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Revealing the secrets of space again! Do you also want to know more about it? Then watch our video!
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00:01The legend of the Black Knight satellite tells us that a spaceship of extraterrestrial origin has been orbiting Earth for
00:09many, many years.
00:10Sounds crazy, right?
00:12But over the years, the supporters of the theory have gathered a lot of evidence to prove it.
00:18So let's look at it and judge for ourselves.
00:221899
00:22Famous scientist Nikola Tesla built a giant tower in his laboratory in Colorado Springs.
00:28This tower was supposed to allow him to study atmospheric electricity and wireless energy.
00:34Everything went fine until one day he discovered something unexpected.
00:39The tower began to catch a signal that seemed to be artificial.
00:43At first Tesla thought that the signal was coming from somewhere in the atmosphere.
00:48But it turned out that it had been coming from an even greater height, from outer space.
00:54Tesla decided that this signal was sent by some extraterrestrial life.
00:58However, the scientific community ignored his theory.
01:02Although they respected Tesla's genius, they still considered him to be a weirdo.
01:07But a few years later, Tesla's reports were confirmed.
01:11The inventor of the wireless radio, Guglielmo Markkani, intercepted similar signals.
01:16Then in 1927, Norwegian radio engineer Georgian Halls noticed something unusual.
01:22When he sent signals at a certain wavelength, they were sent back to him a few seconds later.
01:27At first, he thought it could be an ordinary radio echo.
01:31It's not uncommon for short radio waves to bounce between Earth and the stratosphere.
01:36This phenomenon is called propagation.
01:39But usually it happens very quickly, in about one-seventh of a second after the original transmission.
01:45However, the signal that Halls received took about 15 seconds to get back.
01:50They also didn't match the radio echo people were used to.
01:53The engineer wasn't the only one to witness this phenomenon.
01:57Many radio enthusiasts discovered and confirmed these signals.
02:01But no one found any explanation.
02:04So what was it?
02:05Could Tesla have been right this whole time?
02:08Let's unpack this.
02:10First of all, the signals did exist, and they've been documented by many people.
02:14However, Tesla and Macroni's signals and Halls' echoes are completely different things.
02:20In reality, Tesla and Macroni caught signals coming from pulsars.
02:24Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars.
02:28Those get born when stars, greater than our Sun, finish their life cycle.
02:33After that, they become neutron stars and receive such a strong impulse,
02:38that they begin to rotate at an insane speed.
02:40At the same time, the radio waves pulsars emit reach very far, as far as our planet.
02:47Pulsars were discovered only in 1968.
02:50So it's not surprising that Tesla and Macroni couldn't explain the data they had received.
02:55But what about Jordan Halls?
02:57What he discovered is now known as LDEs, or long-delayed echoes.
03:02It's a more complicated concept because, to be honest, these echoes still remain a mystery.
03:08Scientists suggest that LDEs may be caused by something in Earth's atmosphere,
03:13or they might be reflected from the Sun's plasma clouds, or even from the Moon.
03:17Unfortunately, we don't know the truth yet.
03:20The next incident took place in 1960.
03:24The New York Times published an article which said,
03:27An unidentified silent satellite has been discovered circling Earth in a near-polar orbit
03:32by United States tracking stations.
03:35The identity and origin of the mysterious satellite, which has been dubbed the Dark Satellite,
03:40are unknown despite nearly two weeks of tracking.
03:43Many people believe that this must be the famous Black Knight satellite.
03:48However, later scientists confirmed that it was actually the remnants of a regular satellite that had gone astray.
03:54It malfunctioned, and the thrusters sent it in the wrong direction, they claimed.
03:59Anyway, this whole story led to renewed interest in the Black Knight satellite.
04:04Astronomers all over the world started claiming to have observed it.
04:07Almost any strange celestial object could become the famous dark spaceship.
04:12But up to this point, all the photos and data about the Black Knight satellite have come from observatories on
04:18Earth.
04:19To prove or disprove its existence, people needed some witnesses in orbit.
04:24Gordon Cooper was a pilot and one of the first astronauts in human history.
04:29In 1963, he took part in the longest American space mission at that time, Mercury Atlas 9.
04:35During the flight, he discovered some strange green object, possibly of extraterrestrial origin, in front of his module.
04:42He then told his crew on Earth about that.
04:45NBC News picked up on the news and tried to interview Cooper about it.
04:50But strangely, neither NASA's mission transcripts nor Cooper seemed to give much importance to this fact, as if that didn't
04:57happen at all.
04:57Later, the official NASA's explanation was, there was an electronic malfunction on Cooper's craft.
05:04It led to increased levels of carbon dioxide, which in turn, caused Cooper to hallucinate.
05:09Cooper agreed with this version.
05:11Maybe it's just a curious coincidence, that when he retired, he became interested in searching for extraterrestrial life.
05:18But even if we assume that all this is true, and there is some mysterious spaceship in Earth's orbit, what
05:24do they want from us?
05:25Why would they be watching us?
05:27In 1973, Duncan Alasdair Lunen, a Scottish researcher, decided to investigate this.
05:33He gathered all the data on LDE's collected by Norwegian scientists and began to study it.
05:40Suddenly, he noticed some deviations that could hide a code.
05:43He arranged the data into a graph, where one axis meant the delay in time between the echoes, and the
05:50other, the position of the echo in the sequence.
05:53It turned out to be a collection of dots, which looked like some sort of space map.
05:58Namely, the map of the constellation Vortex.
06:01Lunen began to analyze the echoes recorded by French astronomers in 1929.
06:06Again, he got the same constellation.
06:10But one of the stars was in a slightly different place.
06:13Lunen then thought, what if it's actually a star map from the past?
06:18After rewinding the time, Lunen finally got the whole picture.
06:22He discovered that this was how the constellation looked 13,000 years ago, which probably meant that they could have
06:29been watching us for thousands of years.
06:31In 1973, Lunen gave an interview to the British magazine Spacelite.
06:37He said that he had deciphered the radio message hidden in the LDE's.
06:41Here is what it said.
06:43Start here.
06:44Our home is Upsilon Budis, which is a double star.
06:47We live on the sixth planet of seven coming from the Sun, which is the larger of the two.
06:53Our sixth planet has one moon.
06:55Our fourth planet has three.
06:57Our first and third planets each have one.
06:59Our probe is in the position of our actors known in our maps.
07:05Ugh, goosebumps.
07:06But even though these reports were published in the New York Times, Time and other well-known magazines, no one
07:12really took this topic seriously.
07:14Unfortunately, Lunen's theory wasn't really backed up by any evidence.
07:18Later, he withdrew it himself, saying that he had made obvious mistakes and that his methods had been unscientific.
07:25According to him, he had just been making guesses about what the signals might mean.
07:31And finally, the last part of our story.
07:33This photo.
07:35On the 4th of December 1998, the Endeavour spacecraft embarked on the STS-88 mission.
07:42This was the first mission to the International Space Station.
07:47And then, on the 11th of December, NASA took and published a series of images where you could clearly see
07:53an unusual object in Earth's orbit.
07:55These photos were immediately picked up by the public.
07:59Everyone thought it was the Black Knight satellite, which had been discussed for years.
08:04Had it finally been found after 100 years of speculation?
08:08But as usual, the truth turned out to be much more boring.
08:12During the mission, one of the astronauts was installing a thermal cover.
08:17But the coating was fully fixed.
08:19It broke off and flew away.
08:21The photos were taken just to document this event.
08:25The Black Knight is a very interesting legend.
08:27You can dig into it for hours, looking for new information and evidence, and then watch it getting debunked.
08:34This story is a pileup of many completely unrelated stories, reports, photos of real satellites, and so on.
08:41All this was mixed into one incoherent, illogical urban legend.
08:45Illogical, but very fascinating indeed.
08:51Ever wondered what it would be like to hear the sound of a black hole?
08:55Huh, NASA's got you covered.
08:57Here is a screaming black hole.
08:59Screaming in space?
09:00I thought in space no one can hear you scream.
09:03Well, let me explain.
09:05Using a telescope, NASA examined the movements of hot gas in a cluster of galaxies in 2002.
09:11Then they converted what they found into a sonification.
09:15The sound, how can I put it politely, wasn't appealing, but that's okay.
09:20After all, you're able to hear the noise hot gas produces in a cluster of galaxies 250 million light-years
09:27away.
09:28Hey, how would you like to hear the sound gas produces right here on Earth?
09:32Eh, never mind.
09:34Sound waves already existed over there in the gas cluster.
09:37So, experts just rescaled them to the range of human hearing.
09:41This is how they converted the input coming from the telescope.
09:45The principle is universal.
09:46In our atmosphere, we can hear stuff because pressure waves move through a medium like liquid or gas.
09:53Sound waves in these galaxies can also move because they're surrounded by gas.
09:58What does it have to do with black holes?
10:00Well, the thing triggering those pressure waves in the cluster is a giant black hole.
10:05To be more precise, it's a supermassive black hole that weighs millions of times more than the sun.
10:11Wow.
10:12Experts still don't fully understand the relationship between supermassive black holes and the clusters surrounding them.
10:19They only know that these two evolve together.
10:22They're interrelated.
10:24The cluster feeds the black hole with new material and so on.
10:27And in return, the black hole heats the cluster.
10:31That's all we know.
10:32Now, this made me wonder how large the biggest black holes are.
10:36There are four types of black holes.
10:39Stellar, intermediate, supermassive, and miniature.
10:43Naturally, the biggest ones fall into the category of supermassive.
10:46The largest black hole in the universe we've discovered so far is about 66 billion times larger than the sun.
10:54It's one of the brightest objects in the universe.
10:57Astronomers keep scanning space and finding new black holes.
11:01But have you wondered when the first black hole was spotted?
11:05It was discovered by different researchers independently in 1971.
11:09Scientists first confirmed that these objects were formed from the remnants of massive stars.
11:14After a black hole appeared, it then consumed all the nearby objects.
11:18Here is a quick recap of how these space objects work.
11:22Their gravitational force is super strong.
11:25Nothing can escape a black hole after crossing the event horizon.
11:29Black holes eat everything, just like me.
11:32I mean, even light gets trapped inside them.
11:35What's even cooler, slash scarier, is that the laws of time and space become distorted there.
11:41If you were falling into a black hole, you would realize that time slows down there.
11:46Einstein explains this in his famous general relativity theory.
11:50In very, very basic terms, time gets affected by how fast you are moving at extreme speeds.
11:57NASA has discovered a rapidly growing black hole.
12:00But don't worry, the world isn't in danger.
12:02This black hole has been in front of the eyes of astronomers this whole time.
12:07It's in a region of a well-studied sky field.
12:10Astronomers say that this hole formed 750 million years after the Big Bang.
12:15You know, the birth of our universe.
12:17So, why are black holes so bright?
12:20Well, that's a bit ironic.
12:22When I defined this space phenomenon, I said that black holes were so dense that even light got trapped there.
12:28But, ask any astrophysicist, and they'll confirm that black holes are among the brightest objects in space.
12:35That's because black holes don't exist alone.
12:38They sit at the centers of galaxies and are usually surrounded by clouds of hot gas.
12:43And these clouds create cosmic auroras around black holes.
12:47I must mention, though, that you can't see a black hole directly.
12:51What you see is actually the effects it has on its environment.
12:55For instance, you can see space objects being ripped apart by a black hole.
13:00Remember when the first-time-ever silhouette image of a black hole was shared with the public in 2019?
13:07Proof, you fellas.
13:08You wouldn't really see the black hole if there was no orange ring.
13:12Why is the ring orange and not green or purple?
13:15The dark shadow inside is the shadow of the black hole.
13:18The glowing orange of the bright ring in the image isn't the real hue of the gas.
13:23I'm a little heartbroken here.
13:25It's a representation picked by researchers to depict the brightness of the emissions.
13:30A scientist explained that yellow is the most intense emission, red is less intense, and black has little or no
13:37emission at all.
13:38In the optical range, this ring would likely seem white, perhaps tinged with blue or red.
13:44Now, spaghettification is a real word.
13:48That's an astonishing ability black holes have.
13:51If a giraffe fell into a black hole, it would stretch into a long, spaghetti-like strand.
13:58On Earth, the giraffe's legs are closer to the center of Earth, so they're more powerfully attracted to the surface
14:04than the animal's head.
14:05This rule works in the animal's favor on Earth, but would work against it inside a black hole.
14:11In a black hole, there's extreme gravity.
14:13The closer the giraffe's legs got to the center of the black hole, the more the pull of gravity would
14:18stretch them.
14:19And the closer to the center the giraffe got, the faster its legs would move.
14:24But the top half of the giraffe's body would be farther away, so it wouldn't move toward the center as
14:30fast as the legs.
14:31Here comes the spaghettification.
14:34Can we have meatballs with that?
14:35No?
14:36Okay.
14:37The only difference between a black hole and our sun is that the center of the hole is made of
14:42super dense material.
14:43It provides the black hole with a strong gravitational field that can trap everything, including light.
14:49This is why we can't see black holes.
14:52Did you know that, theoretically, you could turn anything into a black hole?
14:57For instance, if you shrank the sun to approximately four miles across, you would compress the matter inside to an
15:04extremely small size.
15:06This would make it so dense that our star would turn into a black hole.
15:10You could do the same with a planet, or even your own body.
15:14Is there something called a white hole, or is it just a myth?
15:18White holes exist, in theory.
15:21Hypothetically, they function in the opposite way to black holes.
15:24Nothing can enter them.
15:26Physicists think of black and white holes as yin and yang, or two sides of the same coin.
15:32For them, a white hole looks exactly like a black hole, which makes different things come out of it.
15:38But the existence of white holes hasn't been proven yet.
15:41And how about wormholes?
15:44There are so many movies about black holes and wormholes.
15:47How many of them are based on reality, and how much is fiction?
15:51Some people believe that black holes function like wormholes.
15:54You go inside and exit in another part of the universe.
15:58Since we still have a lot to learn and discover about physics, no one can prove this theory is wrong
16:03or right.
16:05Astrophysics says we need to have a solid theory that unifies general relativity with quantum mechanics.
16:12Black holes are among the largest structures in the universe, but there might be tiny specimens.
16:17The mass of the smallest black hole we know about is only three times greater than that of our sun.
16:24Now, apparently, black holes can vanish.
16:27Stephen Hawking developed a theory of Hawking radiation.
16:29According to it, radiation decreases the mass and rotational energy of black holes.
16:35And ultimately, they evaporate.
16:38This process occurs very slowly, though, if we're not talking about small black holes.
16:43Astronomers have discovered an elusive black hole in the neighboring galaxy.
16:48What makes this one special is the fact that it's the first dormant stellar black hole outside of our galaxy.
16:54This type of black hole is hard to observe because such holes don't interact much with their environment.
17:00They don't emit as much radiation as other black holes.
17:04Well, back on Earth, what about sinkholes?
17:06Well, different physics.
17:08Yet, if you cross the event horizon, your whole car can disappear.
17:13Whoops!
17:15Recently, Chinese scientists discovered something interesting on the Moon.
17:19An unusual crystal.
17:21Moreover, they found out that this crystal contains an element that can literally replace nuclear fuel.
17:28Let's find out more.
17:30The composition of the Moon has long remained a mystery to us.
17:34Half a century has already passed since the Apollo mission.
17:38Unfortunately, we haven't traveled to the Moon much since then.
17:41So, it's not surprising that it's not so easy for us to study it.
17:44But, recently, we've made a breakthrough in this area.
17:48In December 2020, Chinese scientists sent the Chang'a 5 probe to the Moon.
17:54The mission was named after the ancient Chinese deity of the Moon, Chang'a.
17:59Quite poetic, isn't it?
18:01Anyway, after the probe went to the nearest side of the Moon,
18:04it spent several days digging through the surface and rocks, and then returned to Earth.
18:09In total, it collected about 4 pounds of various lunar rocks, like basalt, solidified lava, and so on.
18:17And yeah, maybe it doesn't sound too impressive, but it's actually a mini-breakthrough.
18:22After all, we hadn't received any lunar samples since 1976.
18:27And these samples are very important for learning the history of our world.
18:32We've been struggling for many years to find out, for example, how the Moon was born at all.
18:38Yes, there were a lot of theories, but we still couldn't find any proper evidence for any of them.
18:44But thanks to the latest missions and some computer simulations, scientists finally found out the truth.
18:50The Moon was born when some random dwarf planet crashed into our Earth many millions of years ago.
18:57This dwarf planet was slightly smaller than Mars.
19:00The fragments of the Earth went into space, but some of them stayed in our orbit.
19:05Then they stuck together and formed the Moon.
19:09It sounds horrifying, but in reality, the birth of the Moon was the best thing to ever happen to our
19:15planet.
19:15If it weren't for this beautiful satellite, all our oceans would be small puddles.
19:20Life wouldn't have appeared on Earth at all.
19:23So this is already an amazing discovery.
19:26But that's still not all.
19:28Studying the collected rocks, scientists from the Beijing Research Institute discovered something unusual.
19:34A rare lunar crystal.
19:37Looks pretty boring, doesn't it?
19:39Just some tiny transparent monocrystal about the thickness of a human hair.
19:43We've already found such things on the Moon before.
19:47These crystals were formed as a result of volcanic activity, just like some garnets on the Earth.
19:52And yep, the place where they discovered these crystals also suffered from volcanoes, 1.2 billion years ago.
19:59That means that this tiny baby is over a billion years old.
20:05But that's not the most important thing.
20:07It's the fact that this crystal is made of a unique material, the one that we've never seen before.
20:14Researchers from the International Mineralogical Association have confirmed that such a composition can't be found anywhere on Earth.
20:22The crystal was named Changasite, again after the same Moon deity.
20:28And this is another achievement.
20:30This is the sixth previously unknown mineral that we've found on the Moon, and the first one found by China.
20:37Now, it has become the third country in the world to make such a lunar discovery.
20:42However, this tiny crystal still wasn't the only remarkable thing they found.
20:46After studying this gem and about 140,000 other lunar particles, scientists have discovered something else.
20:54They found helium-3.
20:58Why is it so important?
21:00Because this is one of the elements that feed the Sun and other stars in our universe.
21:07We tend to say stuff like, put out the Sun, the Sun is burning, and so on.
21:12And this is one of the reasons why many people actually think that the Sun is a huge fireball.
21:18But it's not.
21:19Its burning is actually a completely different process, which is called nuclear fusion.
21:26The process itself is quite simple.
21:29During this reaction, hydrogen in the star turns into helium.
21:33But this simple process is actually one of the most violent and insane reactions in the universe.
21:39There's a real boiling broth of particles inside the Sun.
21:43The hydrogen nuclei that jump and rush there are constantly repelling each other, since all of them are positively charged.
21:51And so they could continue to boil and chill around without bothering anyone, if it weren't for the stars.
21:58The stars turned out to be cheaters.
21:59They have such strong gravity that they basically grab billions of these little atoms and squeeze them together.
22:07Combining with each other, these atoms create new heavy elements, like the mentioned helium.
22:13And when this happens, they throw a lot of energy into space.
22:18And that's how the Sun burns.
22:20At the same time, it spreads so much energy that we can't even imagine.
22:25Okay, so what is helium-3?
22:28Well, this is an element to which even the Sun can say,
22:31Whoa dude, you should calm down.
22:33The fusion of helium-3 atoms releases even more energy than in typical nuclear fusion.
22:40And most importantly, it doesn't pollute the atmosphere with harmful things like radiation.
22:46We have very, very little helium-3 on Earth.
22:50Its prevalence in our atmosphere is about one in a million.
22:54And besides, it's constantly trying to escape from us back into space.
22:58Probably feels some bad vibes from us.
23:02However, scientists have recently found out that there's a place that contains a lot of this element.
23:08Yep, you guessed it, it's the Moon.
23:12We think that there's more helium-3 on the Moon than on Earth because of the solar winds.
23:17The Sun has been hammering on the Moon with its helium-3 for billions of years.
23:22So now, it's all over the place.
23:24It's still not too much if you compare it, for example, with Jupiter or Saturn.
23:29But don't forget how much energy it can release.
23:33For your information, with only 25 tons of helium-3, it's possible to provide America with energy for an entire
23:41year.
23:42Now, there are 35,000 tons of it here on Earth.
23:45And more than a million tons on the Moon.
23:49Only these sources could feed the entire U.S. for thousands of years.
23:53So basically, in the future, helium-3 may become a new source of fuel.
23:59And it's better than nuclear fuel in basically everything.
24:03Helium-3 won't leave any harmful waste and radiation.
24:06It's more powerful and not that dangerous.
24:09In other words, this environmentally friendly and efficient energy could be a revolution for our planet.
24:16Sounds cool, huh?
24:18So, what are we waiting for? Grab the shovels, you might say.
24:22But there's a little problem here.
24:25Unfortunately, we haven't yet come up with anything as wildly strong and hot as the stars.
24:30To use helium-3, we need crazy temperatures and pressure.
24:35We need a thermonuclear reactor, and we have no idea how to build it. Yet.
24:41And, even if we could heat it up to such temperatures and get the needed pressure,
24:45we still don't really know how to handle helium-3 correctly.
24:50Therefore, even if we have an infinite amount of helium-3, we still won't be able to use it.
24:55But still, there's a great power behind helium-3.
24:59So it's not surprising that different countries have already started a race for nuclear resources.
25:05Now that Chang'a 5 has discovered a new helium-3 deposit on the nearest side of the Moon,
25:10this race can become downright global.
25:13For example, China already plans a new lunar mission in 2024, Chang'a 6.
25:20During this mission, they want to collect the first samples from the far side of the Moon.
25:26As you can see, finding this lunar crystal was very important for us.
25:30These crystals can help us find new ways to create helium-3.
25:34And if we manage to do that, humankind will enter a new era.
25:39But to do this, we still have to solve a number of problems.
25:43How to deliver a bunch of these lunar crystals to Earth,
25:47how to make them produce energy, and so on.
25:50Let's hope that in the future these issues will be resolved,
25:53and we'll find a way to produce clean, safe, unlimited energy.
25:57Let's see.
25:58Let's see.
25:59Let's see.
25:59Let's see.