from another source
between stellar It travels towards the Earth near the speed of light
Cosmic rays are shots The universe engulfs interstellar space The
surface of "Amwa-mua" tells us a story His journey through interstellar
space The interesting thing about Amwa-mua "is his color, it's red" "I
stand on a surface the same as the surface" Amwa-mua When you look
around you see a cover Bright of dark color for all rocks The highest
valley extends to the mountains from behind "Scientists believe that
the brightness of" Amwa-mua The red comes from organic molecules that
fall on it Which represent the building units of life What a wonderful
thing that comes from different origins and passes In our neighborhood
and owns some organic matter Gold mine may be ours In our solar system,
distant objects Comets and asteroids also carry loads This happens
because their surfaces are cut by cosmic rays This changes the nature
of chemicals on the surface "We think the same thing happened to" Amwa-
mua There was an interstellar space And the cosmic rays were buried
over the ages Cosmic cosmic rays are particles High energy makes its
way across the universe Space is filled between interstellar Of the
cosmic rays Particles such as protons, electrons and possibly some The
heaviest and most unusual particles blowing through the universe Some
cosmic rays can It travels up to 99% of the speed of light Active high
speed particles It takes a lot of energy To speed up anything near the
speed of light Cosmic rays come from sources Many active, strong and
violent in our universe Anything with a huge explosion generates cosmic
rays One of the most powerful cosmic ray generators Is the death of a
huge star The supernova is a high-activity explosion So active that he
can Create all exciting particles When the star's fuel runs out, it
collapses The star's mass collapses inside to produce a huge explosion
The shock wave hits the surrounding gas Magnifying magnetic fields The
particles are trapped there and confined Magnetic fields of this gas
Bounce back and forth strongly ,,, is accelerating so In the end, the
particles move quickly And the magnetic field can not restrain it And
it is launched at a speed approaching the speed of light The cosmic
rays have a mass And it is destroyed Cosmic rays are the shots of the
universe The space is interstellar But we are protected Cosmic rays of
space between Starry is battling with another superpower Our guard in
the solar system We may think that the sun is the source of energy And
the warmth of the earth, giving life only But they also protect us in
ways that they do not know The sun produces a stream of particles
Charged solar wind Particles run through the planets At a speed of
about one million miles per hour But in the end it loses its power
There is a region where solar wind slows down Make its way in that
interstellar substance And eventually slows down and stops Solar wind
carries the magnetic field of the sun To be a bubble around our solar
system We call it the "solar envelope" and symbolizes For this giant
magnetic field of the sun It basically works as a protective layer to
protect us Of those cosmic rays If it does not exist, levels will
increase Radiation that hits the ground So the sun really protects us
from The dangerous environment of interstellar space Protect the solar
envelope from most cosmic rays But some succeed in gaining access to
the solar system Fortunately, the Earth also has its own defense
mechanism We have our magnetic field which works on Deflection of low-
energy cosmic rays We have a thick protective cover from the atmosphere
Which absorbs most high-energy cosmic rays Before they had the
opportunity To reach us here on the roof Cosmic rays can travel from
interstellar space That changes DNA and causes diseases But without it,
perhaps we have never been here Even a fraction of cosmic rays Which
passes through our atmosphere to the Earth's surface May have a
profound impact on the evolution of life Cosmic rays can destroy acid
Nuclear device that carries life information These particles break down
and change The atoms collide with cosmic rays , And mobile information
changes ,, This is a boom That's what natural selection is about So we
humans are strongly bound to life In interstellar space around us But
space is interstellar Also larger objects Objects that can completely
erase life Our solar system circulates around a center Milky Way at 143
mph In the middle of the sun, one Two hundred billion stars in our
galaxy We do not live in an isolated bubble alone in the galaxy Here,
we live in a cluster of other nearby stars The movement of those stars
has effects Long term on our solar system , behind the planets and our
solar shell The Ort cloud is located On the edge of real interstellar
space Ort cloud is the remnant of the composition of the solar system
Small dirty snowy bodies, mean comets The comets in the Ort cloud are
very far away So that they hardly adhere to the sun She spends most of
her time looking around The sun is sober in its cold depths But it is
occasionally shaken Our sun moves through interstellar space As well as
other stars Our sun revolves around the galaxy and corresponds Its
neighbors are inevitably stars Sometimes one passes through or near the
Ort cloud The attraction of the next star may shake the Ort cloud Sends
rain from comets It travels through the solar system Some may collide
with the ground Comets that fall into the system The solar interior
must pay attention to it You may be serious about life here on Earth
One of the things we do is look at the galaxy We monitor which star may
be approaching Any time in the near future "With the new Space
Observatory named" Gaia Astronomers watch millions of nearby stars in
our galaxy They track their movement through interstellar space What is
the next star that will cross Earth? It turned out we knew "There is an
orange dwarf called the Glyce-710 In 2018, new data showed that Gliese-
710 "in a collision course with Ort cloud" It will throw some dirt and
some dust It may carry bad news for the solar system To get unwanted
visitors "We were lucky to have" Gliese-710 Will not arrive 1,3 million
years ago But there are other stars there There are all those stars
that you see In our skies in the Milky Way disk And tend to move in the
same direction At a hundred miles per second around the middle Gaia
discovers stars that follow different rules They do not seem to move
with the galaxy movement In turn they race through space They are
quickly launched as artillery shells and move three Or four or five
times other stars in the galaxy It seems to be moving away from the
center Those cosmic shells know Also named super-speed stars What makes
it go so fast? Some of these stars originate from star systems Two of
its members burst into a greater crisis Removes the attractive
association of the other star to allow him to escape Or being thrown
across the galaxy in its high-speed orbit I have some super stars The
past speed is darker It drips from a black hole There are trillions of
black holes in the universe There are almost huge black holes in the
center All large galaxies including our galaxy These monsters create
Chaos on the associated stars There is a binary star system and two
orbits Around the black hole in the middle of our galaxy When they
approach, one falls into the hole Black and the other shoots away at
high speed Those super stars glow Speed through interstellar space Its
starry winds bring beauty from chaos Most of the high-speed stars we
see are Giant stars are bigger, warmer and brighter than the sun They
make their way through interstellar matter Its winds extend and hit
with gas and dust What you see when you look at it is that The bow is
as beautiful as the front wave of the ship We have pictures of them,
they are beautiful beautiful patterns High-speed stars draw the
universe's plate It may sound quiet, but space between The star is far
from calm It is not a property, it is a wild area You can do whatever
you wish In rugged galactic areas, the bad guys prevail Dozens of light
years away from the sun Mysterious bodies disappear in the dark We saw
only part of the material there This is the next big discovery In 2016,
scientists monitored a weak source of light Infrared light 59 light
years away from Earth He is darker than a star and does not revolve
around a star It is only a stray planet When we think of the planet We
believe that an object revolves around a star In fact, this is the
current definition of the planet What if it is not about anything? We
call it planets The next year he picked up Astronomers have more
detailed images They found not one world but two worlds This is
amazing, that body is the middle of space, if not two The stars of the
two planets are orbiting each other The constellation is four times the
mass of Jupiter 300 million miles from each other More than three times
The distance between the earth and the sun They revolve around each
other every century Do not imagine a planet Charda but two planets Two
planets revolve around each other They may be two giant giants as the
buyer If they were, there would be no surface But if they were old, it
was lost They have enough time to cool down They may have two surfaces
, We do not know, but they will be gloomy There is no nearby star to
illuminate them The stagnant planets slide into eternal darkness Across
the wide, cold expanse of interstellar space Not touched by light for
millions of years Suppose you found yourself standing up On the surface
of one of those stray planets It will be a strange sight, there will be
no sun It will only be the night sky around you Imagine a dark night
Lunar is here on Earth This is the level of light that exists In
interstellar space Physicists believe there are billions Planetary
planets in our galaxy Planet for all four stars The question is why you
exist Those stray planets? Have you been alone or have been prostrated?
Somehow outside its solar system? The answer holds both Some of the
stray planets were formed Groups of gas that did not become stars
Others formed as planets around Stars in solar systems as our system
When the systems were formed Solar, were violent places Sometimes the
planets crash And become one body Sometimes you miss the whole thing
They stray away from each other and toss So these planets exist Her
entire life is completely lonely Without a star warming it, the planets
look Uncertainty places unbearable life The planet stalks alone in
Space will not be good for life It's cold there, if it's a size Earth
may be a frozen ball But in 2018, astronomers announced that life May
harbor a moon around a stray planet There are moons orbiting Jupiter
Saturn is so dense with planetary gravity It has nothing to do with the
sun When those satellites deviate By the gravity of the planet The
friction generates heat that makes the water liquid It is possible if
the planet can Stray from keeping his moons It was probably a satellite
Contains liquid ocean under its surface You do not need a star But the
planet is heating up Space between the stars is not empty But it is
full of unrelated objects that have no habitat You may imagine space
between Asteroid as a pinball machine There are high-speed stars and
rare planets There are even moons from their planets They all go out
there Interstellar space is more active And life than we would imagine
as illustrated He even has a pull sing Hundreds of light years away,
quantities drift A vast gas and dust across interstellar space Imagine
all this space between The stars are full of gas and dust Full of star
formation stories Planets, we were missing a lot Scientists call gas
and dust Interstellar interstellar medium It is most of the material
present in the galaxy They are atoms of hydrogen and little Of helium
atoms here and there The interstellar medium does not spread evenly
across the galaxy It is cobbled and lumpy and there are areas of it
More materials and other materials less Areas with more materials The
drag is called interstellar What is the cloud between stellar only
Intensive concentration of gas and possibly dust Scattered across our
galaxy The interstellar clouds may spread For vast distances across the
universe Some up to one million times the mass of the sun This amazes
me When I look at that interstellar clouds I realize that its size is
light years The interstellar clouds are more than Just pools of gas and
dust It is alive We know that places where the stars are made up They
are also places of star death Stars are formed when The interstellar
cloud collapses Gravity pulls materials together to ignite pulp But
astronomers are not fully aware of the process Understand the shape and
composition of the cloud It is important to understand the star
formation process Some shapes and structures are not as big Enough in
some dimensions to allow the collapse of the cloud All we know about it
depends on its shape So figuring out the shape is the key to
understanding the process But there is a problem When we look at the
universe we are We see things on the sky So we may look at the
installation as the sweep between And have little information about its
depth One of the biggest challenges for astronomers is Disassemble the
three-dimensional shape of that drag In 2018, there was a big shift for
scientists In their efforts to understand star formation 490 light-
years from Earth "There is an interstellar cloud called Mosca Similar
to a fine snake This dark painting is dark The expression looks like a
dark two-dimensional cloud Its a silhouette off The stars are in the
background in the sky Astronomers have examined Mosca with infrared
light They found out that she was singing It oscillates, creating
moving waves Across that cloud back and forth Dynamic fluid waves are
called Magnetism which looks fantastic The team converted the waves to
"Musical tones for the song" Moska It turns out that when you study so
you can Determine the 3D shape of that cloud Through the movement of
waves across it It's like listening to The sound frequency of the
machine you do not see And trying to reshape the nature of that machine
The low tone tells you that Tapping for a huge machine like a cello
While the high tone It represents a smaller machine like Kalkman Just
as different machines produce different sounds The drag structures
Different hesitate in different ways She will sing completely different
songs Voices, whether to say or frequencies issued Of the cloud is a
fundamental guide to its shape and composition Although the Mosca cloud
looks like a line in the sky Astronomers were able to determine their
stereotypical shape Not just a thread but a disk As if we see a disc
standing on its own Mosca "is more like a pie than a snake" Inn did
look at the pie from the side This is amazing, as if we were wearing
glasses Stereoscopic for the first time and see the depth of the
universe The same technology can be used To study the interstellar
clouds Bring with it a lot of knowledge treasures About the structures
and processes taking place there We discover that interstellar space In
our galaxy is full of substances But the total number is minus It turns
out that if we took all the materials Which we now see around the
universe And we collected it would not equal quantity The total that we
know is there One-third of the materials are missing Where is it then?
To find them, we should look Behind interstellar space To the dark side
Mysterious space between the Hungarian Milky Way is one trillion
Galaxies in the Universe Perspective The Milky Way is a disk About
100,000 light-years away It is full of stars and lots Of planets, gas
and dust But where does our galaxy end? Where do the other galaxies
begin? Installation as our shop has no break point They become less
dense and gradually fade away Whenever we move into space between the
Hungarian , galaxies have huge gaps Space between Hungarian But as the
space between The asteroid is not empty New research shows that it
holds a great puzzle answer We know the amount of normal material
Emerging from the Big Bang We can look around today and count All the
regular items we see The problem is that they are not equal There are
speeches by galaxies in our universe Not huge enough About a third of
the ordinary matter in the universe is missing There is an ordinary
substance that is not connected to galaxies Where is it then? Assume a
theory about the place of those Ordinary Lost Article They float out of
our galaxy in hot gas Scientists believe that this hot gas May exist in
long filaments between galaxies But the gas is thin and too widespread
to detect Until now In 2018, astronomers studied a star The distant
matte pseudo is called 1 AS 1553 The false star exists when the black
hole feeds It releases light and we can see it across the universe The
stars are false Four billion years until you reach us But observing the
observers is something strange Something absorbs light It passes
through the universe Accused ,, hidden threads of gas Suspended in
intergalactic space These results assume that part A great matter of
ordinary matter in our universe Not confined to galaxies Do not live
within the city limits But live in long flows Thin connecting galaxies
together , by heating its shock waves to millions of degrees Those
threads of gas may extend across the universe The article is
interpreted She was missing all that time This opens an interesting
question Whether it is there And failed to accumulate in the galaxies?
Or have they started inside the galaxies and pushed out? We do not know
explicitly Space between interstellar , and now the inter-Hungarian
space More life than we thought , of the stray planets , to pull the
singer gas Space between the stars stranger than Imagination, but we
are now beginning to cut his story Because there is so much We are
ignorant of interstellar space Making it more important to explore Try
and find out what is there Exists in space between The stars are more
than we know This is the beauty of exploration The beauty of knowledge
is expanding Always presented there always Who knows what might be
there too And what may be hidden in the darkness between the stars

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s07e03

how black holes made us

Black holes Long considered the bullies of the cosmos, but are they
really so bad? Black holes aren't violent.
They are elegant.
They're incredibly powerful objects, but they're beautifully simple.
Simple but unpredictable.
Black holes rip planets to shreds, but they also give birth to stars.
Black holes are like the ultimate recycling-trash-bin combination.
They build galaxies and may have lit up the dark infant universe.
It's one of the biggest changes that happened.
Someone switched the lights on and transforms our universe.
They come in all sizes, from microscopic to ultramassive, controlling
the fate of everything around them.
The story of the universe and how it's arranged is the story of black
holes.
Black holes are the master architects of the universe, and without
them, we would not exist.
Captions by vitac captions paid for by discovery communications Black
holes We're riveted by their destructive power.
Black holes are dangerous.
Black holes are hazards.
Black holes are not friendly for their environments.
There's just no good end to anything that falls into a black hole.
Perhaps one of the most frightening objects in the universe.
But what exactly are these scary objects? Black holes are created when
you get enough matter in a small region of space.
This happens when a massive star dies and collapses in on itself a
supernova.
A black hole is the ultimate consequence of gravity.
It's an object that has so much mass crushed into such a small space
that its escape velocity becomes greater than the speed of light.
They are a one-way street.
You go in.
Nothing escapes, not even light.
But do black holes really deserve their bad rap? In some ways, I think
we set up black holes to be more villains than they actually are.
Black holes suffer a bit of a P.
R.
Problem.
I think they're a lot more menacing in science fiction and popular
media than they really are.
There are trillions of galaxies in the known universe.
And most of them have a supermassive black hole at their center.
These monsters are millions of times the mass of our sun.
Their immense gravity can send stars flying.
They're instrumental in choreographing the dance of stars in their
vicinity.
Supermassive black holes shoot out torrents of lethal radiation and
violent cosmic winds and gobble up anything that comes close.
Now scientists are beginning to realize these cosmic giants may also
have a creative side.
Most people think of black holes as being like giant vacuum cleaners in
space, and basically everything falls into them, but that's not
actually the case.
They're better thought of as the engines of cosmic change.
Although black holes are the end states of stars, they can actually
influence the formation of stars, as well, in a bunch of different
ways.
A galaxy's job is to make stars, but uncontrolled star growth isn't
healthy.
Too many stars can drain a galaxy's gas supply.
Black holes are very important.
It appears that galaxy evolution is tied to black-hole evolution.
We don't know exactly how yet, but the marriage appears certain.
One idea is that supermassive black holes act as cosmic control
mechanisms.
Black holes can act like a thermostat in your house.
If your house gets too hot, the thermostat will kick on the air
conditioner, and if it gets too cold, it'll kick on the heater.
Black holes do the same things for galaxies.
Supermassive black holes regulate star formation by pulling gas in and
shooting it back out into the galaxy.
When these black holes are consuming matter, they're drawing matter
into themselves, but they're also spewing stuff out.
Basically, black holes eat like little babies Very sloppily, so a lot
of what they eat comes flying back out again.
They eat stars.
They eat planets.
But most often, they eat giant clouds of gas.
The black hole drags gas and dust into an accretion disk around it.
This disk spins faster and faster.
Magnetic energy builds up.
With the accretion disk swirling around the black hole, there are also
magnetic fields that are going on.
The material is moving so rapidly that the magnetic field sort of winds
up, coils up, and forms a vortex like a tornado.
Astronomers call them jets.
These jets propagate outward like freight trains plowing through the
galaxy over hundreds and thousands of light-years.
These are like death rays.
The jets disrupt the star-forming gas clouds, limiting excess star
formation in the main body of the galaxy, but in the very outer reaches
of the galaxy, they can spark star birth.
Things are more gentle out there.
You're not as close to the energetic heart, so stars, planets, and life
can form out there partially because of the material that the black
hole has moved out there.
So black holes can have outsize influence on the regions that they
inhabit.
Right around them, they can prevent the formation of stars whereas, on
very, very large scales, they can actually instigate the formation of
stars.
2018 black holes hit the front page.
Scientists discovered black holes gobbling up gas so fast that they
seem to be outgrowing their host galaxies.
It naturally makes the question come up How big can a black hole get?
Now we have the answer.
They can reach size triple-XL, becoming ultramassive black holes.
Ultramassive black holes are so cool because it's just mind-boggling
that black holes so large can exist.
Ultramassive black holes are very rare and typically have masses of
more than 10 billion times the mass of the sun.
10 billion solar masses That's a 10 followed by nine zeros.
Ultramassive black holes are real beasts.
The black hole at the center of our galaxy is 4 million solar masses.
Imagine black holes that are 2,500 times bigger.
That's what we're talking about here.
An ultramassive black hole this big would be as wide as the solar
system and weigh as much as all the stars in the milky way.
They're inside galaxies that aren't a whole lot bigger.
That really surprised the hell out of everybody.
And in 2018, scientists discover a 20-billion-solar-mass ultramassive
black hole growing faster than any other black hole.
This ravenous behemoth devours the mass of our sun every two days.
These big black holes are really good at gobbling up other things.
They'll literally eat anything.
They're monsters of the universe.
This kind of voracious eating can have devastating consequences.
It blasts so much energy and turbulence into the galaxy that stars no
longer form, and the bigger the black hole, the faster the galaxy dies.
The primary thing these ultramassive black holes do to galaxies is they
shut down all star formation, and so in that sense, they kind of kill
galaxies.
And so these things could even wipe out their host galaxies.
Ultramassive black holes are a problem for scientists, too.
They might be the fastest eaters, but that doesn't explain how they got
so large.
With these ultramassive black holes, these black holes that are 10s of
billions of times more massive than our sun, you can't just grow them
from the slow accretion of gas over time.
There's just not enough gas, and there's just not enough time.
It gives us a new mystery to solve.
How do you make black holes that are just that big? There's not a clear
answer so far as to how these ultramassive black holes were formed.
People wonder if there's some other mechanism by which you could make
black holes.
A mechanism so violent it also throws supermassive black holes clean
out of galaxies.
We now know that ultramassive black holes billions of times the mass of
the sun exist, but we have no idea how they got so big.
We've detected lightweight stellar-mass black holes colliding.
They merged into a new larger black hole and generated huge amounts of
energy.
But what about supermassive black holes? When galaxies merge, their
central supermassive black holes will fall to the center of the newly
formed galaxy.
Could these supermassive black holes caught up in galactic mergers
combine to form an ultramassive black hole? In 2017, the Hubble space
telescope spotted something strange in a distant galaxy called 3c186.
It detected an incredibly bright spot thousands of light-years from the
galaxy center.
Scientists suspect it's a quasar.
A quasar is an incredibly bright, active galactic nucleus that's
powered by a supermassive black hole.
We regularly spot black-hole-powered quasars, but always at the centers
of galaxies, until now.
When we actually got this data from Hubble, we were absolutely stunned
to discover that the quasar that we've long known to exist in the
center of this galaxy wasn't actually at the center.
This black hole is offset from the center of the galaxy by about 35,000
light-years.
That's really weird.
What is an incredibly rare and bizarre event to find a quasar, a
supermassive black hole, that is not at the center of the galaxy.
When scientists looked closer, they discovered that the quasar is
hurtling through space away from the center of the galaxy.
Now, mind you, this is a black hole with the mass of about a billion
times the sun, and it's screaming away at 4 million miles an hour.
This black hole, which was probably originally in the galaxy center,
has somehow been shot out at high velocity by some incredibly violent
event.
It's hard to imagine what kind of event would pump that much energy
into such a huge object to shoot it away from the center of a galaxy.
Who kicked it out, how, and why? Scientists have an idea.
3c186 may be the remnant of a galaxy merger.
The merged galaxies' supermassive black holes circle each other,
sending out blasts of energy in the form of gravitational waves.
Gravitational waves are all around us.
They're ripples in the fabric of space-time.
Every time mass moves, gravitational waves are produced, so if I wave
my hand, I am making gravitational waves.
A hand produces imperceptible waves.
When objects as huge as supermassive black holes collide, the energy
released as gravitational waves is phenomenal.
Scientists think these black holes might have been different sizes.
It's possible that if one of the black holes is really massive and the
other one isn't quite as massive, that when they spiral around and
merge, they send out gravitational waves in an asymmetric way.
This asymmetry has a catastrophic effect.
As the two black holes collide and merge, they shoot out a huge blast
of gravitational waves, but only in one direction.
This blast of energy kicks the newly combined black hole out of the
galactic center.
Think of a shotgun recoil, but supersized.
And there's so much energy in that emission that it acts like a rocket,
and it actually pushes the merged black hole away.
It would have been one of the most energetic events ever witnessed.
They're so energetic, they are literally shaking the fabric of space.
We didn't witness the actual collision, but 3c186 could be evidence
that supermassive black holes can collide and merge, building even
larger black holes.
This would be a mechanism by which you would create, ultimately, an
ultramassive black hole.
As for the ejected black hole, the gravitational recoil sent it on a
one-way ride to oblivion.
So gravitational waves kicked this supermassive black hole and sent it
flying through space.
In 20 million years, it's expected to exit its galaxy.
The ejected supermassive black hole may eventually hit another galaxy
and merge with its supermassive black hole.
These largest of black holes seem to throw their weight around,
bullying galaxies and other black holes.
Now researchers have discovered a vampire black hole that's draining
the lifeblood of its neighbor.
Ultramassive black holes seem to destroy their galaxies, while
supermassive black holes seem to regulate star formation.
But are all supermassive black holes forces for good? Hundreds of
galaxies surround the milky way, large and small, but most of the
largest galaxies are red.
This is not a good omen.
In space, red means danger.
If you have active ongoing star birth, then you have massive stars, and
massive stars tend to be blue, but they don't live very long, and they
blow up.
Once you stop star formation, after some amount of time, the galaxy
turns red.
The only stars left alive are small, long-lived red stars called red
dwarfs.
A red galaxy with only red dwarfs is a dying galaxy.
The Sloan digital sky survey found an entire population of these
luminous red galaxies that were no longer forming stars that were dead.
One galaxy around 340 million light-years away stood out.
It was named after a Japanese anime character, Akira.
It's very red.
All the stars in it are red, and that means they're old, so we know
that Akira has not had any active star formation in a long time.
The Akira galaxy doesn't form stars because it doesn't have the cool,
calm gas needed to build them.
Something is heating the gas, making it turbulent.
One of the ways in which a black hole can drive the evolution of the
galaxy in which it resides is by simply powering a wind.
These are winds that are literally driven by light.
When a black hole feeds, it drags gas into an accretion disk.
The disk heats up and gives off light radiation.
The radiation pressure from the accretion disk around this black hole
couples to the ambient gas and dust and pushes it outwards at very high
velocity.
These winds that are driven out by the black hole essentially warm up
the gas in the galaxy, preventing further star formation.
However, whatever's fueling the black hole in Akira is a mystery.
Here's a weird thing There is an outflow, a wind coming out of this
galaxy, and that means there's gas feeding that black hole in the
center, and it's blowing it out.
Where is this gas coming from? Ah, it's stealing it.
It has a small companion galaxy, which is nicknamed Tetsuo, and that
has gas in it.
Akira's supermassive black hole pulls gas from Tetsuo and drags it into
the center of the galaxy.
The black hole is taking the gas from this companion galaxy, and that's
what's falling around the black hole and creating this wind, so Akira
is actually sort of a dead galaxy, but it's being rejuvenated by its
companion, Tetsuo.
Like a cosmic vampire, Akira's supermassive black hole feeds off
Tetsuo.
The black hole drags gas and dust into its accretion disk, which spins
faster and faster.
When these particles are rubbing against each other, well, that
generates friction.
Friction may not seem like that big of a deal.
I mean, you can rub your hands together on a cold day to get warm, but
imagine rubbing your hands together at very nearly the speed of light.
How much friction is that gonna generate? It's gonna make a lot of
heat.
Over a million degrees Fahrenheit So hot the accretion disk lights up.
Its temperature goes up, and he starts emitting light.
It becomes incredibly bright.
Even though there's a black hole in the core, its surroundings are
intensely bright.
This heats up the surrounding gas, generating a hot wind, which extends
thousands of light-years from the black hole.
And those winds carry with them a lot of energy, and that energy, if it
couples to the gas in the galaxy, can blow that gas out.
They inject energy into nearby gas clouds and heat them up and prevent
them from forming stars.
Stars don't form The galaxy dies.
These dying galaxies are called red geysers.
Scientists think around 10% of the red galaxies we see around us died
this way heated up by this galactic warming.
We think that the source of some of this galactic warming is in the
growth of supermassive black holes themselves because when you grow a
supermassive black hole, you must liberate an enormous amount of
energy.
You can't grow a black hole for free, and that energy gets dumped back
into the ambient surroundings and keeps this halo of gas hot.
It prevents it from cooling and forming stars.
Sagittarius a-star, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our
galaxy, the milky way, could turn into a red geyser.
If you were suddenly to dump an enormous amount of gas onto Sagittarius
a-star, you could have what is effectively a red-geyser effect, a very
powerful wind driven by all of this energy.
Star formation would stop, and our milky way would become another dying
red galaxy.
Now new research suggests that Sagittarius a-star has already affected
the inner region of our galaxy, not by killing stars, but by
transforming planets from gas giants into super-earths.
At the center of our galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius
a-star.
We think it's calm, dormant, safe.
Relative to other supermassive black holes in the universe, ours is
relatively quiet.
It's been active in the past, and it could flare up in the future.
It could be active tomorrow, for all we know.
All you need to do to light it up is start dumping some gas on it, and
there is almost certainly a giant cloud of gas that we don't currently
know of on its way to the center of our galaxy, and it will find itself
one day in the vicinity of our supermassive black hole, and it will
start to light up like a Christmas tree.
In February of 2018, scientists at Harvard simulated Sagittarius a-star
during a feeding frenzy to understand the impact of an active
supermassive black hole on its local environment.
They found that, as Sagittarius a-star gobbled up gas and dust, it
belched out bright flares of high-energy radiation, which radically
affected the region around the black hole.
The environment near the center of a galaxy that has an actively
feeding black hole is the worst place in the universe.
You've got this tremendous object which is heating up this gas to
millions of degrees.
This is no place that you want to be.
The model revealed what would happen to any planets in the line of
fire.
Think about being in the way of one of these black-hole burps.
All of a sudden, there's a tremendous wind of radiation that comes
through your solar system.
That could actually strip away the outer layers of gas of a planet like
Neptune.
The high-energy radiation from the supermassive black holes would hit
the gas planets and heat up their atmospheres.
Maybe this would actually strip away the outer layers, leaving the
solid material in the middle.
You could actually turn a gas-giant planet into a terrestrial solid
planet all because you're close to a black hole.
This radiation strips away the gas, leaving the core, now a new rocky
planet but a giant one A super-earth.
Normally, you think of rocky planets being about the size of the earth,
but this would be a way of making so called super-earths.
Super-earths are one of the most common type of planets discovered in
our galaxy.
It's possible that any super-earths close to Sagittarius a-star were
created by these blasts of energy.
Away from our galactic center, a much smaller stellar-mass black hole
is also radically transforming its environment.
January 2017 Researchers discover something strange in a cloud of gas
called W44.
W44 is a supernova remnant.
It's the debris the expanding cloud from a star that blew up.
The explosive shock wave from a supernova pushes gas and dust out from
the dead star, forming a huge nebula.
We see a lot of these.
I mean, they're catastrophic, amazing, incredible events, but as far as
they go, this one appears to be pretty standard, except for one weird
thing.
In the heart of it, there's something very mysterious going on.
There seems to be something shooting out of the very center of this
explosion.
A thin protrusion trillions of miles long streams out from the cloud.
It's moving at over 60 miles a second against the flow of the galaxy.
It's very strange that it's moving backwards against the rotation of
the milky way.
When you see a giant, giant, very massive cloud of gas that is moving
counter to the rotation of the milky way, it needed to be like a bullet
from a gun fired against a headwind in the opposite direction.
So what is that gun? You know, what fired that bullet of gas? The tip
of the bullet cloud is expanding at 75 miles a second.
That's 270,000 miles an hour, over 150 times faster than a bullet.
What in the cosmos has the power to accelerate gas to such high speed?
Could that actually be a black hole moving very, very quickly?
Researchers think a stellar-mass black hole hidden in the bullet cloud
is powering the movement of the gas.
Gravity from this black hole is incredibly strong, and so it will latch
onto this gas cloud as it passes through it, and it can completely
disrupt the motions of this cloud.
This is a very interesting stream of gas that's somehow connected to a
black hole, and we don't know whether it's there because the black hole
is moving through the gas, and it's creating a wake, or whether somehow
this black hole is spitting out a stream of material in some way.
The black hole could be dragging gas into an accretion disk around it.
The gas heats up and expands, giving the initial supernova explosion,
W44, an extra kick, driving this bullet-like cloud out in front of it.
Or the black hole could be racing away from the nebula, dragging the
gas behind it like a wake.
Ultramassive, supermassive, and stellar-mass black holes all play a
role in shaping the cosmos, but there may be another type of black hole
even more dangerous than the rest A microscopic black hole.
We have so far detected triple-XL ultramassive black holes, large
supermassive black holes, medium-sized intermediate black holes, and
small stellar-mass black holes.
Now scientists have another to add to the roster Microscopic black
holes.
We know there are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.
We know there are star-sized black holes from the deaths of stars.
That's what we know for sure.
It's possible there are much smaller black holes, microscopically small
black holes.
Microscopic black holes are virtually invisible to the naked eye, but
magnified, they look like regular stellar-mass black holes the
definition of a black hole is an object that has so much mass crushed
into such a small space that its escape velocity becomes greater than
the speed of light, so it could be something the size of a star, the
size of a galaxy.
It could also be the mass of a planet.
If you could crush the earth down far enough, it could become a black
hole.
The density of a black hole is something that the human brain really
doesn't wrap itself around very easily.
When you think about something the size of the earth, how small would
the earth have to be to be a black hole? And the answer is something on
the order of a marble.
So think about taking the entire earth and compressing it down to the
size of just a marble.
So where do these strange little black holes come from? These very
small black holes can only be formed in the exotic conditions of the
incredibly early universe.
Our universe might get flooded with these small black holes that simply
persist to the present day.
It's the only time in the history of the universe where you could take
a small amount of matter and crush it down so tightly that it could
become a black hole.
Those conditions don't exist anymore, so if these things exist, they
would be primordial.
They would be as old as the universe itself.
These primordial black holes may be ancient, but they still pack a
punch.
When it comes to black holes, the smaller black holes are actually more
dangerous because their mass is concentrated into such a small volume.
In fact, a tiny black hole would be lethal.
If it were to pass in front of me, very quickly, almost instantly, I
would be ripped apart head to toe, stretched into a long, thin stream
of fundamental particles that would then wind their way into the black
hole.
It would actively feast on me in a matter of seconds.
But if Paul or an interstellar robotic probe visited a supermassive
black hole or even an ultramassive black hole, they wouldn't be
immediately ripped to shreds.
One of the most fun questions about black holes is, how close could you
get to a black hole before the gravity would rip you apart? And that
actually depends on the volume of the black hole.
If the black hole is very large, you could get very, very close.
The more massive they are, the slightly softer they are in how they
tear things apart, so a supermassive black hole, actually You can cross
within the event horizon and not really notice it.
You're never gonna get back out, but you won't necessarily be stretched
to your death while you cross inside.
So a probe could visit a supermassive black hole and not be destroyed
until it crossed the event horizon and traveled deep inside.
Then it would be torn to pieces.
But microscopic black holes are currently just a theory.
Microscopic black holes have been the focus for some researchers for
many years, but currently there's no evidence to support their
existence.
Microscopic primordial black holes may or may not have been around
since the big bang.
Now scientists have discovered supermassive black holes from the very
early universe.
They're shedding light on one of the most mysterious eras, the cosmic
dark ages.
Black holes don't just shape the universe now.
They've been shaping it from almost the dawn of time.
Scientists think black holes may have triggered one of the universe's
greatest transformations Turning from dark and foggy to transparent and
light.
At the beginning of time, the universe was a tiny ball of super-hot
energy The big bang.
Shortly after our big bang, our universe was shining bright because it
was full of hot, glowing gas.
Then it cooled off and entered the so-called dark ages until eventually
something lit it up again.
It's one of the biggest changes that happened in our universe.
Someone switched the lights on and transformed the universe.
During the dark ages, the universe was blanketed in a thick fog.
Then something lit it up in a process called reionization.
We still don't really know for sure whether reionization was mainly
caused by young stars or whether it was mainly black holes that ate
stuff and spewed out a bunch of radiation.
Then in December of 2017, researchers in Chile scan a region of space
so far away it takes light 13 billion years to reach us.
They spot an object from just 690 million years after the big bang when
the universe was only 5% of its current age.
It's called quasar J1342+0928.
The thing that's so amazing about this farthest quasar is we may
actually have seen the boundary of these dark ages.
This particular supermassive black hole/quasar tells us something about
the formation of the early universe.
It's thought that quasars helped drag the universe out of the dark
ages.
They gobbled up so much hydrogen gas and belched out jets of energy and
cleared up the fog.
Those jets could have actually put so much energy into the universe
that it made it clear again.
We may actually be seeing the moment where something punches through
this boundary of the dark ages.
Pockets of reionization opened up throughout the early universe.
They came in different sizes, depending on what created them.
While our universe was being reionized, there was kind of, like, all
these holes that kept growing.
If the reionization was made by a large number of little stars, you
would have many, many small holes, much like a sponge, whereas if you
had a small number of monster black holes doing it, you'd have a lot of
big holes, like in Swiss cheese.
At present, we can't measure the ionized pockets to determine if it was
stars or black holes that lit up the early universe.
Perhaps it was both Black holes and stars working together.
The more we investigate black holes, the more we learn about their role
as architects of the universe.
I think scientists of my generation are very lucky to be able to be at
the beginning of this revolution.
We used to portray black holes as monsters.
Now we know that, without them, the universe would be a very different
place.
They made life possible.
Without black holes, we probably wouldn't exist.
We're discovering just how black holes shaped the universe, but the
more we learn, the more questions they pose.
I've spent my career studying black holes, and I want to spend the rest
of my career studying black holes, and I guarantee you that, at the end
of my career, on the day I retire, I will probably have more questions
about black holes than I do today.
This is an incredibly exciting time for black-hole science.
Who knows what we're gonna discover?

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s07e04

Secret world of nebulas

Through our galaxy, there is a pull Amazing gas and dust Seals Contains
the secrets of the circle of cosmic life The birth and death of stars,
planets and humans Those things are the cradle of creation You have a
close relationship with the feasts You are the vows of life The story
of our solar system begins with the nebula If you want to build a solar
system, you will need a nebula Look around you, all you see Everywhere
was a day inside a mist Scientists are now raising the curtain They
open our eyes in front of the extension The true expanses of our
universe They solve the mysteries of these creation engines There are
mysteries hiding within them that we did not even imagine drsamehnour
yahoo,com How the universe works "The Secret World of Sessions" Milky
Way, full spiral galaxy With areas of gas and dust called the
embankments Everyone has their preferences I love the horse head
nebula, looks great I have always been fascinated by the mist of the
cat's eye My favorite nebula is the mighty nebula Maybe the mighty
nebula The best place to understand the emergence of stars It is here
in our art The mighty nebula is one of the most famous of the dams You
can go out at night and see your eyes Man kept watching that patch
Blurred from heaven for centuries The civilization of Maya in Central
America is the fire of creation The Mayans were more right than they
knew Almost every part can be seen from The life cycle of stars in the
nebula We can not understand the life cycle of stars Without
understanding the life cycle of the dams They are intertwined The
mighty nebula has everything, from massive stars On the brink of death
to a gas-guzzling birth star You can see the thin threads of materials,
curtains Which enveloped the fledgling stars The columns hit each other
and Tron Nogoma makes its way through gas withdrawal , You see this
hive Frenetic activity, working before us In 2018, using new data, it
is manufactured NASA envisioned a stunning outline of the depths of the
mighty We have for the first time in history tools Fit to explore the
hearts of those embellishments It was beautiful when starting out but
we have now Clearer images to appreciate the greatness of this
structure In the heart of the mighty are clusters of young stars Burst
charged particles and solar wind To open a gap in the middle to make a
window inside We see the structures in their origin We can see the
processes happening before our eyes The intense starlight of the
clusters activates The gas next to it is blue and blue The pink comes
from the emitted light Of hydrogen atoms in the nebula Glows like gas
in neon lights Blue comes from the light emitted by the stars New warm
and reflective dust particles Those new hot stars illuminate the mighty
nebula But she was born basically in the dark There is a distinctive
type of embellishments The dark nebula is called It becomes so
basically when Dust concentrations are larger Thick dust clouds are
obscured The visible light of the stars behind them To make shaded
shapes such as the horse head nebula This mist is very large and dense
and has A mass enough to make thirty stars the size of our sun
Astronomers can now stare inside We have only recently been able to
start doing so Thanks to detectors Seeing infrared light Infrared light
allows us to see through Dust the nebula and see what happens in the
interior Humans can not see the light below Red but we can sensor it as
heat The detectors tell us that dark clouds are formed The stars are
hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit below zero But in the basement with hot
basins If you look at infrared light You'll see amazing fingerprints
and gradients Amazing heat, a sign that new stars are born Parts of the
material are lumped under gravity When gravity increases gravity It
attracts more gas to grow in size It becomes larger, denser and more
hot Eventually the pressure and heat increase Enough at the center of
this thing The fusion fuse ignites The star is born One hundred billion
stars Which constitute our galaxy The latest star production lines It
goes back to the dawn of time And to the first nebula If we want to
reveal the history of the Milky Way We will start from the beginning,
from the Big Bang 13,8 billion years ago Life in the universe has died
It was initially pure energy But for more than 300,000 years, that has
cooled Energy to hydrogen gas and helium The entire universe was then
one huge cloud The basic ingredients of our universe have spread
exponentially The universe, so the universe began as a single giant
Over time, the primitive nebula began Collapsed and splintered into
small parts These areas have become high Density even collapsed to
tablets The gas cylinders are very hot in their hearts The first stars
caught Started with pure hydrogen But when you get older I made the
other heavier items Stars are new elements, that's their function The
definition of the star is that in its heart, it merges Hydrogen atoms
to helium and releases energy But most of these simple first stars were
Giant giant stars do not live long She burned all her excess Of
hydrogen at super speed They burned themselves And died a few million
years later She died with a bang Explosion issued more elements
Complicated to the initial nebula After the formation of the first
generation of stars There was a huge resurgence of new elements Which
formed and spread across the universe To be able to form the second
generation of stars When the second generation of stars lived and died
It added more components to the cosmic mix The next generation of stars
Merge more elements and explode and die Its elements are being
disseminated to the new generation of The embellishments to be the new
generation of stars Each generation has more elements In the periodic
table of its predecessor After the Big Bang 300 million General Our
Milky Way galaxy was formed Galaxies formed like the Milky Way From the
initial Hungarian nebula A giant gas cloud collapsed and formed our
galaxy There is a rich cosmic music Play between stars and endings We
now know that we are part of that grandeur In the end our sun was born
rich in elements We believe that our sun is a third-generation star
There was a mist then a star A nebula, then a nebula, and our sun It
took ten billion years to form a mix Cosmic elements rich enough to
form planets of life Carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen Oxygen, phosphorus
and sulfur These are the main elements of life as we understand them It
must be formed within the stars These elements formed during the life
of the star But it needs a very violent process to liberate it to the
universe An event that can be clearly seen across The Universe The most
beautiful embellishments in our galaxy consist Of extreme violence
Death of massive stars One of the most beautiful colorful
embellishments in our galaxy They are the remnants of the great
explosions Such as the cancer nebula, the A-chair, and the veil All
formed when a huge star exploded violently The nebula was a star About
ten times the mass of the sun This star will crush him The atoms
together form heavier elements The process produces huge amounts of
energy The big star can To incorporate heavier and heavier elements ,
Until it reaches the iron Then things get worse Iron atoms are so large
that Incorporating it needs more energy than it produces The pulp
begins to collapse on Himself to trigger a catastrophic explosion He
explodes the elements into space When the star turns to a low The
greatest it tear itself violently And all elements of the star To
spread for light years We call it the nebula of the supernova We now
have a nebula full of all Those exciting chemicals All of them are lit
by the explosion of the supernova The remnants of the supernova Glowing
glow in different colors The colors are represented in the mist or
fingerprint Test the DNA of the elements inside it Each atom has a
cloud cover of The electrons that orbit their nuclei When electrons
change energy levels, The frequency of light associated with that
variable energy Send to space and contribute to The wide spectrum of
colors we see We can look at distant plugins and say that They have
lots of hydrogen or helium Or a little platinum or a lot of oxygen
Colors reveal the elements Made during the life of the star and his
death But the shape of the mist reveals What happens after the death of
the star You may think that the explosive star has Similar to others
with the same type of mist Then you see the crab nebula in its
beautiful complex form All of those brackets Swirls of gas and dust
Something must be inside Disappears inside the nebula of cancer An
astral body is called a pulsating star Stars are a kind of neutron star
A ball of high density material Born from the death of giant stars It
is the remains of the core of an explosive star He collapsed and formed
a small ball of Nitrons are a small part of normal matter She is very
hot and she has Strong magnetic field This pulse is about thirty times
a second To detonate radiation spread in Space as a raging cosmic
lighthouse Pulses in the nebula do not release light But rather
releases winds from charged particles The cloud of gas around it is the
nebula of the winds of spring So take all remaining materials from the
potter The greatest and launched in that extended cloud The winds of
springing through the gas Ocean to make swirls and the nebulae of the
crab nebula The supernovae create the elements Spread by the winds
through the universe To be new dams Socks may be a solar system like
our system Nebula starting point of the solar system configuration All
ingredients, chemicals and gases And solids that we see in our solar
system today Imagine the main elements Which is the planet What
happened to bring them together? How to cloud a gaseous element To
become our planets and sun? What about the nebula to our solar system?
In the past they were not there Sun or solar system or human Just a
cloud of gas The dust is a solar nebula We are here today because it is
billions of years ago There was a nebula with all the necessary
ingredients Everything we see in our solar system today was a part From
a cloud of gas and dust, our solar nebula Five billion years ago are
being processed The solar nebula to be our sun So billions of years ago
there was Our solar nebula is a cloud of gas and dust It was
outstanding but unstable What upset the balance to turn Cloud gas to
solid particles? , Something must change inside the nebula Something
that raises stars and planets This remains a mystery What is the answer
to this five-billion-year-old puzzle? There are two theories, both of
which begin with fossils Fossils made their way from The edge of the
solar system towards Earth Our air cover broke through and made its way
towards us Meteorites are important for us to understand and study
Because it capsules time to when The solar system was basically
composed Mina and Adwa are one of the biggest Compounds of comets on
Earth Those rocks have pure records For the early history of the solar
system There was not in the solar system Something before the origin of
those rocks There was no land or other planets, this is amazing The
first solid objects that originated from Cloud dust surrounding our
newborn star Contained the asteroids and meteorites that formed at that
time Time on chemical fingerprints of our solar nebula It contained the
oldest elements and solids that condensed From the cloud of gas and
dust when our solar system was formed I fought together and formed
these The big rock you see here In 2017, researchers who analyze
Configure a type of solid meteorites Called Kondrit, they found
evidence About how to configure our solar system There may be some hard
evidence somewhere Within the chemical composition of those rocks He
tells us exactly what happened And how our solar system originated This
definitive guide is A radioactive component called iron-60 It is
believed to be only In the Great Revolutions If there was a nebula
ready to form stars And next to him came a greater calamity The great
hypocrite will throw all these Heavy elements of the gas cloud It will
also research the composition of stars By hitting and compressing this
gas A nearby star explodes into a larger one The shock wave hits our
bosom Solar system for iron But the crash is a breakdown A sudden
attraction at the core of the mist The gas cloud is clogged Together to
become hot and dense And our sun is born When the sun arose, there were
A cloud of snakes around the sun When it was circling the sun, it
merged And clung to each other and grew into those balls Over the next
hundred million years, those balls became Larger and larger to be
asteroids, moons and planets All the planets in our solar system look
different Some are snow giants and others Gaseous giants and some rocky
bodies But all came in fact From the same nebula before the sun Our
planet grew up With the right combination of elements Everything, every
atom in our bodies She was formerly Sodema before my sun The theory of
the Great Surgeon By pushing our strong solar system configuration But
not everyone agrees Sometimes the biggest arguments come Among the
scientists of the smallest things Here I speak of small radioactive
atoms In 2017, studies showed containment Other meteorites have other
radioactive imprints Rare aluminum alloy The so-called aluminum-26 It
is an irregular atom that does not form Easily in great twists It must
have come from somewhere else This other place is a rare type of star
Giant by forty to fifty times the mass of our sun Star Wolf Wright ,
The stars may be strange The largest is very strange The largest kind
of stars that We saw her as the stars of Wolf Ray The stars of Wolf Rye
burn more powerful than any star to produce Heavy elements such as
aluminum-26 during their short lives It is huge, hot and shiny It
unleashes tremendous winds These stellar winds release tons of energy
Materials from the star to the ocean space To form a bubble structure
Scientists see the process in the nebula The bubble is 7,000 light
years away from Earth In the middle of the mist there is one Massive
stars with enormous starry winds High-energy particles, radiation, as
the name suggests It releases a bubble in the huge mist around it The
walls or bubble crust are dense and full of materials Stellar winds
drive more The more material inside the cortex So that the substance
collapses with an effect Its attractiveness and condensation into stars
Possibly what we see in the bubble nebula Is what happened here 4,5
billion years ago To form the sun and the planets If our solar system
grew up Inside Bubble Nebula Wolf Ra 00: This will explain the
abundance of aluminum-26 Located in meteorites But it was not decided
What we know is that our story has begun The collapse of the solar
nebula But our star will someday die Does the sun turn into a mist?
Awesome or darkened dim? The embellishments will be stars The stars are
the embellishments The largest stars do so With violent superpowers But
99% of the stars are not Big enough to die exploding Some burn
themselves to death But other stars can be dams Beautiful as a
misleading ,, Planetary Safes From afar they look like planets but
ghosts of stars When stars like our sun begin to die, Swells to what we
call red giant stars When the stars reach the size of the sun At the
end of her life, her heart is getting hotter and hotter When the heat
is hot, the gas expands Ocean to turn the star into a red giant It
becomes so large that it is no longer stuck Gravity with its outer
layers The outer layers of that star begin to drift Away to lose
contact with the central core in the middle And begin to explode into
scales and colors and beautiful forms We call those starving stars with
Planetary Feasts We discovered about three Thousands of planetary
nebulae in our galaxy Some seem like hourglasses and others Like a
clown or clown or ball or cake But if they were all ghosts of the same
kind So why this great contrast? If there was a star alone Without
planets and without anything around it It will blow its winds in a
spherical crust If you see Sodema like this It would look like a bubble
of soap in space But only 20% of the embellishments Planetary form of a
bubble full of consistency Most of them have these exotic forms They
look like two-lobe or two opposite squid All shapes are different
Experts believe that alien forms to those Planetary masts may relate to
how the star dies A new research shows the fate of our star Sadema will
be a bright planet Beautiful or just disappear in the dark? We believe
for the first time that we have the answer It's a long-standing debate,
is it our sun? Big enough to be an amazing sdema? It is a strange
coincidence that the model appears We need a specific mass to form a
planetary nebula By chance, the sun is too high Assume new data That
our sun will die dazzled When the sun dies, it will expand To a red
giant filling the sky We got used to our yellow sun Kind of moving in
sight Imagine a shiny red glowing ball A huge swell across the horizon
instead of the sunrise The expanding sun swallows Mercury and then
Venus The surface of the earth will be roasted To turn him into an
infamous hell The bad news is that when The sun expands like a red
giant , They will capture the Earth's oceans Life will not endure then
on Earth Like putting your head in the oven and kneading it It will be
a hard time on earth This may mean the destruction of the planet We
think the sun will grow To swallow the earth's position now Instead of
sunrise and sunset We will find ourselves inside the sun The sun will
expose its outer layers To throw more than half of its mass To reveal
the stellar pulp When we look at this pulp is called Then the white
dwarf was the size of the earth It will be very hot, hundreds of
thousands of degrees This white core radiates hot Ultraviolet light and
x-ray They are impacted by external gas layers And turning them into
ultra-gloss rings A planetary nebula will last 10,000 years It is
certain that when the sun turns into a planetary nebula The solar
system will look very different What it is today, will become
unfamiliar The planetary nebula would mean an end The solar system we
know The sun will eventually die And dissolve into space again But then
the cycle will begin again It is not just an end, it is also a
beginning The plug-in will be supplied Will create a new solar system
When a solar system dies it is born Another, this cosmic life cycle The
signs always signify change in the universe Strongly related to the
star's birth and death Some new notes appear Our favorite soups are
dying too Can be columns Famous creation dead already? Inside the
depths of Eagle Eagle Nebula Dense of cool molecular gas Probably the
best known images In astronomy, pillars of creation One of the defining
images is the pillars of creation They were pictures that arouse my
memory and my emotion The columns are five light-years wide They are
shaded by nearby star cluster lights And those stars have not carved
the shape of columns The surfaces of those stars are full of activity
Boiling and constantly releasing particles Stellar winds at ten
thousand miles At the hour you get caught up in the ocean gas pull In
the end, the surrounding mist dissipates When the mist disappears, you
will live Pull thicker and denser But how long? "When you look at the
pictures" Hubble Beautiful pillars of creation, eagle eagle You see a
scattered blue gas Around the columns themselves This is a guide on how
to configure columns And how it will change over time This blue foggy
gas is just a substance The superheavy evaporates from the same columns
Nearby stars are slowly melting the columns This is similar to the way
it occurs Factors of erosion here on Earth Look at the Monemeunt Valley
and those rocky columns Stunning and exotic forms emanating from the
earth These areas are denser than rocks They were covered by soil and
sand For millions of years, those substances have been crushed The
lighter to reveal the thickest rocks beneath it That's exactly what
happened here That process is under way The pillars are constantly
evolving Know that the pillars of creation A temporary feature in the
life of the galaxy It will not last forever In fact, over the time
since the capture Hubble Space Telescope Photo We've seen a change When
astronomers compared data New "Hubble" images since 1995 They
discovered an exploding crater from the mist At a speed of 450 thousand
miles per hour Stretching a hundred billion miles into space What might
be the source of all that energy? These are associated with the birth
of a star Stars born inside columns make their way Outside, eat that
substance and blow it away The nascent stars like children flock to
candy Eat up gas then spin out of control But the stars also have a
magnetic field This magnetic field spins quickly The material is swept
around it and released To the outside through the plumes of the poles
of the star They are emitters and astral winds Destroying the columns
of creation from the inside out Even worse, these nascent stars grow
Quickly until you soon reach the end of her violent life When the stars
die they send waves Shock, high-energy radiation, particles Great
blasts explosions As such, the columns may be torn completely Some
assume that those columns may Already destroyed thousands of years ago
The Eagle Nebula is seven thousand years old So we see it as it was
seven thousand years ago Not as it is now It is the sad reality of life
The stars that you make are destroyed , This happens all the time,
everything changes Our favorite famous sodas will not last forever It
seems sad, but so does the universe It's a temporary situation, it's
change We see the pillars of creation today and will be Future clusters
of stars But this is the continuous rotation of the gas Dust to the
stars will not last forever The embellishments across the universe
disappear Is gas out of our galaxy? A new search appears to be across
the universe The star formation rate falls quickly Researchers predict
that 95% of all The stars that will exist have already arisen Until the
galaxy is intact And maintain the star formation It needs to collect
reserves New constantly ,, Stuff Gas runs out of our galaxy and so on I
speak with galaxies all over the universe That cycle will slow down and
will one day stop More gas is trapped in the small stars The mass that
will not explode in a greater velocity And the big stars that An
explosive die pays gas away The galaxies throw materials Great wind
turbines and lighters are sent Continuously streams of gas and
particles outside the galaxy But the stars do not work alone But
cooperate with something bigger Experts believe that the main culprit
falls At the center of each galaxy ,, The super black hole In the past,
the Milky Way measured the loss of gas Hundreds of millions of years
ago, it was a black hole The central is super-large and charges some
materials In that process he launched many Energy, like a lot of energy
belching He fired gas and probably escaped some It is completely out of
the galaxy Our galaxy today is still the star But the gas tank needs to
be refilled The galaxies spin with nitrogen Be the pillars and the
stars It seems we have now come to a refilling station We discovered a
huge cloud space Of hydrogen heading towards us That cloud of hydrogen
is huge With a length of ten thousand light years and a width of three
thousand "Cloud scientists call it" Smith It revolves around our galaxy
and hate 27 Million years will hit the disk of our galaxy Will bring
about the vital collision of our galaxy To reshape the stars strongly
There will be plenty of gas Million times the mass of the sun He can
form one million suns But this is just a snack To maintain star
formation You need a galaxy for continuous food , Here in the Milky Way
galaxy We are still stars This is because our galaxy is galactic It is
surrounded by dwarf galaxies And eat it and steal its gas and dust We
are the product of mergers, merging Many small galaxies collide When a
new galaxy hits the Milky Way They bring with it gas and dust New and
the possibility of creating new dams By eating a variety of foods add
the Milky Way A few billion years of star formation But our galaxy is
always looking for its next meal Within a few billion years Her
neighbor will be struck by the galaxy of serial women When the women
merge with the trail Tebbana will provide us with a new quantity of gas
Although this is a tragic accident It is really a good thing Because
when it happens stars will be born New inside the Milky Way This will
prolong the life of our galaxy if we thought so But there are few
galaxies Nearby to eat Milky Way In the end on the run Long will run
out of nebula gas When this gas runs out, there will be no new stars
Whatever happens then it will be Those are the last generations of
stars Without gas to feed, the dams will disappear across the universe
The universe stops The dams run out and disappear The last stars will
eventually be turned off From now on, everything will be dark The dams
,, One of the finest features of the universe What makes the babe
embellishments it Pretty but more It is the cradle of creation The
start and end stars Building upon them planets and life I think it's
amazing to learn about the universe I think we finally learn about
ourselves It is our instrument of communication with the circle of
cosmic life The parallels match our lives , It is very beautiful But it
is temporary It will not last here forever This is the story of our
universe This is the story of change So take your day

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s07e05

Did the big bang really happen?

the great explosion The story of everything Time and the universe we
are the great explosion First:a beautiful name Second, it is the
history of our universe It's so, it's all of us, it's all That is the
traditional view But is it true? Most scientists are not sure The
theory of the old great explosion That the universe suddenly appeared
from nowhere We speak of it as the beginning of the universe But it is
actually the end of our understanding Astronomers break old rules But
it created new problems How to say that the universe has Expands the
fastest of light But are they asking questions that have no answers?
What was the beginning? It is possible that We ask:Is there time before
time? We do not know, we have nothing, it's difficult He does not tell
us what happened At first, it is still an absolute mystery How did
everything start if? The Big Bang Theory was a good story But is it
real? drsamehnour yahoo,com How the universe works Has the Big Bang
really happened? Let's start from the beginning There is no place or
time All that the known balloon Compressed at a smaller point than the
corn Suddenly, the universe expands them Stars and galaxies arose To
create the universe we see today The story of our universe begins with
the great explosion, is not it? The big bang is the truth Notable but
there are details not known Maybe a lot happened Things, it's just one
explanation Science is not right The length of time is even wrong We
may be wrong about A key element in our understanding of the universe
We are experiencing one of the greatest stories of science It may sound
like a great bang Like the explosion, but is it? The explosion is a
sudden emission of energy from the point One to generate normally light
and heat and pressure And a bang But did the Big Bang explode? When you
hear the word explosion you imagine noise but You have to realize that
they are sound waves spreading through the air After the Big Bang there
was no air To hear something in this sense was silent So the big bang
did not explode But to form the universe must be paid Articles ,, Lots
of articles Each burst has a point of ignition What about the Big Bang?
If I thought of the big bang as just an explosion You have the right to
ask where the center This explosion? Where is the center of the
universe? There was no central point, there was no place in The sky
where it refers to the location of the Great Bang The big bang is all
Something, happened here where I sit The big bang happened on the other
side Of the earth, and happened in the galaxy of serial women The great
explosion happened across the universe at once During the explosion,
the shrapnel is scattered from the middle These fragments are scattered
unevenly The size falls in different distances from the center of the
explosion But did the Big Bang blow? Materials in this explosive
pattern? To find signs we have to look in the night sky One of the most
amazing things about the universe when you put The telescope starts
looking at different directions It seems almost equal in all directions
Although the universe is encrusted with galaxies and galactic clusters
The overall picture is what " Called astronomers" homogeneous When we
say that the universe Homogeneous means that it is symmetric By large
scales with variations Slim, it's quite symmetrical If we believe the
story of the traditional big bang The same amount of material has been
launched Same distance in all directions Our homogeneity is not equal
It seems to be the product of what we know as an explosion It was not
great and it was not an explosion The Big Bang was not a blast or a
bomb Or explosives where there is a substance spreading from one center
There is no ring of galaxies emanating from an explosion , A
firecracker explosion occurs by a fuse What sparked the Big Bang? I say
that there is not, that something I lit the big bang We believe that
when something happens When an effect occurs there is no reason There
is something else But we are speaking here of the universe In its
entirety, there is nothing beyond it to exist Science is clear, the
universe did not start to explode But if there is no explosion, how it
began Everything is too small and too big? , the newborn universe we
understand The old synchronized universe also understands it We linked
that story to that We do not understand the first pages in full But we
know the rest of the book How do we tell the story of the Big Bang? We
can even read the front page of the book Our only hope is to look In
the past line by line One of the most amazing things in being a
connoisseur The telescopes are time machines It takes time to light up
here If we look farther, we stare at Reality in the history of the
universe, this is stunning The first signs of the mystery of the Big
Bang came With the emergence of advanced approaches in the 1990s Edwin
Hubble was studying light Coming from distant galaxies We realized that
the more galaxies Further the light was more red Did not it? It turned
out that the light tends to red if The galaxy has moved away from us,
this is called the red shift He had discovered that every galaxy in The
sky was moving away from the Milky Way This was one of the moments of
science Hubble proved one of the rules The basic story of the Big Bang
The universe expands constantly There was one conclusion If the return
of time stabilized, everything would emerge from One point at a time ,,
This is a great bang Discover "Hubble" publishes news But the idea of
the expanding universe was imposed two years earlier From a Belgian
priest and physicist The real idea of the explosion " Great came from"
George Lamitra I realize that if we go back to the beginning Time is
all in one atom Primitive corn I think "LAMETRA" that the universe The
newborn was tiny and dense , pressed in one point Primitive corn The
scientists then identified that point as an entity Infinite is called
exclusivity but there is a problem The uniqueness and laws of physics
do not conform Perhaps it was a tiny point But it caused enormous
problems The Great Bang, for more than a century it was The optimal
scientific description of how everything is created But there was no
explosion Or a bang was not great " In fact, the father of the Great
Bang claimed" George Lamitra That everything had arisen from a small
point called primitive corn I think the most difficult thing to
surround About the theory of the Big Bang All that you see and what you
have known Every man, house, tree, and planet Moon, star and galaxy in
the entire universe At a time before 13,8 billion Year-old was pressed
at a tiny point In fact much smaller than the point Very small, tiny A
point called exclusivity This exclusivity has plagued astronomers for
decades " All because of one word" finite Once he uttered the word
"finite", as the end of grandeur or In physics, it means that you do
not understand anything " Einstein's general relativity predicted," The
default existence of uniqueness But in practice, the rules of physics
are broken when singular Do not understand singularities It is one of
the theoretical questions Mysterious people are trying to understand
The universe tells us something happens We do not understand him well
in our sports Our mathematics is incomplete This is an indication that
general relativity Are not qualified to describe the first moments of
the universe General relativity predicts individualities But it really
does not apply With tiny things The general relativity of Einstein is
very successful In describing the motion of planets around the sun And
the refraction of light around giant objects And the growth and
expansion of the universe But it breaks down when it becomes Gravity is
very strong or weak Maybe not general relativity The most appropriate
tool to understand the origin of the universe For example, if you want
to weigh some spices in your kitchen The use of kitchen scales works
well On the other hand if you want weight Your truck will not be the
right tool Forget relative command Perhaps a basic branch Another of
theoretical physics Quantum mechanics It deals with small, tiny things
But what about nanoparticles? Quantum mechanics can Prove the existence
of exclusivity? General relativity assumes the existence of
singularities This is an explicit assumption of general relativity It
does not fit the laws of quantum mechanics Quantum mechanics tend to
make Things are blurry and this is the opposite of singularity In some
quantum mechanics theories The science of small things There is a limit
to how small For example, I will not be able to Fold that paper for
more than seven times One, two, three, four, good Five, six, can do ,,
I can do, I can breach the rules of physics Mahal, there is a limit, I
can not move forward You can not continue folding the paper Or space
for smaller and smaller parts According to most quantum mechanics laws
you can not To make the thing small and extremely dense It seems that
singularity is inevitable Is the theory of the Big Bang wrong? Or is
our mind unable to solve it? Our laws of physics are not our best
attempts Let's deal with the mathematics of our observations of the
universe The universe does not care what we think The universe does not
care how we understand it These are our attempts to explain the
behavior we see The first moments of the Great Bang Is the greatest
example of our lack of understanding Perhaps the solution lies in the
collection General relativity and quantum mechanics But they do not fit
together Imagine that the rules of quantum mechanics as rules The game
of lacrosse used by its players And that rules of general relativity
are like rules The basketball used by its players If you see a
basketball game you will see the players They follow basketball rules
or general relativity If you see the game of lacrosse you You see its
rules or the rules of quantum mechanics But if we take a team from the
Lacrosse with a team of We brought them together and asked them to
start playing They will not even know how to play with each other They
are different rules in Foundation that does not meet together They are
pillars of modern science, mechanics Quantum and general relativity are
remarkable in their scope But when we want to bring them together and
that's what we need To describe the first moments of the universe
things are floundering Both teams may have played a combined set of The
rules shed some light on the Big Bang Mix quantum mechanics with
relativity The general is the golden standard It's what he likes to do
Theoretical physicist of the present age We have not done that yet, but
we have some theories When I say we have not done it yet, I mean We did
not agree on any theory is right What will be the mechanics? Quantum
with general relativity? ! Is there a consensus between them? What do
we need? We need more amazing and powerful observations And data we did
not expect Another genius or thousands of geniuses who They are
successful and successful in bringing them together Or maybe all of the
above So it remains the beginning of a story The Great Blast is
undeniable But what about the assumptions "The Other to the Priest's
Priest" Lamitra Whether the universe is newborn, corn Primitive, too
hot? If so, how hot is it? The story of the Big Bang is based on
Discover that the universe is always expanding If we go back, he will
That for one inevitable result If we go back and let the universe
become smaller He will be smaller and even smaller Pressing everything
to one point The story of the Big Bang assumes that That point was tiny
But scientists could not prove The existence of these singularities in
our universe We see in our universe that all galaxies are moving away
For all other galaxies in general If we look at the trains leave the
station If we go back, you will come together All trains are in the
same station Have they all come from the same station? Probably Have
they all come from the same pavement? Maybe not Can not place all
trains Together in the same pavement Although physicists were unable to
prove their origin Everything from tiny singularity to density They
remain convinced that the visible universe has expanded From one small
point to very dense and hot Imagine you and your friends in a spacious
room And loitering all of you seems all natural But if you get stuck in
a very narrow elevator You will feel free because you share that heat
So the newborn universe, stacked Everything together was extremely hot
It is theoretically possible that those The era was very hot But how do
you prove it? How to measure the temperature of the newborn universe
Which began 13,8 billion years ago? You can not, but can measure Heat
is the coldest patch in the universe If we move away from all the stars
and galaxies it is You think that space is too cold at absolute zero
But it is not The space has heat eaves About 455 degrees Fahrenheit
Above absolute zero by five degrees Where did these five extra degrees
come from? I believe the blast confirmers Great that they have the
answer They claimed that that little heat was Remaining from the
newborn universe is very hot The guide took decades But he came in 1964
purely by chance Benzias and Wilson were engineers and contracted With
them to measure certain radio signals In order to send wireless signals
over To enter rural areas They used a radio antenna in the form of a
huge trumpet The problem is that whenever the face of this trumpet is
heard they will not hear Noise, radio interference comes from every
direction They thought it was an artificial satellite Not compatible
with any satellite direction There is a nearby military base and they
are asking about They broadcast signals at this frequency and replied
no They thought it was pigeon droppings There is a bath nesting inside
the antenna And its waste makes this noise in your place So they
entered and cleaned all the waste But no matter how loud the noise
continued Try what they can to remove this noise in the background And
finally realized that he was coming from heaven and he was real They
did not hear radio waves But a different kind of radiation Microwave
waves Lagging behind the big bang They discovered the cosmic microwave
background A hidden snapshot of the newborn universe Different colors
indicate slight variations in heat The less hot blue areas Stars and
galaxies will be Warmer orange areas will be In the end the inter-
Hungarian space Cosmic background radiation Microcosm is the birth
image of our universe It is equivalent to your picture when you are
seven seconds old We can set the date of cosmic background radiation
Microbial to 380 thousand years after the Big Bang The temperature here
is estimated at 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit But how hot was the Big Bang?
When we go back the universe becomes Smaller, smaller and warmer We
know the heat of the cosmic microwave background But before it we know
that the universe He was getting younger and younger It is getting
hotter and hotter But we do not know how hot it is The newborn universe
was smaller and more Density and heat than it is now He was so hot that
he did By merging hydrogen into helium Twenty-five percent of the mass
of the universe The newborn is incorporated into helium in a few
minutes It's trillions trillion times The amount of fusion that occurs
inside the sun We need extreme heat to integrate Hydrogen to helium
Scientists estimate that integration has begun After the Big Bang a
hundred seconds When the temperature reached one billion degrees
Fahrenheit During the first parts of The first second of the great
explosion Some estimate heat reaching to 250 Million trillion trillion
degrees Fahrenheit But what triggered this huge resurgence Of energy
here in the emergence of the Great Bang? The first moments of our
universe Is a source of frustration for us because it is It's good for
us to know that But it is also a source of curiosity This is as far as
his physics It's where we try as much as we can Understand the basic
aspects of reality Even if we can retrieve the story of the explosion
The great way to prove the origin of everything from a minute point
There is still another problem Where did all this come from? You can
not find anything From nothing, we all know that But it seems that
everything started out of nowhere The entire universe seems to have
arisen from nothingness How does that happen? The big bang ,, No space
Darkness ,, Nothing Suddenly, the universe grew alive Everyone knows
for sure that you are Nothing comes of nothing It is the biggest
question, how did the universe arise? The truth is that we do not want
to come Everything from scratch, looks like a trick But we exist, it
must happen Something that we do not understand yet It's one of the
biggest questions In cosmology cosmogony I think people say the gossip
Such as that the universe grew out of nowhere Like ,, Suddenly , the
universe appeared But remember not owning For data on the first
universe moments We do not know what was happening We fight in the dark
to try Find out what happened before the Big Bang That era seems to be
out of nowhere Physicists look at the empty space But does "emptiness"
mean there is nothing at all? Nothing is out of nowhere Because that is
the traditional idea of non-existence Does not apply to what we believe
as an empty space It turned out that the empty space is far from
emptiness The void of space is a raging sea whose waves break With
charged quantum particles and electromagnetic fields The void of space
itself is full of movement The material can appear automatically Of
emptiness and then disappear automatically The vacuum is filled with
particles and particles Then there are no collisions Space is full of
virtual images that arise and are absent , No doubt about their reality
Its impact is between, we can see When physics freaks, things are
strange Maybe nothingness is in the end If the empty space contains
Particles arise outwardly from nothingness Can a similar process Raise
the Great Bang? Quantum vacuum itself may be enjoyed Randomly and
automatically a large card Maybe enough energy to do something We call
it the Great Bang There are several theories about the origin of the
universe But was his sudden appearance of Nudity is the only effective
skill? He also created matter of energy The universe is full of
galaxies, stars, planets and comets Where did they all come from?
According to the story of the Great Bang They came from one small point
When the universe began it was not There is no space for matter at all
The heat was strong and space was high Compression so that the
substance does not exist How the Universe Can To become full of matter?
In the primitive corn there was no space But they were energy-dense As
Einstein tells us that all What we need to form is energy According to
the equation of energy equals the mass multiplied by twice Speed of
Light The material and energy are interchangeable Einstein taught us
the special relativity Energy and matter are two sides of a single coin
The material can be converted to energy by blowing something up The
most horrifying examples are the conversion of matter into energy It
was the atomic bomb manufactured in the 1940s But in the Big Bang it
reflected that process Energy has formed matter The material expanded
until the entire universe was filled In cosmic terms, the universe is
Its stretched article grows terribly fast After the creation of the
universe, its growth rate was terrible He became a child of a teenager
in an hour How the universe could become an adult The magnitude is so
great If we believe the story of the great explosion it seems It broke
one of the basics of physics Did the newborn universe grow faster than
the speed of light? In the story of the traditional big bang expansion
The visible universe of a sphere of energy is smaller than the atom The
universe's diameter today is estimated at 93 billion light-years
Imagine the space of the universe Which we see around us today It was a
very small, very dense space The universe must undergo a terrible
growth rate At its fixed rate of expansion there is no time Enough for
the universe to grow to its current size The universe areas that were
next to us In the past it has become very far away So that can not be
explained Their distance from normal expansion The sheer size of the
universe is nothing The only stranger we discovered The universe is
what astronomers call flat We are lumpy and small There are galaxies,
black holes, human beings and innards , But from a broad perspective,
from a general perspective Or the real cosmic perspective, being flat
It can be a general extinction And high-speed growth linked in some
way? We know that the Big Bang was not an explosion Otherwise, the
distribution of matter in the universe would be unequal But something
pushed everything out and quickly But what? In 1980, Alan Guth, a
cosmic scientist, came A young man at Stanford, with a possible answer
His theory of expansion states that the visible universe has expanded
from Smaller than corn to the size of basketball almost immediately In
this exact part of the Second at the beginning of the universe One on
one million on Million on one millionth of a second The universe
expands from its time to the equivalent His weakness is approximately
one, followed by 50 zeros Accelerated expansion leg expansion For the
universe to make it big and fast, then stop The expansion seems to
solve the two big bangs How the universe became so big Super speed and
flatness Because it expands everywhere once, all The energy of the
universe that will turn into matter Paid evenly at the same time and at
the same speed So the stars grow together To become the first galaxies
So here, we, in the solar system We grew up or pushed us into an
expansion event Parts of the universe that diverge Now 93 billion
light-years Previously they were the same space To expand at that speed
must Breaking one of the basic rules of physics We all know that the
rule is bound by the universe The length of time it travels nothing
faster than light So we say that the universe May expand faster than
light But the expansion states that the universe is inflated into
nowhere , There was no "outside" universe The universe was everything
So space was expanding itself He can move as fast as he likes You can
not migrate faster Of light across space But the same space is allowed
to It expands and expands as fast as it wants This is what our universe
does The theory of expansion unites the universe in a distinctive way
Imagine it as a heavily fortified balance If you solicit solvency
strongly You will simplify those wrinkles The theory of expansion seems
to be from Agnes Theories in the history of science So crazy to be true
Expanding helps us understand what can not be explained But there is a
problem We do not know what triggered or spurred expansion The
expanding universe ,, Imagine that the universe was A super-dense card
is packed in its bag Something has driven the universe apart What made
it a hot expanding material? We must be humble and click that we do not
know But whatever he raised, he was gone Expansion in a fraction of a
second It did not last long and this is difficult to understand How to
stop expansion? we do not know We have nothing, it is difficult But has
the expansion actually stopped? A revolutionary theory assumes that if
a force is made Expansion is called a single universe expansion Why is
there no other universe? Did the expansion make a group of new
universes? Is there a multiple universe? If we believe the story of the
Big Bang A smaller point of the atom has expanded To form a universe of
93 billion light-years A theory called cosmic expansion claims They
explain this amazing growth But the expansion raised questions Rather
than providing answers We extended the expansion more than we wanted We
wanted to come up with a mechanism that would address our universe and
end But we quickly realized such as the factories of the vehicles It
does not make a single vehicle and stops but many vehicles , The
expansion tends to produce a universe and another And many of the
universes It is a process called eternal expansion Assume that when the
expansion is over Our universe has led to the formation of stars and
galaxies So we are only a small part of the universe Multi-roomy is
constantly expanding Imagine a bunch of bubbles Next to each other,
they are different universes Our bubble is expanding And bump into our
neighbor and expand it If the theory of the universe is correct The
Multiverse Universe The huge seems scientifically imaginative However,
there is evidence that supports theory Scientists have observed an
unusual sign in Micronuclear background radiation This snapshot of the
newborn universe There is a patch in the southern half that should not
be Colder or larger spot, but colder and larger spot It is strange, we
do not know its full explanation It assumes an interesting but
unexplained theory , That this spot is a cosmic disintegration Surface
damage from collision with another I work in the building with those
who have discovered That huge cold spot They pointed to it and said it
made no sense Why was the background radiation Cosmic universality in
this way? Perhaps this is a proof of another universe colliding with
our being It's similar to going to eat Which makes your thinking stop
If you believe the theory of the multi-universe busy Global impacts and
collisions Not entirely possible, but potentially There may be several
universes expanding Abroad as a result of the current expansion This is
like thinking of a supernatural hero It can not be killed, it is
constantly renewed If the novel of the universe is true, it raises A
huge question on the story of the Big Bang The possibility of a
multiple universe does not assume an explosion One great but many
groups of them But not all physicists believe that hypothesis Society
is divided on the idea The multiplicity universe in their predictions
Because of us who believe this The beating of fiction has its
justifications The other opponents say they are not Scientific theory
is supported by empirical evidence Others welcome the fact that when
It's about explaining everything We are not committed to the story of
the explosion Great antique good I may have been plagued by indoor
phobia If it turns out that there is only land I am happy to discover
that This is part of something bigger Solar system and galaxy Hungarian
clusters and our universe I feel better if there is more From space
there, parallel universes To cheer more Although it is a fascinating
idea without evidence Experimental theory it needs a firm doctrine
There is no reason to believe that creatures are small Like us, we are
aware of the vast real nature of reality , It is still a great mystery,
we have ideas I have ideas, others assume theories But we do not have
data Help us distinguish between those theories And I say to you, I do
not support you Those theories are strong Oscillating oscillators model
The traditional great explosion is steadily increasing The newer
theories do not assume an explosion A great one but an entire group
While scientists continue Rewriting the traditional story More and more
questions are raised But at present most remain unanswered What was the
origin? There is already meaning To ask:Is there a time before time? ,
I think the answer is yes Our science and mathematics are only
deficient Maybe we have mathematics Which describes the first moments
of the universe Maybe someday we can The predictions we associate with
observations Not because that day is not now It does not mean he will
never come We knew a lot more in the last year But we have huge, hard-
to-solve puzzles So I wait for the next "Einstein" drsamehnour
yahoo,com English additional comment: execelente Dr Nour

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s07e06

battle of the dark universe

Across the universe, an endless war rages, a bitter struggle between

invisible forces.
Tegmark: We've seen this cosmic battle go on for the past 14 billion
years.
Like two navies, fighting it out in the ocean of space time.
[ crackling ] narrator: Dark matter And dark energy battling for
control of the universe.
They've shaped the entire history of the universe.
They're not about to stop now.
Narrator: Shadowy forces dictating our past, our present, and our
future.
Thaller: The dark universe is kind of a puppet master behind the
scenes, guiding the universe that we can see.
Oluseyi: It's taken over the universe and, eventually, it may well
destroy the universe.
[ rumbling ] [ crackling, bursting ] -- captions by vitac -- captions
paid for by discovery communications narrator: As we look out across
the universe, we see nebulas, stars, and planets, all constructed from
visible matter.
But what we see is just a small part of the cosmos.
The rest is invisible, unknown The dark universe.
Dark universe is a very common phrase to describe our universe, because
it turns out most of our cosmos is dark.
Dark not as in night.
Dark as in, doesn't interact with light, and dark as in, we don't
really understand it.
All the objects in our daily experience -- our bodies, the air, the
chair that you're sitting in, the planets and stars, all of that only
adds up to 5 percent of the universe.
It's the other 95 percent that is the dark stuff, the dark universe.
narrator: The dark universe is made of two forces -- dark matter and
dark energy.
In a way, the dark matter and dark energy sort of oppose each other.
[ whooshing ] dark matter has positive gravity that pulls things
together, and dark energy has repulsive gravity that pushes things
apart.
Freese: To encapsulate that in one sentence, dark matter is attractive,
dark energy is repulsive.
Narrator: Since the dawn of time, two forces slugging it out for
control of the universe.
Dark matter and dark energy are locked in this epic struggle.
The dark matter is trying to bring things together.
The dark energy is trying to drive everything apart.
So it's basically a battle.
Who's going to win? [ rumbling ] narrator: It's a struggle that started
13.
8 billion years ago in the cosmic furnace of the big bang.
the infant universe was a super hot ball of intense radiation, but
suddenly [ bursting ] It started to transform.
It cooled and expanded, triggering the birth of the regular universe
and the dark universe.
Scientists believe that both dark matter and dark energy formed in the
first moments of the big bang.
It would have formed probably just fractions of a second after the big
bang, around the time that normal matter formed, and the processes that
created the normal matter we know all about.
Similar processes probably created the dark matter.
narrator: During these first microseconds, the universe was a hot,
dense ball of matter and energy.
They're two sides of the same coin.
Matter can convert into energy [ crackling ] And energy can convert
directly into matter, visible particles of regular matter forming
atoms, planets, stars, and us -- and other particles.
They are invisible.
They are dark matter.
One of the big mysteries that we as astronomers have to solve is what
this dark matter is.
We just don't know.
The idea of a type of matter that you can't see and that acts
differently than normal matter is sort of out there.
It's sort of weird.
Narrator: But the dark universe does leave clues.
It's like a crime scene.
You know that a crime has been committed, even though you don't know
the perpetrator yet.
We see the hints.
We see the signs.
We see the signals that something funny is happening in our universe,
even though we don't know exactly what's causing it.
Narrator: There are several contenders for what dark matter could be.
It could be normal matter that we just don't see, or it could be some
sort of exotic matter, a particle of some sort that we haven't detected
yet.
Sutter: It could be a species of particle, like an electron, like a
proton, like a quark, but a special kind that doesn't interact with
light.
One of the favorite possible models of dark matter are wimps, weakly
interacting massive particles.
narrator: Wimps may not interact strongly with other matter or light,
but they do exert a gravitational pull.
[ crackling ] so they're the best candidates for the particles of dark
matter that formed in the big bang.
the early universe was intensely hot and dense, full of new particles
of both visible matter and invisible dark matter.
But another force was present -- dark energy.
Dark energy has existed since the time of the big bang.
Freese: Dark energy was always there.
We don't know how much of it there was, but it's possible that the same
amount of dark energy was always there.
[ rumbling ] narrator: Our understanding of what that dark energy is is
very limited.
Sutter: If you were to ask a roomful of 10 theoretical physicists on
the nature of dark energy, you'd get about 12 different answers.
We're not sure what dark energy is.
Dark energy is just a fancy name for our ignorance.
Dark energy is nothing more than a placeholder name for this enormous
gap in our understanding of how the cosmos works.
But we don't understand it at all.
[ chuckles ] it's true.
narrator: One potential answer to what dark energy actually is may be
found in so-called empty space.
Could this be the source of dark energy? Tegmark: We used to think of
space as just boring emptiness.
But now, I think it's healthier to think of space as a kind of
substance.
Narrator: A substance that carries a strange type of energy.
Every small region of space has a little bit of energy in it, just
associated with the vacuum itself.
Vacuum energy is the idea that vacuum isn't empty, that there is
something there.
There's an energy in it with a kind of antigravity.
[ crackling ] narrator: Perhaps this vacuum energy that pushes against
gravity is the mysterious dark energy.
We simply don't know.
We're not sure that the dark energy is the vacuum energy.
It could be a new type of energy that permeates all of space.
This is what we're trying to measure now.
Narrator: Dark energy and dark matter, forged in the intense heat of
the big bang, opposing forces, one attractive, one repulsive.
But together, over 13.
8 billions years, they will shape the history of the universe.
[ rumbling ] [ rumbling ] narrator: The story of the universe is
dominated by two powerful opposing forces -- dark matter and dark
energy.
For 13.
8 billions years, they've battled it out for control of the cosmos.
Dark matter and dark energy are out there, and they've shaped the
entire history of the universe.
Our universe is actually the balance between dark forces.
Dark matter is trying to draw everything together, and dark energy is
trying to rip everything apart.
Narrator: After the big bang, the infant universe was small, intensely
hot and intensely dense.
[ whooshing, rumbling ] dark matter, the force bent on bringing things
together, thrived.
But in this compressed space, dark energy, the force trying to drive
things apart, had no room to act.
When things were closer together, the density of matter and radiation
was bigger, so big that the dark energy didn't matter.
Narrator: The environment was also tough for normal matter.
It was so hot, intense radiation prevented visible matter from bunching
together to form atoms.
If any normal matter tried to clump together through gravity or some
other force, this energy would just basically blast it apart.
In the very early universe, when our universe was a lot smaller and a
lot hotter and a lot denser, matter, normal matter, tried to collect
together, wanted to join the party.
But it was prevented from doing so because there was also radiation
that would throw it out.
Narrator: Unable to stick together, normal visible matter sped out
across the infant cosmos in a blizzard of particles.
[ crackling ] but then dark matter, the force that brings things
together, intervened.
[ crackling ] dark matter doesn't talk to radiation, doesn't talk to
light.
Can do whatever it wants.
It starts clumping together.
Narrator: Radiation pushes normal matter apart, stopping it from
forming dense regions.
But photons simply pass straight through the dark matter, allowing it
to clump and fall into dense pockets or wells.
The dark matter begins to clump together gravitationally, and this
means that the matter is going to fall into those dark matter wells.
Narrator: Over time, more and more regular matter is pulled into the
dark matter wells.
The regions that have a little bit more stuff, gravity makes them
bigger, and the regions that have less stuff, those expand more.
So you have little pockets of slight extra matter, have more and more
and more matter over time.
[ rumbling ] narrator: Gravity-rich pockets of dark matter pull
particles of regular matter together.
[ whistling, rumbling ] gradually, they form giant clouds of hydrogen
and helium gas.
Dark matter has laid the foundation stones of the cosmos.
This force may be dark, but it's highly creative.
and now, 180 million years after the big bang, everything is in place
for the next dark matter construction milestone -- the creation of
stars.
We know stars, in the very early universe at the edge of time, had to
form from the collapse of gas clouds under their own gravity.
narrator: But there's a problem.
The clouds of hydrogen in the infant universe can't collapse, and no
collapse means no stars.
Bullock: The gas in the early universe has a lot of pressure, and this
pressure keeps it from collapsing.
The dark matter doesn't experience that kind of pressure.
So the dark matter can clump up and make sites for structure formation.
Narrator: So dark matter comes to the rescue, creating regions of
higher gravity, dragging in hydrogen gas, forcing the clouds to get
denser and denser, creating the conditions for collapse and then
creation.
[ rumbling ] so it's only when the gravity of the dark matter
overwhelms the pressure of gases that the gases can collapse and turn
into stars.
Bullock: As soon as the gas cools down, it can fall into those
potential wells that the dark matter created, almost like little
nurseries for stars, and they start forming in earnest.
narrator: Dark matter provides a boost of gravity to kick-start
hydrogen into constructing the first stars, stars that are the seeds of
the first galaxies.
Tremblay: So it's dark matter that would have coalesced in the early
universe and grown from there, and then the luminous component of the
universe, the things that we think of as being the universe itself,
like stars and galaxies, would have just been along for the ride.
Without the presence of dark matter to seed structures, there wasn't
enough time in the early universe to form galaxies, which means you and
me have to thank dark matter for our existence.
Narrator: And dark matter now begins a much more ambitious
architectural project -- to shape the entire universe itself, to build
the biggest structure ever constructed -- the cosmic web.
[ rumbling ] narrator: The war between dark matter and dark energy has
been raging since the birth of time.
[ rumbling ] but in the early years, it's a one-sided contest.
In the early universe, the only thing that really mattered was the dark
matter and the normal matter.
Narrator: Dark matter, the force that brings things together, is in the
driver's seat.
[ rumbling ] dark energy, the force that pulls things apart, is the
underdog.
We've seen this cosmic battle go on for the past 14 billion years.
Fortunately for us, the dark energy got off to a slow start.
Narrator: Meanwhile, dark matter is busy at work, building the
universe.
Not only does it trigger the birth of the first stars, it embarks on an
even more formidable construction project -- the cosmic web.
Straughn: There's this large-scale structure of filaments that galaxies
seem to form on, and that's what we call the cosmic web.
And we can trace the formation of this cosmic web all the way back to
the early universe.
Now this is such a huge structure, we don't think there's time in the
universe for matter's gravity alone to do this.
There must have been an underlying scaffold of dark matter.
Plait: The dark matter started forming into these filaments, and when
the universe cooled enough, normal matter could start to stream into
this gravitational attraction of the dark matter.
That became the scaffolding on which this large-scale structure was
built.
Narrator: The filaments of dark matter joined together, drawing in more
and more hydrogen gas.
Dense clouds of gas build up at the junctions of the filaments, the
point where gravity is at its strongest.
slowly and surely, a familiar-looking structure starts to take shape.
If you've ever gone outside, and you can see a spider web covered in
dew, that's kind of like what happened with the universe.
In this case, the spider web is the structure of the dark matter.
It's all of these filaments, and the moisture in the air is what
condenses around them, just like the normal matter fell into the dark
matter web to form these gigantic structures in the universe.
Narrator: Dark matter, the universe's master builder, succeeds in
stitching together a cosmic web.
This will be the framework for the entire universe.
And so it is dark matter that would choreograph and sculpt the shape of
the universe itself.
One of the amazing things about dark matter is, without it, we wouldn't
be here.
It's hard to imagine how you could have structure in the universe
without dark matter.
Narrator: Galaxies, and then galactic clusters, form at the junctions
of the filaments.
Slowly, but surely, the universe begins to take shape.
When we look at this structure over a cosmic scale, we see that it
looks kind of like a sponge.
You see voids with galaxies all over the edges of them.
That is the structure that was formed by the dark matter in the early
universe.
Dark matter is the thing that enabled, that provided enough gravity for
the initial seeds of structure formation to coalesce, for galaxies
themselves to form.
[ rumbling ] and, of course, without galaxies, there are no stars, and
there's no planets, and there's no us.
Narrator: For 9 billion years, dark matter orchestrates the
construction of the universe.
[ rumbling ] in these, the first battles of the cosmos, this
constructive force is the clear victor.
For the time being, the dark matter has won.
Galaxies continue to form.
Clusters of galaxies are getting bigger over time.
[ rumbling ] narrator: But dark matter's success in building up the
universe sets in motion its potential downfall.
[ whooshing, rumbling ] as the cosmic web evolves into a more complex
structure Gaps form between the filaments, the cosmic voids.
the cosmic voids formed because other, more dense regions of the
universe gravitationally stole material away from them.
So the dense parts of the universe accumulated more matter at the
expense of the less dense parts, which then became voids.
Narrator: And lurking in these voids, dark energy.
Since the dawn of time, it's been waiting for its opportunity.
Now it's preparing an offensive that may help it conquer the universe.
In the very earliest times, the dark matter dominated everything.
It was the big brother pushing the little brother around.
But in the long run, the dark energy is going to overpower dark matter,
and so the relationship is entirely flipped.
plait: We used to think the fate of the cosmos itself depended on dark
matter, and it turns out that's not the case at all.
The fate of the universe depends entirely on dark energy.
Narrator: The long reign of dark matter may be coming to an end.
Dark energy, the great destroyer, is hoping to take control.
This destructive force has one overriding aim -- to tear the universe
apart.
[ rumbling ] [ rumbling ] narrator: Our universe is at war, a
relentless conflict between dark forces.
For the first 9 billion years, dark energy is subjugated.
Dark matter has the upper hand.
Frenk: When the universe emerged from the big bang, the dark energy
played no role.
It was insignificant.
[ rumbling ] narrator: But at some stage in the 14 billion years since
the big bang, these roles became reversed.
Dark energy came to be the more powerful force.
The question was, when? The answer came at the end of the 20th century.
So it was an amazing breakthrough, really important.
narrator: In 1999, scientists measure the expansion of the universe.
[ whooshing ] what they find shocks them.
They expect the speed of expansion to be decreasing.
In fact, it's actually increasing and getting faster all the time.
The data indicate that for about the first 9 billion years, it was
slowing down.
But then, in the past 5 billion years, it started accelerating faster
and faster.
Narrator: Alex filippenko was part of the team that made this explosive
discovery.
Filippenko: It befuddled us.
This isn't how nature was supposed to be behaving, and, in fact,
initially we thought that there was something wrong with either the
observations or the measurements.
I didn't believe it for the longest time.
When the first data came out, I'm like, "nah, I don't believe this, no
way.
" but it's in the data.
It's there.
You can't escape it.
This is as shocking as if you held up a rock, let go of it, and it went
up into the air.
narrator: Five billion years ago, galaxies started moving apart faster
than before.
The question is, why? What could be causing that? Well, one thing is
clear.
It must be getting some extra energy from somewhere.
Narrator: There is one main contender for what may be supplying this
extra energy, a force with repulsive gravity, a force that pushes
things apart.
This is what astronomers call dark energy.
It's this mysterious repulsive force that we know exists in the
universe, and we have no idea what it is.
Narrator: Physicists may not agree on what dark energy is, but there is
a consensus on where this repulsive force has the most influence -- in
the regions between galaxies and galaxy clusters, the cosmic voids.
They're actually filled to the brim with dark energy.
The first time dark energy is really going to make its mark in the
universe is going to be the time when the first cosmic voids begin to
appear.
[ whooshing ] sutter: We see dark energy's effects throughout the
universe.
But when we look into the cosmic voids, which are the most empty
regions of our universe, this is where dark energy is strongest.
narrator: Dark energy is the repulsive force pushing things apart.
It prefers the voids where gravity is weak.
[ rumbling ] bullock: These are areas where there's a lot less dark
matter, and because the overall density is low, that's where the dark
energy starts to peek out and can really drive those voids to expand.
So the expansion and acceleration of the universe are driven by the
dark energy in those regions.
[ whooshing ] narrator: Dark energy pushes thing apart, things that get
in its way, things like the cosmic web.
Dark matter and normal matter are also in its path and are bulldozed
out across the cosmos.
Slowly, but surely, the balance between dark energy and dark matter is
changing.
[ whooshing ] imagine you have a giant swimming pool, and at the very
bottom there's a puddle of water with a splash of whiskey.
So you have sort of a strong whiskey drink down at the bottom of your
pool.
But now you start dumping water into your pool, no more whiskey, and it
begins to get diluted and diluted, and eventually, you just have a
swimming pool full of water, with one shot of whiskey mixed in.
That's not a very strong drink.
It's basically a water swimming pool.
That's pretty much happening with the dark energy.
At first, it's a one-to-one mixture of dark matter and dark energy.
But in the long run, it's all dark energy and pretty much no dark
matter left over.
narrator: The forces of dark energy are on an unstoppable March,
picking up more and more power from the vast scale of the cosmic voids.
Dark energy is intrinsically very weak.
There's very little dark energy and this repulsive effect in every
cubic centimeter.
But the universe is vast.
Space is big.
So cumulatively, all this small amount of stuff adds up to a very large
amount, and over a scale encompassing the entire universe, the dark
energy dominates.
[ rumbling ] narrator: But it's been a very long process.
After the big bang, dark matter dominates for the first 9 billion
years.
then, 5 billion years ago, dark energy starts to get the upper hand.
It causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate and the space in
the voids to grow more rapidly.
As the space expands, there's more and more dark energy because you
have a bigger space.
It sort of creates itself with the expansion of space.
Tegmark: Dark energy has a sneaky way of taking over because it causes
the space to stretch out and get twice as big.
So now there's twice as much dark energy.
Narrator: Dark energy just can't stop pushing, causing the empty space
of the voids to continuously expand.
[ rumbling ] as the universe expands because of dark energy, more and
more dark energy is being created.
Dark energy is definitely gaining the upper hand on dark matter.
It was always there, but it took over compared to other stuff.
narrator: Eventually creating enough energy to supercharge the
expansion of the universe.
this acceleration continues.
The universe is getting bigger and bigger, and it's all powered by the
forces of repulsion, dark energy.
And for the universe, that could be very bad news.
If that's the case, dark energy may destroy the universe.
It will get stronger and stronger until it literally rips apart the
fabric of space-time.
[ rumbling ] [ rumbling ] narrator: Dark matter and dark energy have
been battling each other for 13.
8 billion years.
For the first 9 billion years, dark matter dominates.
Dark matter exerts positive gravity, but pulling everything together
leads to one inevitable outcome.
If the universe was totally dominated by matter, eventually our
expansion would slow down, glide to a stop, and then turn around and
collapse into a small, dense state from where it came from, an event we
call the big crunch.
Narrator: During the big crunch, gravity would play havoc with the
cosmos.
Galaxies would be dragged together.
Stars and planets would smash into each other.
The universe would collapse in a blazing inferno of superdense matter
and energy.
[ rumbling ] fortunately, none of this will probably happen.
scientists have now dismissed the possibility of a big crunch.
sutter: We don't face that, because we have a universe filled with dark
energy.
Dark energy is causing the universe to do something else, something it
would prefer not to do.
It is accelerating the expansion of the universe.
Narrator: As dark energy gets stronger, it supercharges this expansion.
The presence of dark energy is like a high-octane additive into a gas
tank, where a car isn't just coasting along.
It's boosting along, and that's what's happening with our universe.
Narrator: If that's correct, this supercharged expansion will continue
for the next few billion years.
The repulsive force of dark energy will become invincible, and such
unbridled power will come with a high cost.
I know of three ultimate doomsday weapons.
One is galactus' ultimate nullifier.
Another is the infinity stones in the hands of thanos.
But those two are make-believe.
The real one is dark energy.
It's the real ultimate universe destroyer.
narrator: The universe may pay the ultimate price for this ever-
increasing expansion driven by dark energy.
Carroll: And if that continues forever, the future of the universe is
very, very simple.
It continues to expand, to accelerate.
Everything moves apart from everything else, and the universe becomes
empty.
There'll be nothing left but cold, desolate, empty space forever.
narrator: Dark energy will finally win the long war with dark matter.
But the result won't be pretty.
This future universe will be cold, dark, and empty.
Eventually it's going to get so cold that really nothing can happen in
it.
It's the big chill.
It gets colder and colder and darker and darker.
Everything will fade out, and though it began with a bang, it's going
to die in a whimper.
The universe flatlines because of dark energy.
Narrator: The universe dies in a big chill.
Galaxies are so far apart, they're distant islands in a sea of
darkness.
Gradually, the galaxies dies, too.
Star birth stops, and the universe fades away.
Or maybe not.
There's another, far more violent scenario.
Here, dark energy just goes from strength to strength.
It could be that dark energy is so strong that it will multiply upon
itself as the universe gets bigger.
This is a process that we call phantom dark energy.
Narrator: Phantom energy is dark energy on steroids.
It multiplies uncontrollably in the voids, tearing at the fabric of the
universe in a process called the big rip.
Dark energy is weird enough, but imagine the possibility that there is
more and more of it as time goes on, and it's called phantom energy,
and in that case, it would rip everything apart, even black holes.
[ whooshing ] it will start to rip apart galaxies themselves [ rumbling
] Rip apart solar systems [ rumbling ] Rip apart people, rip apart
atoms Rip apart nuclei.
[ rumbling ] until finally, space itself is pulled apart.
[ whooshes ] narrator: The universe, as we know it, will be destroyed,
but the big rip may not be the end of everything.
there will be no normal matter and no dark matter.
And with nothing left to conquer, phantom energy may use its powers to
become a creator, triggering a rebirth.
[ bursting ] eventually, when you get to this ultimate stage of
emptiness, because of the phantom energy, we're actually able to turn
the universe around and get it to collapse again, and then go through a
series of bounces.
So we call it the phantom bounce.
narrator: With this phantom bounce, universal life energy left in this
dead universe starts to collapse.
Freese: And eventually it becomes hotter and hotter and denser and
denser, and then the fiery inferno eventually pushes you back out into
another big bang, and this just keeps going on indefinitely.
narrator: So the destructive and repulsive dark energy spawns a force
that becomes the ultimate universe recycler.
The end state of our universe would lead you back into another cycle, a
whole new big bang from the beginning.
[ bursting, rumbling ] narrator: In the end, dark energy may kill the
cosmos, or it may create a new one.
Dark energy is mysterious.
Dark energy is unknown.
Dark energy is going to do whatever it feels like.
Maybe dark energy will go away.
Maybe dark energy will decay and become a flood of new matter and
radiation.
Maybe dark matter will get stronger.
We don't know.
narrator: For now, we think dark energy will determine the fate of the
universe.
But all of our evidence is speculative.
What if we have it all wrong? What if there is no dark universe at all?
[ rumbling ] narrator: A large part of our understanding of the
universe's past, present, and future is based on educated guesswork
about two invisible forces -- [ crackling ] Dark matter and dark
energy.
But it's pure speculation.
Perhaps dark matter and dark energy don't exist.
There's not new stuff in the universe.
Anything is possible.
Dark energy, in particular, might not be real, so maybe there's
something else that could be pushing the universe apart.
Tremblay: So we could absolutely be wrong about dark energy and dark
matter.
Maybe they don't exist.
Maybe tomorrow we'll discover that our understanding was wrong all
along.
Narrator: That's an awful lot of maybes.
Let's add one more.
When it comes to finding answers, maybe we're looking in the wrong
place.
Filippenko: One possibility is that there are other universes out there
pulling outward, so to speak, on our universe.
That might be the answer.
But most theoretical physicists and astrophysicists these days think
that dark energy is real because that seems to be the simplest
explanation for a wide variety of observations.
narrator: No one really knows what dark energy is made of.
Maybe the answer lies in the past.
The best theory for dark energy we have right now is the simplest one
and the oldest one, and that's the idea that it's a cosmological
constant.
narrator: Albert einstein came up with the idea of a cosmological
constant in 1917.
He suggested that space has its own energy, energy that can affect the
way the universe expands.
when edwin hubble proved the universe is expanding, einstein thought
the cosmological constant was his biggest blunder.
But observations that the expansion of the universe is accelerating
reveal einstein was right all along.
Filippenko: Well, here we are.
We've reintroduced the idea.
So einstein's biggest blunder may have actually conceptually been his
greatest triumph.
narrator: But to understand the true nature of the dark universe, we
may need to re-evaluate what we think we know about gravity.
[ rumbling ] when we're trying to understand dark energy and dark
matter, there's a chance that just our fundamental theories of gravity
are wrong, that general relativity isn't quite right.
Narrator: Einstein's theory of general relativity explains how gravity
works, how stars orbit in galaxies, and planets orbit stars.
some scientists wonder if altering this theory will help us understand
the dark universe.
Tremblay: So you need not absolutely believe that there is something
actually called dark matter.
You need to only understand that there is something in the universe
which behaves like dark matter.
For example, you could effectively mimic the behavior of dark matter by
modifying our current theory of gravity.
Narrator: But successfully modifying einstein's theories on gravity is
a big challenge.
Einstein's equations are very robust.
You don't fluff around with einstein with impunity.
[ rumbling ] narrator: For decades, theoretical physicists have toyed
with einstein's equations, looking for ways to explain dark matter and
dark energy, or make them go away.
As yet, no one has managed.
The dark universe persists.
[ whooshing ] I think that the best description of the observations we
have today is that dark matter exists.
It's out there, as well as dark energy.
I think dark energy exists.
I think dark energy is real, but I must admit that sometimes, at 3
o'clock in the morning, I wake up screaming, worried that, in fact,
we've settled on the wrong answer, and that in a couple hundred years,
they're going to be laughing at us.
narrator: Until then, our observations tell us the battle between dark
matter and dark energy has shaped the universe.
dark matter dictated the past, built the galaxies, the stars, and the
planets.
dark energy will determine its future, potentially tearing the universe
apart.
Just because we can't see dark matter and dark energy directly doesn't
mean they have not had a profound effect on the evolution of the entire
universe.
The dark universe was there at the beginning of the universe, shaping
it, and actually creating the conditions for us to be here, and it's
taken over the universe.
And, eventually, it may well destroy the universe.
narrator: Our universe may be dominated by the long struggle between
dark matter and dark energy.
But all of this conflict has led to a creative outcome, an outcome for
which we should all be grateful.
The name dark matter suggests that it's something nefarious and somehow
bad for us, but actually it's turned out that dark matter is very much
our friend.
Because if it weren't for the dark matter, we wouldn't be here.
[ rumbling ] thaller: There's a wonderful irony to calling it the dark
universe, because now we're actually beginning to shed light on how the
universe began, how the largest structures in the universe evolved.
We wouldn't be here without this dark universe.
It's not dark at all.
It's shedding light on our own reality.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s07e07

Hunt for alien life

Earth -- a planet defined by life.

Stricker: The amazing thing about life here on earth is no matter where
you look, you'll find it.
Narrator: But is earth unique? Thaller: The big question of our day is,
does life exist somewhere else beside the earth? Are we that special,
or is life everywhere? Narrator: The ingredients for life are spread
throughout the universe.
But then we started looking into space and saying, "wait a second.
That chemistry is everywhere.
" narrator: Is life inevitable? I think that there have to be planets
out there that are capable of hosting life.
Narrator: What does life need to get started, and once started, can
life spread? It's possible that life started on mars and was
transferred to earth inside of a meteorite.
Narrator: Life has conquered our planet, but can life conquer the
universe? -- captions by vitac -- captions paid for by discovery
communications the universe is a very big place.
There are trillions of galaxies, each one home to millions of stars and
an unimaginable number of planets.
So where is everybody? One of the most basic philosophical questions
is, are we alone? Are we the only ones looking out and thinking, "what
is all this?" is it all just for us, or do we get to share it with
anyone? I mean, that's about as fundamental a question as you get.
Narrator: What are the odds of life existing somewhere else? We just
don't have a good insight to how probable life is anywhere in the
universe.
Life could possibly be forming everywhere.
We don't quite know.
There's a lot about life that we don't understand.
All we know is that it happened at least once.
But beyond this one little planet, we don't know whether or not it
happened anywhere else.
narrator: The universe is an unfriendly place.
Planets with lava oceans circle too close to their stars.
Pulsars blaze with deadly gamma rays and x-rays.
Black holes consume everything in their path.
Temperatures plummet close to absolute zero.
it may seem impossible for life to survive in such hostile
environments, but here on earth, life exists against the odds in some
very strange places.
Life has actually permeated every part of our planet.
There are places where you're like, "how did you even get there?"
narrator: At first glance, a beautiful lake might seem like a good
place for life, but california's salton sea is no paradise.
The toxic salt waters are killer Surrounded by scorched desert and
volcanic geothermal fields.
It's a deadly environment.
One of the last places on earth you'd expect to find life would be in
boiling mud vents.
You can start to hear these vents because there's gas, and there's
water and mud slurry that's coming out, right here.
So these are active mud volcanoes.
It's really hot.
It's, like 164 degrees fahrenheit.
Narrator: But life is resilient, finding a home even here, inside
volcanic vents in the california desert.
We're in the middle of a really hot desert, and as the mud comes up,
it's coming up hot, and it's kind of acid, and yet there can be
microbes in environments like this, happily thriving away.
This is an environment that is actually conducive to life, even though
we think it might not be.
Narrator: Almost every inch of the earth's surface is teeming with
microscopic life-forms.
The thing about life on earth is that it exists in so many different
environments under such harsh, extreme conditions.
It's like it hangs on, no matter what you throw at it.
Very dry, high pressure, very hot, even in high radiation environments,
which would kill a human within seconds.
Narrator: Life even survives being bombed with asteroids and
meteorites.
We have a wonderful indirect example of just how tenacious life is, and
that's the fact that it survived the late heavy bombardment.
Narrator: The late heavy bombardment was a violent assault on young
earth, where life had just gotten a foothold.
Experts think around 4 billion years ago, asteroids comets and space
debris rained down on the inner solar system.
This rocky barrage would've melted parts of the earth's crust and
boiled away oceans.
It was a violent time called the hadean period.
The hadean named, after hades, named after the underworld, after hell.
It was a brutally unpleasant place to be.
It was spewing its own innards out into the surface in this intense
cycle of hot volcanism.
Narrator: If life on earth overcame these hellish conditions, then
perhaps life can survive anywhere.
Straugh: I think if it can happen on earth, I think it can happen on
other planets.
I think life finds a way, and I think we need to go looking for it.
Narrator: The question is, what exactly are we looking for? Plait: What
is life? You know, that seems like a simple question, but it's not that
easy to answer.
Life is incredibly hard to define, right? It's sort of like, you know
it when you see it, but how do you write down the rules? Stricker:
Every time we think we have a grasp, there's this new form that comes
about and completely questions that entire definition.
There's a joke in astrobiology that if you ask 200 scientists for a
definition of life, you'll get 200 different answers.
Narrator: Life can be as intricate as us humans or as simple as single-
celled organisms, like bacteria, but there are some things all life-
forms do.
Plait:In broad terms, life consumes things.
It breathes.
It eats.
It excretes.
It grows.
It reproduces.
It's complex.
Narrator: Life has transformed the earth in all sorts of ways, but life
is still just an accident.
Life, as I see it, is just a chemical reaction, but it's the most
important and special chemical reaction in the universe.
Narrator: If life is just a product of chemistry, then what are the
odds of it starting anywhere in the universe? One thing we know about
chemistry is that given the right conditions, the same chemical
reaction will reliably occur.
Narrator: It's like a game of chance.
For life to win, the conditions need to be just right, but to figure
out the odds, we need to understand what those conditions are and how
common they are.
Oluseyi: So it comes down to a numbers game.
It's about statistics and probabilities and likelihoods.
Narrator: It's like having to roll a 6 for each condition for life.
But how many 6s would you need? How many precise conditions does life
require to get going? You might have 100 dice, roll them all, get all
6s.
Only then do you get life.
Narrator: You could need hundreds or hundreds of thousands of dice.
We just don't know.
We honestly have no clue how common or rare life is in the universe.
Plait: We don't know how life originated here on earth, where we kind
of understand the conditions.
There are a lot of different ways life could've started.
Is life rare? Is life common? We don't where it lands.
Narrator: Putting odds on life existing is a waste of time until we
understand it better, and maybe our answers don't lie here on earth.
One way to crack this problem is to go looking for life elsewhere.
If we can find other examples of life, we can immediately begin to put
a quantitative answer to how probable it is for life to happen
anywhere.
Narrator: And the best place to look for life might be in our own
backyard Mars.
If life can start here, then maybe life could conquer the universe.
[ explosions ] narrator: For life to conquer the universe, first, it
has to get going.
When we look at life on earth, it's possible that it all has a common
ancestor.
Life started at one spot, branched out, and became all the different
kinds of life that we see.
Narrator: But how did it start? The first question to answer is, what
is life made of? Top of the list are the most basic building blocks --
chemical elements.
Here's what I know about the universe -- the laws of physics appear to
be same everywhere.
The chemical composition, the elements are the same everywhere.
And the cosmos creates these elements, not from the big bang but from
stars.
Narrator: Over the course of a star's life, it creates elements.
And when a star dies, these elements are blasted out into space in a
supernova, spreading the ingredients for life out into the cosmos.
We, the earth, our solar system, all the ingredients that make us, us
were forged in nuclear fires.
So the death of stars leads to the birth of life.
Narrator: Those key ingredients include oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and
phosphorus, but the element most central to life as we know it is
carbon.
All life as we know it on earth is based on carbon.
Carbon forms the structure, the architecture of our living molecules.
Narrator: Carbon is an incredibly versatile building material.
It can bond with other elements to form long-chain molecules, each with
different properties.
As an element, it seems to be capable of producing a vast and complex
chemistry, and that complex chemistry is what we find in life.
Narrator: We call this organic chemistry.
but getting from basic organic molecules to complex life-forms is a big
leap.
We don't really have the slightest idea, to be honest, about how life
on earth got started.
Scharf: A really big question is, how do you go from a mix of
relatively simple organic molecules to a living system? Narrator: We
know it all starts with basic elements created in massive quantities [
explosion ] By the death of stars.
But how do you start connecting those lego bricks together to build
that first cell? The short answer is, "we don't know," but we have some
ideas of potential steps.
Narrator: Chains of organic molecules become more and more complex.
Amino acids form proteins.
Fatty acids form phospholipids, which makes cell membranes.
Nucleic acids form dna, the molecule that stores genetic information.
Eventually, a simple cell emerges.
So all of the bits you need to plug together to build a cell from
scratch seems to exist in outer space.
We found organic compounds everywhere.
They're all over the place -- planets, comets, gas clouds.
The very basic ingredients of life available elsewhere in our solar
system, so there could be life everywhere.
narrator: In 2018, nasa announces it's found organic molecules on
another planet, a planet we've always suspected of harboring alien life
-- Mars.
So whenever nasa has a press conference, and they say, "hey, I have
some results to report on about mars," everyone goes nuts.
Dartnell: The internet goes mad.
Maybe we've got photograph evidence of the green men in a ufo.
Lanza: This time, it's the martians.
They're going to tell us they found a martian.
The world listens 'cause everyone wants to know.
Everyone asks the question, "have we found evidence of life?" narrator:
For 6 years, the mars curiosity rover has been exploring a region
called gale crater, hunting for signs of ancient life.
A bit like fossil-hunting on earth.
Gale crater is not unlike places on earth that can preserve fossils, so
a really good example of this would be the petrified forest in arizona.
This looks like a piece of wood, but in fact, it is stone.
It is all stone, but it used to be a tree.
This fossil lived 200 million years ago.
Narrator: This patch of desert in arizona once looked completely
different.
Lanza: This landscape looks very dry right now, but 200 million years
ago, it was wet swampland with trees and flowing water.
Narrator: Like the petrified forest, mars has also changed over time.
Gale crater was once a lake bed filled with fresh water.
And it was just so exciting because we knew then that we had landed
right on top of an environment that once had tons of flowing water and
could very well have preserved organic materials, even though it looks
very barren and desolate to our eyes.
Narrator: In 2018, curiosity drills into this ancient martian lake and
discovers organic molecules.
Finding organics on mars is so exciting just because, I mean, wow.
That is -- those are the building blocks of life, not just the
elements, but actual molecules.
There was a wave of excitement after the announcement of organics found
on mars and complex organics.
It's not totally indicative that life is there, but it's a really good
telltale sign that there may be possibly life-forms on mars.
Narrator: The results aren't proof of martians, but the ancient lake
bed is evidence that the red planet once had something else crucial for
life -- liquid water.
it's one thing if you have all these ingredients lying around for life.
You could have, you know, carbon over here and hydrogen over here,
maybe methane or whatever.
You have to mix them together, so you need something for them to be in,
a medium of some sort.
Narrator: Life needs a liquid to mix essential chemicals together.
We're used to thinking of earth as the only water world in our solar
system, but new evidence says otherwise As extraterrestrial visitors
carrying liquid water from outer space reveal.
[ explosions ] narrator: It's no coincidence our blue planet is a water
world.
There are more than 366 million trillion gallons of water on earth.
It even makes up 60% of our bodies.
I think life on earth could be easily described as water chemistry.
That is the essential feature of life on earth.
Narrator: Some is locked up in ice caps or as vapor in the air, but 96%
of liquid water is in our oceans.
Well, earth is really special.
There's no other place like it that we've found.
It's a pretty substantial planet with liquid water covering 70% of the
surface.
All life on the earth requires bodies of water in order to survive.
No water, no life.
Narrator: Water is what chemists call a solvent, and it's the best
solvent we know of.
It can dissolve more substances than any other liquid, allowing
molecules to mix and interact.
Wherever water goes, it transports valuable chemicals, minerals, and
nutrients.
Oluseyi: If there was no liquid, things would just sit around
separately.
You need this constant interaction, and you need a different chemical
mix, and water does all of that.
And so a lot of our searches for lifelike planets, or earthlike
planets, outside our solar system are based on this sort of primary
assumption that we need liquid water.
Narrator: We've long thought earth has liquid water because of its
unique position in the solar system.
It's right in this zone that we call the habitable zone where the
sunlight can support liquid water on the surface of the planet.
narrator: But we have now discovered that liquid water might exist in
places we never expected.
In 1998, a meteorite crash-lands in texas.
[ explosion ] today, scientists at arizona state university are still
studying its secrets.
We had no idea that it would contain this really, really spectacular
finding.
Narrator: It contains a mysterious purple mineral.
The exotic color comes from exposure to cosmic radiation, but the
compound itself is very ordinary.
It's actually sodium chloride, which is essentially the same mineral as
table salt, but what's really cool is that it actually contains little
globules of liquid water, and that liquid water was trapped in these
crystals 4 1/2 billion years ago.
Narrator: In 2018, scientists reexamined the crystals and discovered
the liquid water wasn't traveling alone.
We've now actually found organic compounds in association with this
liquid water in these salt crystals, and that's something that's really
new and really spectacular.
Thaller: We actually found amino acids, the building blocks of all of
our proteins, even our dna, and we found liquid water, the very
building blocks of life, inside a meteorite.
Narrator: So could life exist somewhere else in our solar system? a
nasa mission to saturn turned up some shocking results.
The cassini space probe flew beneath saturn's moon enceladus.
Dartnell: Enceladus, no one cared about.
It was a tiny, little snowball of a world.
Narrator: But enceladus surprised everyone.
Geysers of liquid water, dozens of them, blast out of trenches along
the moon's surface, coming from a vast subsurface ocean.
Oceans on earth are full of life.
Could the same be true of enceladus? Mckay: I'm a big fan of enceladus.
I think it's by far and away the best place to go to search for
evidence of life.
Narrator: In 2018, researchers analyzing the cassini data discovered
that the plumes of enceladus contain complex organic molecules.
Just simple molecules, we find those, like methane, but the cassini
results are showing that there are these more complex, larger organic
molecules as well.
Narrator: This is the first ever detection of complex organics on an
extraterrestrial water world.
All of a sudden, here's water jetting out, carrying organic material,
all the ingredients needed for life.
It was, like, too good to be true.
Narrator: But enceladus isn't the only small world with a subsurface
ocean.
Other moons and dwarf planets have liquid water, too.
We think the most important thing for life to form is the presence of
liquid water, and our solar system seems to be full of it.
Sutter: The discovery of liquid water in the outer solar system changes
the rules of how life might originate in the universe.
narrator: Across the universe, alien life could be hiding underneath
the surface.
Internal water oceans are far more common than surface water oceans, so
if there is a lot of life out there in the universe, chances are it's
in an internal ocean under miles of ice.
Narrator: Who knows what might be lurking inside icy exoworlds? There
may be jellyfish and octopuses all over the place in exomoons and
exoplanets under ice that have civilizations that we just don't know
about.
Narrator: Finding liquid water oceans could open up a world of
possibilities.
If you're not excited about intelligent extraterrestrial octopus
civilians, I don't know what to say.
Narrator: The chances of finding life in our solar system just got a
heck of a lot better.
Building blocks and liquid water are common, but you need more than
just these two conditions for life to take hold.
Life needs a spark.
Life appears to need some form of energy to actually get the molecules
interacting.
One thing that may have helped kick-start life on earth is ultraviolet
radiation from the sun.
Narrator: Ultraviolet light is emitted by all stars.
There are billions of stars in our galaxy.
Can life get started around any star, or is our sun unique? [ explosion
] narrator: Earth is a solar-powered planet.
At the bottom of the food chain, plants use photosynthesis to convert
sunlight into chemical energy -- food for the rest of us.
Dartnell: I like eating both grass, essentially wheat, and I also fancy
the odd hamburger from a cow that has eaten that grass.
This whole ecosystem is powered by sunshine.
Narrator: But recent studies have shed new light on how life developed
under our sun, specifically the role of ultraviolet light.
U.
V.
A.
Radiation is useful for breaking molecules up and triggering reactions.
Maybe that played a role in the origin of life.
It breaks down simple organic molecules, and then they can rebuild
themselves into things that are more complex.
You do that over and over again, eventually, you somehow get life.
narrator: Scientists think life on earth started around 4 billion years
ago A time when earth's atmosphere gave little protection.
U.
V.
Radiation levels were 100 times higher.
Was u.
V.
Essential for the development of life's code, dna? We know that life on
earth stores information in dna and then uses that information to build
proteins, so you have the blueprints and the bricks.
The blueprints are the dna, and the bricks are the protein.
Dartnell: But we think that the first life on earth, we used a chemical
which is much simpler.
Narrator: This simpler chemical was rna, dna's single-stranded
forefather.
Rna is almost like a two-for-one offer.
It does both of the fundamental things you need for a cell in the same
compound.
So it was simultaneously the bricks and the blueprint.
Narrator: Unlike other molecules, rna is more resistant to the high u.
V.
Environment of early earth, allowing it to flourish.
Rna eventually evolved into dna, and life started.
Oluseyi: To have life on the planet, one important consideration is a
certain amount of light that's going to be needed and a certain type of
light that's going to be needed.
narrator: So if all stars emit some u.
V.
Radiation, can life start around any star? When we think about looking
for places that are conducive for life, we want to find a planet that
might have enough u.
V.
Radiation, so the star is, you know, bright enough or close enough
that's providing enough energy to the surface for life, but we also
don't want to have too much u.
V.
Radiation.
Narrator: It seems you need just the right amount of u.
V.
the most common stars in the galaxy are red dwarf stars.
If red dwarf stars can harbor life on planets around them, there's an
awful lot of real estate like that in our galaxy.
Narrator: Red dwarf stars could be good for life's chance of conquering
the universe in a number of ways.
One, they represent over three-quarters of all stars in the universe.
Two, they live for over a thousand times longer than sunlike stars,
and, three, they seem to have rocky planets around them much more often
than sunlike stars do.
Narrator: Those are the pros, but red dwarf stars also have cons.
For instance, they might not be bright enough for life to begin.
Some of the red dwarf stars that we know emit less ultraviolet light
than the sun.
They don't give off much u.
V.
Light at all.
Maybe on a planet around them, there isn't enough energy to get life
started.
Narrator: Red dwarf stars are also much more temperamental.
They can go from being gentle and quiet to having violent outbursts
Stellar flares.
These types of stars have incredibly strong flares.
That means they're shooting off a bunch of energetic particles and
radiation and light that's baking the surface of those planets.
Radebaugh: If the star is just bombarding the surface with u.
V.
, then it will destroy all of those things necessary for life.
It will actually destroy the life itself.
narrator: These stellar flares could strip away a planet's atmosphere,
sterilizing the surface.
more research is needed, but for now, the odds of life thriving around
dwarf stars are a toss-up.
so far, the only thing we know is that there is one kind of star that's
definitely right for life -- our sun.
We know of life in one place in the universe, and that's here.
That's earth.
Narrator: Only 4% of stars in the universe are like our sun.
So if life can only get started around these rare, medium-sized stars,
the chances are not looking good.
but life may have an ace up its sleeve.
What if life can start on just one planet and then spread? What if life
travels across the cosmos looking for planets to conquer? [ explosion ]
narrator: Earth is our only example of life emerging anywhere in the
universe.
But what if life on earth didn't start on earth at all? There's one
idea that life on earth actually didn't get going here but was
delivered from space.
Narrator: Scientists call this theory panspermia.
Scharf: The idea of panspermia essentially talks about the transferral
of life throughout the cosmos.
Narrator: We know asteroids and comets carry organic molecules.
But could they carry life itself? What if life starts on one planet?
Can it actually get itself to a nearby planet? Is it possible that
meteorites could actually transport living beings? Narrator: For life
to travel around the cosmos, first, it needs to take flight.
An asteroids is on a collision course with an inhabited planet.
So what happens if there's a huge cataclysmic collision on a planet?
Material is blasted off into space.
narrator: The impact might kill life on the surface of that planet, but
it's possible some bacteria might escape, hitching a ride on chunks of
the planet's surface.
A meteorite being ejected from a planet after an asteroids impact -- I
mean, that's not going to be an easy ride.
But it turns out it's not as bad as you think.
Some bacteria are very, very hard to kill.
Some we don't even know how to kill.
Even the impact that actually threw that rock into space -- the
bacteria, no problem.
If those chunks of rock expelled during asteroids collisions could
actually hold onto viable organisms, then it really could change the
way in which we think about life spreading in the universe.
Narrator: If the microbes can survive takeoff, then they can start
their journey to a new home.
The odds of life conquering the universe seem to be getting better.
The important question now is, how long could that life, those
bacteria, those microorganisms inside that rock, survive the space
environment? Narrator: Exposure to u.
V.
Radiation could be fatal, killing any life on the surface of an
asteroid.
But experts think that microbial passengers could still survive by
hiding underground.
It doesn't take much to shield a microorganism from u.
V.
Just a little bit of rock, and you have enough protection to just hold
on throughout a journey to the next body, to your next home.
Narrator: Eventually, they could arrive at an uninhabited world that's
ready and waiting for life, but they're in for a bumpy landing.
Would the rock burn up coming through a planet's atmosphere? It's in
for a hot ride but only for a few seconds, and only the outer layers of
that rock will blow off, and then it just falls and hits the ground not
that fast, a couple hundred miles an hour.
If a human were in there, that would be bad.
But for bacteria, no big deal.
Narrator: The panspermia theory says life could start on just one
planet, then spread to another planet, and possibly another.
If we found alien life-forms, would they look familiar? One of the
biggest questions about finding other life in the solar system is, how
similar will it be to us? If it's just like us, it begs the question,
did we have a common genesis? Did we originally come from another
planet? Narrator: One radical idea is that life on earth came from
mars.
Imagine mars 3 1/4, 4 billion years ago.
It was more earthlike then than earth was at that point.
The earth was still quite warm.
Mars actually had cooled off faster, had a thick atmosphere, water.
Life could've arisen there.
Narrator: Mars has been hit repeatedly by meteors, sending chunks of
the planet flying off into space, and some of those chunks have landed
here, on earth.
So this is a really unusual meteorite.
It was found near the city of los angeles, and we actually know that it
actually came from the planet mars, and we know that because it has
gases trapped inside it that have the exact same composition as the
martian atmosphere.
There's been a lot of transit between meteor strikes hitting mars and
then earth.
There's a little bit of mars on earth.
There's a little bit of earth on mars.
It's possible that life started on mars and was transferred to earth
inside of a meteorite.
When you think about it, maybe we're the immigrants.
We are the martians.
Life on earth started on mars and got transferred here.
narrator: Panspermia could allow life to spread from planet to planet,
conquering our solar system, but what about even greater distances? In
2017, the cigar-shaped space rock 'oumuamua appeared in our solar
system.
It came from interstellar space, and experts think it could be carrying
organic matter.
One of the fascinating things about 'oumuamua is it has sort of a
reddened surface.
Now that could actually partially be from the presence of organic
molecules.
Narrator: Could life survive interstellar or even intergalactic travel?
Whether or not this is an easy way to transfer life around in the
universe, it's still an open question.
The possibility of transferring life from star system to star system
seems a little bit remote.
Narrator: The immense distances and dangers of interstellar travel
would be hard to survive.
Some experts think there is one way for life to conquer the universe,
but it won't be life as we know it.
[ explosion ] narrator: The universe is unimaginably large.
Many experts believe there is life out there.
We just have to go find it.
Oluseyi: One of the things I love about being a human is the fact that
I'm born with this curiosity.
This curiosity drives us to explore -- explore earth, explore our solar
system and beyond into the galaxy, look for other life-forms.
Narrator: But with current technology, it would take thousands of years
just to reach the nearest star.
It's unlikely humans will ever leave our galaxy.
If life one day does spread from earth into the cosmos, it's probably
not just going to be a bunch of meat bags, like us, but other forms of
life that are more suited for interstellar and intergalactic travel.
Narrator: Our fragile bodies are not suited to the distances and
dangers of interstellar travel.
Machine life may be more robust for traveling between planets and
between stars than biological life.
There are a lot of scientists that think when we encounter aliens, we
won't be encountering them.
We'll be encountering their machines because we can build machines that
can last a million years, go from one star to the next.
It's much easier than transporting us, fragile gloppy bags of meat.
And so if we go out into space, we're more likely to find robots than
we are biological life.
Narrator: For humanity to discover alien life, humanity itself may have
to evolve from biological life to artificial life.
Oluseyi: What's really ironic here is that while we're figuring out the
origin of life on earth, we humans could be inventing a form of life on
our own, and that is what we call artificial intelligence.
The development of a.
I.
, self-replicating machines even, may very well be just the next key
transition in our evolutionary history.
Narrator: Could a superintelligent self-replicating machine conquer the
universe? Maybe this a.
I.
Can fashion its own machines, create factories to create resources to
replicate itself, create ships that will allow it travel from one place
in the universe to another.
Narrator: But would a.
I.
Represent a new form of life? Thaller: I think the answer is yes.
I think it actually goes on from there.
I think artificial intelligence might be the next necessary stage in
evolution.
We made the computers.
They are our children.
I think of life as a process that can retain its complexity and
reproduce, so bacteria are life.
Humans are life, and some future creation of advanced artificial
intelligence that can do those things should also count as life.
Narrator: Life could take many forms, and in such a vast universe, it
could be that life is inevitable.
With all those stars and all those planets, I think, without a doubt,
there is a good chance that life has developed elsewhere in our
universe.
Must life happen in our universe? Is it an inevitable consequence of
processes in operation? Maybe, maybe not.
Narrator: Until we find it, we won't know for sure whether life can
conquer the universe.

Read more:
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-
show=how-the-universe-works-2010&episode=s07e08