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Saturn's Rings & Earth's Spin: Physics · Acedra
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Saturn's Rings & Earth's Spin: Physics
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0:13
millions of years ago Saturn has an extra
0:23
Moon perhaps 400 km across and formed almost entirely of ice
0:33
but this moon is doomed it's orbiting just too close to resist the immense forces of Saturn's [Applause] Gravity the Rings probably formed from an object that got too close to Saturn there's this invisible boundary around Saturn called the RO limit and that's the limit depending on what you're made of where Saturn's gravity is strong enough will actually pull you apart that the gravity on the side closer to Saturn is strong enough that compared to the gravity on the other side that will L
1:07
literally rip you apart you don't have enough gravity of your own to stay
1:23
together a leading theory suggests that just beyond Saturn's atmosphere an ice Moon approaches close to or even just inside its Ro [Music]
1:38
limit as Saturn's immense gravitational force pulls it apart the moon begins to rupture
1:52
catastrophically a world ripped apart by its proximity to a giant
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up to 177,000 trillion tons of ice breaks apart an orbit around Saturn
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and thanks to the speeds this material is traveling it's likely that in just a few days it spreads out to encircle the great [Music] giant Saturn's iconic ring is now in [Music] place but as Cassini turns its instruments towards it it sees a single ring
3:42
transformed the images we returned they were phenomenal they were resolution a factor of maybe 20 times better than anything we had had before [Music]
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Cassini reveals how Saturn's giant rings have
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evolved this debris now forms a dis wider than Jupiter yet on average just 10 m thick within moon-sized chunks of ice orbit the structure clearing great voids turning one ring into
4:34
many but it's as Cassini captures images with the sun directly above the equator that the most surprising feature of the Rings emerges we knew this was going to be a time for us to investigate the third dimension something that you don't get to see when you just look at picture of Saturn's rings and what we found was staggering
5:09
just right out of the gate we saw vertical structures I just can't tell you how surprised we were to see this it's just the spectacle of it was just unanticipated I have just imagined flying along in a shuttlecraft across the ring right close to the ring so to my perspective it would be almost like it was an infinite sheet of gleaming debris and I'm flying along and flying along and flying along and suddenly I come upon a wall of rubble that's 2 miles
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High I mean is that cool or what really i' I've said over and over again they should put that in a movie this once Tiny World of rock and Ice that has seen the most dramatic Transformations is today the Solar System's greatest
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[Music] Jewel after more than a decade in orbit Cassini has forever deepened our understanding of Saturn but its mission is far from Over the Earth is speeding up it's literally spinning faster could it cause a tech meltdown and what have melting glaciers got to do with it you may or may not know mean I wouldn't expect you to know there are 86,1 160 seconds in a day but scientists who measure time have found that in 2021 the average date is 0.05 milliseconds less than this that's
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because the Earth is literally speeding up okay so you might think 0.05 milliseconds so what but this actually goes against everything that we expect to see happen and scientists are desperately trying to find an answer because since its creation Earth's spin has actually been getting slower in a not very recent history the days on Earth used to be twice as fast but what does a fastest spinning Earth actually mean 3.5 billion years ago the planet's rotation used to be only 12 hours long
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at that kind of pace life would really suck we'd have nightmarish weather patterns with hurricanes tearing across the land centrifugal force would pull water towards the equator flooding entire region like Indonesia and the northern tip of South America okay that's a worst case scenario and Earth is unlikely to ever spin that fast again but if we keep speeding up it could be bad in another way by 2030 there could be a fullscale technological meltdown GPS relies on
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precision timing and if a day Falls too far behind that 24-hour Benchmark there could be disastrous consequences for one satellites could lose their correct place in the atmosphere and we'd lose all means of being able to predict where they are in the sky if we leave this slip for too long without correcting it then our navigation systems will be completely wrong throwing all of our smart technology off course fortunately for us we can sidestep This Disaster and there's a
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fairly easy workaround timekeepers can add and take away what's known know as leap seconds to account for these tiny differences they can alter what's known as International atomic time which can be adjusted for the subtle discrepancies between the Earth's rotation and our clocks and what's pretty mind-blowing is that by observing the night sky we can keep track of these tiny changes so keeping time is a pretty skilled art form that's how we know that the Earth
9:26
is spinning faster but that doesn't explain why despite billions of years of slowing down the Earth's rotation is speeding up so what's causing it this is Dr Jazz Hill Valor she's an expert in how the climate affects the Earth's rotation so we probably all know that the melting ice caps is going to cause sea levels to rise well it's also causing the Earth to spin faster and what happens when the earth spins faster is that we get a greater centrifugal force imagine a figure skater when you
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watch figure skaters they start off spinning really slow with their arms out and as they bring their arms in they start to turn faster and faster that's because they're bringing more mass towards the center of their rotation so how can that happen on the earth well water has this crazy property where when it freezes it actually expands so if you think about all of the glaciers and the mountains and the ice sheets as being these huge tall towering sheets of ice
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well what would happen if we suddenly melted them really quickly which is something that we're seeing happening at the moment if we take all of that mass in those glaciers and those ey sheets and suddenly it melts and gets closer and closer to the surface just like the figure skate are bringing their arms in all of that mass is going towards the center of rotation meaning that the Earth is going to start spinning faster this melt water currently sits at the poles this is why right now scientists
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believe the Earth is spinning faster than usual so will it get faster forever here's the conundrum actually scientists expect this to be just a blip although it's been getting faster for the last 2 years experts expect the Earth to go back to its longer term pattern of slowing down and it's the moon that's causing this this is to do with the tidal relationship between the Moon and the Earth we only see one's face of the moon it's tidally locked with the Earth so as
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the Earth is turning the Moon is pulling the ocean towards it and then as we move away the oceans go back round and that causes our Tides so this kind of wobbly dance between the Moon and the Earth means that the Moon is slowing down the Earth and all that energy that's lost from the earth slowing in its rotation is getting put into the moon's orbit and the Moon is actually moving further away as it continues to drift away the effect of the moon's gravity on Earth weakens
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causing us in the longer term to slow down what's more over time the melted water in the polar regions could actually make the earth spin slower some scientists believe that the water will drift towards the equator which will further slow down the Earth's rotation this is called equatorial bulging think of it as a big spare tire around the middle of the Earth it exists already down to the centrifugal force exerted on the Ocean by Earth's rotation but adding to the weight of this tire is
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no good thing all of that excess water is going to go and sit around the equator which means that there's more mass further out from the center of rotation the equatorial bulge of water is going to get higher which means that around the the equator there's going to be even higher sea levels than we originally predicted it could mean that hurricanes and typhoons and Cyclones that form at the equator could become more severe because there's more water vapor there so the increased severity of
13:16
these storms because of the Earth spinning faster is probably only going to be a temporary effect but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried about it because more severe storms means that we're going to see more severe natural disasters happening all over the planet so although at first glance it doesn't seem that important that the Earth is spinning a bit faster it really does matter because it could be a big hint as to what else the climate crisis has in store we lost calm with the
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spacecraft if the spacecraft wasn't back up and running by the time we flew past Pluto our 9year weight would have been for nothing there's a little bit of drama because this is true exploration New Horizons is flying into the unknown when we got there we saw something that absolutely blew our minds it was incredible wow when we saw these photographs of what it actually looked like really a world in its own right it was mind-blowing there was active geology on Pluto right now
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something so far from the sun should just be a cold dead world but it's not it had this living breathing heart 3 2 we have IGN and LIF off of NASA's new horizon we've been using the best telescopes that we had available to us to observe it for years uh most notably The Hub Space Telescope and through a lot of observations a map was made of of Pluto's brightness but it was very fuzzy you have some light periods and dark bits but that's all we had the voyage of
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spacecrafts that explored the rest of the solar system didn't go past Pluto we had to send a dedicated spacecraft to go and have a look at Pluto because we'd never seen it before I mean lots of people mve their personal life around their work and and mine's no different but it's it is different in the sense that you know the spacecraft goes past Pluto once in your lifetime and so uh we arranged our wedding ahead of that and then we actually decided to wait to have children until after
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Pluto when you have a mission like Pluto you have times where you you really are quite busy on the mission you're taking you data we flew past Jupiter that gives you data we're looking at the stars to make sure our instruments are still operating and they're healthy but there are periods whereby you know the the spacecraft is in hibernation it's spinning it's not taking data if there's a problem it knows how to call us but other than that it's it's just marching forward towards [Music]
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Pluto we lost Cal with the spacecraft totally silent and so you can imagine when you're in any kind of critical situation the worst thing is lack of any information and that's essentially what we had Pluto Ace mom on New Horizons Pluto 1 could you advise why we are not locking up to Telemetry about the 4th of July so American Independence Day in 2015 it goes into safe mode just stops doing anything except pointing back to the Earth and telling us there's a problem
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mom Pluto Ace stand by I'll check with the station on the status of telemetry so to put that into context our encounter is 10 days at this point out and it's a flyby we're going to go past Pluto once we're not going to slow down we're not going to snop we're not entering the system we're flying by it the spacecraft wasn't back up and running by the time we flew past Pluto our ninee weight would have been for nothing Station 43 Pluto a mom on New Horizons Pluto 1 go ahead Pluto Ace we
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found the spacecraft um it was responding to us it was giving us information but it was in a state that could not accomplish the encounter with Pluto it takes 9 hours to talk to the spacecraft at that point and so we were doing the tests on the ground making sure that the sequence that we going to upload was working it took us 3 days to do that around the clock we um slept in our offices no one wanted to leave um because we had waited all this time and there was no way that we were going to
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let this opportunity slip by and it will transmit a message back to the Earth for about 20 minutes in which we'll find out how it's doing but there's a little bit of drama because this is true exploration New Horizons is flying into the unknown so before we enter the Pluto system we downloaded the highest spatial resolution observations we'd made to date there's only five of us in the whole world that had seen this image of Pluto my hair looks better like that and
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we're all just sitting there at that moment of like
18:16
whoo we've recorded data of the Pluto system and we're outbound for
18:26
Pluto to see that was just incredible life-changing experience look what we accomplished it's it's truly amazing humankind can go out and explore these worlds um and to see Pluto be revealed just before our eyes so when you see an image of a new world especially one as diverse as Pluto there are so many things you can take home from it and and one of the first that jumps out of me is that heart-shaped region that's in the middle of the cter Hemisphere and in particular
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on the left hand side of the heart it's very smooth and you don't get smooth regions in on any worlds unless there's some form of active reprocessing and so there was active geology on Pluto right now couldn't believe it still can't really so why is it so geologically active we still don't have all the answers does Pluto have a subsurface ocean there was mountains with holes in which points to the idea of a volcano maybe it's a crow volcano a volcano that erupts ice and that would be better
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explained if there was enough heating to sort of maintain a liquid water ocean Pluto is really cold really really really cold colder than you could possibly imagine cold it's so cold that water there is sort of the Bedrock it's the ice is so hard it can form mountains which is something that of course just couldn't occur on the earth and so on Pluto we see these we see these big ice structures so it all kind of implies that there's lots on Pluto that is quite
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fresh and new and so whether you could have life that is in a sort of this this contained Place subsurface so dark but with an with an energy source it it's hard to imagine from what we know of life it's not impossible but it's going to be a difficult thing to to get to see because it's so far from the earth we don't want to do any harm you certainly wouldn't want to send you know a probe into this PR World CU you could kill everything that was in there just as you
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discover it so it's definitely um the thing of sci-fi and and it's fun to think about but it's going to be a really difficult thing to test anyone that's been working at home during this lockdown uh will understand the frustration of limited broadband and we have this on New Horizons because the spacecraft is so far from the earth getting a signal back is so weak it's meant that our 6 GB of data that the spacecraft took during the encounter is still being download down loaded you're
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really trying to make sure you have everything on the ground before it gets wiped from the spacecraft before it's gone for from Humanity forever you want to make sure you have everything you know true exploration isn't something that normal people get to do right I've got to explore worlds that have never been seen before and and I think once you've had that taste it's just you can't let it
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go it's not quite adrenaline junky stuff but you want to do it again and so it would be would be absolutely incredible to do it twice in a lifetime what a privilege black holes aren't what you think they are they're not holes they're not black and we can actually see them and we've even managed to take a picture of one you are currently looking at something inredible the first ever image of a black hole the one at the center of the Messier 87 Galaxy 55 million light
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years away now we know there's a black hole at the center of our galaxy the Milky Way which is 27,000 light years from the solar system and we know that it's super massive because in 2008 Professor Andrea gats in a team measured how big it was and found that it was 4 million times more massive than the sun this measurement was such a big deal that in 2020 she won the Nobel Prize in physics to work this out they studied the orbits of the Stars moving at incredible speeds around the black
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hole and used this to weigh the black hole if there's a black hole at the center of our galaxy that's going to force these objects that are really close to the black hole to move much faster than they would move if there were no black holes so the first thing you want to see is that there are very fast moving objects where you think the black hole is if there's a black hole there's a further prediction you can make about what these stars are going to are going to do they are going to move
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around the black hole on very short periods in other words going to be able to see them move on more than just straight lines as part of their um their travel around the black hole these stars are going to move around the black hole because the gravity just like planets move around the Sun contrary to their name and to Common belief not all black holes are black in fact the gas and dust that spirals around the black hole can be accelerated to huge speeds which
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heats up due to friction causing it to Glow in fact feeding black holes are some of the brightest objects in the entire Universe there's a super massive black hole in the center of every Galaxy so how do we know when quazars were first discovered they were thought to be hugely bright stars and any ideas of them being black holes were dismissed as just crazy but we now know they are feeding black holes and they're described as feeding because stars and gas cards that get too close
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are torn apart violently by the immense gravity and then lost Beyond The Event Horizon to become part of the black hole they're essentially like a little snack for the black hole there's a quazar at the center of the signis a Galaxy that's a trillion times brighter than our sun and dror Andy Fabian from the University of Cambridge is studying this quazar with x-ray images these help reveal the gas clouds that are orbiting around the black hole there's a lot of other things going
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on out there an enormous amount of energy being released which we can only be aware of if we look with x-ray eyes we could see what was going on at the center and we could start to understand how the black hole was feeding energy out into all the surrounding gas the friction generated by this dense atmosphere of gases produces the hottest and most electrically charged environment in the universe what we know is that the hotter something gets the brighter it gets the
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more light it emits by feeding on all this gas the black Hol sometimes end up with just too much material around them and end up burping out a load of it which then impacts the Galaxy this can actually expel a load of the gas that the Galaxy would have used to make more stars and essentially stopping the Galaxy from growing any bigger so black holes seem to wield a worrying amount of power they can literally control how how big a Galaxy can grow galaxies could in a way be much
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bigger than they currently are something is stopping them growing larger and that something is the black hole at the center now this is bizarre because the ratio of the size of the black hole to the size of the Galaxy is the same as the ratio between a grape or something this big and the size of the Earth it sounds impossible that something that small would have so much control over something that big but that is what's going on it's been calculated that the mass of a black hole
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is on average about .5% of the mass of a galaxy essentially the bigger the Galaxy the bigger the black hole will be this correlation made astronomers start to wonder whether black holes might have been present or even responsible for the birth of their Galaxy cuz it really meant that there was something linking these tiny super masive black holes in the center of galaxies with the whole galaxy itself it meant that somehow their whole history had been intertwined
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that the growth of the galaxies and the growth of the black holes was somehow
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related now in the early Universe we don't know if stars formed first or if black holes formed first but if the black hole formed first then the Galaxy of stars could have then formed out of the gas that was swirling around it what everyone really wants to know though is what happens when a star gets swallowed by a black hole well a couple years ago a gas cloud called G2 came perilously close to the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our galaxy The
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Milky Way this is the first time really in human history that we have not only known an event like this was going to happen but we are prepared with the right sort of technology to see the details unfold astronomers monitoring the event were able to test the effect of the black hole on this gas cloud it was essentially on a collision course with one of the most powerful entities in the entire universe and it was being stretched out on its way there was moving quite fast and it's not moving in
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a straight line but it's a curved line and that's a very very bad sign because it tells you well there's something acting on it it's it tells you wow gravity is pulling on that object instead though it was spaghettified and it circulated the black hole and then was essentially catapulted back out into space lucky Escape for the gas cloud this event confirmed that it is possible to get perilously close to a black hole and still Escape so there's a black hole at the center of every Galaxy and they
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have the power to dominate everything around them but they're not just giant Hoovers sucking everything up around them Stars gas dust they're all happy to orbit them with no issues we're seeing the black hole at the center having a Galaxy wide effect on the surroundings so if they really do have a galaxy-wide stronghold and the one at the center of the Milky Way has been there since its existence that means that you me and all the stars that we can see have always
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and are currently right now now orbiting a super massive black
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hole this is one of the few places in our solar system where we have a good chance to look for life there's evidence for a vast subsurface ocean below the icy crust of the Moon the amount of water that suspected there is many times more than all oceans together we have on Earth on the PO you're approaching minus 200° C icicles that could be several meters high might be present and if you're very lucky then you might just spot a plume erupting nearby like an ice volcano that ejects
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material from the subsurface to enormous altitudes um on top of that there's uh good good chance that there's an energy source at the bottom of the ocean hydrothermal activity that can support the emergence of life that makes uh Europa
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outstanding Europa Clipper is the first mission that goes to the outer solar system that has the exclusive goal to investigate the habitability of the body in the outer solar system will launch in October 24 and will arrive at Jupiter in April 2030 so it's 5 and a half years for Europa Clipper Jupiter has like about 70 moons so the number increases like every every year by a bit but there are four moons that stand out that are the so-called Galilean moons the
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innermost is IO then Europa then ghid and then Kalisto with the telescopic observations before the arrival of the first spacecraft you could see that some of these moons are really really bright they reflect way more light than a rocky surface would and so for example Europa and also Enceladus they are one of the brightest uh objects and so it was suspected already at that time that the surface might be composed of shiny reflecting water I I mean after the investigation
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of the uh Galileo spacecraft in the late '90s Europa became a prime target in planetary science um all over the solar system because with a huge subsurface ocean with the spectr tidle thermal activity that became the first place that could be habitable in our solar system uh besides maybe Mars that immediately sparked uh proposals of missions to go back to Jupiter and specifically investigate Europa I mean if you are a planetary scientist probably the most rewarding science goal
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is to see if a planetary body is habitable or actually inhabited so Europa Clipper will stay in orbit around Jupiter and in most of its revolutions it will have a close flyby at Europa um and the flybys are arranged in a way that it's like a web in the end surrounding the Moon that you have in the end a good overview over uh almost the entire surface after these 50 flybys during this closed flybys you you get uh an idea of what is uh evaporating from the surface of Europa and from that
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of course you learn uh about the makeup the composition of the surface and this is of course specifically true if there's plume and vanting activity that's what I really would put a smile in my face if we could measure plue material um that's connected to the subsurface ocean of Europa the instrument called suda the surface dust analyzer the instrument I'm working on it measures the composition of tiny grains that are surrounding Europa mostly ice grains and these
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grains are um knocked off the Surface by microm meteroid impacts with the suda instrument we can set sample these materials and with that we get an idea about the surface composition we could constrain what Sals were there in the ocean uh what the if there's an alkaline neutral or basic environment if there's hydrothermal activity at the bottom of the ocean what the organic chemistry uh inside the ocean has evolved to unfortunately we currently only have one example of a planetary body or Moon
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where life exists and so it's very difficult to speculate about the nature of life elsewhere if we look for signs of Life on an icy moon like Europa it probably most straightforward to just look for simple forms of life if there would be complex civilizations um in the subsurface oceans we probably would have known by now right but I know that um at least for the life on Earth the access to oxygen is important to develop complex life compared to simple monocellular life so
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um this is one of the big science question that Europa Clipper wants to answer has Europa ocean exess to oxygen that is created on the surface so is material from the surface cycling back down to the ocean if yes then oxygen might be Avil in the ocean and this opens up the possibility for more complex life not just a single cell but maybe fish like a complex life everything between uh one cell or no life or fish-like life like complex organisms that might be even intelligent
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or not nobody knows it's really up in the air I look very much forward to the launch it will be launched on Falcon heavy that was decided only a few months ago so one of Elon musk's rockets and I'm very much looking forward because I never saw a rocket launch in my life I like to see it but on the other hand it'll make me nervous so if the that's always a problem if if Rockets have a chance even the safest Rockets have a chance of like a 1% or 2% that there's
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some failure and uh then everything was in vain because all the development has been done most instruments have been crafted twice that you have a spare so I really hope that the launch will go well so I think it's one of the most exciting missions there is and I'm really glad that I can participate uh in these Endeavors so humans are going to Mars and soon lots of them SpaceX could be going as soon as 2026 NASA and China by the 2030s and India Russia and the
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United Arab Emirates are all planning on it too but what happens when they all get there how can we actually survive well some lucky scientists have already been
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there okay okay not really they're living in a Mars simulation right here on Earth to troubleshoot what could go catastrophically wrong when they do go to Mars it's time to explore the [Music] unexplored okay let's break this down into two key challenges we're going to need to overcome if we go to Mars the physical and the psychological let's start with the physical in many ways Mars and Earth are quite alike it has a similar dry land mass volcanoes craters and its days are
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just 37 minutes longer than ours what would you do with an extra 37 minutes but that is where the similarities end and it's the differences where the problems start gravity is just 38% of that on Earth it means that you can jump higher but you'll lose muscle mass imagine Dwayne The Rock Johnson training his chest every day with an 100 kilo bench press to maintain that impeccable physique suddenly you land on Mars and all that's available is a 38 kilo weight over time his chest is going to get
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weaker and weaker and it's a similar situation for astronauts going to Mars then there's the atmosphere which is incredibly toxic it's around 95% carbon dioxide and to make matters worse Mars is bombarding Ed with radiation you get the idea Mars is extremely dangerous but luckily there's a team of scientists who are actively trying to resolve these problems before we get
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[Music] there so when we talk about Mar simulations what we're doing is we are trying to mimic the surface phase of a human robotic Mars mission there's a million things that can go wrong so when we think about Mars we're talking about a world that is up to 380 million kilm away from the earth which happens to be about a thousand times the distance to the Moon and so it's probably thousand times more things that can go wrong what we learned through our missions it's not only the big things
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that are challenging it's a small thing think of being in the space suit uh despite the air condition you start to sweat but you cannot scratch your nose in the helmet obviously so little things like a little piece of foam where I can simply rub your nose into it and and make sure you don't sneeze inside a helmet which is a very bad idea by the way um is is a little thing that that doesn't sound very glorious but it's the things that make your work easier and um
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uh and really making sure that you have um gone through the ins and outs of those little details can be a GameChanger we have been doing those Mars simulations for 13 campaigns now since almost 20 years now and there's literally hundreds hundreds of experiments we did and many of them went wrong or did not turn out the way like we expected of them to to do and so we live and breathe the Mantra of fail fast fail cheap and have a steep learning curve because that's where you you you
39:39
get better we died many deaths um simulated of course so gravity atmosphere and radiation are not actually the main concerns these are the big things that we already know about that we can create technology to help mitigate them it's the small things that we don't know about yet there what could kill you and there's a lot of them so far the answer to most of the physical challenges has been better technology and better space suits but physical survival is only part of the battle the
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team are also pioneering incredibly Advanced psychological studies to figure out who will be the best humans to go to Mars we we think that there is no such thing as a born astronaut when we select analog astronauts uh for the austan space for this has been done very very carefully it's a multim month process we're evaluating we just did a recent con from the last class uh 637 individual parameters anything from your chiso level to the uh length of your pinky finger and your ability to
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entertain little children and psychological factors and so on you're much more looking for team players who are outstanding when it comes to health uh but they also have technical competence but at the same time who are also to display social warmth uh they are they know how to tell a joke in the airlock at the right time they know how to cook they know how to do a magic trick they can play the guitar they can also set up you know settle down a a broken leg or so we're not looking at
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the psychological clones of each other but they need to complement each other um and so we're looking actually from the anthropometric point of view we're looking for the average Joe the average Jane or an average JY so we have people who in the beginning who have a high technical competence but then you the work doesn't stop here because you need to continuously mon monitoring the activities throughout the mission that's exactly what we're doing our our simulations for instance we are uh in
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the previous experiment in 2018 in Oman we had a um an artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm actually who was looking into the pitch of the voices uh when people talk to each other and we know when people are under stress the pitch shifts just slightly above the the average uh or for this mission in in Israel right now we had uh one of the experiments was fantastic experiment the astronauts would have uh locators so we could produce heat Maps where the
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astronuts would congregate throughout the mission or also relative heat maps how much physical spacing they have in between them if you don't like somebody you tend to increas the distance for instance and so we're looking at the methods that tell us here's a stressful situation emerging before the people would realize it and magically then everything goes according to plan and so it's it's about keeping them functional by keeping them happy by feeding them
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well you know um no food no fight uh but also making sure they they they don't smash each other's heads before leaving the lunar orbit so with the right training technological development and people management Dr gromma believes that we can definitely survive on Mars but so far we've only been focusing on a finite scientific mission go survive for a bit and then return and that's understandable given how many risks there are for even doing that but this hasn't stopped people from dreaming
43:01
even bigger Elon Musk has famously said that we're going to Mars for good to become a multiplanetary species some scientists have taken this and come up with some scary speculative solutions to explain how we might survive one of those is through mutations the high levels of radiation on Mars could cause our bodies to change and it's possible that that some of these changes might actually help us survive it's hard to predict how quickly this might take and the effects that it
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might have but some scientists say that it could take just a few Generations like we could see changes in our skin tone to deal with the radiation could we go green our bone density might alter to account for the lack of gravity and we might not even need our immune systems because we'll be living in such a sterile environment but all of this is only relevant if we're actually going will we really ever be setting off to Mars for good yes we will I give I can give you this in written it's only a
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natural process if you I think at the core of our beliefs and of heart and our DNA we are a migratory species our children and grandchildren will look up in the sky to the moon and see little dots of light out there on the lunar surface saying we are out there it's a statement to the universe and the same will happen tomorrow as in the worlds Beyond it's just a matter of time the James web Space Telescope is revealing the universe like never before our planets the furthest
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galaxies and the strangest phenomena and what you can see is actually material falling into a black hole and that's only in the first few weeks there's going to be a lot more discoveries to come the James Webb Space Telescope is a product of Decades of hard work from scientists around the world I have been waiting my entire astronomy career for jwst it is absolutely revolutionary compared to what was available it's very very rare in science that you make a big step forward in your measurement
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capability in the way that jwst has done for astronomy and it's just it just doesn't happen very often in the history of Science and that's really exciting and significant one of the things that makes James web so special is its gigantic mirror so that there are various things that make the primary mirror on James web special and incredible I mean the first is the sheer size of the mirror it's the largest one ever launched the web mirror is around 6 and 1/2 m in size so if you can imagine
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that that's bigger than most houses you're walking by it's so large it wouldn't fit in the rocket so they had to devise a way of folding it up so that it would fit inside the um the top of the rocket it's absolutely humongous and that makes a really big difference in terms of the sensitivity of the telescope well it's thousands of times more sensitive than Hubble is a step forward of factors of a thousand or more factors of several thousand in fact I'm correcting myself the bigger the mirror
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the more light you collect the bigger the collecting area the more sensitive you are and the further you can see the other thing that makes it absolutely incredible is um the the the Precision with which it's been made if the mirror was stretched to be the size of the United States and and you were to measure the size of the biggest bumps and dips on the mirror you're only looking at a bump or a dip of order 1 cm in size it's it's absolutely incredible and that's what generates the the near
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perfect images from the primary mirror but it's not just the mirror that makes the images from James web so incredible it's also the type of light that it detects the James Webb Space Telescope detects infrared light which is a wavelength of light that we can't see but the unique properties of infrared make it incredible for exploration so with the infrared light you can see the atmospheres of exoplanets there molecules in D formation regions things like caffeine
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and alcohol and water ice the signatures of life around other planets so just a few things then infrared opens up the possibilities for astronomers like Olivia and allows them to capture images that would previously be impossible in the optical range but even within the infrared Spectrum there are multiple different wavelengths on board web there are three instruments that observe near infrared this is closer to the visible spectrum but the instrument that's garnering the
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world's attention is the mid infrared instrument on board jwst known as Miry Marie is essential for jdst without it you can't see the cooler phenomena in the universe you can't peer back as into the early stages of star formation as you would like so Samir is an incredibly significant and important instrument the image is um contains far more detail than has ever been done before when we look at it in a new wavelength of light we find things that we hadn't expected to see and
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that's a really important part of how you discover things about the universe Miry allows us to see further along the infrared spectrum and this in turn allows us to see through dust clouds and further back in time than ever before that's because as galaxies move away from us the color they emit shifts further into the infrared so the longer the wavelength we can observe the further back in time we can see but despite the capabilities of Mir it very nearly didn't make it on board
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James web so mie wasn't initially part of those plans because it seemed technically very complicated and I think people were thinking about the science in a slightly different way and so I started making the case that really we needed to add a mid infrared facility to the telescope Jillian Wright is the European principal investigator for Mir and the director of the UK astronomy Technology Center and was instrumental in pitching to get Mary on board web when when I found out it was confirmed
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that Mary was going to be on board I I remember being very happy and also knowing that I was going to be very busy for a large number of years Jillian wasn't wrong construction of James Webb Space Telescope started in 2004 and 17 years of work later on Christmas Day 2021 with Mary securely on board the telescope finally launched and lift off deage liftoff from a tropical rainforest to the Edge of Time itself James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the
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universe I've been looking forward for the web lunch for many many years and as it got closer to Christmas day I was extremely nervous I don't think my family enjoyed Christmas morning with me because I had on the TV um the web launch playing and I was I was quite nervous I had my pillows ready in case I needed to hide everything went perfectly it was it was an incredible launch it was a pleasure pleasure to watch so it was a very good Christmas present it was
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a lovely Christmas present it really was over the next few months the James web Space Telescope traveled over 1.5 million kmers away from Earth to its new home gradually turning on the instruments along the way so then it was getting really exciting cuz we we've been from Christmas day all the way through through until um the late the late spring when Miry finally gets turned on as the instruments are being turned on it's both exciting and and it's nerve-wracking because you you know
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that there could be things wrong after Decades of work the James web Space Telescope was finally operational and it wasn't long before the images started coming
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in I knew when web was going to take its first images they were going to be spectacular what had not prepared me was just how spectacular they going they were going to be the first images were just incredible just so beautiful it was amazing and then when the first images came back I was just absolutely astounded at how good everything performed and I've been smiling ever since it's almost emotional the images are spectacular and the only thing more spectacular than the
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images are the discoveries that lie within them so one of the things I think that's really exciting about the early images is the way they show how Mary really adds information I can see details in there that I knew existed but I never thought I'd be able to see with a scientific instrument some of the first web images released were of the Southern Ring Nebula this is a planetary nebula which is a star at the very end of its life in the mirror image we see actually
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a second star so we can see a red star and a white star so these are actually a binary system in and that's the very first time we've seen this binary companion in the southern Ring Nebula this is an image of Stefan's quintet five galaxies that are interacting with each other and what you can see in this galaxy up here is actually material falling into a black ho hole in an active Galactic nuclei you can see the material in the galaxy is actually aiting and falling into the Galaxy
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itself this is 13 times further than what we've been able to see before in the infrared I mean jwst has already found the furthest galaxies we've ever seen the highest red shift ones the closest and that's only in the first few weeks of operation and that's really exciting and I think it's an indication that there's going to be a lot more discoveries to come with web we've designed it to answer many of the questions we already know about the universe but as with all new telescopes
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there's a realm of new discoveries the Mysteries that will arise I think they're really exciting new questions to answer the questions we don't know how to ask just now and I think that's really exciting to see something that nobody not only has nobody ever seen it before but nobody expected to see it I feel very privileged to be part of this I'm proud to be part of jwst it's been an amazing journey and a fantastic privilege really to be part of it I think it's just incredible I had a I
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helped make that instrument and and when I see these images I'm just full of
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smiles Scotland's astronomer Royal Katherine Haymon believes observations of the universe don't agree on its age because the mathematical models aren't quite [Music] right she suspects our understanding of the dark universe may be an illusion right our best information about the universe tells us what the universe looked like right after the big bang and from that data we can come up with a model of what the universe should look like today but what we're finding is that the
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universe that we observe isn't quite what we expected and we can't fully explain the universe that we're observing today means that we can't trust it when it tells us how old our universe is just doesn't add up Catherine thinks that although researchers have calculated how much of the Dark Universe is out there they've little real idea of its impact we know that the stuff we're made up of the Earth the moon the sun everything we can see in the universe that accounts for less than 5% of it the
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rest is dark two components dark matter and dark energy Dark Matter that's the kind of the big gravitational stuff that keeps everything Bound in our universe together and then ha it's evil twin dark energy which appears to be causing the expansion of our universe to accelerate those are our three main ingredients and we only understand 5% of it so you could picture this as an epic fail alha science we don't understand 95% of our universe but I like to think of this as
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a big challenge uh because if we can understand that then uh hopefully that will really revolutionize our understanding of uh everything around us to try and work out just how dark matter impacts the universe Catherine investigates how it has evolved over time since the Big Bang so this is a map of Dark Matter spanning across the sky where you can see bright spots that's where there's lots and lots of dark matter and as the color gets darker that's where there's emptier voids where
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there's much less dark matter in our universe and uh what we're finding is not what we were expecting we can see clumps we can see voids we can see that Cosmic web likee structure but it's not exactly what we expected it's a lot smoother than predicted for what we should see today that's a bit of a problem CU it takes time for these dark matter structures to form Catherine has spent decades fine-tuning and finessing her Dark Matter map so for about the last 20 years I've
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been working to map out the invisible dark matter in our universe this is our map of the North we've got another map of the South and whilst this is one of the largest dark matter maps that we've ever been able to make it's still quite a small patch of the sky so we might have been unlucky this might have been just a weird patch of the universe that we've looked at but it's not exactly what we expected and the fact that this is a lot smoother suggests that the universe is
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slightly younger than we first thought as yet Catherine is unsure just how much younger but her work continues
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sent to look for conditions where life could have begun is NASA's Mars reconnaissance
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[Music] Orbiter mro sends back more data than all other Mars missions combined [Music] M has three cameras on board the first is the Marcy weather camera it sees Horizon to Horizon on every orbit so it builds up a map of the entire planet every day so you can see a global weather map every day on Mars the second camera is the context camera it provides high resolution and it's covered about 99% of the surface [Music] mro has made more than 60,000 [Music] orbits it's highresolution cameras
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revealing Mars in unprecedented detail discovering polar [Music] Avalanches shifting sand dunes
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and what look like seasonal flows of sand or even liquid
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meltwater then in 2017 mro turns its gaze to one of the red planet's oldest features the aidonia Basin thought to have been an ancient sea aridia Basin is a huge Basin in some of the most ancient crusts on Mars it Formed about 3.8 billion years ago and it held more water than 10 times that of the great lakes or three times that of the Caspian Sea on
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Earth and it is on the ancient seabed that mro sees something remarkable emeros saw a massive 4 100 m thick deposit formed from a mineral that forms in deep sea hydrothermal environments such as one that might have undersea
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vents Mars not only had the same ingredients for life as Earth it also had an active environment to spark it into
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action aridia Basin was an ancient sea 3.7 to 3.8 billion years ago and that's about the same time when life was first emerging on Earth this might have been a place where life could have existed because those hydrothermal vents underneath that sea might have created a very conducive environment for life these initial conditions in the history of both planets look so similar that it seems reasonable to expect that this could eventually lead to life [Music] these actively fertile
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conditions are thought to survive in places like the eridania Basin for hundreds of millions of [Music] years but then 3.7 billion years ago something happens that transforms prospects for Life on Mars forever
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[Music] Mars underwent a fairly substantial transformation in its climate climate got colder what liquid water there was either soaked into the ground and froze or froze at the surface a lot of It ultimately would get transported to the poles where it forms these big thick ice caps that we see today [Music] at the same time as the temperature
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plummets Mars becomes more volcanically
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active leading to catastrophic [Music] flooding water rages down from the Southern
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Highlands until in a place known as easma it plunges over Cliffs 4 km
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High creating the largest waterfall the solar system has ever seen [Music]
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[Applause] [Music]
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cascading into a spectacular Canyon 10 km wide by 100 km [Music] long once the floods subside the water disappears the only trace it ever existed etched into the planet's surface the strongest magnet in the universe has been discovered it's an exotic ultra rare neutron star it's called G OJ 2018-57 and it's got a magnetic field over a trillion times stronger than the Earth's stars like this are so strong that they have the power to do ridiculous things to anything that comes
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even remotely close if you got within 1,000 km of it you'd simply dissolve your atoms would be super stretched their shape would warp into something completely unrecognizable the molecular structure that makes you up forget about it it's gone you just disappear so nothing good can come from messing with a start like this but how magnetic is it well its field is calculated to be 1 billion Tesla Tesla is the unit we use to measure how magnetic something is just to put this into context the Earth's
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magnetic field is a millionth of a Tesla but we've cooked up something far stronger in the lab this is what 1200 Tesla
1:04:53
did despite its super charged magnetic strength the star is actually incredibly small it has a diameter of 20 km you might be wondering just what makes a star like this so magnetic first we need to find out more about how these neutron stars and their rarer subtypes come about neutron stars are created by the death of massive stars having run out of fuel their upper layers are obliterated and the core collapses we witness an extreme explosion a supernova left over electrons and
1:05:37
protons come together to form neutrons and with the right solar mass we end up with a neutron star a severely squashed down version of what was there before astronomically speaking they're the densest thing out there if you uh dropped a marshmallow onto a neutron star it would have the energy of an atomic bomb because the gravity is so powerful so they're cosmically very small but unbelievably dense let's put it another way if I had a Matchbox full of neutron star material it would weigh
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approximately 3 billion tons or let's go another way maybe something smaller like a sugar cube a Su cube of neutron star stuff would weigh as much as a mountain and I'd be very strong but what stuff makes up neutron stars why are they so dense well their insides are a bit of a mystery we know that they have atmospheres made up of hydrogen and helium and an outer and inner core made from neutrons electrons and atomic nuclei but we still don't know what hyperdense matter lies at their Center
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so does this density cause a star's Mega magnetism actually we don't know this takes us literally to the edge of scientific thinking scientists believe that as a neutron star is born the magnetic field of the previous star shrinks combine this with this unusual highly dense matter and this could cause the phenomenal magnetism it wields so we don't really know why a neutron star is so magnetic it's a total mystery but the neutron stars density is just the tip of the iceberg they are
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capable of far stranger things we observe binary systems of two neutron stars that are in orbit around each other and when we observe these systems we see them getting closer and closer together all the time so what will happen eventually is that they're going to collide and when they merge the neutron stars will be completely destroyed and form a black hole so when two neutron stars fuse together colliding violently this can create black holes but this can also give birth to things called
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magnetars and that's what is believed to have happened with our strongest magnet however there's another reason it's one of the rarest stars in existence Not only was it once a magnetar it's now what's known as an x-ray Pulsar this Pulsar is truly incredible it exists in a binary system with another star orbiting each other but it's not an equal relationship the highly magnetic Pulsar feeds off its lower density companion with energy accumulating at its magnetic poles it gives off bursts
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of X-ray pulses like a lighthouse in the deep dark corner of the universe Dame Joselyn and B benell discovered them in 1967 and wrote the rule book for how we monitor these phenomena the pulses are short and quite steep so these things have to be small the other thing that we very quickly established was that the pulse period was very very constant it wasn't getting tired which means it's got large reserves of energy which means it's big so it's small and it's big
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you have to be more precise in what you're saying it's small in width it's big in Mass so high
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density that's the first Pulsar cp1 1919 so that's what it sounds like if you listen to the radio signal
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so that's a whole star spinning at that rate and there are some that are even faster if you listen to the fastest one it would sound like your kitchen blender it's going at 700 revs per second but we still don't know so many things about stars like the strongest magnet in the universe crucial elements of the mystery remain unsolved why are these Stars so magnetic and what is hidden deep in their core maybe one day the Stars Secrets will be revealed Jupiter played a crucial role
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in developing life on Earth thank you Jupiter we normally just see the very top layer atmosphere there are so many secrets of Jupiter contained below these clouds so I'm currently analyzing data from the junior spacecraft Juno the spacecraft has all these magical instruments to see inside of Jupiter Jupiter is the most extreme environment NASA's ever visited to send a spacecraft there is a little bit insane this is one of the largest spacecraft ever made we had to
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you know build an armored tank to go there [Music] Jupiter's radiation environment is the most dangerous environment for a spacecraft to go into it's a region we were very afraid of because no one had ever been there before if that doesn't fire just right you fly right past Jupiter that's it you don't go into orbit you go around the solar system Again by the time you come back to Jupiter it's decades later almost there it's a very uncomfortable situation
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[Music] [Applause] welcome to Jupiter we just did the hardest thing NASA's ever [Music] done what we actually found blew our [Music] minds when you first look at Jupiter what really catches your eye is the Great Red Spot is this gigantic storm in the southern hemisphere of Jupiter is larger than the the Earth it has been around for over 200 years and it's absolutely incredible then you begin to look further away and you see these belts and SS moving in different directions on the
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planet and everywhere you look you basically see a storm and what drives these storms well likely Jupiter is collapsing very very slowly this is energy left from its formation and this energy is Rel released and it's that energy that churns the atmosphere so violently all the time this is in contrast to Earth where our weather is governed by the [Music] Sun a lot of tourists go to Northern Sweden and Scandinavia to see the Northern Lights of the earth if you want
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really want to show and something that's on all the time you got to Jupiter and see Jupiter's aora is brighter than all the energy that all the power plant on Earth can produce and is actually fueled by a volcano so Jupiter has this Moon called IO and that's fiercely volcanic spewing out material near Jupiter all the time about ton a second of material this material gets trapped by the magnetic field this energy funnels down impacting the planet and that's the Aurora we see [Music]
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what we find is vortices kind of like hurricanes they're all packed together and we've been watching them now for a year and they haven't all merged into one they're packed in in this pentagonal pattern there's actually six of them if you count the one in the center and they just sort of sit there and this is remarkable this is really the first time uh that anyone has seen such a geometric pattern of Cyclones on any planet or anywhere I look at an image like that
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and I say wow the idea that nature can make such a geometrical structure is [Music] fascinating we' known since the voyage emissions that lightning exist in the Clouds Of Jupiter what Juno found is there's a second form of lightning at Jupiter this is the signal from the microwave radiometer and it's uh measuring the heat of the planet and uh every now and then we get a spike bam it became very clear very soon that this was radio signals from the lightning in Jupiter's atmosphere maybe
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a thousand times brighter than the lightning on Earth the presence of of lightning at Jupiter hints at vast amount of water and junus actually confirmed that in the lower part of the atmosphere one out of 400 molecules is a water molecule that's a lot of water does that mean that there's life in Jupiter's atmosphere well ultimately we don't know we have a this notional what life is based on our experience here on Earth can we translate that to Jupiter can there be
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life forms floating about in the atmosphere you don't really know
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Jupiter is so massive about 300 times more heavy than the earth with all this gravitational power comes huge responsibilities Jupiter originally flung water into the inner solar system creating the conditions for Life Earth so thank you Jupiter it also likely altered the orbit of an asteroid that killed the dinosaur 65 million years ago Jupiter's presence gravitational presence is absolutely everywhere this is the outline of Jupiter and basically what we're seeing
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there are just the cloud tops but what we want to know is what's inside Jupiter before Juno we believe that Jupiter would had a really small core under which gas just stuck by gravitational forces what Juno has it's actually that Jupiter has got a really big core there's something denser it's probably like 5 10 Earth masses it's mostly made of rocks at very high pressures and temperatures so that shows that Jupiter started its life as a rocky IC world and that it capture the gas
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that was around the hydrogen and helium and that formed a giant planet that's Jupiter now [Music] I first became interested in Jupiter when I was at College in Sweden was there was a telescope on the roof and one night we got to see Jupiter with her own eyes and it was absolutely extraordinary a whole different world that I can see right there in the night sky what would he think about me today I think he'd be proud ecstatic the Milky Way could fit into the universe as we know it 10 10 million
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million million times so it's big really big and we know that it's expanding at an exponential rate which means that in about a billion years time the universe will be about 10% bigger so do we know how big the universe is right now and could we ever actually map out the size of the universe so let's start with the bits of the universe that we can actually see light has a speed limit so there's only so much of the universe that we can actually see and we call it the
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observable universe we think there are around about 170 billion galaxies in the entire observable
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universe what we really need to work out how big the universe is is a 3D map of it that's what the slowo digital Sky survey is trying to do with three coordinates you can make a 3D image of where to find all of the galaxies in the universe by placing the plate with the Galaxy coordinates over the telescope they could isolate each Galaxy individually and work out a third coordinate for each one that third coordinate was red shift with red shift the team could get the distance to each
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Galaxy from the Milky Way Dr Sagel called it a 3D movie on a colossal scale his team essentially brought the stuff of Science Fiction to life using this new map cosmologists were able to see how galaxies were arranged in space maybe you've seen things like this in the opening of Star Trek or Star Wars or whatever and and that all looks great but it's not real this movie it is the real universe
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[Music] just like how Galaxy the universe is held together by gravity but there weren't enough galaxies to generate enough gravity to actually hold the universe together most of the stuff in the universe was missing so this map LED astronomers to some more evidence for something they'd been theorizing for quite a while now it's simply not enough stuff to arrange things into the patterns that we see have galaxies spinning in the way that they do there's something else there there's
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something beyond the galaxies that we see the visible matter it's called dark matter it's invisible and we haven't found a way of detecting it in a lab yet I know it can seem like us astronomers just start making up wild theories when we don't understand maybe what's going on but we do know dark matter is there in the same way that we know the wind is there because we see the trees move we have so much evidence for it including the fact that the gravity it generates
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is literally holding the cosmos together what we finding out there in the universe is really weird it's equivalent to the idea that only one out of six cities in America actually has any people living in it there is six times more Dark Matter than there is in all of the stars and the dust in 170 billion galaxies in the entire observable universe so does that mean that the universe is six times bigger well no not quite but the universe is certainly six times heavier than we
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thought and It's Complicated by the fact that the Universe isn't just full of invisible stuff that we can't see but the stuff that we can see is also moving away from us the universe is getting bigger literally as we sit here watching it it's an observational fact that if you look at the galaxies around us and the most distant galaxies that we can see they all appear to be moving away from us if you were standing in California you would see New York moving away from
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you but from the perspective of New York you would see Boston move away by observing the brightness of supernova Professor Saul perm and his team proved that the universe is not only expanding but that its expansion is speeding up at an alarming rate at the end we concluded that actually the universe really isn't slowing down it's actually speeding up in this expansion and that was a a big shock Professor Pearl mut's Discovery was so important to the scientific community that in 2012 he was
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awarded the Nobel Prize in physics so after you establish something like that the question on everybody's Minds is why well we don't know but but we did work out what to call it we have a name for it we call it dark energy we figured out that the Universe about 68% Dark Energy the really crucial thing about how this dark energy behaves is that but it it doesn't dilute when the universe doubles in size you got twice as much dark energy make it four times as big you've
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just got four times as much dark energy so how do you measure something that's big that's getting bigger that's full of stuff that we can't see well unsurprisingly you can't at least we can't yet but what we have done is map out the stuff that we can see and as usual the universe has done things that we never expected it to do and that map revealed that the universe is flat cosmologists plotted three points of a very big triangle that went from Earth to two points in SpaceTime as far
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back as we could go if the universe were positively curved if the angles inside the triangle added up to greater than 180° then it would be finite in size if the spatial geometry is flat if the angles inside the triangle add up to 180 then it could go on forever the answer was mindblowing space itself is flat now we're not talking about the shape of space here we don't mean space is flat like a piece of paper we're talking about how light behaves in space for it to be flat it means that
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light would travel on and on in an infinite Direction and never be disturbed if space wasn't flat that light could loop back on itself it' almost be like if you could stare out for long enough and detect light faint enough then you would be able to see the back of your own head that means that the simplest picture of the universe is a universe that's infinite we really could live in a universe where there's galaxy after Galaxy after Galaxy in every direction up down sideways and it never stops
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this provided the perfect picture of what the universe looks like an infinite Universe filled with galaxies in all directions that is still getting bigger absolutely
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[Music] mindboggling what powers weather is very different depending on where you find find yourself in the solar system the Earth's atmosphere and the weather on Earth is is driven largely by one thing and that's the sun and the sun pours its energy down through the atmosphere and it hits the surface and the surface of the Earth then warms up with Earth you've got all the energy coming in from the Sun heating up the surface creating thermals that then uh then drive the atmospheric flows that we
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see somewhere like Saturn doesn't have a surface to be heated up so when you compare the weather systems on these giant planets to those that we have on Earth you have to sort of tear up the rule book a little bit the sun is the great controller of Earth's atmosphere but in the outer reaches of the solar system where Saturn lives sunlight is 100 times weaker it means some other heat Source must be driving Saturn's incredible weather
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as Cassini studied the cloud tops of Saturn it was able to infer a huge amount about the truly strange world that must lie beneath and the energy source that helps power this planet we had a whole variety of scientific goals at Saturn and one of the main ones was to understand the meteorology of the Saturn atmosphere and and what energizes the winds that we see on it and so on and we have affirmed now the belief that atmospheric systems on Saturn are actually powered by energy
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from below from an internal heat Source on Saturn they're not powered by sunlight like we have on the
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earth looking deep inside the planet reveals a heat Source shaped by extreme pressure within huge clouds of water Cassini records lightning 10,000 times more powerful than any on
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Earth this lightning transforms methane gas into enormous clouds of so
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at 8,000 km deep the pressure of the atmosphere is 80 times greater than that at the bottom of our deepest oceans enough to transform this graphite rain into diamonds
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but even these diamonds are likely destroyed by the pressures of [Music] Saturn eventually
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dissolving 30,000 km down and Saturn's heat source is revealed here pressures are so intense that the atmosphere behaves like a liquid metal able to conduct electricity in this state molten helium Falls like rain and as it merges with the surrounding material kinetic energy is released as incredible amounts of heat and it's this extreme EXT ordinary heat source that helps Drive Saturn's [Music]
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weather within just a few hundred million years of its birth Saturn has witnessed great drama now it will remain largely unchanged for billions of
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years it has the biggest volcanic plumes that we know of with exotic sulfurous compositions the highest temperature lavas that we've detected it's as hot as 1800° Kelvin so IO wins lots of awards for being extreme some of us love IO just for its own sake but it's also a a laboratory for understanding other planets especially the the terrestrial planets very early in their history when they were hotter they had more heat this was a time when when life first formed when
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plate tectonics was getting going we we in many ways studying very early Earth it's like studying another planet understanding IO might teach us something fundamental like to understand that type of volcanic eruption without having one happen on Earth today that would be unfortunate for all of us living here IO that's happening today very high Fusion rate volcanism more active than the most active volcanoes we usually have on Earth and it changes our whole view of how planets
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work for terrestrial planets like the Earth and Moon Moon our thinking is is that it's kind of like the life time of a human being when you're young you're energetic and active and then you get more quiescent and more and more quiescent then you die boring well these outer planet satellites are much more like the Hindu life cycle where you can be reborn and and go through all sorts of cycles of activity so very different concept of how planets work we have no shortage at all of of
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unanswered questions and Mysteries throughout the solar system and
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beyond right IO is um a little bit larger than Earth's moon it's one of four large moons of Jupiter it's the innermost of the four large moons and three of these moons are in a a resonance so every time ganam orbits Jupiter once Europa orbits twice and IO orbits four times this means that the the distance to massive Jupiter is varying and the whole Moon changes its shape where the surface of the Moon Rises and sinks as much as 100 m in case of IO every 42 hours that changing of
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shape it's like bending a piece of metal back and forth it Heats it
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up so we've proposed the ioa volcano observer in the Discovery program that's NASA's lowcost category of planetary Mission but uh this Mission would make 10 Close flybys of IO while orbiting uh Jupiter has a suite of instruments and the tour is designed so that we fly by IO at just the right times and places uh in order to measure the the title gravity signature we have to have pairs of identical flybys one when Iowa is closest to Jupiter and one that's otherwise identical but when IO is
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furthest from Jupiter so it sees the same signal except that dis difference in range to to Jupiter which changes the shape of of IO that'll tell us really what's going on inside IO does it really have a magma ocean and even if it has a magma ocean what type of magma ocean that's really I think the most fundamental thing that we need to get a spacecraft that makes close flybys of of IO at a minimum landing on iO and orbiting IO with be even better we have to understand
1:33:56
though IO is deep within the intense radiation of of Jupiter so Jupiter has a very powerful magnetosphere so it's a very high radiation environment it's very tough on electronics so you know we're not going to explore IO the way we have Mars with these long lift Rovers on the surface unless we have a revolution in in electronics and how how to withstand the radiation um so fast flybys is is the way around that for now uh get get in there close get a bunch of data and get
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out of that radiation as fast as you can there are volcanic plumes up to several hundred kilometers high very spectacular and uh that some of that material may be directly Escape aisle but also that high radiation environment and those energetic particles interact and strip off material if we're so close that we're in flying through a a lava fountain that would obviously be bad for a spacecraft uh we hope to fly through the upper parts of plumes where it's
1:35:06
it's mostly gas and very small particles that that are not hazardous U of course if you make a math error and impact IO that would not be good unless it was intentional to dispose of the spacecraft at the end of the mission and that is how we would plan to to end it all after the the mission is
1:35:31
over it would mean a great deal to me to see this mission go forward now I'm I'm not going to be the one leading the mission at iio you know it has to be the next Generation you have to think in terms of multi-generations when you're dealing with the outer solar system and especially when you have to spend a decade just just to get the mission approved so for me though that's all fine uh I get it started and then I enjoy life and enjoy watching uh others carry on and I have no doubt that I will
1:36:05
surprise us it's it's it's a very surprising place and it's surprised every Mission that's ever looked at it the conventional thinking is that there's no way there's life on iO it's too hot well it's only hot over 1% of the surface uh there are certainly places with with better temperatures it's also thought that there no water well we haven't detected water but we didn't think there was water on the moon either for a long time until we got better measurements so we
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might be surprised about that and also what kind of Life are we talking about the only thing we we know how to talk about is Life as we know it which is carbon and water-based life so if it's some other kind of life then who knows all bets are off so it's the surprises that will be the the most fun and most significant Wormhole scientists are absolutely
1:37:03
buzzing so what's going on sci-fi writers have always loved wormholes they're a convenient way to whiz a character through space at impossible speeds but for years scientists didn't really take much interest in them luckily there has been a recent boom in Wormhole research so what's happening could we day travel through a wormhole and what would happen if we did let's explore the unexplored let's start with what a wormhole actually is you've probably got an image like this in your mind a tunnel
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or a bridge and that's exactly what it is a bridge between two parts of the universe one way of thinking about a wormhole is almost like two black holes back to back the black holes warp the fabric of space time so much that it completely bends back in on itself and the openings can allow you to pass straight through from one point to another to understand how these sci-fi like wormholes might work we first need to understand the traditional idea of a wormhole one that's equally as
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interesting but perhaps a little less useful for space travel a non-traversable wormhole to help explain that is theoretical physicist Juan Mala one of the pioneering experts in wormholes who's actively researching some very exciting I'll be it mindboggling science so uh a non-traversable wormhole is a bit like this picture of the tunnel and so with the exception that it's a tunnel that is present at One Moment In Time and then at later times it stretches and becomes thinner and um eventually it
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collapses completely and it stretches almost infin um and so if you try to Traverse this tunnel you would go into the tunnel and the tunnel closes before you can exit on the other side so that's why it's called non-traversable and this closing of the tunnel is similar to well it's the same actually as the singularity you have in the interior of black holes and so if you try to go through this tunnel you would die so it's not recommendable to it's not recommended
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right so this doesn't seem like the most practical wormhole in the world there would have been a lot of very short sci-fi films if the leading character just hopped into one and immediately died on the other hand you could binge watch all of Doctor Who in about 5 minutes so how could we make one that we could actually travel through the previous thinking was that wormholes would immediately collapse because they're so inherently unstable what was missing was some sort of matter that
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would prop the Wormhole open long enough to travel through this is where it gets interesting to have a wormhole that uh can be held open and be traversable just as a theoretical question of whether it is possible with the matter we know it is possible but only when they are very small um now you can also ask the question of whether if we could we discover some other type of matter so that uh we could have a very big Wormhole that we as a person could go through and um the
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answer to that is yes so we could have some very uh some new form of matter that hasn't uh been discovered by it's very unlikely that this form of matter should exist that should put that from the very beginning but it is a theoretically possible to have that kind of matter and they would have to be their mouths have to be very big so that they wouldn't kill the traveler because if uh if a person goes through a region where the the curvature of space is uh is relatively large you would be pulled
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your head is pulled from your toes and you would you would die so you have to make sure that the curvature SpaceTime is weak enough and for that you need that the MTH of the Wormhole should be as big as the size of the Earth so very big so much bigger than ourselves keeping up right so there's the traditional wormholes the non- traversible ones that as soon as you enter they collapse bad idea so what do you do when something collapses you prop it open with something good idea and
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what do you prop it open with wood scaffold a force field no a weird type of matter that opposes the force of gravity that stop stops the Wormhole from collapsing we don't know if it exists but it theoretically could it doesn't defy the laws of physics simple well there's more and then uh with this type of matter you could have a wormhole but uh it would take a long time to go through it as seen from the outside so you could have one here and one on the other side of the Galaxy let's say or
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some far away and then you could go um through the warm hole it would take you let's say 20,000 years uh and that is the time for someone that remains outside but for the traveler it could take a very short time like a second you you would just go through it and you start traveling very very fast and because you travel very fast your clock runs much more slowly uh and for you it looks like it was just one second so in theory we need a new type of matter that we don't know exists yet to have
1:42:16
antimatter properties that allow it to prop open a wormhole a wormhole the size of the Earth and if we make it through with without any particles tearing through us and avoid having our bodies stretched and our heads pulled off if all of that happens and we make it to the other end everyone you know would be dead great look needless to say this is all theoretical but it is based in real physics and it's incredibly exciting there's a big buzz around Wormhole science at the moment which is usually
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some sort of side area of research and this is down to some new breakthrough discoveries scientists have finally proven that entering a black hole is not necessarily a one-way trip while this probably won't help with the issue of traveling through a wormhole it does stop the laws of quantum mechanics from breaking which is a big relief to a lot of people there's a development that has uh happened in the last couple of years where people have realized that uh this
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something similar to worm holes are responsible for getting the information out of black holes so there was this famous information problem for black holes that you can send information to a black hole and the black hole would emit hooking radiation that apparently has no information um but it it seems that the warm holes managed to get this information out of the black hole so yeah that's I think the most exciting development of the last few years so previously people thought that anything
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entering a black hole couldn't leave it this was known as the black hole information Paradox even though black holes emit radiation Ste St Hawking suggested that this radiation didn't contain any of the information pertaining to what went into the black hole I discovered that black holes are not that black after all they give off what has been called hiking radiation because of this emission black holes will lose mass and eventually evaporate completely the Hing radiation seemed to
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be random and featureless so it appeared that all the information about what fell in the black hole was lost however new studies suggest otherwise that in fact you can decode information coming out of a black hole and it's not lost forever so wormholes could exist and they're far more weird and complex than movies would allow you to believe okay they're far less practical but when has practical ever been fun so if you're ever hurtling throughout a space headed towards the
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barrel of a wormhole and you previously would have thought about going in you'll be pretty glad you've seen this
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video tucked away on the outskirts of Washington DC an anonymous building is home to a small team of solar weather Watchers we can be hit by the next solar storm anytime soon because they happen fairly
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frequently Yari colard Vega is a director at NASA's space weather analysis
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office good morning everybody is there any activity today everything looks quiet so far today her team's job is to keep satellites and astronauts safe from the everpresent threat of space weather space weather is the activity in space that is mostly dominated by the Sun we have the solar wind which is the expansion of the solar Corona and is always there the solar wind is a stream of electrically charged particles that flood from the Sun and continually bathe the
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Earth we see its effect through the glowing gas it creates at the top of our atmosphere the
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Aurora this solar wind is a constant presence but sometimes activity on the sun's surface increases dramatically the sun can also have big strong solar storms that come in different types we have the solar flare which are big bright adoptions of radiation and we also have coronal mass injection which are big explosions or particles that travel through space coronal mass ejections or or CMEs are enormous bubbles of electrically charged particles that explode from the
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sun's surface at millions of miles hour and not only can they destroy infrastructure here on Earth they can fry the electronic circuits of satellites in a Flash and are even a Potential Threat to human life
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coronal mass rejections can actually cause damages to the instrumentation of the satellites that we have in space which is the satellites that we use for technology every day on Earth you know communication problems GPS signal loss and in the scenario of astronauts it could cause a radiation hazardous environment for them we send astronauts to the moon and then the future years to Mars they're not going to be protected we have to to make sure that we send those astronauts
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to space safely so we need to make sure that we can predict those
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events Yari and her team keep a constant eye out for solar superstorms and when they spot them assess their severity our job is to do the predictions when you have a Corona Mass injection and when we do that we actually can see how the CME explodes and how it actually travels through space and then we inject the CME into a simulation which is what we have here you can see here the Sun the Earth and you can see the planets and the missions across the solar system and
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this is like looking at the sun from the top and you can see here very small CME being ejected and we use the images here so we can actually predict where are they're going and when they're going to
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[Music] hit
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Neptune an ice giant 17 times the mass of
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Earth over one and A2 billion kilm farther from the Sun than Uranus Neptune is almost chemically ident
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identical yet bizarrely it couldn't be more different Neptune in a way was almost a relief because it it wasn't featuress you know it's like oh good a planet with with clouds and features
1:49:48
again Neptune was a great excitement it's got swirling clouds really strong
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winds at 1500 mph incredibly fast the fastest winds that we've got in the solar [Music]
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system one of the things that Voyager discovered was an immense dark Vortex within the atmosphere
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a huge swirling dark
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spot we say it's a giant storm but just those words don't fully contain we're talking about a storm the size of the planet Earth or larger and the surprises keep coming even though it's much farther out Voyager discover covers Neptune is warmer than [Music] Uranus and the source of the heat is another Oddity of this strange planet in fact when we look at this Dynamic activity in these extraordinarily cold regions we really are at a loss to understand just what's going on
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here one theory is that the buildup of pressure beneath the thick layers of
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Cloud turns the carbon and the methane into a rain made of diamonds they then melt as they fall into the interior of the planet producing the extra
1:51:45
heat as the heat makes its way out into the Frozen coal of space it churns the entire atmosphere whipping up winds around the globe there are no mountain ranges no valleys no Continental boundaries to get in the way of the perfect fluid dynamical
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flows what that means is that when you start a weather pattern going when you start a Vortex spinning or you start a plume Rising there's very little to get in the way of it so those winds that develop and go around they just keep going around and around there's nothing to slow them down no friction with the
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surface and the extreme cold here makes the atmosphere less
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viscous creating supersonic winds that outpace anything seen on Jupiter or
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Saturn Voyager 2 has almost completed its Grand
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Tour but before heading out into Interstellar space one last World awaits
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around 100 million years ago an asteroid 10 kilm across is ejected from the asteroid belt dislodged from its orbit by Jupiter it is now on a collision course with Earth [Music]
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[Music] when it strikes the impact generates a fireball so hot anything within a 1,000 km radius dies
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instantly the impact throws some 300 billion tons of sulfur up into the
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atmosphere and during the nuclear winter that follows 75% of species plant and animal are wiped from the face of the Earth including a largest creatures ever to walk on its surface
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by driving the dinosaurs to Extinction Jupiter cleared the way for us to inherit the earth and although it still occasionally flings asteroids our way Jupiter also protects us
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for objects heading toward Earth from the far reaches of the solar system the giant planet's immense gravity acts as a
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shield around 100 years ago a lump of rock and Ice 4 km across is hurling towards the inner solar system but Jupiter stands in its way 5 4 3 2 1 we have ignition and liftoff of Atlanta and the Galileo spacecraft Bound for Jupiter 70 years later a mission launches that will witness just how effective a shield Jupiter can
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be on board the space shuttle [Music] Atlantis the Galileo
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[Music]
1:56:40
Orbiter 3 years after Galileo launches Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 has been captured by Jupiter's gravity
1:56:52
and now locked in the giant planet's deadly Embrace tidal forces begin to tear the comet apart its journey into the inner solar system cut short what happens next presents the Galileo scientists with a unique opportunity and so everyone was observing it and they realized two things one is that had just passed very close to Jupiter and probably had gotten pulled apart by Jupiter's tides and the other was that it was going to crash into Jupiter 2 years later the discovery
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that a comet was about to hit Jupiter was a huge surprise and very
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exciting after crossing the inner solar system Galileo is approaching the spot where it will witness the comet's final moments we knew Galo would be able to see the flashes directly we knew that the impacts were going to occur on the night side and that Galo was going to be able to see
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him on July 16th Galileo sees the first fragments of the comet enter Jupiter's southern
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hemisphere at 60 km per second the fragments really heated The Atmosphere Red Hot almost to the temperatures of the sun and the pieces hit the planet one after the other pieces of comet Shoemaker leaveing 9 strike Jupiter over the course of 6 days na look like big flashes on Jupiter the pictures of the impact were
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fantastic these tiny Points of Light captured from 240 million km away are the only time a comet strike has ever been witnessed
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the most destructive impact releases energy equivalent to 6 million megatons of TNT leaving behind a giant Dark Cloud 12,000 km
1:59:45
across by capturing objects in its orbit and incinerating them on impact Jupiter protects us 70% of our universe is made up of something so weird and so strange it continues to baffle the world's brightest Minds we are absolutely still lacking great ideas it is crying out for some new breakthrough new thinking perhaps the greatest remaining mystery in our universe what is dark energy dark energy is basically our name for that thing that we don't understand it's not the color dark it's just an
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expression of our ignorance as to what is this stuff like genius could come up with a new Theory yeah it is quite possible I'm kind of hoping it's me so this is clearly a huge deal in physics and raises many many questions the obvious one to start with is why do we think Dark Energy exists now ever since the big bang our universe has been expanding with space itself stretching moving galaxies further apart now physicists used to think that the energy that was made in
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the Big Bang to power that expansion would eventually start to run out and the expansion would start to slow down then a Nobel prize winning Discovery turned all of that on its head Saul perer and his team measured the way the universe was expanding by comparing the brightness of supernova this is when a star runs out of fuel at the end of its life they brighten as a fireworks and fade away and they reach the same brightness and you can then use that as an indicator of how far away it
2:01:29
is by just looking to see how bright it appears to you just like when you watch a uh you know a car receding to the distance you can tell how far away it is by how faintly tail lights look if you can use the brightness of the supern to tell you how far away it is that's really telling you um how long ago the explosion occurred because you know how long it takes for light to travel that great distance and what they discovered definitely shook the physics World suddenly he was saying that we
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lived in a universe that was accelerating I remember at just being just incredible I mean all the astronomers walking around scratching their head saying this can't be right surely it can't be right now exciting as this finding was like many things in science it raised a lot more questions than answers once you know that the universe is actually speeding up then you're faced with the question of well what could make it speed up this mysterious thing that was causing this
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newly spotted phenomena that no one could explain was immediately called Dark Energy now it's great to have a name for this but it doesn't exactly explain what is driving this accelerated expansion so what is this energy now just like with dark matter which makes up 25% of the universe and is also currently unexplained this weird type of energy seems to defy our laws of physics and has properties that our current models just cannot explain so you can think of it as you get more
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space you actually get more dark energy which is like getting something for nothing which is clearly ridiculous the way we think about it is that it's either some new stuff in the universe some particle or even just a a new field that you put into the universe to explain the properties of the UN universe so what is it that's changing the way our universe evolves well scientists differ in their thoughts of what it could be from a liquid or a brand new particle like dark matter or
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even an unknown Force now scientists at Berkeley in California are looking for something that they call chameleon particles this is a whole new type of particle that's thought to create a force which when it interacts with other particles changes those particles calls mass by putting atoms in a vacuum they're hoping to expose these chameleons the experiment works by first collecting a cloud of cesium atoms on top of the Spheres and the atoms are free to fall subject only to the Earth's
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gravity and the potential chameleon Force we will either discover the particle or rule it out once and for all so far they haven't found any evidence for these chameleon pars and their elusive Force but it is an idea that continues to be explored so whatever this energy is we now know that it makes up a whopping 70% of our universe so how can we figure out what it is now the obvious place to start is by looking at How the Universe formed and has evolved with incredibly powerful
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telescopes one of the things that I do is try to simulate the entire universe and and tie what we think about the physics of the evolving Universe to what we actually see with surveys like Desi Desi the dark energy spectroscopic instrument is one of these incredibly powerful telescopes observing the distant Universe now the further away galaxies are the younger they appear to us that's because light takes time to travel to us it can take even a billion years to reach us here on Earth thanks
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to this we can look at the average distance between galaxies at different Cosmic times and look how it's changed due to the expansion of the universe and therefore figure out what is the role of dark energy and what we need to do that is more detail and we get more detail from more data now there's a lot of projects and telescopes that are mapping the universe in this way but one that we're all very excited for is the launch of the Space Telescope uid in 2022 it's
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the most powerful telescope ever created even dwarfing the iconic Hubble Space Telescope so it could be just what we need to solve this problem these are going to be the biggest images that come down from in orbit you have an image effectively of 625 megapixels so that's roughly 300 HD television screens full of data and that comes down every 10 minutes this image takes roughly the same amount of dat the hble has taken and will takeen its entire lifetime in one day the hope with uid is that it
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will be able to give us the detail that we so desperately need to be able to solve this problem we have like lots of theories and hundreds of models that could still fit our data when uclid comes lots of these can be thrown away and it could like you know narrow down the possibilities of what this dark energy is uid will give us a coherent data set that we can all these theories against so dark energy Remains the biggest mystery in physics but with all these great scientific Minds across the
2:07:01
world and all the projects focused so desperately on figuring out what this is it might not be long before we finally find this huge missing piece of the puzzle we need teams like uid that's the only way you can get the data that you need but to understand that data to give it some interpretation to give it an idea could come from one person that could be the next Einstein is the signal real if the signal is real we still have to be able to explain what or who is making
2:07:35
it I've dedicated my entire career to finding life beyond our Earth and lately I've been trying to find it on Venus the planet next door oh wow life on Venus that just blew me away Venus it is an absolute hell the temperatures on the surface average about 470 C which is hot enough to melt lead air pressure on the surface is what it would feel like to be about a mile under the ocean because the clouds of sulfuric acid are so dense with Haze Venus became a desolate hellscape
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[Music] the veneer emissions uh were an extraordinary program several of the veneer didn't even attempt to land one of them lasted 127 minutes and provide a lot of data um some tried to take pictures but the lens caps wouldn't come out and by the time we got to 7 8 9 10 11 12 veneer emissions we had managed to get to the surface of Venus take measurements and be sure of its intense temperatures and pressures and also so the hurricane level winds that um were passing in the
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atmosphere when they eventually got the um the correct sort of radar going through the clouds and seeing what was going on and then it got really exciting then we thought this is a planet with a lot of volcanoes on it and even more fascinating volcanoes unlike any we see on the earth these volcano had been partly responsible for spewing out gases that led to Venus becoming the fiery hell it is now but recent data shows there may still be life left in them yet
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they found that Venus had um hot spots within it something uh active on Venus um that really is quite exciting to actually see [Music] these we do know life is very resourceful and there is one place on Venus that could host life if there is alien life in the Clouds of Venus or anywhere else beyond the Earth we have very little hope of ever actually seeing them but we can look for the gases that their life produces and that is what I've dedicated my entire career to do my specialty is
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looking for a gas called phosphine it was just here you know I was actually trying to find my fostin molecule okay well we lost fostin which actually is very fitting on Earth phosphine it's produced by life that doesn't care for oxygen so I thought maybe we could find phosphine on other planets that are oxygen poor and there it would be a very robust sign of Life an astronomer from Cardiff named Jane Greaves reached out to me saying oh wow perhaps there really are these
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floating microbes they needed some help interpreting a potential signal from Venus obtained with the Alma telescope that seemed to indicate there was a sign of phosphine in the Clouds of Venus when you go really high up so about 50 kilometers up the pressure in the clouds is like it is at the surface of the Earth and the temperature is actually like 20 or 30 cenr so it's really quite habitable Jane and the rest of our team used two telescopes many months apart
2:11:06
and in completely different parts of the world to look at the atmosphere of Venus and these two independent observations agreed with one another so that was January 2019 when I was reasonably sure and that's June of 2019 I like here it is again I at first did not believe it but there was a small part of me that thought my whole career had been for something it's really obviously something there so that kind of blew me away maybe maybe all the work I had done
2:11:35
saying that phosphine was a sign of life was just going to pay out right
2:11:46
now astronomers have announced they found what could be evidence of life life elsewhere and not on Mars but on the much more inhospitable Venus there's something seriously weird going on there Perhaps Perhaps this is life and that just blew me away it was so exciting so you can see that really they look very like each other so it was a robust result two telescopes nothing to do with each other saw the same thing my second Instinct that kicked in quite quickly was is the signal real if it is
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is it for sure phosphine or could there be another the molecule mimicking it and if it is real and it is phosphine was I right in saying that only life could produce it well there are two ways that it could possibly be life one is there's just a completely different biochemistry there it's radically different from anything we imagine on Earth the other way that in principle a more water loving life a bit more like biochemistry you see on Earth could hide itself away
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inside a protective shell of some sort in inside the sulfuric acid droplets there's questions on whether even the signal is real if the signal is real there are questions on whether it is phosphine or potentially other molecules that could mimic the same signal like sulur dioxide if the signal is real and it is phosphine we still have to be able to explain what or who is making it and only then could we consider that we have found life we're all just trying to figure out
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the truth and I would love for there to be phosphine but primarily I would love to know what's happening in the Clouds of Venus phosphine or no fast feed and the rest of the community is doing the same thing really hoping somebody will come in and say we could start to plan for a space mission fly through the atmosphere would be super exciting and given they managed to get a land to the surface and signals out in 1985 that's got to be possible Right we are only just now beginning to be
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able to even interpret the signals from places that could host life it's a really exciting time to be discovering potentially the first one of those signs in the planet next door but there will be many many more to come deep ocean is an alien world but incredibly Earth is not the only place in our solar system that has oceans oceans that could support life wherever we find water we find life I want to get data back from a probe and be able to say it's life Jim but not as we know it NASA is
2:14:30
planning to launch a mission to explore the methane oceans on Titan Saturn's largest moon yep you heard that right oceans of methane essentially oceans of liquid FS they're building a drone to fly over the surface and look for signs of Life can you imagine the free freedom of exploring a planet in that way rather than being stuck on four wheels on the surface but most excitingly they're also planning to build a submarine to dive under the surface of these methane oceans in search of
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life that first picture are you kidding that first picture from a submarine from anybody's submarine on the surface of an of a sea on another planet in our solar system changes the world I mean that's that's something that none of us have ever seen before that is true discovery that is why we do any of this and that would be awesome that first picture alone would make this entire Mission worth it it was back in 2005 that the Cassini hyans probe revealed this surface that really did look quite
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earthlike in fact it revealed these lakes that had an uncanny resemblance to the Great Lakes of North America but these aren't Lakes of water they're Lakes of methane and at- 180° C they're far too cold for any life form with an earthlike chemistry so we're looking for life but not Life as we know it what I'm really interested in finding is what I call a second Genesis of Life organisms that are clearly not related to any life on Earth but is it even possible to have life that can
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survive on methane rather than water methane is incredibly flammable it's even burnt by Hobs so that we can cook cook food to find out researchers at Cornell University took all of the ingredients that we know are present on Titan and mix them up not in a test tube though this isn't breaking bad but in a superc computer even without water they were able to make a cell membrane essentially the outside wall of a cell the building block for life now I know the dream is to see some great big
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tentacled monster like rising up from the methane ocean I mean realistically we're looking at something like microbial life but that still will be incredibly cool cuz it will be completely different to anything we have on Earth it will be entirely and 100% alien we tend to think that life would look like us you just have to look at the Star Trek movies all the aliens kind of look like insects and things that we already know but why not be something completely different something that we
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can't imagine but something perfectly suited to the the conditions that are on Titan I grew up when Star Trek was just coming out and it was an inspiration to me but the key moment was when I realized that the job I wanted was not Kirk's job but Spock's job he's the one with the Tricor he's the one that's detecting life and my favorite saying is it's life gy but not as we know it now one place we've been looking for life for a long time is the surface of Mars because although it's Barren and
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dry today once upon a time it was covered in an ocean of water incredibly traces of that ocean do still exist today 4 and a half billion years ago the Martian ocean covered 19% of the planet's surface it was as deep as the Mediterranean that was until solar radiation bombarded the planet and stripped it of its protective atmosphere and the water ended up freezing into ice caps on the poles Mars was a water world it would have been better to characterize it as a water world whereas
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now of course it's a desert world but it's that water world that's interesting that's the world that may have had life and that's the world we want to investigate and crucially it looked how the Earth looked when life first started on Earth so if life could have started on Earth then what's to say that life couldn't have started on Mars Mars isn't the only place that's getting scientists who are on the hunt for alien life excited the one I'm really rooting to have life on is Enceladus which is a
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tiny Moon of my favorite planet s it shocked us all when we found out that it had water plumes just pouring out of its South Pole it wasn't just spewing out of one crack on the surface but four huge fishes that were each larger than the Grand Canyon that amount of water could only mean one thing Enceladus have to have liquid oceans under its surface and it's not just Enceladus high on the list of places that we'd expect to find alien life is Jupiter's moon ganam the
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largest moon in the solar system scientists managed to discover that there was an ocean 100 kilom deep 10 times deeper than any ocean on Earth that was encircling the entire Moon each new Ocean discovered gives a little bit of a boost to our chances of finding life elsewhere in the solar system but could any living things survive the extreme environment of space and other planets lacking protective atmospheres creatures on Earth could give us some idea meet this little fell this is a
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tardy grade sometimes known as a water bear or a moss piglet Moss piglet they're just too cute these are aquatic so you'd expect them to die if they weren't in water but they actually have a very special ability as that sample drawer starts to dry out as that specimen starts to dry out what's cool about these guys is they can survive that extreme desiccation drying down to like a crispy little booger now they might look dead but as any '90s kid knows a lot can happen if you just add
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water it's not really dead because when we add more water to them when environmental conditions are good again they can come right back alive this ingenious hibernation mechanism makes them one of the most resilient creatures on Earth and means they can survive some really extreme and changeable conditions just like those in space they have even reanimated after years spent Frozen in the intense cold of Antarctica and they can withstand incredible pressure and
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even survived being shot out of a gun it's mindblowing dude I guess they're like the hand solo of the microbial world like these things could totally survive being frozen in carbonite as well to come in space put him on a satellite opened up the door set them outside exposed them to extreme temperatures vacuum right hot cold huge radiation and then when they brought him back to Earth they did what you're seeing here like a machine man you add the water to it they take them up cells
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start to do their thing again and they they come back alive it it always blows look I'm an old fat dude and I've looked at these hundred times thousands of times Millions maybe man well and then when I actually look at him under the microscope every single time I'm like dang that's cool man what's clear after finding all of these other oceans elsewhere in the solar system is that we can't claim to be the only blue planet anymore but I'm more excited for the day
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that we can say that we know that we're not the only place in the solar system that has life it was really a wow moment there was liquid water elsewhere in the solar system we had been [Music]
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right you have all of the ingredients that you need that we know of to develop Life as we know it we have cleared the Tower and the Cassini spacecraft is on its way to Saturn so these sort of hard cases these James Bond looking cases uh used to transport the flight Hardware this is one of the magnetometer sensors uh that I worked on and it will have been integrated onto the boom that came out from the side of the spacecraft and here's part of the magnetometer
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instrument and here's the other half of the magnetometer instrument this is a quarter siiz model so this is a quarter size me [Music] um I'd like to be this weight not this Hy she was one of the best things about the Cassini Mission because I spoke to her on the phone every couple of days for years and years and
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years so a gas giant like Saturn is incredibly mysterious Saturn just captivates people because it looks so
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Supernatural it engenders the immediate feeling that it can't possibly be real it has no solid surface and it has rings around it and we don't necessarily know where those Rings came from or how old they are these as you can see are spiky Shadows that are created by these features here that are sticking up 2 and 1/2 miles having the perspective of Cassini to be able to see that was one of the most extraordinary things I think about the images that came back it was
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just extraordinary it was out of Science Fiction some of the most amazing discoveries that Cassini made were about Saturn's moons the first flyby of Enceladus was not terribly close but something funny was happening in the magnetometer data Okay so
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put it into slide show my boss came to the team and said you can see there's a little pimple in the data just over there this looks intriguing this is not what we we expect we expect on a rocky moon for the magnetic field to drape over it a bit like a nice peaceful curtain draping over a window that's not moving and instead it looks like there's something some sort of Breeze gently fluttering that curtain and what we were able to do is calculate what irons were generating
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those waves and it was water group irons so Michelle decided after discussions with all of us that she would go to the jet propulsion lab and she would propose moving the next flyby of Enceladus which wasn't for some time to come to much sooner and this was a huge risk for her we knew for us to be able to have a chance of really seeing what was going on at Enceladus we needed to get closer the principal investigator of the magnetometer God bless her she went into
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action and convinced the project to take the spacecraft close to the South Pole so we could all get a better look and I must confess I didn't sleep for two or three nights before that close flyby cuz if we hadn't seen anything no one would ever believed anything I said it again so but what we found was spectacular this image made me nearly fall off my chair because here we see dozens of jets big and small coming off the South polar region was fantastic it was really a wow sort of a
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moment there was liquid water elsewhere in the solar system other than the earth Enceladus tiny Rocky Moon of Saturn is geologically active a St stable liquid environment organic material and contact with rock you have all of the ingredients that you need that we know of to develop Life as we know it I love this picture and it's about as much meaning as you can get out of the the Cassini Mission because we know that that Moon has a an ocean and it that could Harbor
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life one of the mysteries of Saturn originally was the source of the Rings and it turns out that enceladus's gers feed the very faint but very wide e-ring it shouldn't be surprising that we found such interesting geological activity on a planet with 82 moons ironically all these wonderful discoveries that we made meant you run out of fuel it was on 1% It had an empty tank so we had to crash it into the planet and let it go this is the start of the end of the mission we're running out of fuel and
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we're going to make sure we go out with as much great science as we can we want to see how much of the atmosphere we can see before we lose the signal before it can't fight the atmosphere anymore and it goes off point these last grand finale orbits where SC Dove between the Rings and the planet they were never foreseen in the original Mission planning actually getting to do that was was really remarkable take these these these kind of dangerous Dives between the Rings in
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the planet to see what that space was like uh actually with the spacecraft physically being there was really remarkable in some ways I just want it to be over now you know you're sort of waiting for it to end and and it's really weird quite a lot of us were gathered round tensely waiting for the data to come back we were relying on the commands that we had written and we had sent to the spacecraft to have worked properly and for the spacecraft to continue to be able to talk to us right
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up to the very last minutes I can confirm science playback
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is and and then it'll go away it just will lose the signal and that'll be end of mission cross zero [Music] time so that would be the end of the spacecraft project manager off the
2:29:37
net it doesn't feel a long way away actually cuz every time I watch it I am immediately there again so that that I think I guess says something about the the the impact that not the end of of mission had that was a great spacecraft it did exactly what we asked it to do all the way to the end when you have checked on a spacecraft every day for more than a decade and then suddenly it's not there it really is a wrench it's it's a blow and you feel sadness and and a
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certain amount of grief godspeed think it and release it ever wonder what would actually happen if an alien civilization made contact if they haven't already would the public be made aware or would it be kept secret how would we decode what they're saying and how on Earth will we reply well believe it or not there is an entire field of science that is dedicated to this by sending intentional messages we'll let the civilizations know that we want to make contact there actually is a protocol
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that tells us what to do in case we pick up a signal that looks Pharmacy it's time to explore the unexplored Seth shostak is a senior astronomer at seti the rather cunningly named search for extraterrestrial intelligence Institute for decades The Institute has been leading the way in actively searching for extraterrestrial signals in the hopes of making the first contact with ET most people when they think of looking for intelligent life they have some scenario kind of like in
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Star Trek right right you get to a fancy rocket and you just you know rock it off to some other world and look for it we simply can't do that but what you can do is maybe find the aliens at home by EAS dropping on their radio waves or maybe they have flashing lasers if alien civilizations are anything like us then they'll emit plenty of signals all the time radio television microwaves all we need to do is just EAS drop on one of these signals and then boom we've got contact
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to make this possible seti uses 42 radio telescopes called the Allen telescope array they direct these telescopes towards clusters of stars that we know have exoplanets in the hopes that one of those exoplanets is broadcasting signals now we're looking for signals that are what are called electromagnetic signals which is to say you know flashing lights or radio waves I mean radio is just another form of light if you will uh so that's what we're doing and why do we do
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that well we know that it would work we know that signals like that like those could go you know from one star system to another and not become so weak that you could never detect them I mean it's always possible that they develop some new physics that allows them to communicate in a way quite different from what we're envisioning but you know you can't do an experiment based on science you don't yet know so we go with what we do know they haven't found anything definitive yet but what happens
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when we do a lot of people do think that there's some sort of official procedure if you find a signal I mean wouldn't the Pentagon get involved and so forth well they've never shown much interest in getting involved and asking for procedures like asking Chris Columbus hey Chris look you know you're G to get in these three ships and head head West on the Atlantic what if you discover a new continent if you got a protocol for that well he didn't and it wouldn't have
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helped anyhow are you as surprised as me to hear that there is no no official protocol for when we receive alien signals now people who are involved with study tend to think ahead they're actually is a protocol that tells us what to do in case we pick up a signal that looks promising it's it's very trivial it just says check out the signal tell everybody and and don't start broadcasting back until you have the you know the consent if you will of the rest of the world's population so
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you don't have one Society trying to monopolize communication with the aliens what would happen after that is you would get everybody in the world who can study this thing because they got a big antenna or whatever then they would build new equipment that might be able to get the message in other words the bits that presumably are attached to that transmission and once you have those now you have you know the equivalent of the hieroglyphics and now you try and figure out what they might
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mean bear in mind these might not be intentional messages we could be picking up their equivalent radio and TV Transmissions that have just stumbled into our radio telescope but for now let's assume that they are sending a direct message what happens next what if we decide to talk back you know how will we incode that will we send them stuff in colloquial american English some a language they always seem to understand in the movies or or what else you know probably it's better just to send lots
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and lots information I would just send them the internet myself really it's mostly video games Tik Tok dances and ASMR replying to any signal that we might pick up is actually it's very controversial you wouldn't think so but it is you know what are you going to say and there's some people say you shouldn't reply at all so you know the manner of replying is is controversial because of this potential for some sort of Danger on the other hand I'm sure that if we were to pick up a signal next
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week or next or next year they going to be plenty of people who have the ability to construct a transmitter in a backyard dish who are going to be sending their own messages to the aliens that's more terrifying than sending the entire internet but what's odd is if aliens exist and there isn't some Mass government conspiracy then why haven't we heard anything well as stti continues their search for extraterrestrial intelligence there's another organization that thinks that we
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shouldn't be waiting to hear from them we should be actively sending signals to potential alien habitants what would you call an organization that messages extraterrestrial intelligence my name is Doug Bako I'm president of medy international for over 60 years seti scientists have been searching for signals from other civilizations so far we haven't found anything but what happens if every civilization is doing exactly the same as us it would be a very quiet universe that's why we should
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be sending messages of our own to try to elicit first Contact I'm at a scientific facility far north of the Arctic Circle called icecat an organization that sends radar signals into the sky to understand the composition of our up upper atmosphere but the interesting part the new angle is that we can also use it to send signals to nearby Stars one of our Prime targets is the nearest star to Earth Proxima centari which is orbited by a planet in the habitable zone we're
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sending signals that communicate some core ideas of science like chemistry the periodic table of elements something that we and the aliens have in common by sending intentional messages we'll let the civilizations know that we want to make contact and in some cases that may just be what's required to get a response whether you think we should just wait and listen or actively send messages out into the expansive space the search is is well and truly on we haven't yet found evidence of life
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outside the Earth let alone intelligent life but scientists do believe that there is life out there and remember these signals can take a really long time to transmit in the best case scenario we could send a message and get a reply in just eight years that's how long it would take to communicate with the nearest star to Earth more realistically it could take centuries even Millennia to communicate so this is an inherently multi generational project so there may well be another planet a
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thousand light years away whose messages are hurtling towards us and it could be any day now that we finally hear from them or maybe they're just watching listening biding their time or if they're anything like us at all they've been meaning to message us back and they will just after one more scroll
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the fate of the planets is intricately tied with that of the star that they orbit so for our own solar system the sun dictates Our Fate as our sun has changed so has the potential for life on our neighboring planets their history shows that habitability is a delicate balance [Music]
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that doesn't always [Music]
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last there is only one planet that has retained its water and habitability and that's Earth what's remarkable about Earth is the stability of those conditions that Earth has been able to maintain Oceanic conditions at its surface throughout its entire history through billions of years and that's what's facilitated the very rich biological evolution of Earth Earth is a very special place it's the only place in the universe where we know definitively that there is life for that
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to happen you need not just liquid water appearing on a planet but liquid water staying on a planet and that's the magic of Earth thanks to the size and G ology of our planet the atmosphere has remained stable enough for billions of years protecting the precious water that has enabled complex life to
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evolve life has woven itself into the fabric of the planet
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and to shape the continents and the
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[Music] oceans so that now life itself maintains the very atmosphere that protects our fragile ecosystems
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[Music]
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but as the sun continues to grow [Music] hotter temperatures on Earth [Music] rise upsetting weather
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patterns raising great storms across the planet
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and devastating
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droughts as plants around the world die out oxygen levels plummet around a billion years from now the age of complex life on Earth will finally draw to a close Earth will ultimately be like uh Venus and Mars Just mostly Co too there'll be no nothing else really in the atmosphere and it will remain in that state as a sort of hot oven Planet until ultimately the sun when it uh uses up its hydrogen and goes into a different phase will become what we call a red giant you know as we've seen in
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other stars throughout our galaxy throughout the Universe our sun will continue to get hotter and hotter over time in that point it will expand greatly to the point where it will um nearly engulf the Earth and entirely and at that point the uh planets will will lose their atmospheres and they'll just sort of swept
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away as it exhausts its hydrogen fuel the sun's Outer Edge inflates as our star enters its red giant phase expanding millions of kilometers out into
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space Mercury is the first to be
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engulfed then Venus's fate is sealed
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some models predict that Earth May barely escape the fiery fate of its
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neighbors hanging on Beyond the Edge of the dying star with Mars
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[Music]
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but the long era of the four terrestrial planets will be
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over the lives lived on one of them nothing more than a distant memory right now the two Voyager spacecrafts are hustling through Interstellar space at 35,000 mph the space is so far away that it took 35 years to get there and now we need new signs to understand it I couldn't believe how nature was fooling us it made us rethink everything we knew about the shape of our solar system I think I discovered that the tail is has a Coran shape and even where the edge of
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our solar system actually is there was a lot of confusion actually the confusion lasted almost a year even just to understand what Voyer is trying to say requires a very special set of skills it's really like a SS watch maker it need to be a trained eye to tell me can I trust this data or not what's even more extraordinary is how Voyager the old spacecraft from 1977 with 64 Koby of memory was able to make this journey at all two 1 we have ignition and we have
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lift off both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 and it had to be then thanks to an extremely rare planetary alignment that happens once every 175 years where we could fly past Jupiter get a gravity kick and go to Saturn get a gravity kick and get to Uranus and another gravity kick and go past Neptune within just two years Voyager one had reached Jupiter Voyer showed us a planet which looked so Serene through a telescope was actually rocked by hundreds of raging hurricans a
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glowing Aurora at the North Pole and three thin Rings Voyer took 33,000 images of Jupiter and its major moons that captured the world and we'd get to see these pictures and go whoa look at that what's this what's going on it was [Music] fantastic and a night like tonight our eyes our minds our our our souls our blood are moving out through the universe we're part of history and that means that we have to replace the old myths with new ones
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just one year later and Voyager one had already sped past Saturn spying intricate details in the planet's rings from earth scientists could only see five or six Saturn's rings Voyer showed us that there were more than a 100 and I can remember those first pictures as we flew away looking back at that system and seeing the reflected sunlight in that structured ring system was just so beautiful then the voyagers parted ways Voyager One headed straight for the edge of our solar
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system Voyager 2 took a more scenic route reaching Uranus in 1986 and eventually Neptune in 1989 showing us yet more outstanding views of the green and blue planets and spotted gas on Neptune's large Moon Triton and that was the main mission the first human-made object to reach the Distant Worlds of our solar system but the Voyages weren't done yet they were about to embark on the journey to search for the edge of our solar system and before they left there was one last
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thing to do Kagan convinced NASA to turn the cameras um towards Earth and take that very famous picture the um pale blue dot on that blue dot that's where everyone you know and everyone you ever heard of and every human being who ever lived lived out there lives it's a very small stage in a great Cosmic Arena these images were the last of 67,000 images taken by the two Voyager spacecrafts their cameras were then turned off to save power as They carried on their Journey towards Interstellar
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space the boundary where our Sun's solar wind ends and the rest of our universe begins problem was nobody actually knew where it really was scientists thought that sooner or later the charged particles that create solar wind were going to run out and Voyager would enter a pristine environment of interstellar space we thought that would happen oh maybe just beyond Neptune but no that didn't happen well we said to NASA give us a bit more money another 5 years well
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this kept happening year after year NASA please give us a little bit more money a little bit longer we'll soon we'll be there as voyagers 1 and two continued to move out into the outer reaches of the solar system they remarkably continued to send very faint signals back to Earth and this what makes this so interesting and so fragile the whole instrumentation of Voyager was designed to visit the outer planets that are that have very strong magnetic fields so now we are
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dealing with a signal that is almost at the noise of the instrument and because Voyager was not designed for that it's Miracle fit that all this team is able to go mine the data and pull out the signal and tell us what's going on just five instruments were still operating on the spacecraft and in 2012 more than 35 years since Voyager 1 left earth scientists started to see the first signs that they were crossing into Interstellar space through the boundary known as the helops think about the
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helops as your walls of your house this is what separate environment that is dominated by the solar wind from environment that is dominated from other winds from other stars outside of our bubble the heliosphere the expectation was that there would be a sudden shock a burst of activity that would make it obvious we'd finally reach this sharp boundary but the reality was much stranger all of the detectors on Voyager were seeing particles suddenly appear and then disappear then appear and then
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disappear and nobody had a clue why these strange particles seem to be coming from elsewhere in the galaxy did we Cross or not the data was so confusing on one hand Voyager was still being affected by the sun's magnetic field but the particles were suggesting we had crossed and turns out what really tipped the scale in the team was the Radio Data the data was stored on the spacecraft using a tape recorder so ancient technology it's extraordinary but it worked uh and the data were gathered and
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sent back bit by bit and 6 months later we played we turned to the radio station of Voyager and guess what we
2:50:57
heard these plasma waves converted into sound that we can hear were the final proof that we had crossed the boundary into Interstellar space the first human-made object to venture into Interstellar space even more extraordinary than crossing the boundary into Interstellar space was what the data said about the shape of the solar system Sy I was tasked to create a computer model with all the physics that we know to kind of predict this shape of the Helios field
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it turned out that the Solar System's helos spere is not round like you think has a tail from whizzing around the Galaxy and more than that I was finding that has a CO Sun shape two horns with a void in the middle was just a shock to realize that something such basic as the shape of our home is completely different and all of this was discovered by a small extremely low Tech probe more than 10 billion miles away and they're still going in 2018 NASA's Voyager 2
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spacecraft crossed the boundary finally both Voyager spacecrafts with their 1970s technology had reached where No human-made Object had ever been before Interstellar space there's very little material very empty space can be very very empty the environment out there is colder and denser and of course it's dark there's not a lot of light you're far away from the Sun Voyager has also discovered that our solar systems impact is much bigger than we thought before we would have liked to
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get to a region where the heliosphere doesn't influence anymore the interstellar medium what we call a pristine interstellar medium what we're measuring now is a medium highly disturbed by the Sun the voyagers are still sending us ever fainter signals still teaching us new things about Interstellar space but they're running out of time we probably have two three maybe four more years of power to communicate with voyager but there are still so many Mysteries left to be
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solved what is the environment outside what's happening the nearby stars that are influencing our system and so on so one of the beauties of the Voyager mission that it started as a planetary Mission gave us the first images of our planets discover volcanoes in the solar system and then it's went to discover our heliosphere our vast you know regions of our solar system and enter into the Galaxy long after their power has gone the Voyages will continue to rush away from us monuments to human
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endeavor and exploration heading out towards the Stars Voyager will continue its little journey in the interstellar space way past when we maybe as a species will cease to exist when we might move to a different planet it'll keep going and going and going and going and going forever
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[Music]
2:54:19
[Music] so this is sodium cyanides highly toxic but we use this material for our research for origin of Life cyanide is deadly as little as a tenth of a gram can be fatal John's colleague xen fangu has been working with it for over a decade just keep gloves on don't eat it that's for sure
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mixing the cyanide isn't enough it then has to be exposed to the conditions of early Earth I'm going to put this in the Solar
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simulator uh this machine just simulate the early Earth conditions levels of UV light were much higher back then you realize the is energy to drive the reaction and it's free energy from the Sun and we're going to use it inside the machine the cyanide combines and recombines creating the building blocks of [Music]
2:55:41
life after few hours we can detect amino acid nucleoside precursor lipid cursor they're all very important biomolecules in life cyanide may be the raw material needed to Kickstart life so finding an abundant Supply is vital for John and Xiang Fung's Theory and one type of location is more promising than any other
2:56:20
impact craters as a meteorite strikes its energy superheats the atmosphere generating huge amounts of Cyanide and it also melts the planet's crust creating hydrothermal systems the Metro impa really important for life to start JN and Jen Fung's idea is that rainwater flowed down the crater walls absorbing Cyanide and then was heated in hydrothermal pools at the bottom and reaction taking place then so simple to prove their Theory John and xan Fong need evidence chemical traces from one of these
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craters on Earth it's simply not possible to find evidence of these environments because all of the impact crators of that period have been erased used by plate tectonics scientists still don't understand how life began on Earth but they do have three theories about how and where it might have happened hydrothermal vents with chemical energy for early life volcanic pools could have assembled cells and impact craters could have provided the raw material for life
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but here on Earth essential Clues to solve the mystery have long been erased to find them scientists need to return to
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Mars poor Uranus it's got rather boring clouds truth be told so there wasn't a lot to see with the cameras
2:58:22
passing close to the planet Voyager sensors reveal why Uranus is so
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featureless temperatures here are the coldest of any world in the solar [Music] system there's simply not enough heat to drive the storms seen on Jupiter and Saturn Uranus is an entirely new class of Planet an ice [Music] Giant and more surprises were to come [Music] Uranus has [Music]
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rings we knew long ago from telescopic observations the Rings were there at Uranus we didn't know their configuration uh or their shape Voyager begins to explore the ring system and spots something curious in the
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shadows Tom moons Cordelia on the inner edge of the brightest ring and ailia on the Outer Edge help to organize the
3:00:16
system particles within the Rings can be moved inwards or outwards as these tiny objects called Shepherd moons whose gravitational force can shape and sculpt the Rings
3:00:40
themselves but it's the orientation of the orbits of these moons and the Rings themselves that singles without Uranus as the strangest of
3:00:54
Worlds Uranus looks bizarre the Rings rather than looking like that when you look through a telescope they're actually orbiting up and over the top of Planet the whole thing is tipped like a spinning top this bizarre orientation hints at an unusual past
3:01:28
since the beginning everything in the solar system has been circling in the same direction it begins with a vast cloud of material that orbits the young
3:01:44
sun over time the material draws
3:01:51
together forming each of the
3:01:59
planets today they all orbit the Sun and spin on their axes in the same counterclockwise direction as that primordial
3:02:13
Cloud except for Venus and Uranus which spin in the opposite direction but Uranus is even stranger because the entire planet is on its side this was a really strange system so why is Uranus so tipped on its side if a roughly earth-sized object smashed into Uranus late in its formation history then that would have had the proper amount of momentum to basically knock it on its side
3:03:00
[Music]
3:03:10
and the Collision may also help to explain another of Uranus's Mysteries why the planet is so cold that impact presumably relinquished all of that internal energy that the planet had when it first formed and has left it as a relatively dead and sluggish
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[Music] World much is learned during this brief
3:03:46
encounter but voyager's strangest discoveries are yet to [Music]
3:04:09
come most surprising is Mercury
3:04:18
the least explored of the rocky planets because of the difficulty of getting into orbit around a planet so close to the Sun 5 4 3 main engine start 2 1 and zero and lift off of messenger on NASA's mission to
3:04:43
Mercury a planetary Enigma in our inner solar system [Music] now going through the sound barrier following a direct route to Mercury would be [Music] impractical a spacecraft would arrive at such high velocity it would need to haul a prohibitive amount of heavy fuel in order to slow down enough we have just had spacecraft separation ground with solid have jettison so messenger controls its speed by stepping from one planet to the next using their gravity to slow
3:05:45
itself even so messenger still approaches Mercury moving so fast that it is forced to fly past the planet three times slowing on each
3:06:07
pass until after nearly 7 years of flawless navigation it arrives safely in orbit
3:06:22
at last able to begin its Mission mapping Mercury's
3:06:31
surface that first image ever acquired from orbit around Mercury was amazing when it finally came in it looked perfect it looked exactly like we expected it to be for me that was the real moment when I realized that we had successfully made it into orbit and everything was working this pioneering Voyage has led to a completely new idea of how Mercury may have
3:06:58
[Music]
3:07:03
formed Mercury is the most cratered planet in the solar
3:07:11
system with many puzzling features that hint at a violent past
3:07:20
mercury has a very unusual orbit if you were on the surface of the planet you would actually have to go around the Sun twice to get one full Mercury solar day also highly unusual is the planet's disproportionately large core Mercury is basically a big ball of metal surrounded like a tiny bit of rock how do you end up with a planet that has so much metal inside and then almost none on its surface that was a huge mystery and the major question is why why is it like this when
3:07:57
the rest of the planets aren't a clue to understanding these strange features was found in Mercury's chemistry so very soon after we got into orbit we started to get chemical data back from the surface and we immediately uh got some prises the tiny probe detects volatile chemical elements in concentrations that no one had thought possible this close to the
3:08:34
Sun these are elements that go into rocks but that evaporate at relatively low
3:08:44
temperatures and immediately told us that some of the older ideas of how Mercury formed could not be correct what messenger discovered about Mercury could suggest a new twist in the story of the solar
3:09:05
system just a few million years after its formation the young Mercury is seething with the heat of its violent birth
3:09:25
slowly a crust formed rich with volatile elements if it had been close to the Sun these elements would have evaporated before the rock hardened so what could explain why they're so abundant on Mercury today the orbits of the planets and their current locations have changed over the history of the solar system so where things are today doesn't mean that's necessarily where they formed they could have and probably did move from different locations to where they are
3:10:00
now one possible thing is that mercury didn't form where it is today if we're much closer to the other planets maybe even outside of Venus or Earth or in somewhere in between there if Mercury had formed near Earth and remained at a more comfortable distance from the Sun its Destiny could have been very
3:10:24
[Music]
3:10:33
different but it wasn't to be so what turned it into the strange sun-scorched world we see today we don't know the full story what we have right now are theories and as we have new observations we are trying to change everything to fit those observations messenger's evidence of the volatiles on Mercury surface and the unusual size of its core suggest an interesting new Theory
3:11:18
it's possible Mercury began life as much as 160 million kilm further from the Sun than it is
3:11:30
today in the region of space where the young Earth is also forming a region with scores of planetary embryos all fighting for
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position in in the chaos it's possible that something large pushes Mercury off orbit and in towards the Sun [Music]
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[Music]
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Mercury brushes against another planetary
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embryo this glancing blow removing much of its crust and mantle
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now little more than a metallic planetary
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core Mercury continues toward the
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sun ending up in the peculiar elliptical orbit we see today
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before we sent the messenger mission to Mercury I think we had a very simplistic idea of what it was going to be like and Mercury turns out to be a more complex place with a more interesting and complex history than we had previously imagined but of course all things have to come to an end and once we were out of fuel we could no longer burn our engines to keep from crashing into Mercury and sequencers chief launch Contin [Music] after 4 years of observations Messengers fuel finally runs
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out and the spacecraft adds yet another crater to this tiny world where any prospects for life were scorched away when it was thrown too close to the Sun
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we're guaranteed to find an identical copy of our whole universe as well as countless variations where things are similar to here but still different multiple universes now are a genuine possibility which begs the question is there another you in a parallel universe now it probably doesn't surprise you that studying parallel universe was once considered completely Bonkers in the scientific world and even alienated people who decided to pursue it when I was a grad student I used to
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secretly print out my Multiverse related papers this job was the only job I was ever interviewed for I was on the verge of having to drive a taxi capab now theoretical physicists have realized that parallel universes are possible mathematically at least so why do we think other universes exist now one of these reasons comes from the weird world of quantum physics the important thing to remember about quantum mechanics is it's weird it really is weird it's the study of
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subatomic particles the building blocks for every single thing around us in the universe and what it tells us is that these particles can be both particles and waves but crucially they can be both at the same time which splits our reality giving us multiple different universes the idea here is that when you make a measurement of a particle that's here and there at the same time and you find the particle over here then there's a u which finds a particle over here in
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this world but at the same time there's another world over there where another U has found the particle over there and both of these worlds are equally real so the quantum Multiverse is not separated from us by distance it's not someplace very very far away it's someplace that's effectively here in space but the complexity of the quantum Dynamics prevents these different branches from talking to each other whether you like it or not the fact that we live in a Multiverse is the
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dominant scientific Paradigm suck it up another theory is one of mathem itical inevitability if our universe is made from a finite amount of simple matter then it follows that other universes are made in a very similar way just as this house is made out of fundamental building blocks that we call Legos everything in our world is made of fundamental building blocks we call Elementary particles and if you have some random process arranging Elementary building blocks in a finite volume there
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are of course very very many different ways in which it could do this and that means that if this process repeats in an infinite number of other volumes of the same size then we're guaranteed that eventually it's going to create every possible Arrangement we're guaranteed to find an identical copy of our whole universe as well as countless variations where things are similar to here but still different even a Max over there who's identical to me not just in his physical appearance
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but in that he actually feels that he is me another theory called inflation describes how the universe expanded exponentially in the very first tiny fraction of a second after the big bang but with some areas of space expanding faster than others creating bubbles or pockets of SpaceTime where other universes could have formed if this idea turns out to be right then it could mean that these universes developed with their very own laws of physics so there could be another you in those universes
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that's able to walk through walls or fly through space so if our universe is not alone the question remains what would the other you like according to Quantum Theory there's a new version of you and a brand new universe made with every single decision you make so every time I flip a coin say heads or that is just some little Quantum accident the universe is splitting into two worlds every time it comes up heads or tails so our experience of the splitting is like the experience of
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walking through a garden of paths that fork when we come to a fork in the path we take one or the other heads or tails but both Forks exist at the same time we only experience one of them there are literally gajillions of universes out there of which ours is only one then there's the patchwork Model A near identical copy of our own Universe just made elsewhere in this kind of parallel universe there's another U that's very similar just with subtle differences we're guaranteed to find countless
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variations where things are similar to here but still different the dinosaur killing asteroid that was our lucky break missed Earth so there are no humans just dinosaurs in Winchester today there's another one where I didn't make it as a physicist but I'm actually enjoying life working as a bartender then there's a whole bunch which are very similar where I just chose to dress a little bit differently these ideas all Point towards multiple weird and wonderful universes existing
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out there but we're scientists not able to see the entirety of our own Universe how on Earth can we prove that these other universes exist scientists think that they might be getting a little bit closer truth goes through three stages first it's ridiculed then opposed strongly and finally it becomes self-evident perhaps now we are reaching the stage of self-evident scientist Laura massini Horton found something really weird she found evidence for what appeared to be two universes crossing
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over the detection of the cold spot was was uh uh one of of the signatures that we predicted by by tracing forward the quantum entanglement of our universe with all the other surviving universes we we predicted that there should be a large area in the sky of about 10° and indeed that's what was observed about 7 months after we made the prediction recently there's also been a big leap forward for inflation Theory which predicted that if this rapid expansion of the universe happened it
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would send ripples out into the universe we call these ripples gravitational waves we' never detected anything like this until 2015 when two experiments called ligo and Virgo managed to detect gravitational waves coming from the merger of two black holes with that detection made it makes it more likely that we might be able to detect gravitational waves from inflation but why should we really even care about figuring out if multiple universes exist it actually feeds into
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the age-old question of what is our universe expanding into if other multiple universes exist perhaps our universe expands as neighboring ones contract and this could actually tell us more about our own universe and especially how our own universe will end perhaps eventually we will expand until those other neighboring universes also then have a big bang and start expanding into us which means that we then start Contracting and perhaps our universe will end not in a big bang but in a big
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crunch rain made of diamonds and ruby gemstones 2,500 Dee clouds filled with hellish liquid lava and 350 year old giant mega storms this is the most extreme weather in the universe Saturn is the second largest planet in our solar system and its rings make it instantly recognizable and personally it's my favorite planet because it rains diamonds from its clouds scientists estimate that around about 10 million tons of diamonds are produced in Saturn's atmosphere every
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single year now the sizes of those diamonds could vary a little bit but they're estimated to be about a centimeter across that's the size of a 4 karat diamond but why does this happen we know that on Saturn there's carbon soot the carbon soot is created by lightning lightning actually zapping methane in the atmosphere the carbon soot precipitates or falls through the atmosphere is the carbon soot falls from the clouds this same crystallization process occurs but instead of taking
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billions of years it happens in a matter of moments now in order for a planet to have weather it needs an atmosphere a layer of gas gas that surrounds a planet so for example Earth's atmosphere is made of nitrogen oxygen Argan and a little bit of water vapor as well the planet Mercury and our moon on the other hand they don't have an atmosphere hence why they look like gray lifeless rocks on earth a cloud forms where it's too cold for water to stay as a vapor in the
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air now that can happen with other materials too just at different temperatures so it's essentially possible to have a cloud made made of anything but what about planets that are so hot that things that exist as solids on Earth actually liquids and gases in their atmospheres I'm talking about things like rock and lava imagine it being so hot that lava evaporates into the air forming clouds and then you get lava raining from the sky 55 cancrete e is an exop Planet that's about 40 light
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years away from us it orbits really close to its star not only that it's also tidy locked which means that one side of the planet always faces its sun and it's always daytime there and it's boiling hot the day side is permanently covered in an ocean of molten lava it can be hard to picture what lava rain would actually look like but volcanic eruptions here on Earth in places like Hawaii give us a hint of what it might look like right here was the site of a massive eruption all along this fissure
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Fountains of lava shot into the air nearly 100 m High the liquid lava droplets then cooled and solidified in the air before raining down onto the surface as these tiny Pebbles this is what we think the rain might be like on planets like 55 caner e the Planet Hunters and astronomers think theyve found an EXO planet with the strangest rain in the universe wasp 12b is an exoplanet 12,000 light years away it's a gas giant like Jupiter but it's twice as big and its atmosphere is 2,000
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de hot an atmosphere like that we think the conditions would be just right to give us molten Ruby rain and the way that it scatters light suggests that there are clouds high up in the atmosphere at this part of the atmosphere the temperature is around 2,000 de so the most likely substance forming these clouds is an aluminium oxide called corundum which forms the basis of rubies this crazy extraterrestrial weather doesn't stop at gemstone rain there are planets out
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there that have the most gigantic storms that humankind has ever witnessed we have Mars Rober footage that shows us dust devils that are over a kilometer high but impressively the storms on Mars can reach up to 20 20 km in altitude and it's all down to Mars's atmosphere its atmosphere is 11 100th the pressure of Earth and the effect of having that uh really low atmospheric pressure on Mars means that uh it can't trap any of its heat so Mars is a cold Barren desert
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compared to Earth or to Venus the dust storms are so bad on Mars that every few years or so they engulf the planet for months at a time that's going to have a major impact on any future human missions that we send to Mars these storms on Mars though are minuscule in comparison to what's been observed elsewhere in the solar system we've sent probes and satellites to all of the gas giants and found some mindblowing weather activity the Great Red Spot is a storm on Jupiter that is twice the size
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of the entire Earth it was first spotted by giovan Cassini through a telescope in 1665 which means it's been raging nonstop for at least 350 years that makes it the longest living storm that we know of the outer planets are Big Balls of gas and that makes a huge difference in the weather because you don't have continents you don't have mountains for the winds to rub against and there's nothing to control the uh weather the way the continents partly control our weather
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Saturn is the planet with the largest and most powerful storm in the solar system covering 4 billion square kilometers and we know about it because we've seen satellite images of it growing on December 5th 2010 the radio uh receiver on Cassini started picking up the radio signal of lightning and on the same day the camera saw a little storm up in the northern hemisphere of Saturn within six months the storm grew so large that it wrapped around the entire planet and its head
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cut up with its tail the truth is life on Earth is a huge anomaly in our solar system our galaxy and even maybe across the entire universe the majority of other planets are a lot less inviting so the planets that we' found so far aren't particularly nice places to go then not somewhere you put on your vacation list anytime soon so while we might not describe whether here on Earth is mild all of the time astronomically speaking mild is the most appropriate word what
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makes Earth so habitable is this perfect mix of conditions that we have that essentially make it like a Goldilocks planet for life and that includes our proximity to our star the sun any closer and it would be a hellish Inferno and any further away it would be a Frozen on Wasteland so it could just be a matter of time before we find a Planet that's similar to Earth but what we do know is that warm cold wet dry windy and Mild all of these conditions work in perfect
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Unison to Keep Us Alive here on Earth essentially we got lucky so think about that the next time you want to moan about the weather this tiny little Moon 500 km in diameter has proved proved that it can surprise everybody water vapor plumes with organic material coming out of this tiny little Moon who would have [Music] thought I get asked whether Enceladus is my favorite Moon and at the moment it is partly based on the observations that my team made and the discovery that we made at Enceladus
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so the Cassini mission was the first uh spacecraft mission to orbit around Saturn and its moons it was also the first mission to taste what was in an extraterrestrial ocean the mission kept being extended and extended and so in the end the mission lasted for 13 years the discoveries were pretty radical we were flabbergasted to be frank I think for me the most surprising discovery that was made was this water vapor plume at Enceladus which we Then followed up
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with discover about a liquid water ocean under the surface a heat Source organic material I've now given away all the secrets my team and I changed the course of the mission cuz this was a team effort so we had three flybys of Enceladus and two of these flybys were quite distant flybys in the data that my instrument took so data from the magnetic field in the environment of Enceladus we saw some strange signatures that we weren't expecting to see and what those signatures were telling
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us it was almost as if Enceladus was a bigger obstacle a bigger body than it looked we thought maybe we hadn't got the trajectory of the spacecraft back properly so maybe we were seeing an artifact in the data but the fact that we saw it on two separate flybys meant that we we said okay we thought we were seeing something so I actually traveled out to the jet propulsion lab and I was planning to make a presentation to the project cuz what I wanted to do was I wanted to
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persuade them that we thought we were seeing this really strange atmospheric signature um and that it would be really good to go close on the third flyby and I was really nervous because if the flyby changed that meant all of the plans that we had made for the last 6 and a half years would have to be changed and some instruments would not take the data that they had planted but the possibility that we would discover this water vapor atmosphere SC Enceladus
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was exciting enough that the majority of people decided it was worth a go it was extremely nerve-wracking waiting for that third flyby so you know I'd essentially put my and my team's reputation on the line and so I must confess the first the two or three nights before the fly by I didn't sleep very a well I tossed and turned a lot cuz if they hadn't found anything no one would ever have believed anything I said again you know every once in a while you have to be brave and you have to
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say that you think you're seeing something but luckily they found something when we had that third flyby what we found was instead of there being an atmosphere covering the entire surface there was simply an outgassing of water vapor from the South Pole in addition to that because we went so close all of the other instruments were able to take fantastic data sets as well and what we found is there were cracks at the South Pole through which this water vapor was escaping
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there was an internal heat Source there was organic material and so that meant we had three of the four things for potential habitability to form you need a heat Source you need liquid water you need organic material and then you need those first three things to be stable enough over a long enough period of time that something can actually happen so that's when there was a a real focus on Enceladus for potentially being a place where life or habitability might have been there in
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the past or might be able to form in the future the coming together of all of the Enceladus data and the discoveries that were made um underpins what I think is one of the most important discoveries that has been made in planetary science in the last 30 years and that is that you don't need to look close to the Sun to find liquid water you can be quite far from the Sun but you can find liquid water it's just not on the surface it's underneath the surface and so that's been a almost been
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a sea change in planetary science we now have a a much better understanding about Enceladus and its internal structure so we have a global liquid water ocean underneath the surface of Enceladus and the surface is is made up mainly of water ice biggest unanswered questions for Enceladus are why is there only a water vapor plume at the South Pole we still don't quite understand why there's a heat Source because the fact remains that it was formed billions of years ago because
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it's so small it should have cooled down um and so we think it might be linked to um its orbit around Saturn so if the if the orbit around the Moon is not completely circular then on some parts of the orbit it's closer to the planet than on others and when that happens tidal forces keep the interior warm I think Enceladus will always be memorable for me because in some ways it was my way of becoming confident in my in my ability to persuade people but also confident in my team and what we
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were able to do with the data that's probably why it's my favorite move depending on what we discover again orid it might move slightly down my list for me it was almost a coming of age for my team but also for the instrument you know people say to me why do you explore planets and for me we are explorers humankind have always been explorers when we didn't know much about the Earth people would take ships and and and go to what some people said was the edge of the Earth and they were
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scared they're going to fall off for me exploring planets is part of that exploration it's what we do my first view of Saturn actually was through a telescope that my dad built I saw Saturn and it's Rings didn't see any of the moons cuz Saturn is so far away but we were able to see the Rings clearly and we also saw Jupiter and some of its moons as well so I never thought back when I was a child that I'd end up doing what I do today I will never forget Enceladus in planetary science it will
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always be an important thing and it will be an example that people refer to in the future as well who owns Mars it's a surprisingly big problem with the USA and China planning to send humans by the 2030s and with private company SpaceX potentially sending them by 2026 it's going to get pretty grounded up there you can even go online and buy a bit of Miles yourself I've got mine so who owns what up there and what happens if things get nasty I think we're going to need a space
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lawyer it's time to explore the unexplored space law sounds like a fantasy job but it does kind of makes sense surely there must be some kind of rules and regulations well yes and it started in
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1957 the US and the Soviets are in the midst of a cold war they sworn ideological enemies suddenly the Soviets launched Sputnik the first ever human activity in outer space it flies around the earth a few times including directly over the us and that raised a whole bunch of new questions if an enemy vehicle enters your airspace then you can shoot it down but suddenly people had to think about where does airspace end and space begin the prospect of war in space was so frightening they decided
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to keep the war on Terra Firma to the surprise of the rest of the world they joined together and drafted the outer space treaty finally it's over to the space lawyer the the most fundamental Baseline principle is is found in articles one and two combined which basically makes outer space into a kind of a global common an international area legally very similar to the high se's no single state can act as if outer space or part of the outer space or even part of the
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moon is part of the national territory it's basically open for all states and freedom for for states to be active there is the bottom line the the drafters of the outer space treaty were basically concerned with two elements if you will one was the military use of outer space and the secondary is subsidiary level about science the the the treaty didn't really discuss things which we are confronted with today as questions at least theoretically like the settlement on the
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moon or human settlements on Mars so it's good that states are free to use space even if they weren't thinking about settlement but that wasn't the only thing they weren't thinking about in 19 57 the treaty only refers to political States it doesn't even mention private companies so does that mean that the billionaires of the world are exempt from the treaty one of the uh clear uh drawbacks looking back at the ospace treaty was the absence of any detailed reference to the private sector so what
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you see in the ospace treaty is only one almost fleeting reference to the private sector in the guise of what they call non-governmental entities but at the same time it made sure that the state in this case the United States or any other state where those activities belonged to was the one being responsible and then article seven followed that up with also liability so not only you as the United States will be responsible for them for whatever they do and you will be liable for any
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damage they cause by doing that so uh the United States cannot Dodge any International respons ability just because space a or Virgin Galactic or blue origin does something in outou of space okay so I get that ultimately states are responsible for what private entities do in space how they operate and any damages but what about the use of land on Mars we're planning on building habitats and living on Mars is that even allowed so we have to make a very fundamental and important distinction
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between on the one hand the prohibition for any St to own part of Mars on the other hand the freedom of outer space activity which is the other part of the global common thing also means the freedom of Simply uh simply establishing a habitat putting space objects there which then serve as houses or probably even uh ex excavate minerals locally and build a habitat from those minerals that all is in principle again allowed and of course there is a tension between those
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two because uh it is one thing to be allowed to land somewhere to put people down somewhere maybe to have them live there for 25 or 30 years but at what point in time should we uh should we say wait a minute now we are moving to something which looks too much like a real colony which is prohibited by the ospace treaty but again that that question has not been solved yet but it's not like here on Earth where if you break a treaty we can physically take action Mars is over 300 million
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kilometers away so if the USA or Russia or China or a private company starts breaking the rules up there wouldn't it be pretty hard to stop them next question is then of course what happens if a private entity disregards the international rules of space law well if that happens then of course the first line is that the operator who goes beyond the treat the terms of the license will be held criminally liable under the laws of his own country it becomes a little bit more complicated at
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the second level when we go to the international Arena either these states have to agree to a tribunal or they have to sort things out on a diplomatic level and of course then the reality of the International Community kicks in that the bigger you are as a state the more you might get away with these are all crazy scenarios that could arise in the future and talking of the future many people see Mars as a future second home for Humanity but how would our laws on
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earth work in space and if no country is allowed to claim sovereignty over celestial bodies then how will it be governed if there are communities and multiple generations of Martian people but of course at some point in time certainly when they start living there knowing that they will never return to Earth uh when they probably uh get babies there who have never been on Earth for any part of their life uh there will be a tendency for those quote unquote colonies I prefer to use the
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word settlements actually to say well we don't want to be ruled by this Earthbound State anymore because they have no idea what it means to live on Mars and to to to be safe on Mars so uh we will we want to create our own legal regime and sooner or later that may actually become we want to create our own State I often compare this with the pilgrim fathers who went to North America and then after you know a number of years said well why why are we still paying taxes to the British king in Far
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Away London uh so it took a war of independence before the United Kingdom finally accepted okay let them be on themselves let them be their own State I just hope that when that happens in space we are more peaceful as terrestrial States in allowing those to go out in their own but that's still decades away if not much further if my first chat with a space lawyer has taught me anything it is that there is still a lot of gray area in space law if we want humans to
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play nice on Mars then we're going to have to answer a lot of these unresolved questions and if you're silly enough to have fallen for one of those bogus websites that claims that you can buy a piece of land on Mars wow the paper is not is just worth the paper it's written on and it doesn't give you any title don't expect to reap any benefits from it we're used to seeing NASA fire up its rockets and launch billions of dollars of equipment into space but what happens
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when it messes up the Hubble Space Telescope project has suffered yet another setback and how do you fix a billion dollar mistake up in space I did not have a line item that says NASA put wrong mirror in telescope with Engineers needing to fix it not once but twice so our the the the summer 2021 event um is a um was a pretty intense anomaly this is a story of how the Hubble Space Telescope nearly destroyed NASA's reputation and the retired engineer that helped bring the telescope back from the
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brink both times when I received the call I was honored that they would think of me to try and help them uh resolve this this is electrical engineer Ron barish I started working on uh Hubble in 1987 approximately 2 years before launch Hubble was one of the most ambitious space projects the world had ever seen NASA had spent hundreds of millions designing a massive mirror in the telescope to get the sharpest pictures of the universe ever seen expectations were high it promised to catapult space
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science into a radical new era and all eyes were on it and liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope our window on the universe it was very exciting to uh to watch the launch you have a go to open the doors and even more exciting to verify that our system was functioning flawlessly when it was turned on in orbit uh very exciting NASA was quick to Champion it as the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo but then disaster struck
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the Hubble Space Telescope project has suffered yet another setback Engineers have discovered that the giant telescope has a warped mirror which means the images sent back to NASA are distorted the pictures are little better than those from groundbased telescopes we found out that there was Distortion in in the image uh well the images I saw were uh blurry the uh they called it spherical aberration when light enters the telescope it's reflected first by a large 8T mirror onto a smaller secondary
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mirror which concentrates the light onto the cameras if either mirror is slightly out of true the picture becomes distorted and that's exactly what had happened the mirror hadn't been tested with the rest of Hubble had it been tested the scientists would have seen that the mirror was ground incorrectly by just 150th of a human hair tiny but enough to ruin everything everyone on the project was very disappointed uh and it was an embarrassment that uh we had spent so
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much time on the uh program and that there was uh a significant flaw the news was not very uh kind to the project well the American taxpayer they're not going to be happy well look you launched this $2 billion white elephant what you going to do and the bad news kept coming as NASA's reputation received blow after blow after to blow a matter of fact my sister said to me uh you worked on Hubble that's an embarrassment to the United States but despite the setback there were still
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some that had hope for Hubble so do not write off the Hubble telescope it merely means it's not going to be quite so good as expected until the repairs are carried out replacing the mirror wasn't practical so instead Ron and the rest of the team created an instrument called co-star which would act almost like a pair of glasses redirecting the light to account for the floor in the mirror my job job was to provide uh an Electronics interface box called the remote
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interface unit co-star three years after Hubble's embarrassing start they finally had the parts needed to fix the broken Hubble Space Telescope although it's needed now was a team of astronauts bold enough and daring enough to attempt the mission of this magnitude there weren't very many of us in the office at that time who had done space walks and so that's how I got kind of a quick turnaround from one flight to the next you know it all effect faers the hundreds and hundreds of faers I came up
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with that I had to accommodate I did not have a line item that says NASA put wrong mirror in telescope Catherine Thornton and story Musgrave were two of the astronauts that were selected for the mission and in 1993 they set off the world held its breath as the astronauts carried out five back-to-back space walks in an attempt to bring Hubble back from the brink the first space walk on Hubble um did the dance when the music starts what you going to do well you got a
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power tool and you unbolt the thing you undo the connection Zip Zip stick it in the Box hang it over there get the new one out Slide the new one in it's fingertips baby fingertips that's what's so awesome about Hubble it's almost like plug-and play we installed co-star we installed a co-processor on the computer to give it more memory added a new magnetometer and um other cats and dogs as we called it it is easy you've got to make it easy around the world astronomers anxiously awaited
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the first pictures from Hubble's new camera on the 18th of December 1993 the results came
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[Applause] in right there get it when a image hit the monitor oh everyone screamed it just got it's fixed okay that is better than any decom completion you've ever seen those are actually Stars I think you got it yep yep sir me a little premature but I'll shake your hand when the images first came back and I saw them made me be feel proud that I was part of that mission and that we had brought the telescope back to what it was supposed to be as a matter of fact
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uh my understanding is the images were clearer than uh what they had ever expected to the relief of Ron NASA and the entire world Hubble was finally fixed and it immediately began to deliver on its original promise allowing us to see the universe in ways we could previously only dream about Hubble was only supposed to last 15 years instead it continued to make groundbreaking discoveries for more than 30 but then in 2021 it suddenly shut down and the team at Nasa once again had
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to fight for Hubble survival so our the the the summer 2021 event um is a um was a pretty intense anomaly probably one of the more dramatic ones that we've had anding is the anomaly response manager for Hubble and it was her job to figure out why Hubble's computer had shut down and ultimately find a way to get it back up and running but that was Far easier said than done so enzinger had to think outside the box after the first few days and it wasn't immediately apparent um
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that we could get a path forward to resume science uh we knew we'd have to pull in um a lot more folks with Hubble still showing no signs of life and Zinga knew she needed some very Niche expertise to try and help fix Hubble so she called upon Hubble's original Architects to come back and get stuck in when I received the call I was honored that they would think of me to try and help them uh resolve this uh anytime you work on a system like this it's part of you it's uh if there's ever
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a problem with a spacecraft in orbit uh everyone jumps in and works on it even if you're retired a lot of people were concerned that we would not be able to uh to fix the Hubble it was very stressful the last thing I wanted was to have the uh system that I spent 18 years of my life on to be the cause of the end of the mission and so I was under a lot of stress but undeterred by the challenge the team set to work to identify what went wrong and get HBL back online the
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telescope uh was down for approximately 4 weeks um I think the first couple of weeks was probably the most frustrating and the most anxiety producing uh we put together what's known as a uh fishbone diagram uh everything that could possibly cause the problem was written down and we eliminated them one by one until we zeroed in on the uh the exact cause it was amazing how everything came back to me on July 15th enzinger and her team successfully powered up the backup
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computer onboard Hubble and over the next few days the team gradually brought the science instruments back online once we realized that we had solved the problem and the telescope was back up and running it was quite a relief mainly relief mainly a lot of relief how did it feel compared to 93 in my case it was even better uh this was my system that had stopped uh that had halted the telescope and to be able to get it back up and running was very proud I I was very
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proud one after the first servicing mission that we got the telescope up and running but this was more personal if another problem comes up I'd be very proud to work on the with this team again to uh resolve any future issues it would be an honor and a privilege for me to be called back to support hubo at any point in time I will always be a Hubble hugger early in its history radio active elements in its interior would have provided heat that melted the liquid
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water that's currently ice and so we think that during the early portions of series's History it had a global
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[Music] ocean in infancy series was well on its way to becoming a fully fledged world [Music] the water that Now lies Frozen within its interior was once liquid protected beneath a thin layer of ice ancient series is covered by a deep saltwater
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ocean but then something happens to cut its development short
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as the young Jupiter circles the sun it clears a path through the gas cloud that envelops the early solar system but that process causes it to do something alarming
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Jupiter begins to spiral
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inwards plowing straight through the region of space that would become the asteroid
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belt when the young Jupiter moves through the primordial asteroid belt things get scattered around things get gravitationally deflected and as a consequence of all of this gravitation interaction more than 99% of the original mass that was there is basically now
3:57:23
gone the asteroid belt has been disrupted over time by the movement of the giant planets and this has acted to throw material from the asteroid belt out of the asteroid belt into the outer solar system these protoplanetary cores like series were never able to graduate to full-fledged planets because there was just not enough material in the orbital [Music] neighborhood when Jupiter passed through the primordial asteroid belt it starved series of material halting its
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growth and the dwarf planet was condemned to live out its life as a cold Barren Rock
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but siries isn't the only World in our solar system whose development was cut short Mars would suffer a similar fate at the hands of Jupiter
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after marauding through what would become the asteroid belt Jupiter enters the region of space where Mars is
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forming continuing its Journey spiraling towards the Sun
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as Jupiter bulldozes inwards its immense gravity scatters material in all
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directions some is sent careering into the sun
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the sun's outer Corona Burns at a scorching 1 million de releasing a barrage of charged particles that travel at around 400 km/
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second the solar wind [Music]
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this Onslaught would strip away our atmosphere but for the powerful force that protects us the Earth's magnetic
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field solar wind is this stream of charged particles that come streaming out from the Sun and at Earth which has a powerful magnetic field when those charged particles begin to get close to Earth they get diverted around Earth by interactions with that magnetic field that protection keeps solar wind and other ionizing radiation off of the surface so on Earth where we have this really great magnetic field we are nice safe and sound inside the shell of that protected from all that radiation the
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magnetic field of Earth effectively forms a protective bubble around the Earth's atmosphere and when the sun dips below the horizon there are times when Earth's protective force field is [Music] visible the Aurora is a stunning display of Earth's magnetic field in [Music] action it's best seen at the poles but across earth it's protecting our atmosphere and all life on our planet this vital protective shield is generated deep within the way a magnetic field is
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generated inside a planet is when you have convective Motion in a fluid that is capable of conducting electricity and in the earth that electrically conducting fluid is liquid iron and the molten portion of the earth's core is a place where these motions take place and it can set up a magnetic [Music] field just like Earth Mars once had a molten metallic core generating a magnetic field around the [Music] planet auroras danced above Mars's poles protecting its atmosphere and seas below
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but the field didn't
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last in the oldest rocks on Mars you see evidence of a once powerful magnetic field you get to the younger rocks rocks that are 3 billion 2 billion 1 billion years old no evidence of a magnetic field whatsoever and there is no intrinsic magnetic fi on Mars
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today half a billion years after it Formed Mars's magnetic field dies out the bright auroras above its poles slowly fade
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away as the shield that protects the planet shuts down for
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good once it's stops then what happens is all the atmospheric components things like hydrogen and oxygen that make up water they get stripped away because you don't have the shield the magnetic Shield anymore so the high energy particles that come in from the Sun and from outer space they begin to strip away the components that make up water without its magnetic field to protect it Mars's atmosphere and then water slip away into
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space so why did Mars lose its protective shield what happened deep beneath its surface that stopped Mars from developing like
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Earth the answer lies at the beginning of Mars's story at its very
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creation 4.6 billion years ago when the planets were forming from the dust cloud circling the sun early differences between Mars and Earth set the young planets on very different paths [Music] Mars forms further from the Sun where crucially there is less Rocky material to build a
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planet Mars is different because it's not just further out it's actually much smaller if a planet gets to be too small it just freezes all the way through Mars is just half the diameter of Earth meaning its core cooled more quickly and so it lost the heat that powered the Dynamo that generated its protective
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shield Mars's small size condemning the planet to die
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the universe is not what you think it is that's because what you can see is only a tiny fraction of it we have no idea what 95% of the universe is it hardly seems that we understand everything maybe we're just going to have to scratch our heads and start all over again it begs the question why is 95% of the universe missing for decades physicists have been trying to find this elusive undetected part of our universe in the beginning we just had a name for it dark matter so what is dark
4:06:50
matter sounds exotic but it doesn't have to be there's a lot of dark things out there in the universe until I shine my light at these bottles I can't see them Dark Matter could just be ordinary stuff that you can't see now what we do know about dark matter is that it's matter that doesn't interact with light so we can't see it but we know it's there because of its effects duee to gravity because of the way that stars orbit the centers of galaxies the stars on the edge move a
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lot faster than they should so there has to be more matter out there on the outskirts well there's an alternative idea for what the Dark Matter could be and so what we think it is is that it's some new kind of fundamental particle not neutrons not protons not ordinary Atomic stuff but something entirely new and these particles are everywhere in the universe they're flying around in our galaxy they're in this room actually there' be billions going through you every second
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you don't notice but they're there so this invisible matter that dictates how our universe works is known by particle physicists as wimps weakly interacting massive particles if we can't see them how do we find them part of the problem is that here on Earth We're searching through a relative swamp of ordinary matter that we can see which kind of blocks our view of the stuff that we can't see if you were to try to build one of these experiments in a laboratory on the surface of the Earth
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then your signal would be completely swamped by cosmic rays they would just ruin your attempt to do the experiment because the count rate from the cosmic rays would be so high that you'd never be able to see the Wims and that's why scientists are doing something that at first might seem pretty strange that they're going underground and searching in the [Music] dark after walking a mile underground like this you have to wonder about uh the fact that we may be looking in the wrong place
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[Music]
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this is the um the inner vessel of p2l we call this project and it goes inside that big recompression chamber we put a liquid in there what we call a super heated liquid it makes it sensitive to radiation so when particles strike the liquid that goes in there normally it's now empty they produce bubbles yes electric sensors they are very sophisticated microphones and through sound we are actually able to distinguish differentiate between different types of particles as well
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what sound would Dark Matter make it it's it's actually very soft it's not the loudest but of course there's a chance that looking for dark matter in this way by essentially listening to it to see if it makes an appearance might never be possible you do your job the best you can and then you hope for the best but uh nobody knows if there's Wims out there or not we're trying now other scientists are searching for this mysterious dark matter by using the world's largest physics experiment at
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CERN in Switzerland the Large Hadron Collider they're not listening out for it they're attempting to make some from scratch what they're doing is smashing together known particles at huge huge speeds to create huge energies in these impacts that might just spew off some particles of dark matter when the protons collide most of the time the particles they produce nearly always they some new particles are created but they tend to be low mass particles but sometimes very rarely you
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produce these much more massive particles and these are the guys that we're really looking for so the search for Dark Matter continues in underground labs and at CERN and also by observing the night sky and scientists believe they're getting closer to discovering what it's made of but will we ever find it you have to accept the evidence and if it turns out that I wasted my life working on the wrong hypothesis so B what I really want to know is what is the universe made
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of I can really see it as being a particle in nature and I'm really driven as we all are driven here to try and find it and if you don't we will dust ourselves off and move on whatever they do find will surely change the the laws of physics as we know them with Scientists pushing new technologies in the boundaries of our knowledge what's more we've now realized that dark matter is only just the start of the story so 15 years ago some astronomers observing distance Supernova saw that
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the distance to those Supernova was larger than they expected and so the only way that they could understand that was to have a universe that started accelerating 3 billion years ago and whether that carries on accelerating or not we don't know but what we do know is that there has to be another component to the universe which we call this dark energy but you don't know what it is no idea not at all no one knows what it is no one no one there are more theories than there are
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theoreticians so whilst Dark Matter might make up 25% of the unnown own stuff in the universe there's this whole other whopping 70% made up of something called Dark Energy we know even less about Dark Energy it's so weird and so unknown to us that we're actually going to need a whole other video to find out about it the question we all want to know is are we
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alone and now we have eyes on the ground perseverance is ready to answer that question for us [Music]
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confirmed for the last four years I've been recreating the surface of Mars in my lab at the University of Oxford what I've most been interested in is whether I could recreate lakes and other liquid water environments that might have existed on the surface of Mars about 3 and 1/2 billion years ago where it gets really interesting is that now NASA has landed a Rover a perseverance Rover right in a crater that might have once hosted a lake although there's no water on the
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surface of Mars today there is inescapable evidence that it was once present when you look at it from space you'll see certain features that jump out at you as being quite similar to those we have on Earth you'll see sweeping valleys that look like they were carved from liquid water these Pebbles that are a few cm in diameter what you can see when you look at the pebble outlines is that they have rounded shapes so they've been basically rounded during a transport process and
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they're too large to been moved and rounded by wind processes and so the only way we can actually get this rounding is by water flow you'll see gigantic Canyons this one here is the vales marinaras and this thing would stretch from Los Angeles to New York this thing is truly colossal and I remember when this image first came up and we were all huddled around a giant screen looking at this and actually took us a while to really hit home oh gosh actually this is the first evidence from
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on the ground of water flow on Mars we see great big ice caps at the poles much like we do on Earth as well we see signs from space that are immediately recognizable as great big channels in enormous flood planes the largest in the solar system that would have excoriated their way across ples as large as the continent of North America we see chemical signatures we see minerals that have water locked in their structures that could have only formed when that water was freely
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available and we also see both of these coming together in the form of certain features that we know from studying them on Earth only form where there's bodies of water where perseverance is set is a crater called J and why jazero crater was selected is that it combines these two key indicators of water in one site and how delta form is where you have a river flowing across the surface of a planet and in its water it's containing all kinds of churned up sediments and then
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as soon as that River reaches an open body of water like a lake or an ocean it dumps all of that sediment load why the perseverance mission is so exciting to me is that for the past four years it was those carbonet that are found in its Delta I was trying to recreate in my lab perseverance has been in the making for a very long time and it's a roving scientific Suite of instruments it's a moving laboratory and it's absolutely incredible the things it can
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[Music]
4:16:35
do so to finally get to hear the the sounds of grains of sand being turned over and the the sounds of that very thin atmosphere being being blustered around in this crater it's it's absolutely incredible the first times I saw the pictures from the surface it was like being in Star Wars and learning about whole new places I couldn't believe it and um here five six years later I am with um with my PhD on the surface of Mars I feel very very fortunate ultimater data
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confirm that engine performed this first flight the first flight of a powered aircraft in another planet what's incredible about the Ingenuity fact that this is the first time anything has been Airborne on another planet at all not just Mars so the image we're looking at on the screen is the image from our onboard navigation camera showing us hovering above the surface of Mars how incredible the idea is that it might be able to scout ahead to places of interest for future astronauts and look
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for any hazards perseverance has four main scientific goals first is to search for habitable conditions the second is it's interested in searching for Bio signatures the third mission goal is to harvest and then cash together samples of interest to return to Earth the absolute dream is to one day have a sample of Martian soil returned from derero Crater from those carbonet that you can see from orbit and to compare that to the kinds of crystals that I was forming in my lab and just see how
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similar are they what do they look like and the final goal of the perseverance mission is to prepare for humans to come and live there one day people who are fit people who are top in their fields people who are experts people who have a a spirit of Adventure but I would say most critically you need people who have the right temperament think about a mission of Mars what is it is it outdoor stuff or is it [Music] confinement and then I see somebody that says I have a stamp collection I do a
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lot of reading I enjoy watching movies and I'm thinking that might be good for confinement timus is a key step in getting humans to [Music] Mars right now launching humans from Earth is extremely expensive because we're just so heavy getting off this gigantic Rock instead if we can have a base set up on the moon we can have supplies ready to go from there manufactured on the moon that can then be launched straight to Mars and so this makes it cheaper and easier to be
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launching things not just to Mars but perhaps around the solar system as well once you've got to Mars there are a whole host of problems that you wouldn't even think about based on life on Earth so you need something to protect you from essentially exploding or at least having your skin all stretched out in the blood boiling and getting the bends things like that the way space suits are designed now they're mostly pressurized spacecraft essentially they're almost
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like a mini spaceship things like how do you maintain water how do you recycle your water supply how do you recycle waste here we are at the throne number two right here it's pretty small so you have to have pretty good aim how do you keep making the best of everything you've got without throwing things away and they're all prop s that we're going to have to overcome if we're ever going to be a space fairing interplanetary species I've had a very long time to
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think about whether I would go to Mars and so I'm not being flippant when I say yes absolutely would absolutely love to go it would be the most Fabulous Adventure there'd be so much to do and explore and so many questions endless questions so yes absolutely Big Bang was not the moment of creation it was actually this the cosmic Dawn the moment that the very first star in the universe was formed and started forging the materials that we need to make you me and
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everything around us this is your origin story several million years after the big bang the universe was dark and boring filled with cold hydrogen atoms floating through space all the things we treasure did not exist the Big Bang created space and time and all of the essential ingredients but it didn't create anything that was recognizable as our present day Universe instead it left us with one of the most boring periods in the universe's history The Cosmic Dark Ages
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if you go back to this time of the Dark Ages the universe looked completely different if you had a Observer translated back in time uh you would see a completely dark boring featureless Universe an utterly alien place it would appear to us it was a universe without any light there were no stars no Galaxy now the transformation of our universe into one that we would recognize didn't start until the first stars were born the cosmic Dawn would have been spectacular there was this magical if
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you like metaphysical moment it was the starting point that led to the appearance of Life the moment of First Light let there be light the first stars are fundamental to How the Universe evolved new galaxies were forming out of Darkness this Age of Enlightenment was a very Dynamic period of time what we found is that in the early Universe stars are much more massive maybe even a 100 times more massive than the Sun that has dramatic consequences because massive stars have a very different life
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a much more violent life than the kind of low mass star that the sun is they would be 20 times hotter shining ultraviolet blue 10 million times more luminous than the sun they going to live very very short time only a few million years that's that's really nothing we of say they're like the rock stars in the universe they live fast and die young were appearing and disappearing it's like fireworks it's very Dynamic it grew up exponentially very quickly within tens
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of millions of years there were plenty of stars filling up the universe the cosmic Dawn is the beginning of complexity in the universe that led to our existence
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so stars are essentially giant furnaces right they take the simplest element hydrogen and they transform it into the heavier elements needed for life this is why stars are so important they create the sugar spice and all things nice needed to me you me and the pal of gos For the First Time new elements are being made they take hydrogen turn into helium helium gets combined to make carbon and we go to oxygen and Sil the rocks that we see have been formed inside a stellar interior and
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then throw them back out into the universe the gold and the silver and the rings on my finger they've all been made in a supernova there's no other place in the universe that you can create elements like that so it might sound like a internet meme but it's true we literally all are made of Stardust we have astrophysicist Margaret Burbage to thank for that she actually managed to figure out what was going on inside Stars so so far so good right we've got this epic theory of creation that took
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billions of years just to get the ingredients for you and me but how do we actually go about proving that that's what happened so scientists are on the hunt for eyewitnesses stars that could have been there at that first moment that Cosmic Dawn luckily astronomers on the search for ancient Stars know what to look look for we know that they are much Bluer Than the stars of today that's because ancient stars are made out of pure hydrogen so they burn much more efficiently and therefore much
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hotter which means they're blue think about like the flame on a hob or a bunson burner which burns blue compared to the flame of a candle or the dying Embers of a fire which burns orangey red in 2013 Stephan Keller and his team found that needle in a hay stack an ancient star in our own Milky Way galaxy that provides valuable clues about what happened at the cosmic Dawn at first we thought we must have done something wrong here but we confirmed it the next night and that's when things really got
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exciting has been around for 13.6 billion years it's a very pristine start it Formed very early on in the history of the universe in fact what we're able to do with this star is for the first time say that there was only one star that preceded it so this is the purest star that we've ever found making it the oldest star that we know of but it's still only a second generation star not a first generation star the first to form in our universe we need to find one of those
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this is why astronomers are excited for the launch of the James web Space Telescope later this year because it might just have a chance of spotting some of these first Stars being born so there was the Big Bang and then a 100 million years of nothing and then there was the big switch when the universe finally turned on the lights the cosmic Dawn this finally gives us a scientific answer to one of the biggest questions that Humanity has ever asked when we've been searching for answers to for
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Millennia where did all this come from it turns out that the device you're watching this on the chair you're sat on and even you yourself all of the stuff that makes all that comes from Stars we are all curious where we came from if one opens the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible the Old Testament one finds a version of this story How the Universe started and how we humans came to live in it some bits of this story are right there was a beginning in time light came into existence from
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Darkness life was created we are now at a special time that allows us to explore this question scientifically we are able to peer deep into space and see those very early sources of light that tell us how we came into existence and of course with modern technology we're hoping to get the story much more accurate I'm NASA astronaut Jessica Mir I may be one of the first people to return to the
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moon the Artemis Mission has the stated goal of sending the first woman and the first person of color to the surface of the Moon it will have been over 50 years since humans have set foot there we aren't just going to go there once and then come back or go there a few times like in the Apollo missions and then come back we're going to keep this presence going with a Gateway program that will be an outpost in orbit around the Moon think of it kind of like a little mini space station with
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subsequent missions of Landings on the moon and then eventually using all of that time and knowledge and those lunar missions as a springboard to go even further and go to Mars my mom tells me I first started saying I wanted to be an astronaut when I was 5 years old so it actually was quite difficult to believe when it came true in 2013 when the phone rang and I was given the option to come here to NASA to be an astronaut it's almost felt surreal copy Jessica's egressing 10
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seconds to a 20 second Handover coming out of the hatch for your first Space Walk is a moment that I don't think anyone ever forgets my first spacewalk happened to be only a few weeks after I arrived on the space station so at that point I was still learning how to move and navigate myself around on the space station that day I was with my colleague and friend Christina cook she was in the same class of astronauts as me so we really are like astronaut siblings she's like my
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space sister sister we were ready to go out of the hatch that day for the first all female spacewalk of course there had been other women that had done spacewalks before us we were the 14th and 15th women to do so but this was the first time that two women together were going to embark on a spacewalk so there I am and I'm looking down at my feet dangling below the hatch and then there is nothing else between this Earth spinning below and my feet and that was
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just the most profound moment I was just in awe and so excited just us up there were floating the whole time going around our planet every 90 minutes it was still even though I was living it even though I understood the science behind why I was there it was still difficult to believe that it was actually happening so it was really only after the spacewalk ended that I started thinking more about what it meant and it was interesting because in the beginning I thought why does it matter why is
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there so much attention being drawn to this first all female spacewalk it just happens to be the the fact that right now there are two women going out the door were just as qualified as everybody else up here and so it's just a matter of time that this would happen but then when I started thinking about it differently so many people tuned in to watch that spacewalk and so many people started giving us this feedback about how inspiring it was for them and how
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much it meant for them and that really took me a little bit by surprise and I also started thinking more about the generations that came before us so Christina and I both of us when we look at this now we don't think about it as our Personal Achievement we had that opportunity because of the generations of women and other minorities that had worked so hard that had truly pushed the envelope and broken those glass ceilings to allow us to be where we were so now
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when we look toward the future and we look at the Artemis program this Administration has set forth the goal that we will be sending the first woman and the first person of color to the surface of the Moon of course I would be absolutely thrilled to be that person to be one of these first people returning to the moon and to me it would represent so much I know somebody asked me once what I would say what would be those those first words like we have those famous first words from the Apollo
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Mission and that is something I would have to put a lot of thought into I think it to me it would be a little bit like how I described that first all female space walk it wouldn't be about my achievement it would be about the achievement of everybody on this NASA team that got there and it wouldn't even only be limited to that really that next person that goes to the moon is a representative of all of humanity so a lot of people ask us why haven't we been back to the Moon if we
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did this 50 years ago why is it so difficult why haven't we been doing it there's nothing easy about going to the moon what we accomplished in the' 60s was extraordinary we are due to go back to the moon for so many reasons the first is simply for exploration it is an inherent characteristic inside us as humans to explore to want to look around the corner to go further to ask those questions and just quench that Curiosity that we have secondly though and equally
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as important is for scientific reasons if we look back at the Apollo missions we learn so much about the our solar system about the formation of our planet and of the Moon and I know that that will be true as well for the emis missions for example we'll be targeting the South Pole because at that area we know that there is much more frozen water so by going to that spot we can study and understand that water that ice that frozen water will help us understand more about the moon about our
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solar system and it will also be a resource we can use oxygen in the soil we can use that frozen water in the surface we can use that to make fuel to make resources for further exploration so that would be that next step take what we learn in The Proving Ground around the moon and now use that to get to Mars where we need to be autonomous we need to think about things like sustainable Food Systems we won't even be able to necessarily carry all the food and water that we need up
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there so maybe we want to bring some things that we can grow everything that we learn in these early emis missions to the moon will apply then on to Mars fairly soon we will be launching that Artemis 1 test mission and that mission will be about 3 weeks it will go all the way out to the moon and Beyond it and we will test out all of those systems of the Orion spacecraft and that launch system the next mission the emus 2 mission would have crew members on it so
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that will be the first mission that has astronauts going out to the Moon they won't yet land on the surface of the Moon but they will go out again further than the moon they'll be in orbit around the Moon before they come back here so that will be another vital step in making sure we have everything ready and we're prepared for those later missions which will then land on the surface of the Moon we'll also have the Gateway which will be in orbit around the moon
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so think of it kind of like a little mini Space Station instead of being around the earth though it'll be there proximal to the Moon and then we can use that to go back and forth we can keep people on board the Gateway and then we can have regular excursions down to the surface of the Moon we can use that as a test bed for other hardware and technology and experiments and then we can eventually use that as a stepping stone to getting to Mars to me the moon represents this
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Spirit of exploration that I think has driven humans from the beginning of evolution of our species and also me personally the Stars the Milky Way the moon were so bright in our view and I think that's something that really shaped part of my childhood letting that natural scientific curiosity that Spirit of exploration extend not only from what was in front of me on the ground but also to what was lying up there above and of course the Moon is this incredibly prominent object and
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something that that I think we're all drawn to it makes me so optimistic now to know that it is a national priority again we have laid out this Foundation to get back to the moon so we will
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[Music] return we've waited years for this I've waited years this was almost the perfect day almost Rosetta was and is a unique space mission it's a travel not just in space space it's also traveled back in time to the very early days of the solar system this is the story of the Epic ambitious mission to land a spacecraft on a comet hurtling through space nothing like it had ever been attempted before or since Rosetta completely transformed our view of comets it was a mission 25 years in the
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making that all came down to a few frantic hours fer was not anchored it bounced we don't know where it is but let's go back a bit to 2004 the Rosetta spacecraft with its little F Lander tucked away inside is about to
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launch uh well the the actual launch took place on 2nd of March in 2004 the first part the mission was just to catch up with the mysterious Comet known as 67p that took 10 years during which time everything on board Rosetta was powered down only to be woken up as it neared the comet it was quite a nervous time when Rosetta was coming out of hibernation because if it didn't wake up that that was curds really billion euros of Kit out in space and if it didn't
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call home at the expected time um there was very little that could be done about it and then it got this got this signal wake up Rosetta and it's just like hasn't woken up all right send the signal again H switch it off and switch it on again T it's woken up which was just so so much of a relief hudle one out the way when Rosetta woke up that that was really the point where everybody got excited again we had no idea how the comet would look like we don't know what shape it is it's
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probably spherical is we didn't immediately see see the high uh quality images we saw better and better ones the closer and closer uh Rosetta came then wow what shape is that the shape is not potato shaped as we expect it not roundish it's it's the comet has this kind of rubber duct shape like one of those yellow plastic ducks and that made hurdle too that extra bit harder Landing F safely on top of it there was no area on this Comet which is nice and smooth as we have hoped for the terrain
4:39:51
was was rough everywhere um so there was a risk uh but that also made it fascinating and and interesting Phil was equipped with little harpoons to fire off to help it cling to the comet once it made contact and the landing site had to be meticulously chosen to allow Fila to recharge its solar battery trees in the glow of the Sun the stakes were huge this was a lifetime's work for most of the scientists on the Rosetta Mission the team already knew there may be a
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problem with the thrusters that were supposed to slow down filet's approach but the time had come to deploy fil on the 12th of November 2014 off it went one could see the fer Lander as it moves away from the main spacecraft getting smaller and smaller with the landing gear successfully uh deployed I found this already very emotional to see the baby go after 10 years attached to the spacecraft you now see it in in Freedom uh on its way the last 22 kilomet uh to the surface of the
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Comet and then fer was Free Falling for almost exactly 7 hours to the surface of the Comet everybody was you know jittering and just waiting and waiting and waiting for for for the signal to say it landed and [Applause] then I just went absolutely hey it's landed it's landed I'm so excited it's landed it's
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landed yeah it was it was just the the tension that had wound up and the release of that tension and the relief you waited years for I'm waiting years I'm just so excited I'm going to cry I'm sorry it's fantastic and of course everywhere in the world in the control rooms in the scientific teams people started to open the champagne and started to celebrate it landed it was fantastic it was wonderful everybody was really really really happy in the control room we
4:42:04
thought yeah great we are landed we have to touchdown signal but the mood in the control room was suddenly very different something wasn't quite right within a few minutes we realized that although we have landed and although we still got radio contact which was positive we did not anchor and the Lander was moving again and then uh the principal investigators came out of their little cocoon and Ian came up to me and he gave me a big hug and I gave him a big hug
4:42:33
and I said oh you know it's fantastic isn't it it's really great you know you must be so so proud and pleased and he said no has gone wrong it bounced we don't know where it is I said what do you mean he said well it hasn't been announced yet but it will be announced in a minute that actually F feli did land but the the Harpoon didn't anchor it and the little crampons on the on the legs couldn't get a grip and so it it's bounced and we had no idea what's going
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on where we would jump and how we would land and when we would land uh deare filet had crashed off the face of the Comet and bounced about 1 km back into space any further and it risked escaping the comet's weak gravitational pool and drifting off into space forever anxiously they waited we had no idea whether this would be a successful Mission or would be just a touch and and we would never again hear from the Landers and then the news came in so we did land somewhere uh and we still had
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radio contact we still received signals and this was the moment of great relief because that was the moment where we knew we are at the surface and we can still communicate with the Lander but the good news didn't last long it landed in the shade not great for something reliant on solar power this meant they had less than 72 hours of battery time to undertake months worth of scientific collection the Clock Was ticking so it's one of those things it's like okay let's just
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throw away 10 years worth of calculations and let's just redo them all over the space of five hours which is what they did we also optimized the sequence in a way to get the maximum science out of the energy available once they knew they' only got 70 hours and and it was just going to seep away it's like it wasn't if you turned all the instruments off the battery would stay at that particular level no because it was so cold it was having to maintain it was having to keep
4:44:53
heaters on as well you know to make sure that the instruments kept working so you just knew You' got 70 hours full stop all right so you worked for 70 hours you you just did it you just Barrel through get as much data as we can and amazingly almost all of the instruments on filet had survived the impact it was go time we were very lucky I mean we ended up in an orientation that the antenna were pointing uh well upward so to say that we could establish the radio link uh
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with the main spacecraft and again we were also lucky uh because we could switch on the instruments we could do fantastic signs from the surface of the common about 80% of the science goals of the the the Fel Islander were achieved so it was an absolute fantastic success you know the fact that crash landed got around that it was a amazing success this was of course a bit sad to see the voltage of the pety drop and and knowing that fer will go into a hibernation and eventually that's what
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happened even in those few hours Phil had unveiled a world full of surprises of dust and debris gases erupted from deep within the comet even the crash landing threw up interesting discoveries even by analyzing the bounce itself uh we got information on what's what's the surface made of and it was a bit surprising that the surface was rather hard but perhaps most exciting of all was what this Comet was able to teach us about us the Rosetta Mission had one of its goals to understand the building
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blocks of life because Comet 67p was rich in organic compounds like phosphorus carbon oxygen nitrogen and the amino acid glycine all essential for the origins of life and offering tantalizing Clues as to how these compounds may have arrived on Earth in the first place so the original building blocks of life came from comets
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while F had gone into eternal hibernation the mothership Rosetta continued to fly around the comet collecting data for two more years but then Rosetta's time had to come in the last ditch effort to get as much out of the mission as possible the team decided to crash land Rosetta into the comet collecting data along the way and allowing the scientists to get one last look at their old friend F took this sort of shallow dive onto the surface of the Comet and and then sort of Crash
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landed and it's camera was going the whole time so we saw these last pictures of the of the the the surface rushing up to greet
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Rosetta and then the signal died and you got this little sort of oscilloscope thing with nothing on it just like you know like somebody when they die and you see the the signal die on the heart thing and it was just like it was it was so devastating people were in I cried and it's just hell's teeth it's a robot you know but it's been part of your life for so long and so important so that was it that was the end of the Rosetta Mission there is still many many Publications done using the data from
4:48:34
Rosetta that's still the most relevant and best um scientific information we have uh from a comet Rosetta completely transformed our view of comets to some extent what we know about the uh evolution of the solar system and what we believe about the formation of Life uh all of this is is triggered by Rosetta and this is not often in lifetime you get a chance to get involved in in such a project
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[Music] like Jess Barnes geologist ktie Joy is fascinated by The Far Side mystery because people hadn't seen The Far Side of the Moon we just made the assumption that The Far Side was the same as the near side so Luna 3 turned our ideas on its head and those ideas are still being turned on our head ktie is one of NASA's lead investigators studying the precious Apollo samples to better understand the moon's mysterious has past because the moon surface is very
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old it can tell us a lot about history of the solar systems past it can tell us about Mars Mercury Venus and the Earth every time there's new technology we can ask these rocks new questions and that's why they're sort of the gift that keeps on giving because they're always going to be available for us to look out with new ideas the Apollo samples continue to teach us about the moon the earth and the rest of the solar system
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but when it comes to solving The Far Side mystery there's a problem with the lunar missions that have been to the surface and collected samples we've only visited a very geologically restricted area on the near side of the moon so in order to fully understand the moon and the far side composition we really need to go back and collect samples from a more diverse region and with NASA's emis Mission aiming to return humans to the lunar surface in the coming years Jess is preparing for a new batch
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of [Music] evidence we want to preserve that DNA fingerprints rocks as precisely as possible so that we don't lose any of that evidence so before we go back to the Moon we really need to understand what's the best way to curate and keep samples safe and preserve them for future Generations
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to get ready for these upcoming missions NASA is releasing some crucial untouched evidence from its vaults after Apollo 17 people soon realized that it would be beneficial to Future generations to lock some of the Apollo samples away in special storage for 50 years and now we're at the point in time when NASA has decided things have improved so much that we're not in a position to open those samples use new technologies on to answer past and new questions now armed with techniques
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impossible 50 years ago Jess is one of the handful of people chosen by NASA to analyze these precious samples one of the things that we've been doing is using a particle accelerator to measure the oxidation state of sulfur in our samples we're really looking at these samples forensically and this is a really new technique that's been applied to lunar samples only in the the last few years yeah bring it up a little bit and we can do a slow scan this tool allows Jess to piece together the sample's
4:52:21
history and establish how new evidence might be better preserved in the future we find that samples that were prepared 50 years ago contain a lot more sulfur than we see in samples that were actually stored Frozen for 50 years we're not quite sure why that is but this is one of the things that we want to find out do we need to do something differently for samples coming back from the Moon in the future it's a problem that must be addressed before we return for more
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evidence something Jess knows is critical if we're ever to finally solve the mystery of the moon's Far Side in 1996 scientists announced they'd found evidence of possible Martian life but Mars is a frozen desert Planet its surface is completely uninhabitable so could these strange shapes really be ancient alien fossils Rel and lift off and why does scientists think they might be able to find more of
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them I've always loved space there's all kinds of things moving around and we have no idea what's out there planetary scientist Nina Lanza knows it can be difficult to interpret images from space this is peral LEL who was an astronomer in the 1880s who was obsessed with Mars he made many observations of the surface of Mars using telescopes on the ground on Earth lol's maps of Mars led to an idea that has enthralled us ever since what he thought he saw were these
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Canal features he thought he could see signs of a civilization on the surface of Mars and these ideas had a huge impact not just on science fiction but also actual science so in 1964 when NASA's pioneering Marin 4 probe reached the red planet the public eagerly awaited their first look at the alien World Mariner 4 was the very first time we had closeup images of Mars from a spacecraft people when they first saw them were incredibly disappointed because they looked nothing like the
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Mars of our imagination there were no alien civilizations there was no water there were just a bunch of craters and it really looked like the moon but just 7 years later marinina 9 made scientists think again its more powerful camera revealed something remarkable etched on the Martian surface this is an image from Mariner 9 and it's a really important image because it was the first time scientists saw evidence that there might be something more on the surface than just craters this is a
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very sinuous channel that looks like it was carved by flowing water each mission that followed has Unearthed more evidence that Mars was not always a dry Frozen Planet the Viking orbiters sent back some incredibly beautiful images things like these flowing channels and Teardrop Islands both of which suggest that water was once abundant on the surface and flowing making these
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features Mars Global surveyor sent back this one which shows a feature that looks like a beautiful River
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delta the twin Rover's spirit and opportunity found dramatic evidence these are hematite spheres and they form in water this is a vein of a mineral called gypsum so gypsum is a mineral that not only forms in water but actually contains water in its structure it's now known that in the first one or two billion years of its life Mars was much more like Earth it had a thick atmosphere and was covered in rivers lakes and seas there is overwhelming evidence just looking at the surface
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that there was a lot of liquid water on Mars's surface in the past however this discovery while extraordinary did not prove Mars also had life life needs water but that's only one thing that it needs it also needs certain chemical ingredients and also environmental conditions before it can actually develop and Thrive the Northern Lights on Jupiter are the most spectacular in our solar system they're stunning and they're bigger than our entire planet they produce incredibly powerful
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flares that reach terawatts of power that's more energy than you'd need to briefly supply all of human civilization what causes them why do they seem to pulse like clockwork to truly unlock Jupiter's Mysteries we needed a way to get closer to it than ever before Jupiter is the most extreme environment NASA's ever visited to send a spacecraft there is a little bit insane we had to you know build an armored tank to go there Juno arrived in Jupiter's orbit in 2016 as it got closer the auroras on
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Jupiter became so dramatic and active that astronomers said it was like Jupiter was putting on a fireworks display for Juno's arrival which seems apt given the sheer scale of the spacecraft behind me is the Juno spacecraft basically life size it's an enormous spacecraft close to 70 ft in diameter as it spins around and cartwheels through
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space this is one of the largest spacecraft ever made Juno showed us more than we'd ever seen of Jupiter's auroras as they rippled over the planet's poles the Northern Lights on Earth are caused by solar winds entering our atmosphere and interacting with the planet's magnetic field Jupiter's magnetic field also known as the magnetosphere is 20,000 times stronger than the one here on Earth it extends all the way back to Saturn and perhaps further and it's the biggest structure
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in the solar system next to the sun's magnetosphere that's one of the reasons Jupiter's auroras are so huge these gigantic magnetic tentacles capture particles from across the solar system thrusting them towards the planet's poles creating this epic light show that never dies but this is only part of the story as well as photographing Jupiter's dazzling displays Juno also began mapping Jupiter's core and that's when things got interesting Jupiter is a gas giant it is
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full of loads of gas especially hydrogen and helium and when hydrogen is under extreme pressure it acts in a really weird way it becomes liquid metal liquid metal like at the core of Jupiter is an ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen and using some of jino's findings physicists in California tried to recreate this extraordinary phenomenon bubbling away deep inside Jupiter's core so basically we're creating a little planet interior inside our laboratory Marius moo and his team
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at the national ignition facility conducted a pretty crazy experiment they fired lasers at a tiny Target which imitates the core of Jupiter the lasers simulate the unfathomable pressures going on inside so this is the Target that we put inside this target chamber we f a little portion inside this cone here with liquid hydrogen about 20 million of a gram and then we shine 80 laser beams from the top and 80 laser beams from the bottom so the power that we put in the
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lasers when we shine the laser onto the target is about 500 times the power that is used for the entire United States at a given moment 5 4 3 2 1 shot through the laser blast the team observed this surreal change that takes place in the core of Jupiter at this time the pressure got so high that the light is now reflecting off the shiny surface of the hydrogen hydrogen transformed from being transparent to opaque and then becomes a metal like a shiny metal if we were to go deep inside
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Jupiter we would see a deep oan of fluid shiny metal and just like that the planet completely messed with what's possible with the elements it throws out the rule book on Jupiter this metallic hydrogen makes up to potentially 50% of the planet's mass and it's this huge liquid metal ocean that accounts for Jupiter's gigantic magnetic field but that's not all it also causes charged particles to leak out at its extremities and it's this that causes is the breathtaking auroras that outshine all
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the others in the solar system so Jupiter's core is the main source of the auroras but its moons also wanted to get in on the ACT particularly one of the strangest moons in the solar system IO this moon is the most volcanically active in the solar system it's spectacular volcanoes spew plumes up to 300 miles into the atmosphere adding extra fuel to Jupiter's light show so we see Jupiter in the middle but around Jupiter we see the moons EO Europa ganam Kalisto the gases that come from IO
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become trapped in the magnetic field and they become accelerated to very high energies these trapped charged particles get dragged towards Jupiter's poles by its all-encompassing magnetosphere energetic charge particles come in bombard the atmosphere make it Glow and then we're seeing this glow in the atmosphere of Jupiter so the combination of the gigantic magnetosphere its supercharged liquid metal core and unique moons create these breathtaking auror but astrophysicists were still
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puzzled by one thing why do these auror light up and Flash in semi-regular patterns pulsing in this EXT extremely bizarre way it took a team at UCL to crack the case in the time they watched the auroras they found that they pulsed every 27 minutes by closely analyzing the data sent back from Juno and the European Space Agency telescope xmm Newton they came to the conclusion that periodic vibrations crashed across the magnetosphere causing waves of plasma to
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send heavy ion particles surfing across the magnetic field toward Jupiter but the mystery isn't over just what causes these vibrations what determines the pattern of these pulses and why does Jupiter randomly decide on these rhythmic regular intervals this is just the beginning of our learning about Jupiter's auroras and that's just the start of a wider search there are more like them across the Galaxy waiting to be explored nearly everything we've sent into space is still there circling our
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planet huge amounts of abandoned old Machinery just littering space it really is a terrifying thought when you're going 177,000 mph it does not take a big piece of debris to ruin your day the energy would be more like a 50 caliber Browning machine gun sniper round experts are now beginning to ask have we trashed space forever over the last several years orbits around Earth have become littered with satellites and old pieces of Machinery so how much junk is in
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space space junk is all the stuff that we've launched into into orbit that no longer serves a useful purpose so it's satellites it's rocket bodies it's uh you know old gloves basically litter that we've left in space now this isn't a trivial issue because as we enter into a period of more rapid space expansion from space space tourism to companies putting more smaller satellites into space it's now estimated that the number of pieces of space trunk up there is over
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130 million pieces that are orbiting the Earth and that number is only growing so space is being littered with these dangerous uncrewed pieces of Machinery flying through space at break neck speeds it's a lethal accident waiting to happen so what happens when junk collides you're on your way to the and I'm going around in 2009 NASA actually had to order an emergency evacuation of the International Space Station when they discovered a piece of space junk about the same size as a CD
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traveling towards them at 8 kmet a second we got a call that we were having a red conjunction and we're looking around what the heck is a red conjunction you know cuz we hadn't really trained for it it was a little bit chaotic because this is the first time we had had one of these cop you're on your way bag and I'm going around esg2 it's either going to hit or it's not going to hit and so worrying about it doesn't help you all you have to do is just prepare everything that you need to prepare so
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that if it hits then you're in the best possible configuration now thankfully the ISS wasn't hit that time but this is a genuine concern for NASA EA and other space agencies because if it was hit the damage would be catastrophic it gets hit by something relatively small penetrates but because the pressure inside it just forces the modules to open up just like a balloon bursting and that happens extremely quickly and with no chance that an astronaut in that module could could
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could ever get out in fact you can recreate these kind of collisions in a lab and it really reveals how dangerous they really are you see your screen flash up and it's over all that work is turned into
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this so this piece of Modern Art here you can see it's all sped out now that's about 250 mg that's a little bit bigger than a heavier than a ibuprofen pill and um the energy that would have on orbit at say 14 km/s would be uh well the momentum would be about the same as a hot loaded 357 Magnum so that's a lot of momentum and the energy would be more like a 50 caliber uh Browning machine gun sniper round a single one of these collisions can create thousands of these tiny
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lethal fragments that act like space bullets that Ripple out into space causing unimaginable damage as they go in fact some forecasts suggest that a major Collision like this could happen once every five years you we see thousands and thousands of of near misses every single day as a result of of all the junk that we put up there you you end up in the situation where you know it's basically it's a you know a lottery in terms of whether or not your satellite is going to be hit and this
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wouldn't just cause issues up in space with so much of our modern world dependent on satellites for things like navigation and the internet communications weather forecasting it would cause absolute Havoc down here on Earth as well now with more and more of these objects being blasted into space every single year it's becoming a serious threat to Modern Life so what can we do about it and how will we solve this problem step one it's actually tracking all of this space junk and that's
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something that the US Air Force has been doing for decades prepass SVN 26 no time critical commanding no satellite conjunctions good on step six they've been cataloging space junk since the early ' 80s they started with 6,000 and have grown to to 10,000 over the next two decades and since 2009 the amount of trackable space junk has gone up by 20% to over 25,000 pieces but the problem is the only space junk that's trackable is stuff larger than a cricket ball and it
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misses those tiny tiny fragments that can be incredibly lethal so space agencies across the globe are working Round the Clock to come up with solutions to remove this space junk one option to use a space Harpoon this system will capture those items of debris tow them out of the orbits where they might collide with active satellites and allow them to burn up safely in the atmosphere so the idea is to have a system which takes them away from where from where they cause a problem and
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basically destroy them safely it's a great idea but the thing is it's a bit of a slow tactic cuz you have to remove everything piece by piece and the problem is we're putting even more space junk up there just to do this now other plans include capturing them in a net or sticking a magnetic Thruster onto them or even using solar radiation to sail them off into the sunset it just shows though with so many of these ideas being developed how dangerous of an issue this actually is and if our quest
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to remove this junk fails and with the increase in objects littering space every single day the question is have we ruined space [Music] forever I want my kids and my kids's kids to be able to explore space and if we ruin the environment we can't do that and that would be tragic because my passion for space came when I was 10 years old and I watched Apollo 11 and I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and that magic that created that feeling in me that said I want to do space I
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want my kids and my kids's kids to have that opportunity and if the space environment is ruined that'll never happen so just like we've seen laws come in to protect our environment here on Earth we could also see laws come in to help protect space and the environment around Earth with the hope of preserving the Wonder and the beauty of the night sky for generations to come
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now aliens contacting us might seem like science fiction but now new mysterious signals from outer space are intriguing scientists around the world this signal was so bright that it was completely unlike anything we'd ever seen before it's not crazy to think that radio burst could be created on another planet what causes them is one of the biggest mysteries in physics so are these signals from Aliens now linking strange signals from space with aliens sounds a bit like
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something cooked up by conspiracy theorist so is this real science yes this is real science it's the job of an astrobiologist to figure out where in the universe is habitable and if possibly intelligent life could have developed there and then contacted us in fact in 1961 pioneering astronomer Frank Drake organized a now Infamous secret meeting to try and figure out how many civilizations like this exist outside of our own so we start out with the rate of star formation multiply that
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by the fraction of stars which actually have planets habital planets in each system the fraction on which life develops the fraction by which intelligence appears by the fraction of those which actually give a detectable technology this r times the average time that these civilizations remain detectable n equals about 10,000 detectable civilizations at present in our galaxy The Milky Way calling themselves the order of the dolphin this group of award-winning
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scientists set out on the hunt this huge number of civilizations that they thought could be out there oh I believe very strongly that they are out there we can be very very wrong and yet there will be many many detectable civilizations from secret government agencies to Nobel prizewinning scientists the search was on for weird unexplained signals first there was the wow signal in 1977 detected by the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio the signal was strong about 72 seconds but more importantly it
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was detected in something known as the hydrogen line that was significant because at the time astronomers thought that if extraterrestials did exist they would use that frequency the astronomer at Jerry Emon was so excited that he actually wrote the term wow on the print out but very quickly it was dismissed by astronomist is actually coming from a comet then in 2007 came a detection of what would become the biggest mystery in physics something that could have been a
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GameChanger in the search for aliens my student showed me this sign that was so bright and apparently so far away that it was completely unlike anything we'd ever seen before then we realized this is just impossible unless a civilization is way more advanced than we are scientist Duncan Lura and his team had found what we now call fast radio burst they're incredibly bright radio signals so bright that they can't be coming from any naturally occurring phenomena on
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Earth they have to be coming from outer space quite frankly it was unlike anything I'd ever seen before yet it had all the Hallmarks of a signal that was coming from deep space I did think that it could be a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization um we create signals like that on Earth so it's not crazy to think that radio burst could be created on another planet so it was a groundbreaking time for physicists and with this new data from Laura the burning question everyone still had was
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are these alien signals now the problem with the Laura burst was that it was just a one off and how do you prove a oneoff is real and not just some noise or some random signal in your detector well it helped when other scientists around the world started detecting signals just like it they were coming from all over the sky uh and they were clearly real so it was a breakthrough moment now although this seemed really exciting it meant that there are probably much more likely
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explanations for what was going on we observe binary systems of two neutron stars that are in orbit around each other and when we observe these systems we see them getting closer and closer together all the time so what will happen eventually is that they'll going to coll lot and when they emerge the neutron stars will be completely destroyed and form a block hole when you look at the energetics of these events you can easily explain the FB energies with them you can also
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explain the durations of the FB pulses with the expected durations of these merger events so it's quite a plausible explation now neutron stars are some of the most energetic objects in the universe seconded only to black holes and you need something really energetic to produce a fast radio burst now astronomers recently have discovered a fast radio burst coming from a magnetar in our own Milky Way galaxy magnetar is a special type of neutron star that has a very high magnetic field and while
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this is really exciting that we finally might have an explanation it means that aliens producing f bees is becoming a lot less likely now that fast radio bursts are real you know comes back to the point where they could be caused by aliens so if I were looking for a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization I'd be looking for it coming from a single point in the sky here we have a population of sources all over the sky which implies that the aliens are all over the place all over the universe
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that just seems highly unlikely to me so we're one step closer to solving the mystery of fast radio bursts even though it's looking likely that they're not the alien signals that everyone was secretly hoping for but as a scientist I reckon Never Say Never we'll always keep observing the sky and I think in our lifetimes we've got a great chance of discovering alien life somewhere out there in the universe we have done a great deal of searching in the last 50 plus years and
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we've learned that we're going to have to search perhaps a million stars on countless frequency channels before we have have a good chance of success if I had this to do all over I would still do it and in fact probably put more time into it because I've come to realize that's what's required to succeed and to me that time is not time wasted because the eventual discovery of is of such importance that that justifies not just one human life being dedicated to succeeding but many [Music]
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this weird creature might just be the best living Explorer in the universe to Comm in space put him on a satellite opened up the door set him outside exposed them to extreme temperatures vacuum right hot cold huge radiation and they they come back alive this is the tardigrade often called the water bear and you can probably guess why and they might even hold Clues as to whether life on Earth arrived from outer space these creatures are the best candidates to
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explore whether life came from somewhere else in the universe or it emerged on Earth could they even be the origin of Life themselves so what is a tardigrade they're aquatic microscopic animals barely visible to the naked eye is they transparent and only about a millimet long they also love Mossy conditions which has earn tardigrades their adorable nickname Moss piglets oh tardigrade means there a Latin name slow stepper tardy means slow grade it refers to foot you can start to see he's got
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long thin filaments coming off his body and some actual more almost look like horns coming off his head that he uses in feeding so why are these Moss piglets the ultimate Space Explorers well despite being water dwelling creatures they have a special process of morphing or adapting to hostile surroundings like radiation or freezing temperatures by drying themselves out they can cope with all kinds of nasty conditions as that sample drawer starts to dry out as that
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specimen starts to dry out what's cool about these guys they can survive that extreme desiccation drying down to like a crispy little booger yeah that it's called a ton they roll up into a special Tight Ball essentially like a rolly po bug almost and then go through a series of of radical chemical changes in the cells and their bodies to deal with this loss of water being in a ton form tardigrades are as far from alive as you can be but give them a splash of water
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and they spring back to life what better place to test the robustness of a ton State tardigrade than the freezing SPS of Antarctica we extracted them from soils in Antarctica shipped them back here frozen solid and they've been frozen solid here at at least - 60 since 2012
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moly it's mindblowing dude it's basically the same community that I saw when I collected them in Antarctica we put them in a tube froze them shipped them four or five years later we want to study them right pull them out we thought them out and now what I'm seeing now looks almost exactly like what I saw when I was looking at them like fresh in Antarctica so they can survive the most extreme conditions on Earth but what about in space Byron and his colleague Carl took them on a special outing to
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the International Space Station took them in space put them on a satellite opened up the door set them outside exposed them to extreme temperatures vacuum right hot cold huge radiation and then when they brought him back to Earth they did what you're seeing here they dumped some water on them see if they actually reanimate voila they they take the water up man and and they start right they they swap it out the molecules and like a machine man you add the water to it they take
5:23:06
them up cells start to do their thing again and they they come back alive it it always blows look I'm an old fat dude and I've looked at these hundred times thousands of times Millions maybe man well and then when I actually look at him under the microscope every single time I'm like dang that's cool man just like that the mighty water bear enters tonate and navigates brutal conditions that would kill almost every other living thing so if we know they can survive in space and we know they
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survive on Earth could it be possible that these Space Explorers traveled between the two possibly even sparking life on Earth when the Israeli space agency spaceil crashed their Luna Lander baret in April 2019 one scientist began to Wonder Could the colony of TD grades they had on board have survived and could they survive a crash landing to Earth if they hitched a ride on a meteorite Alejandra trespas mua of the University of Kent set about replicating the baret crash and the kinds of
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pressures that this little batch of bears would have experienced by firing them out of a gun okay so not quite a gun like that more of a lab based gas gun Alejandra recreated the moon's conditions in a chamber and then fired the tardigrades into sand to recreate the impact that they would have had on that fateful day knowing how fast the spacecraft from the very shet mission crashed we thought well let's try different speeds up to 1 km/s which if you think about it uh if
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just to get it into a daily activity just think you're on your car and your car starts going faster and faster and faster up to 3600 km/ hour so this is how fast taric rates were short so we started with 0.5 which they all survive uh 100% survival so that's great we researchers happy tardy great happy and we kept going we went up to 0.7 and they again survived then we went up to 0.9 and unfortunately at these speeds tar degrades couldn't make it which means uh they they didn't survive
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the barit mission but this isn't the end of tier grades in space Alejandra's studies continue she and her team are testing whether they could survive in the water plumes or the icy surfaces of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter these creatures are the best candidates to explore whether life came from somewhere else in the universe or it emerged on Earth I do not believe life is unique to Earth so don't write off tider grades just yet they and Other Extreme files
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could still provide the answer to the life we live today the D mission is designed to save Earth from an asteroid Dart is our first planetary defense Mission defending against asteroids like this one benu we're bombarded by almost 50,000 kg of space rocks every day most are tiny and burn up in the atmosphere as shooting stars but some bigger ones can cause real damage like this meteor in chubin Russia in in 2013 which exploded with the power of 13 hirosima bombs and
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that was only 17 M wide by comparison the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was 10 to 15 kilm wide and now there is another asteroid on its way benu is about 0.5 km wide about as wide as the Empire State Building is tall between the years 2175 and 2199 there is a 1 in 2,700 chance of benu impacting Earth doesn't sound like much of a risk but if it does hit it will have the power of 80,000 hoshima bombs but don't worry NASA and the European Space Agency are on it enter Dart the double asteroid
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redirection test developed and led finessa by John's Hopkins University Applied Physics laboratory it does what it says on the tin really at least that's the aim Dart is a demonstration of the kinetic impact technique just slamming a spacecraft into the asteroid brilliant I'm Lenley Johnson I am NASA's first ever planetary defense officer this Mission will demonstrate that humankind doesn't have to worry about going the way of the dinosaurs why double it is called the double asteroid
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redirection test because we are targeting a binary asteroid system called diamos which means Twins and impacting the moon to change that moon's orbit around the larger asteroid the impact affects of an asteroid the size of dorus the Moon of dios uh 160 m or so in size size of a small football stadium would be a area of a small United States or European nation so it's important that we be able to protect life on Earth with this capability Dart is set to hit didos in Autumn
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2022 we'll be able to measure some of the impact from Earth but another spacecraft is heading that way the European space agency's Hera will arrive around 4 years later to assess the outcome of dart's mission but why go to so much trouble when didos isn't even at risk of hitting the Earth because dios isn't the only thing out there there are over 20,000 asteroids close to the Earth of which 1,200 are considered high risk thankfully people like Richard Kowalski scour the night sky to find
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asteroids before they find us they're known as the asteroid Hunters as you can see on this screen is the sequence of four images that that came from the telescope these objects around the screen are not moving so I know that they're stars but this object in the center is moving and thus we know that it's an asteroid the importance of surveying for near Earth asteroids is asteroid impact on the earth is truly the only natural disaster that we can actually predict before it
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happens the Earth has been hit in the past and will be hit again in the future what we'd like to do is to be able to discover these objects before they hit the earth observations collected are all sent to the minor planet center and uh if they are uh asteroids that could come near the Earth and and be a potential uh impact Hazard uh that information is uh sent to uh the planetary defense coordination office at Nasa if an asteroid is a more immediate threat of impact I actually get a uh a text
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notification on my smartphone at Nasa we're kind of the Uber asteroid Hunters maybe is what you could could say so what would happen if an asteroid did hit Earth well we all know impacts leave craters but what else happens because it's not just the Collision itself that would cause Devastation so for this experiment we're going to fire this tiny 1/4 in aluminum sphere at very high speeds up around 5 km per second and then we'll see what type of crater it produces so we use sand because it
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records the shock effects very clearly Pete Schulz uses super highspeed cameras to capture every detail of the impact and aftermath high volage is inning light rolling the ball travels 15 times faster than the speed of sound and like some asteroids would incinerates on
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impact oh perfect perfect perfect now we're seeing the fireball come in is brighter than the Sun and then kapow it hits the surface jeez this whole region down range would have been incinerated it would have been incinerated just by this plasma this looting Vapor plom engulfing everything there would have been winds that would have been going so fast it could pick up houses and spread them hundreds of kilometers away this would have been arm get so all eyes are on the D Mission and there are
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a couple of other asteroid deflection ideas floating around to some of them are wild here are some of the top ones one nukeit very Hollywood and probably the first thing you thought of too great in theory but could result in radioactive debris raining from the sky not ideal two gravity tractor sounds very space farming doesn't it the idea here is to fly a device next to an asteroid so it slowly pulls it away from the earth's path this offers a lot of control but it might not be effective
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for anything over 500 m in diameter three paintballs yeah you heard right paintballs personally my favorite suggestion first the act of shooting the asteroid would deflect it and also using white reflective paint means that the force of the sun's photons would theoretically push the asteroid even further off course the downside itd need about 20 years notice for it to work so we've got paintballs tractors and nukes which might all seem like crazy ideas but they're serious
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contenders for now though it's all eyes on Dart and its mission to save the world
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