Sun's Has Evil Twin + Other Universe Facts in Just 20 Minutes

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Ready to dive into some mind-blowing space trivia? You'll learn about the theory that our Sun might have a distant, unseen twin called Nemesis, which could be linked to mass extinctions on Earth. The video also covers fascinating tidbits about parallel universes and other cosmic mysteries. It's a quick and fun way to expand your knowledge of the universe. In just 20 minutes, you'll be amazed at how much there is to discover about our cosmos!        Animation is created by Bright Side. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/   Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV   Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brightside Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en   Stock materials (photos, footages and other): https://www.depositphotos.com https://www.shutterstock.com https://www.eastnews.ru ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.

Transcript

00:00 Let's face it, as stars go, our Sun is actually, well, pretty boring.

00:05 Come on, there's nothing unusual about it.

00:07 There are millions of similar yellow dwarfs in the Universe.

00:11 And yet we love it.

00:12 After all, it's the only star we have, and it gives us life.

00:16 However, it wasn't always like that.

00:19 Once upon a time, the Sun had a twin, possibly an evil one.

00:24 What happened to it?

00:25 Well, let's find out.

00:27 This here is a giant molecular cloud.

00:30 They're also sometimes called dark nebula.

00:33 Here, there are many interstellar clumps full of gas, dust, and piles of stars.

00:38 These clouds have no clear boundaries and often take weird, crazy forms.

00:43 You can even see some of them with the naked eye.

00:46 Look at the clear sky at night.

00:47 They look like dark spots all across the bright Milky Way.

00:51 And this is exactly where our Sun was born about 4.5 billion years ago.

00:57 The Sun originated from one of these molecular clouds.

01:00 Billions of years ago, waves of energy were passing by here.

01:04 They collected all this material and compressed these clumps into dense nuclei.

01:09 That's when a protostar was born.

01:11 This young protostar was a ball of lukewarm hydrogen and helium.

01:15 And then, millions of years later, the temperature and pressure inside the balls increased.

01:21 As a result, a star was born -- the Sun.

01:25 But not everything in this molecular cloud has turned into the Sun.

01:29 The remaining materials began to revolve around the new star.

01:32 And as you might have guessed, they gradually turned into planets, including our Earth.

01:38 This is how our solar system was created.

01:41 But it's quite possible that this is not the whole story, and that at the same time,

01:46 along with our star, another one was born.

01:49 The lost twin of the Sun, made from the same materials under the same conditions.

01:54 But why do we think that it exists?

01:57 Well recently, scientists have launched some statistical models to find out more about

02:01 the birth of stars.

02:03 And these models have shown that many stars appear not individually, but in clusters.

02:08 Or at least with one sibling.

02:11 After more research, scientists confirmed that, yep, most stars formed inside molecular

02:16 clouds are born with a companion.

02:19 Sometimes these companions stay together.

02:21 For example, a small star will revolve around a large one.

02:25 They can even form double, triple, and other star systems.

02:29 And sometimes, their paths may diverge forever.

02:33 This probably happened to our Sun as well.

02:35 It could've had a sibling too.

02:37 Perhaps not even one, but a whole cluster of little brothers and sisters.

02:42 And one bigger twin with a similar mass and other characteristics.

02:46 But if that's the case, then where are you, our lost twin?

02:50 Well, we have one hypothesis.

02:53 And according to it, this twin may not be as good as it seems.

02:57 In the 1980s, scientists began to notice a certain pattern in the Earth's history.

03:02 Approximately every 27 million years, give or take, large-scale extinctions occurred

03:08 on our planet.

03:09 Pretty strange, right?

03:11 Every 27 million years in the history of Earth, some kind of catastrophe occurred that changed

03:17 its biosphere forever, as if something as scheduled, cyclically, caused them.

03:23 Then an astronomer, Richard Muller, suggested that there may be something that caused the

03:28 events.

03:29 A certain celestial body.

03:31 According to him, it could be a dwarf star that we can't see because of how dim it is.

03:36 It could be located about 1.5 light years away from us.

03:40 This star rotates around the Sun in a huge orbit.

03:44 And it approximately takes a whopping 27 million years for it to finish its orbit.

03:49 And when it gets closest to the Sun, it starts to cause complete chaos.

03:54 While approaching us, this troublemaker changes the trajectories of comets in the Oort cloud

03:59 or the Kuiper belt.

04:00 As a result, all these comets start to rush straight toward us.

04:04 Then they crash into the Earth and cause mass extinctions, just like it was with dinosaurs.

04:10 This hypothetical star was named Nemesis.

04:14 That's the name of the ancient Greek deity of retribution.

04:17 What is it taking revenge on us for?

04:19 No idea.

04:21 Perhaps it didn't like the fact that, once upon a time, the Sun took away almost all

04:25 the dust and gas from a molecular cloud.

04:28 The Sun became a fairly large star, but the twin remained dark and small.

04:33 Moreover, in the end, it was forced to fly away in the middle of nowhere.

04:38 Anyone would be annoyed by something like this.

04:42 Scientists have put forward various hypotheses about what the mysterious Nemesis is.

04:47 Perhaps it's a brown or red dwarf?

04:49 The remnants of a star that has completely depleted its fuel.

04:53 Or maybe it's not a star at all, but a rogue planet more gigantic than Jupiter.

04:59 Well, whatever it is, its existence isn't particularly pleasant for us.

05:04 However, all our attempts to find the culprit, unfortunately, failed.

05:09 At the moment, we still haven't found any signs of Nemesis.

05:13 Recent studies have called into question the theory of regular mass extinctions.

05:18 If you look more into fossil records, you'll notice that these catastrophes occurred rather

05:22 randomly rather than on a clear schedule.

05:26 Now scientists doubt if Nemesis may actually exist.

05:30 They also say that any star moving in a similar orbit would be very unstable, and it's very

05:35 unlikely that it could have survived for that long.

05:42 So once they explode, stars aren't supposed to come back to life.

05:46 But some of the stars somehow have survived the great supernova explosion.

05:50 Such zombie stars are pretty rare.

05:53 Scientists found a really big one called LP40365.

05:57 It's a partially burnt white dwarf.

06:02 Now a white dwarf is a star that has burned up all of the hydrogen, and that hydrogen

06:07 was previously its nuclear fuel.

06:09 In this case, the final explosion was maybe weaker than it usually is, not powerful enough

06:14 to destroy the entire star.

06:16 It's like a star wanted to explode but didn't make it, which is why part of the matter still

06:21 survived.

06:22 One of those zombie stars used to be a white dwarf, or just left over from an explosion.

06:28 It gobbled up too much from another star and, surprisingly, managed to explode once again.

06:37 If you manage to go to the Moon one day and see fresh footprints, that doesn't mean there's

06:41 someone else there with you.

06:43 Footprints or similar marks can last for a million years over there because the Moon

06:48 doesn't have an atmosphere.

06:49 There are no winds, not even a breeze, that can slowly erase those footprints.

06:54 In outer space, you'd be strong enough to weld two pieces of metal together with your

06:58 own hands.

06:59 Okay, it has nothing to do with your strength.

07:02 You could just press them together with no effort, and that's it.

07:06 Oxygen in our atmosphere makes a thin layer on the surface of the metal.

07:10 It's like a barrier, which is why such a trick is impossible on Earth but perfectly

07:15 logical in outer space.

07:20 If you ever go to space, don't take off your spacesuit unless you're on a spaceship.

07:25 Air in your lungs would expand as well as the oxygen in the rest of your body.

07:30 You'd be like a balloon twice your regular size.

07:33 Good news, the skin is elastic enough to hold you together, which means you wouldn't explode.

07:39 Small comfort, huh?

07:41 If you watch a very touching movie in space and start crying, your tears won't run down.

07:47 They will gather around your eyeballs.

07:49 Your eyes will get too dry, so you'll feel like they're burning.

07:53 Any exposed liquid on your body will vaporize, including the surfaces of your tongue.

07:58 Speaking of burning, there's one thing fire can't do in space.

08:02 Fire can spread when there's a flow of oxygen, and since there's not any in space.

08:07 If the fire breaks out in a rocket, you can simply turn off the ventilation system and

08:12 voila!

08:13 It can get more complicated if there's intense smoke, sparking, and material melting in conditions

08:18 of reduced gravity.

08:20 Regular foam fire extinguishers we use on Earth are useless here because they release

08:25 foam randomly.

08:27 Researchers are developing a fire extinguisher that will put out fires by using sound waves.

08:31 The bigger the sound intensity, the bigger the flame they can put out.

08:35 But the astronauts might end up deaf if their frequency is too high.

08:43 A black hole is not like some starving monster that wanders around and has gravity so strong

08:49 nothing can really escape it.

08:51 When something comes close to the point of no return, which we also call the "event

08:55 horizon," it disappears.

08:57 No way back!

08:58 But quantum physics claims nothing can really destroy data.

09:02 So it's a true paradox.

09:05 Stephen Hawking was the one with the idea of how black holes don't really have event

09:09 horizons.

09:11 Maybe they have apparent horizons.

09:13 Those trap things for some time only.

09:15 After that, the trapped energy will somehow get away, but in a different form.

09:20 When something goes into a black hole, it changes shape and gets stretched out just

09:24 like spaghetti.

09:25 It happens because gravitational force is trying to stretch an object in one direction

09:30 but at the same time squeeze it in another.

09:32 Like a pasta paradox.

09:34 Speaking of, a black hole that's as big as a single atom has the mass of a really

09:39 big mountain.

09:41 There's one at the center of the Milky Way called Sagittarius A. It has a mass like

09:47 4 billion Suns, but luckily it's far away from us.

09:52 There are more than 23,000 pieces of so-called "space junk" bigger than a softball floating

09:57 above our planet at speeds up to 17,500 mph.

10:03 And there are 500,000 pieces in general, some of them the size of a marble.

10:08 Space waste is generally debris made up of natural particles called meteoroids and artificial

10:13 particles like things we make on the Earth.

10:17 Meteoroids orbit the Sun while the majority of human-made debris orbits our planet.

10:23 For example, we launched almost 9,000 spacecraft around the world, from satellites to rocket

10:29 ships.

10:30 Even the tiniest pieces can damage a spacecraft at such high speeds.

10:34 Galaxies, planets, comets, asteroids, stars, space bodies are things we can actually see

10:40 in space, but they make up less than 5% of the total Universe.

10:45 Dark matter, one of the biggest mysteries in space, is the name we use for all the mass

10:50 in the Universe that's still invisible to us.

10:55 There's a lot of it.

10:58 It may even make 25% of the Universe.

11:02 Dark energy makes the rest of the 70% of the Universe.

11:06 Scientists don't know much about it, but they think dark energy could be behind the

11:10 increasing expansion of the entire Universe, while dark matter slows it down.

11:32 The Sun's heat is beneath our feet.

11:35 Scientists have figured out that Earth's core is actually as hot as the surface of

11:39 the Sun, around 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

11:43 One of the reasons it's so incredibly hot down there is because Earth is still shedding

11:47 heat from when it was created billions of years ago.

11:50 Also, when an object as big as Mars slammed into the young Earth, it not only created

11:55 the Moon, according to one theory, but melted the surface of the planet.

12:00 A lot of that extra heat is probably still stored inside the core.

12:04 But there's no need to worry.

12:06 The planet's core is harder for us to access than it is to probe the surface of Pluto.

12:11 In fact, chances are we may never develop technology that could physically reach the

12:15 core.

12:18 There's no air on the Moon.

12:19 But then how can it be rusting?

12:22 Scientists have discovered the presence of hermitite on the Moon, and it's a kind of

12:26 rust.

12:27 A special NASA research instrument examined the light reflected off the Moon's surface.

12:32 It turned out that the composition of the satellite's poles was very different from

12:36 the rest of it.

12:38 The Moon's surface is dotted with iron-rich rocks.

12:41 But without oxygen and liquid water, rust can't appear.

12:46 Solar winds add to the mystery.

12:48 They bombard the Moon with hydrogen, and hydrogen makes it much more difficult for hermitite

12:53 to form.

12:55 Even though the Moon doesn't have an atmosphere, it still has some trace amounts of oxygen.

13:00 Its source is our planet's upper atmosphere.

13:03 Earth also protects the Moon from almost 100% of solar winds, although not all the time.

13:09 And even though our natural satellite is bone dry, there might be water ice in the shadowed

13:14 craters on its far side.

13:18 A day on Uranus lasts 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 24 seconds.

13:24 But get this, the planet has a tilt of around 98 degrees, and that makes a season on the

13:29 gas giant last 21 Earth years.

13:34 Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos.

13:38 In the next 30 to 50 million years, Mars' gravitational forces will tear Phobos apart,

13:44 and it will likely result in the formation of a ring around the planet.

13:50 The Earth is the densest in the solar system.

13:53 At the Earth's center, there's a core that takes up 15% of the planet's volume.

13:58 It consists of two parts, the outer and the inner core.

14:03 The inner core is a solid ball made of iron and nickel.

14:07 Its radius is 760 miles, which makes 20% of the entire Earth's radius and 80% of the Moon's

14:14 radius.

14:15 The 1500-mile-thick outer core is liquid.

14:19 It also consists of iron and nickel, but it's not under enough pressure to be solid.

14:26 Mars houses the biggest volcano in the solar system.

14:30 While everything seems to be calm on Mars nowadays, in the past, some sort of force

14:34 caused enormous volcanoes to form and erupt.

14:38 One of these volcanoes is Olympus Mons.

14:40 It's 16 miles tall, which is the height of three Mount Everests, and 374 miles across,

14:48 making it about the size of Arizona.

14:50 The volcano grew to such a gargantuan size because of the weak gravity on Mars and the

14:55 lack of tectonic plate movement.

15:00 Gravity is not the same everywhere.

15:04 The rocks, metals, and other minerals and substances that make up the planet are packed

15:08 into the ground more tightly in certain places than in others.

15:12 This has surprising consequences.

15:15 Gravity varies slightly depending on where you are.

15:17 You weigh 0.5% less standing at the equator than you do at the poles.

15:23 In most cases, that's a difference of less than one pound.

15:27 How high up you are also has an effect, so if you were at the top of Mount Everest, you'd

15:32 also weigh slightly less.

15:34 Just don't look down.

15:37 Earth's toughest living thing is so small you can't see it.

15:41 Water bears, also known as moss piglets, are cute little creatures with eight legs and

15:46 squashed up heads that are less than a hundredth of an inch in length.

15:50 Despite their microscopic stature, they can basically survive anywhere.

15:54 They prefer bits of wet moss or the bottom of a lake, but they won't complain if you

15:59 put them somewhere really uncomfortable.

16:02 They can endure extreme cold and incredible heat, and survive both huge pressure and high

16:08 radiation.

16:09 Some of the little bears once even managed to survive unprotected in outer space for

16:14 ten days without a problem.

16:16 That is tough.

16:17 They handle all these things by rolling up into a ball and hibernating, which reduces

16:22 their need for oxygen and food.

16:26 The moon's gravity is about 17% of that on Earth.

16:30 If you weighed 200 pounds on our home planet, on the moon, your weight would decrease to

16:35 a mere 34 pounds.

16:37 You would also be able to carry stuff six times heavier than what you can carry on Earth.

16:42 It would also be easier to walk on the moon's surface, but it would be more dangerous, too.

16:47 Your feet, inside a heavy spacesuit, would sink into the lunar soil up to six inches

16:52 deep.

16:53 But let's imagine you decided to skip the tedious process of walking by leaping through

16:58 the air.

16:59 Then you'd likely lose control of your jumps in no time.

17:02 Plus, the moon's surface is littered with deep craters.

17:05 It would be a tough feat to avoid all of them.

17:09 You can see solar eclipses because even though the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun,

17:15 it's also 400 times closer to Earth.

17:17 So it's perfectly capable of obscuring the star.

17:21 But in 50 million years, I won't be around then.

17:24 The moon won't be able to block the sun completely because of the satellite's changing orbit.

17:30 Venus most likely used to be covered with oceans, from 30 to 1,000 feet deep.

17:36 Also, some water was locked in the soil of the planet.

17:40 On top of that, Venus had stable temperatures of 68 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, which, you

17:46 have to admit, was quite pleasant and not that different from the temperatures on Earth

17:50 nowadays.

17:51 So what I'm getting at is that for 3 billion years, right until something irrevocable happened

17:57 700 million years ago, Venus could've been habitable.

18:00 But now it's not.

18:03 The moon is the second brightest object in our sky.

18:06 At the same time, among other astronomical bodies, it's one of the dimmest and least

18:11 reflective.

18:12 Our natural satellite only seems bright because it's so close to Earth.

18:16 For comparison, our planet looks much brighter when you look at it from space.

18:21 It's because clouds, ice, and snow reflect way more light than most types of rock.

18:26 Triton, Neptune's moon, has all its surface covered with several layers of ice.

18:32 If this satellite replaced our current moon, the night sky would get 7 times brighter.

18:39 Neutron stars are some of the smallest yet most massive objects in space.

18:43 They're usually about 12 miles in diameter, but are several times heavier than the Sun.

18:48 Oh, and they also spin about 600 times per second, far faster than your average figure

18:53 skater.

18:57 Saturn is the least dense planet in the Solar System.

19:00 It has 1/8 the average Earth's density.

19:03 And still, because of its large volume, the planet is 95 times more massive than Earth.

19:09 A transient lunar phenomenon is one of the most enigmatic things happening on the moon.

19:14 It's a short-lived light, color, or some other change on the satellite's surface.

19:19 Most commonly, it's random flashes of light.

19:23 Astronomers have been observing this phenomenon since the 1950s.

19:26 They've noticed that the flashes occur randomly.

19:30 Sometimes they can happen several times a week.

19:32 After that, they disappear for several months.

19:35 Some of them don't last longer than a couple of minutes, but there have been those that

19:39 continued for hours.

19:41 The year was 1969, one day before Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

19:47 One of the mission participants noticed that one part of the lunar surface was more illuminated

19:51 than the surrounding landscape.

19:53 It looked as if that area had a kind of fluorescence to it.

19:57 Unfortunately, it's still unclear if this phenomenon was connected with the mysterious

20:02 lunar flashes.

20:03 Trash isn't just a problem in Earth's oceans, cities, and forests.

20:07 There is a thing called space junk, which is any human-made object that's been left

20:12 in space and now serves no purpose.

20:15 There's also natural debris from meteoroids and other cosmic objects.

20:19 There are currently over 500,000 pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth at speeds

20:24 high enough to cause significant damage if they were to collide with a spacecraft or

20:29 satellite.

20:30 NASA does its best to track every single object to ensure that missions outside Earth can

20:35 reach their destination safely.

20:37 Our Sun is insanely massive.

20:40 Want some proof?

20:42 99.86% of all the mass in the Solar System is the mass of the Sun.

20:47 In particular, the hydrogen and helium it's made of.

20:50 The remaining 0.14% is mostly the mass of the Solar System's 8 planets.

20:57 The Sun's temperature is hotter than the surface of a star.

21:00 The surface temperature reaches 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the upper atmosphere heats

21:05 up to millions of degrees.

21:07 If someone could dig a tunnel straight into the center of the planet and out the opposite

21:11 side, and you were adventurous enough to jump into it, it would take you 42 minutes to

21:17 fall to the other side.

21:19 You'd speed up as you fell, reaching maximum speed by the time you reached Earth's core.

21:25 After the halfway point, you would then fall upwards, getting slower and slower.

21:30 By the time you reached the opposite surface, your speed would be back to zero.

21:34 Unless you managed to climb out of the hole, you'd immediately start falling again, back

21:39 down or "up" to the other side of the planet.

21:42 This trip would go on forever, all thanks to the weird effects of gravity.

21:46 A might be a fun way to spend an afternoon!

21:51 There might be more metals, for example, titanium or iron, in lunar craters than astronomers

21:57 used to think.

21:58 The main problem with this finding?

22:00 It contradicts the main theory about how the Moon was formed.

22:04 That theory says that Earth's natural satellite was spun off from our planet after a collision

22:08 with a massive space object.

22:11 But then, why does Earth's metal-poor crust have much less iron oxide than the Moon's?

22:17 It might mean the Moon was formed from the material lying much deeper inside our planet.

22:23 Or these metals could've appeared when the molten lunar surface was slowly cooling down.

22:28 Or maybe, as they've been saying for centuries, it's made of green cheese.

22:31 That's it for today!

22:33 So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your

22:37 friends!

22:38 want more, just click on these videos and stay on the Bright Side!

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