- 19 hours ago
Our satellites keep finding unusual space objects. Sometimes we know what causes these incredible objects in space, but others remain unsolved mysteries. Here are some awesome space facts and recent space discoveries that have scientists scratching their heads!
Category
🎈
FunTranscript
00:00There's a giant ghostly hand that stretches across space.
00:04Its eerie fingers are reaching for a glowing red cloud that looks like molten space lava.
00:10Although it looks like a scene straight out of a sci-fi movie, it's 100% real.
00:15The hand was formed after an enormous star collapsed in a huge supernova explosion.
00:20The boom created a new star that is bursting with energy.
00:24The energy given off by the star is so big that it caused debris from the explosion to swirl around
00:30it.
00:31This is what created the supernatural-looking hand.
00:34The hand is so big that it stretches a colossal 150 light-years.
00:40As for the lava-like structure it's reaching for, that's actually a huge gas cloud.
00:45So while it looks spooky, it's completely harmless.
00:48And you can go to sleep tonight without worrying about a giant ghostly space hand scooping you out of bed.
00:54There's a bizarre star hidden in the depths of space that seems to randomly flash on and off.
01:00It's known as Tabby's star, and its light dims at super-irregular intervals for really odd lengths of time.
01:07There have been so many theories about what's causing this, from meteor showers to outer space interference.
01:14The comet shower idea was quickly debunked.
01:17Dust from comets, which would block the light, goes away after a couple of months.
01:21Tabby's star fades slowly over decades, so the timing just doesn't add up.
01:27It can't be down to planets either, as no planet is big enough to block that much light from a
01:32star.
01:32After years of speculation, scientists have finally found an explanation for the strange phenomenon.
01:39The dimming and brightening are actually a result of space dust.
01:43A ring of dust surrounds the star, which often temporarily blocks its light.
01:47On day 8 of its mission in 2019, China's lunar rover discovered something really strange on the far side of
01:56our moon that caught the attention of the entire world.
01:59While navigating a path around a bunch of lunar craters, it spotted something really weird lurking inside one of the
02:06moon's holes.
02:07It was a colored substance, just like gel, that we'd never encountered before.
02:11The curious material was a rich, dark green color and glistened like diamonds.
02:17After a year of analyzing the foreign substance that measured 20 inches by 6 inches, the scientists finally came to
02:24a conclusion.
02:25The glistening effect seems to come from glass.
02:29In space, it usually appears as a result of lunar impact melts.
02:32This means that it's most likely from a comet or rock that has hit the moon and melted upon impact.
02:39But while it's likely that the strange substance is just melted rock, scientists aren't 100% sure.
02:46This is because the pictures were captured under bad lighting conditions,
02:49and there were a bunch of other factors that badly impacted the quality of the images.
02:54So, the jury is still out on this one.
02:58There's a huge space cucumber floating through the galaxy, and no one really knows where it came from or why
03:04it's there.
03:05Okay, it's not exactly a cucumber.
03:07Or a pickle.
03:08It's more likely a super-enlongated rock.
03:11Scientists think it may be longer than half a mile, but only 540 feet wide.
03:16It's traveling so quickly that there's no way it's bound by our sun's gravity,
03:21meaning that the strange object was formed somewhere outside of our solar system.
03:26We don't even know how long it's been wandering through space.
03:29It's estimated that it entered our solar system during the Victorian era.
03:33But who knows where it had traveled before that.
03:37For years, we've been told there are 8 planets in our solar system.
03:419, if you count Pluto, which got kicked out of the club some years ago.
03:45But that might all be about to change.
03:48There may be an enormous secret world lurking in the midst of our system,
03:52which scientists are calling Planet 9.
03:56This undiscovered planet could be way out past Neptune.
03:59There are seemingly unexplained clusters of orbits there.
04:02And this hidden 9th planet would explain this.
04:05The planet, if it exists, would be 10 times the size of Earth,
04:10take at least 10,000 years to orbit the sun,
04:13and would sit over 200 times further out than our home planet.
04:16This is why it's been so tricky to identify,
04:19as it's almost impossible to take a picture of.
04:21In 2019, 30% of the area that the planet is likely to be in had been searched.
04:27It will take at least another 2 years to cover the remaining area.
04:31In the meantime, we'll be waiting on the edge of our seats.
04:35No.
04:36Strange radio waves are beaming down on Earth, and scientists are baffled.
04:41These fast radio bursts are sudden, unexplained, and last just milliseconds.
04:46We first picked up the weird signals in 2007,
04:49and scientists have been scratching their heads ever since.
04:53They appear to be coming from outside the Milky Way, millions of light years away.
04:58For us to pick them up from that far away,
05:00they must be emitting more energy in a fraction of a second than the sun does in 80 years.
05:06Most of these signals only came once,
05:08which would have made identifying them much easier,
05:11until this all changed in 2017.
05:14In August, a signal was picked up that repeated 93 times,
05:18ruling out speculation that the signals were being caused by random one-off events.
05:23To this day, we still don't know what's causing the signals.
05:28Back in 2014, NASA captured a surprising picture of the sun
05:33that showed that it might like to play dress-up.
05:36A brilliant storm of magnetic fields caused the sun to look like a flaming jack-o'-lantern.
05:42Even weirder is that the image was captured on October 8th.
05:46It was possible because of something called active regions.
05:49These are basically areas of the sun that have greater levels of light and energy.
05:54This is what gives the flaming look in the images.
05:56The light forms two eyes, a nose, and a wide, jagged, smiling mouth.
06:02Fortunately, this look was just a coincidence.
06:04And there isn't a giant pumpkin-carving enthusiast lurking in the depths of space.
06:09Hey, I want to know, is this a trick or treat?
06:13Space fans spotted what appeared to look like a spoon on the surface of Mars.
06:18It was half covered in dust.
06:20They noticed it after images from a Mars rover had been released.
06:23As spooky as the suspicious silverware may sound, it was just a trick of the light.
06:29The spoon is just a regular old rock, albeit in a slightly odd shape.
06:34The play of shadows in the photo made the object look even more spoon-like.
06:39Maybe there's a dish nearby that the spoon ran away with.
06:42A cosmic eyeball floating somewhere among the stars is no regular-sized eye.
06:48It measures an incredible 660 miles across.
06:52One of Saturn's moons, Tethys, has become a bit of a celeb to space fans.
06:57The spherical moon sports a large crater that makes it look exactly like a giant interplanetary eyeball.
07:03There's even a set of peaks inside the crater that look like an iris.
07:08Saturn has a gang of 60 moons in total.
07:11And Tethys isn't the only one that looks like a random Earth object.
07:15Prometheus looks like a potato.
07:17Atlas resembles a pita bread freshly served from a Greek restaurant.
07:21And Mimus even looks like some villain's spacecraft.
07:25And then there's this.
07:27There's a giant cat's eye right in the middle of space.
07:30Its official name is NGC 6543.
07:34But that's kind of long and boring, so most people call it the Cat's Eye Nebula.
07:38And it's actually one of the first nebulas to have ever been discovered.
07:42Like other nebulas, it was formed by a star that shed its outer layer of gas.
07:47The gas floated off and produced this amazing and intriguing structure.
07:51The star fires off this layer of gas every 1,500 years.
07:55Each time it does this, it creates a spectacular new dust shell.
07:59Hey, don't get me started on gas.
08:03You're flying above Earth on the International Space Station at an altitude of 250 miles.
08:09You cast a glance out the porthole, and your eyes widen in surprise.
08:13There's some kind of bright blue flash just above nighttime Europe.
08:17It's like there was an explosion of some strange substance there.
08:21Such a strange luminous event was spotted by a French astronaut from aboard the ISS.
08:26And it wasn't an explosion at all.
08:29It was lightning, and was directed upwards.
08:33Until recently, this phenomenon was a kind of fairy tale among pilots.
08:37Scientists had heard their stories about lightning striking upward,
08:41and about red and blue flashes at high altitudes too.
08:44But there was no definitive proof of the existence of these luminous events.
08:48But they do exist, and are called sprites, elves, trolls, and ghosts.
08:54So how does ordinary lightning work?
08:57Masses of moist air in a cloud rub against each other and create static electricity.
09:02It would be almost the same if you danced in a wool sweater.
09:05It becomes charged with static electricity.
09:07And if you touch a metal doorknob, there's a discharge between your fingers and the door.
09:12There's your lightning.
09:13So a thundercloud builds up a strong negative charge.
09:17Sooner or later, a leader is born in the cloud.
09:20It's a bright thermo-ionized channel.
09:22Or more simply, lightning.
09:24The leader moves toward the ground in steps of a few tens of feet.
09:28And it can accelerate to an average speed of 200,000 miles per hour.
09:33At that speed, you could make a trip around the Earth in just 7 minutes.
09:37But negative particles attract positive particles.
09:40And particles with opposite charges will tend to connect and compensate for each other.
09:45So, simultaneously with the negatively charged leader,
09:48the positive charge from the Earth begins its upward journey.
09:51The electric charge from the Earth connects with the negatively charged leader in one channel.
09:56This is when the brightest and loudest discharge happens.
09:59We call it lightning.
10:01It's this discharge that you hear as thunder.
10:04The main lightning doesn't strike from top to bottom, but from bottom to top.
10:08Yep, that is, the lightning is actually directed upward.
10:12It's as if the Earth is striking back at the thundercloud.
10:16And that charge can reach up to 30,000 amps.
10:19Your average wall outlet only has about 15 amps.
10:22And the record for the length of lightning is about 440 miles.
10:26That's more than the width of the state of Kansas.
10:29Meteorologists recorded such lightning in Brazil.
10:32It was a discharge between giant thunderclouds.
10:35And the longest lightning strike was recorded in Argentina.
10:38A single lightning strike there lasted 16.3 seconds.
10:42By comparison, you blink at 0.1 seconds.
10:46So we saw a regular lightning strike.
10:48The positive particles from the ground neutralize the negative particles in the cloud.
10:53But the cloud is still full of positively charged particles.
10:56They accumulate and wait for their time to create lightning.
11:00Once the charge reaches a critical point, the lightning cloud throws that charge dozens of miles upward.
11:06This is called a blue jet.
11:08It's exactly the same luminous event seen by a French astronaut aboard the International Space Station.
11:13The blue jets look like someone turned on a gas burner pointing upward.
11:18The positively charged blue jets neutralize at high altitudes with negatively charged particles.
11:23But people on the ground cannot observe blue jets.
11:26Thunderclouds obstruct the view.
11:28But they can be seen from an airplane.
11:31That's why, for a long time, commercial airline pilots were the only witnesses to this phenomenon.
11:36On board the ISS is also a great place to observe jets, as they are born at the very top
11:42of thick clouds and shoot dozens of miles upwards.
11:45But if you climb even higher, you can see this kind of bizarre lightning.
11:49It's a sprite.
11:51It looks more like a jellyfish.
11:52A cloud of red charge at the top and a bunch of little tentacles coming down.
11:57Now, normal lightning can have a temperature of about 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
12:01But you can touch a sprite with your hands.
12:04Unless, of course, you're afraid of a powerful electrical discharge.
12:07The sprite has about the same temperature as an energy-saving light bulb.
12:11All because sprites are born in the mesosphere.
12:14This is the layer of our atmosphere that starts at about 31 miles high.
12:18And it's the coldest place on our planet.
12:20On the ground level, where we live, the air is much denser.
12:24There are just more air molecules.
12:26They absorb heat from the sun's rays.
12:28And we feel comfortable.
12:29But the higher up we go, the fewer air molecules there are.
12:33At the altitude at which commercial airline planes fly, there's no longer enough air to accumulate that heat.
12:39You wouldn't even be able to breathe up there.
12:42That's why every airplane has oxygen masks for emergencies.
12:45And the temperature here is even colder than at the South Pole.
12:49In the mesosphere, there's almost no air.
12:52And the temperature here can be around negative 202 degrees Fahrenheit.
12:56And although the temperature of the lightning itself is high,
12:59In general, it's like if you poured a glass of boiling water into a huge barrel of cold water.
13:04The temperature won't change much.
13:07Sprites can only appear when paired with thunderclouds below.
13:10As a discharge occurs in a cloud, a sprite appears in the mesosphere.
13:14It tries to equalize the amount of charge in the atmosphere.
13:17So it's like these red flashes of lightning are trying to reach down to the thunderstorm.
13:22And a sprite itself can be as wide as the state of Massachusetts.
13:27And then there's a ghost.
13:30It can appear for the tiniest fraction of a second right after the sprite.
13:34It's a faint green glow like an aurora.
13:36They were first discovered in 2014.
13:39And official confirmation by the scientific community only appeared in 2019.
13:44They're still poorly understood.
13:46But there's a hypothesis that ghosts have something in common with auroras.
13:51At least their color is green.
13:52And it may arise due to excited oxygen atoms.
13:56Sometimes we can spot trolls along with sprites.
14:00They look like pillars that support a sprite.
14:02It's a red glow at the end of the sprite's tentacles.
14:05The next moment, the troll releases a red streak down from itself.
14:10And if we climb even higher, we can see the elves.
14:14They only appear for one millisecond.
14:16It's a dim, flat glow that appears during thunderstorms in the ionosphere
14:20at an altitude of about 62 miles above sea level.
14:24Elves can be as wide as the distance between New York and Washington, D.C.
14:28Elves were first discovered during space shuttle flights in 1990.
14:33And these are pixies.
14:35They weren't discovered until 2000.
14:37Scientists observed bright, brief, luminous events for 20 minutes.
14:42Although they look like lightning striking inside a cloud, they have nothing to do with them.
14:46Pixies are smaller than 100 meters, which is about 330 feet.
14:50We shouldn't forget that any lightning is extremely dangerous for humans.
14:54And if you're caught in a severe thunderstorm, you need to leave its epicenter immediately.
15:00You can determine how far you are from the epicenter easily.
15:03The speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound.
15:06So, when lightning strikes, it takes a couple of seconds until you hear the thunder.
15:10So, you need to measure that interval.
15:13Lightning.
15:14Now, count the seconds.
15:15Every second of thunder delay after lightning is about 1,150 feet.
15:20That's the distance a wave of sound travels in one second.
15:23So, if the thunder delay after a lightning strike is five seconds, you're about one mile from the lightning.
15:28You can also tell if there will be a thunderstorm by the smell.
15:32The air before a thunderstorm seems unusually fresh.
15:36This is because the air currents bring in ozone molecules from the upper atmosphere.
15:40The same ozone protects us from harmful ultraviolet rays and transfers heat from the sun to the atmosphere.
15:47What we use to breathe is the oxygen of two atoms.
15:50Add one more and you get ozone.
15:53Ultraviolet light breaks down the two oxygen atoms and is absorbed by them.
15:57These broken atoms are then attached to the normal double oxygen atoms.
16:01When an ultraviolet beam strikes an ozone molecule, it knocks one oxygen atom out of the chain again.
16:07But ozone tends to regenerate.
16:09So, the lost oxygen is reattached to other double atoms.
16:13But the ozone layer began getting damaged when humanity started emitting harmful gas into the atmosphere.
16:19Freon is to blame.
16:21It's the gas we were using in old refrigerators.
16:23The freon molecule contains harmful chlorine atoms.
16:27Ultraviolet rays knock this atom out of the molecule.
16:31Then that chlorine atom steals one oxygen atom from ozone.
16:34And we have a double oxygen molecule that can't regenerate and save us from the harmful ultraviolet rays.
16:41This causes a hole to appear in the ozone layer.
16:44The most famous ozone hole was over Antarctica.
16:47But when humanity banned the use of harmful chemicals, this hole began to recover.
16:52It's not that the hole will close completely.
16:54It will just return to the way it was before.
17:17Something like this might happen because scientists have recently picked up a strange radio signal off that star.
17:23Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our solar system.
17:26It's only 4.2 light-years away.
17:28That means a beam of light that starts from this star reaches Earth in 4.2 years.
17:33That's also 270,000 distances from Earth to the Sun.
17:37The star Proxima Centauri itself is too pale for us to see with the unaided eye in the night sky.
17:43But its system hides a little secret.
17:45Let's fly there and take a closer look.
17:49So here's this red dwarf.
17:51It's 7 times smaller than our Sun and 8 times lighter.
17:55Proxima Centauri is 1.5 times bigger than Jupiter and almost 150 times heavier.
18:00But what we're looking for is a little further away.
18:04This is Proxima Centauri b, a planet similar to Earth.
18:08It's only 10% larger than Earth and is in the habitable zone of the star.
18:13It's the perfect distance, not too far away and not too close.
18:17So the temperature isn't too high or low there either.
18:20Water, if it exists on that planet, can be in a liquid state.
18:24And so, life can survive and evolve there.
18:27Maybe it's developed enough to send us the signal that we had received.
18:31A radio's signal is basically waves.
18:34They have a certain frequency and length.
18:36And we can always tell an artificial signal from a naturally generated one.
18:39The signal that we picked up from Proxima Centauri b had a frequency of 982 megahertz.
18:45The regular radio we listen to in the kitchen or in the car picks up signals around 100 megahertz.
18:50That's why scientists have concluded that the signal was created artificially.
18:55Such signals could have a way of communication between the developed worlds.
18:59If this is really a message from an outer space civilian, we should be able to decode it.
19:04For this, any civilization must use the simplest method of encryption.
19:08For example, Earth has already sent a radio signal into space.
19:12It was the Arecibo message.
19:15This message consists of 1,679 digits.
19:18It's a rectangle of 23 by 73 squares that has information about our civilization encoded using a binary code.
19:26At the top of the rectangle, there's a system of numbers that we use.
19:30They're marked in white.
19:32This purple thing is the key to read the next part of the message.
19:35The atomic numbers of the elements like hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus are encoded in this key.
19:42These are the key elements that can start life.
19:45If those who receive this signal can make sense of the numbers in the key, they can read the next
19:50part of the message.
19:52These green things are the building blocks of our DNA chain.
19:55And right at the bottom here is the DNA chain itself.
19:58The white rectangle indicates the number of pairs of these building blocks.
20:02And the blue spirals show the shape of a DNA chain.
20:05And then we see the human silhouette itself.
20:08The white and blue object to its left is a coded number of our average height.
20:12The human itself is drawn here at the ends of the DNA strand, so that the outer space civilization can
20:18understand what we look like.
20:20And the white rectangle to the right of the human sketch is the number of Earth's population at the time
20:24of the message.
20:26That's 4.2 billion as of 1974.
20:29Almost half the number we have now.
20:31The next part is a drawing of our solar system.
20:34The big yellow square is the sun.
20:37Then come all the planets in our solar system, including Pluto.
20:40Pluto, Earth is shifted up a bit here, so that outer space civilization can understand where this message is coming
20:46from.
20:46In the last drawing is the observatory from which this message had been sent into space.
20:51This signal is now on its way to the M13 star cluster 25,000 light-years away from Earth.
20:57So it won't get there for another 25,000 years.
21:00And we'll need another 25 to get a response if there is really someone on the other side who can
21:05receive the signal.
21:06If the signal from Proxima Centauri is also a message, we'll need time to decode it.
21:12So let's fire up our super-powered computing machine and wait for the result.
21:16But this isn't the first mystery signal we've ever picked up on Earth.
21:20Scientists recorded an unusual, wow signal, in 1977.
21:25They supposed it came from somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius.
21:29The telescope was picking up the unknown signal for an impressive 72 seconds.
21:34Later, a scientist who looked at the printout of the signal concluded that the signal was artificial.
21:39He wrote, wow, on the printout as his reaction.
21:43The following observations and studies couldn't catch this signal again.
21:47Some theories said that this signal came from a celestial spaceship flying by.
21:51It had flown away, and we could no longer detect the signal.
21:55But most likely, this signal was created on Earth.
21:58It was directed upward but reflected off an object at a high altitude.
22:02It could have been an airplane, a satellite, or space debris orbiting our planet.
22:06Then the signal was picked up by the telescope.
22:09And because it was human-made, all of its characteristics, like wavelength and frequency, could have confused scientists.
22:17In 2017, scientists recorded a flare on Proxima Centauri.
22:21The star's brightness increased by 1,000 times in just 10 seconds.
22:25Before that, there was another flare there that was weaker but lasted about 2 minutes.
22:31With these flares, Proxima Centauri has emitted enormous amounts of radiation.
22:36Even if there was life on the star's companion planet, these flares would have likely destroyed it.
22:41The stellar winds would have simply blown the atmosphere off the planet and made its surface lifeless.
22:46Overall, the planet Proxima Centauri b receives 60 times more high-energy radiation and 400 times more X-ray radiation
22:55than Earth.
22:56Scientists have concluded that the probability of life here is 1 to 100 million.
23:01And while we don't know yet for sure if the signal was artificial or natural,
23:05the scenario of a bunch of spaceships coming to Earth is most likely possible.
23:09Our only method for searching for outer space civilizations is using radio waves.
23:14They're like loud noise that blasts away from our planet in different directions at the speed of light.
23:19The main problem here is the gigantic distances.
23:23Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light-years wide.
23:27Suppose there's life at the other end of it.
23:30If we send a radio signal to them, it won't reach that supposed planet for another 100,000 years.
23:35And we won't get a response for another 100,000 years.
23:39It's the same if someone once wanted to contact us.
23:42We didn't learn how to create and receive radio signals until the 19th century.
23:46If a civilization was developing at the same time as us somewhere in the Milky Way,
23:50and they invented the radio, we won't get their signal for several millennia.
23:55Plus, the radio noise from our planet is starting to fade away.
23:58We use Bluetooth, fiber optics, cable TV.
24:01So in about 100 years, we'll no longer be visible to other worlds.
24:06Or worse, what if there was an outer space civilization somewhere that was sending signals into space?
24:12The signals were reaching our planet, but we didn't yet have the technology to pick them up.
24:17The world that was sending the signal has evolved, and the signal went out.
24:21We could have caught those remnants of the radio waves that were moving through the universe.
24:25But we set up the antennas too late.
24:28There are about 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.
24:31Each of them contains billions and trillions of stars similar to our sun.
24:36Maybe there's a planet near one of them that looks like ours.
24:38Life could be blooming there.
24:40In this outer space civilization, just like us,
24:44is looking through telescopes in hopes to catch the radio signal from an unknown planet.
24:48Here we go.
24:49Let's see.