The Sun Isn't Normal. This Telescope Learned the Hard Way.
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- Опубликовано: 24 авг 2024
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The Kepler mission did a great job at showing just how abundant planets are beyond our solar system, but its hunt for Earth 2.0 orbiting Sun 2.0 was a lot less successful. That's partly because the scientists who designed the telescope assumed our Sun was a lot more typical of a star than it turned out to be.
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"The sun isn't normal."
Damn right it isn't. That's the only star we need for us to exist.
@@superstraighthhwhitemale8880 Fr 😂
HANK!!!!!
Queer Sun is the name of my next sci-fi novel.
What does Linode have to do with the Sun?
So we're an unusual species, on an unusual planet, with an unusual amout of moons, of an unusual size, and now we are also orbiting an unusual star.
I feel a bit lonely now.
Replace the words "an unusual" in your post with "a weird." Does that make you feel better?
Well there's 8 billion of us, and plus all the other little critters here. At least we have company in our loneliness
Still, it seems like such a waste of perfectly good space.
Change unusual to special, and I think you'll find it a lot more meaningful
The Great Filter is behind us, Humanity shall ascend to the stars, long live humankind.
Can you imagine being the scientists who figured out how to lean a telescope against the sun. That's amazing
It's one of those situations where I really hope somebody found the opening to say "that's so stupid, _it just might work!"_ IRL.
Those are few and far between; you gotta execute when you get the chance!
I paused to ponder that amazing fact too.
That’s just so interesting 🤩
The concept itself isn't a tricky one (using radiation pressure from the solar wind has been done before), it's the way in which it was combined with the gyros to restore an extra axis of control that was really creative :)
Honestly just so cool
All space travel is amazing. Imagine planning course to the moon or even mars. It's not as simple as pointing the nose at it then flying straight.
Our sun being "the quiet one" also means that it has less solar flares, which makes technological advancements not too hard to do.
And yet it is still a danger we face. Maybe it is not so surprising how few signs of life we can find out in space.
Tau Ceti would be quieter still.
@@elio7610 at least that would save humanity from what is to come
@@SupraSav What is to come?
Some alien technology can be non-electricity-based or not hampered by solar flares at all. It's quite a cool thing to speculate about.
One of the most brain ticklish things ive learned is that a large percentage of people who are deaf from birth or from a really young age, and who have their hearing restored by whatever means, are stunned that the sun is not audible. This is stunning. Its beautiful and sad. These are people whos only concept of sound may be tactile and somatic vibrations. And yet even if just subconsciously, they were imagining sounds they couldn't possibly relate to in any direct way and assigning them to things. They are surprised they cant hear the sun. They dont know what sound is. But they know its something.
Thats staggering in is beautiful sadness.
So, the theory is that the sun is noisy as hells! Jackhammer-loud and chaotic. But because there’s not enough atmosphere to travel through as sound waves, we do not get to hear the sun’s chaotic sound. But if the sun were to go out… it would take eight minutes for the light to vanish, but (apparently) 13 YEARS for the sound to stop, since sound is slower than light
If the sun made noise that would be terrifying
@@Brucie69 but it does make sense, doesn’t it, sir bat?
Interesting, thank you.
Ok, it's not THAT deep, man.
This is a good illustration of why space science is stretched between two mandates... "find another Earth/find life/find intelligence" is exciting and what sells, but "just finding out what the universe is doing" is science's more basic goal. Not everything should be about finding mirror images of what we expect and hope to find. We just need to gather data and interpret it creatively. I think it is enlightening enough to find out about things in the cosmos that are not like us; it's all part of understanding.
You are correct on many levels. But Humans be weird. Our knowledge of our death makes us want a sense of purpose, of continuity. Finding out that there is another sentient being would be oddly peaceful.
Not logical but often true.
Finding things that looks like us in space, makes us understand what is happening to us our could happen to us. Or even WHY it's happening to us.
You dont want to interpret data creatively you want to interpret it correctly. Does everybody here just say dumb things that they think sounds good with little to no thought as to what they are saying?
@@thomgizziz I think they mean it in a more "putting fragmets of knowledge together to make a theory about what the F^ck is happening in space" sort of way. Less so creative interpretation, more interpolation.
@@thomgizziz I was quite conscious of the words I used, but I am not going to explain it to someone who was so rude, so feel free to ignore it. However I will say that @stove3517 got it right and would remind you to consider that all human endeavor is "creative". Maybe ponder on that a bit before you throw around insulting words, if you are capable of creative thought yourself ;)
i like how humans discovered so much about space by just having a staring contest with the sky for years on end until we saw something change
It's really mindblowing that the basic stuff of cosmology is a generational project by millions of people staring into the sky!
I’m sure the sun being less “noisy” than other stars contributed to the likelihood of human evolution
Less solar flares as well so a lot more stable.
Beware of elegant causation. "I'm sure of-" is a dangerous statement in the pursuit of truth.
I’m skeptical tbh life seems to find a way. I think it’s more about the plate tectonics and the cascade effect that has to starting life. I feel life would just adapt to more bombardment possibly having darker skin or being sub terrainian or underwater perhaps having hardened bodies with black pigment on the surface. Thick atmosphere could offset things too especially if it’s rich in water. Gills on the surface or salamander like skin for oxygen. Lots of ways to get around a noisy sun with active biochemistry already seeded
It stopped our neighboards from complaining.
and probably of life un general, especially non-, aquatic life
The Sun's slow spin rate is an important factor in the Earth's habitability.
@@JustinMShaw Our moon impacts the Sun's spin?
To be honest one of the surprises from the Parker Solar Probe's mission thus far is that the Sun's corotational magnetic field zone contains far more angular momentum than had been expected so I'm not sure how accurate that is.
If anything one possible alternative explanation might have to do with the surprising regularity of the solar magnetic reversal cycle which is approximately 11 years. It has been noted that this seems to somewhat curiously line up with the periodicity of the alignment of the 3 planets with the largest tidal force contributions on the Sun namely Venus Earth and Jupiter all aligned in one direction. This could be a coincidence or it might be a possible driver or feedback in this poorly understood feedback cycle.
If this is true then it might just be that the Sun's B field gets flipped before it can build up large outbursts relative to other G type stars with the tidal effects of the planets somehow playing an oversized role.
People think we're in an impossibly unique set of circumstances for life, without considering there's a virtually infinite number of Goldilocks zones in a universe our size.
@@watamatafoyu Eh, the number of potentially habitable planets is ridiculously high, but not so high that enough unique requirements for the development of life won't add up enough to make life quite rare. Not to mention things like signal lag means that a lot of those planets are so far away that even if we can look at them with a big and fancy enough telescope, that signal is so old that from before any life could possibly have developed. A planet 6 billion lightyears away means a signal that is at least 6 billion years old. So that alone cuts down on a *huge* number of possible planets for us to look at in the whole observable universe.
@@watamatafoyu - You fail to consider how impossible it is for life to start _at all_ under any circumstances. Life only comes from life.
The more we learn about our planetary system, we learn that it is, as far as we can see, unique. That says a lot about the so-called Fermi paradox imo. I think the conditions occur so far away from each other that they can literally never reach one another due to expansion. A unicorn doesn't seem rare to itself.
With probably quadrillions of planets out there, I´d be carefull with "unique". Can we go with "unusual"?
It’s be fantastic if our earth is unique, being the ONLY inhabitable planet in this galaxy that generated complex, intelligent life.
Would a finding of that nature put a stop to Man’s inhumanity to Man? Or precipitate an existential meltdown?
Damn, I’ll probably be long dead before we find out…
It’s called we were created by God
@Jack Sparrow yet, that might well be the case. Intriguing, isn't it?
@Jack Sparrow Or per universe. We have absolutely no idea how rare or common life is, and we never will be until (if) we discover it elsewhere and are able to compare its circumstances to our own.
There's a reason cartoons of the sun always wears a cool pair of sunglasses.
He's quiet, chill, and a pretty cool dude.
Love ya, Sun!
It's clearly to protect his eyes from the harsh rays of WAIT A SECOND!!!
after an afternoon of analogue horror i'm glad sci show gave me an episode on how THE SUN ISN'T NORMAL
YOU CANNOT RUN
I had the same feeling, and I haven't watched or played any horror anything in the last few weeks. Might just be the way they phrased the title.
If the sun was normal, you wouldn't have been born.
The Earth is, as far as we know, the most unique planet in the universe. Hence, the Earth isn't normal. There's nothing wrong with being different.
All we know is that our sun is different in one respect to similar local stars. It could be that those stars are anomalous, and our star is the norm. The sample size is too small to draw any conclusions.
Not as scary as traversing the caves and underground caverns in TotK with gloom-corrupted monsters and gloom hands with cat eyes out to kill you...
Theres some Post out there on the internwebs about how the sun is the closest we have to irl Eldritch horror
It's Huge and ominous randomly Lashes out with massive extensions .
It's surrounded by Failed Siblings Jupiter is still born star. Ect , eventually it will devour us all
Here is my question about the habitable zone: Does it really mean much? Moon, Venus and Mars are all in our solar system's habitable zone -- none of them hold much promise of finding life. However, the generally accepted best chance at finding life off earth in this solar system is Jupiter's moon Europa, which is well outside the habitable zone.
The habitable zone is more like a "Better luck here" zone more than anything.
Yeah, it's really the "possible liquid water on a planet" zone. Then get other options like certain moons around gas giants.
g-stars I think are more relevant of a factor than the habitable zone, imo having more or less stable conditions over millions of years is the important factor for finding life.
It does, because looking for everything/anything is little different from looking for nothing in particular -and we do not the resources/capabilities to intensely study every star/planet in range.
'An area around a star where surface temps and conditions allow for the possibility of liquid water' is a pretty decent parameter given our single life data point (Earth).
@@LENZ5369full agree, especially considering that the next best location in the solar system are icy moons with subsurface oceans orbiting gas giants; those are a lot harder to identify than a planet + its distance from its host star + host star's properties which are probably well known before the planet is discovered.
Its less that the habitable zone is the absolute best place to look, and more that its the easiest place to look that is also a good place to look. (But also our single confirmed location with life is a planet in the habitable zone with tons of liquid water on the surface)
My science teacher introduced me to this channel, and im still watching it now.
Congrats!
Welcome aboard. :)
You have a good teacher
Congratulations you too are autistic like the rest of us 🥹
Plot Twist: He introduced it to you yesterday.
Carl Sagan’s “mediocrity principle” (we live on an unremarkable planet going around an unimaginable star in an unremarkable part of the cosmos) while reasonable has been known to be false for many years, yet Sagan’s shadow still stretches across time. Good to hear more voices with a more accurate narrative on our place in the universe.
Wish he were around to update and hear his new words on things. :/
We are unique and mediocre at the same time. Kinda difficult to wrap our heads around it...
@@Echo81Rumple83 I was commenting on our location in space. Specifically the sun. G2-class which are rare when you start counting main sequence stars. Further it’s unusually quiet, even for it’s class, a singleton and has an unusually high metallicity for its age and location. Not unique but very unusual.
You however feel you are unique, just like everyone else?
The only reason I can think of that would lead Carl Sagan to ever assume something like this is religious. He don't want the Earth to be special, because if the Earth is special, that makes the Bible more plausible
@@rphb5870Or you can just see it as a null hypothesis - you assume there aren't any special circumstances or correlations, then see if the data breaks that assumption. In our case, the data has eventually shown we are indeed an outlier.
The more i hear about how insanely unlikely we are to even exist let alone be capable of exploring space tells me that the "Great Filter" is behind us and we might be one of the first sentients to be able to go into space.
Dare to dream.
space is so big, and old, it would be weird if we are the first, there are so many possibility's, but even if life is super rare, and advanced life even more rare, we are not alone, there could be so many life forms somewhere, and some of them look like us, its just, they are either really far away, or they are so different we don't even notice them, but with the amount of time that it took for us to get here, compared to the amount of time for life to develop, there are bound to be many many different things.
on our planet alone through time their have been many things that have lived that could have reached our level.
many bipedals, even if we humans die out like all the others who weren't us but were like us, their are still life forms on this planet with the capability if given enough time to reach our level, on our planet it seems for a short time some of the other humanoids existed along side us, but they died, but if multiple can exist together, then a single planet could supply us with multiple different kinds who are also like us, alive and aware of being aware.
i feel it even if it is rare with such a big bucket there are bound to be at least a few, and the bigger the bucket the more there are, but also the more there isnt.
think of it like looking for gold, you scoop some dirt up, you might have a few flakes but also alot of dirt, if you get a bigger scoop you get even more gold, but also alot more dirt.
our universe is a very very big bucket, and its full of dirt.
@@TheInfiniteVoid I'm not saying that we're the first intelligent species, I'm saying that the universe could be teeming with intelligent, sentient beings but that those beings are likely on planets that have a great deal of gravity so that space exploration is just not a viable route for them.
So long as we are stuck on one planet the great filter is not yet behind us. If the 1859 Carrington Event had occurred in 2020, modern civilization would be wiped out rather than just blowing the few generators present globally and supplying free power to telegraph systems.
@@JustinMShaw global warming
If our sun isn't normal, it's the perfect sun for me.
It's just going through a phase...
@@GregMoress
I just hope the Sun’s quietness isn’t a symptom of depression.
I do astrophotography and sometimes take pictures of very small galaxies far, far away. The fact that there might be billions of (possibly) inhabitable planets out there blows my mind!
It’s possible that you have photographed the dawn, apex and twilight of civilizations that will never know you were looking. I wonder how many photographers in other civilizations will be taking our pictures.
@@codename495 Wow, I didn't think of it this way.
I'm not so sure it's really in the Billions. The more we learn the more we find the conditions for life becoming even narrower.
@Zkeleton Z it's estimated that there are 200 billion galaxies out there so if just 1% of galaxies have life that's like 2 billion with life
@@zkeletonz001 You clearly just don't quite understand how big the universe is. You're not realising that all the stars we can see are only a tiny, insignificant portion of the entire universe. There are approximately 200 sextillion stars that number is outrageously large: 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. And you really think that it couldn't be in the billions?
The problem with larger planets, they are easier to see but their gravity is intense. We need a planet within 10% density of earth or the rocket equation becomes unsolvable.
"unsolvable" how ?
Not unsolvable, it is just impractical.
@@destiny_02 The fuel needed exceeds the lifting capability of the rocket. We are in a sweet spot, we have liquid water, but our planet is not so massive or dense that gravity is not stronger otherwise we might not ever be able to leave the atmosphere.
If it's a few light-years away, we'll just set gravity to high and evolve on the way there.
@@Maelthras *leave the athmosphere with a rocket.
The rocket equation relates to rockets, so a species in another planet where rocket are not enough would develop other means to get out of the atmosphere.
Maybe we lack creativity and there are other methods, surely more difficult or impractical but don't know.
The likelihood that most stars in general, not just M stars but K, G and F stars as well are 3 to 10 times more "active" than our sun with regards to solar flares and CMEs needs to be taken into consideration when hunting for Earth-like planets. Even in or own solar system Venus and Mars were completely ravaged by our sun's relatively calm solar winds. A beefy magnetic field may be just as if not more important than where exactly in its orbit a planet is.
Good point. ☝️
Indeed
Which means something like gandamede aka Jupiter's moon (one with a magnetic field) may be our only chance of looking for life
Because if something has a magnetic field then it may be able to start having water and then life
@@seantaggart7382 Well, icy moons have another layer of protection; ice. A sheet of ice only a few feet thick can block as much if not more cosmic rays than our entire atmosphere. The ice sheets on Europa, Ganymede, Callisto and Enceladus are kilometers deep, so any life in the oceans underneath them will be more than well protected.
The question about those worlds is how complex can life on them get without an energy source as abundant as the Sun. They'll gave geothermal heating and chemical soups for energy, but without photosynthesis life might be limited in its ability to grow more complex.
imagine our sun is like "aaaaa" and we think "Okay, let's move to this one too" and the sun there is like "AAAAA!!!" and we have regrets
Using the sun’s radiation to stabilize Kepler is incredible. Mind blown 🤯
bruh, every time these topics come up, it always gets so existential for me. like im here chillin under the sun but if you think about the why's and the how's, it gets overwhelming sometimes. scary feeling? idk the term but yeah
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@@CooManTunes lmao
Welcome to cosmic horror.
Not ONLY did I help build, fuel, launch, and operate the Kepler Space Telescope, the photos at 0:11 were taken with my personal camera as the program's camera was broken that day.
I was ALSO the one that helped to wear out the reaction wheels during an anomaly in the EMI/EMC test that left the wheels ramping up and down at max torque for a few hours when they were only supposed to do that for a couple of minutes.
I was also one of the Systems Engineers during commissioning while operating the vehicle from LASP in Boulder, CO.
Wow that's so cool
@@stuartgray5877 Ahahahahahahaha 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
You're Troy Cryder?
@@darketernal3 No but during the fueling of the Kepler Spacecraft my personal camera was the only one in the room at the time. It is possible that this particular picture was taken after fueling as the vehicle was mated to the third stage.
And after fueling my photos were given to "NASA" so they can still claim credit for them.
Usually not mentioning that a planet/moon can have liquid waters far outside the habitable zone. Just like Venus is actually inside the goldilock zone but is super warm. A moon can also have tidal heating and what not. With that in mind would red dwarf be more reasonable? Still fear the many solar flares.
Red dwarfs can flare more than life might like, but it seems most of their flares are at latitudes above or below their planetary disc plane.
So, not life-threatening.
Most stars are red dwarfs, yet we orbit a yellow one. This suggests that they're not as welcoming as our rarer sun.
Maybe for simple life but if it doesn't get enough light then photosynthesis isn't going to work and that is the foundation of the food chain.
planetary bodies around dwarf stars are likely to be tidally locked and bathed in hard radiation.
I do think that a G type star is important for other reasons namely having to do with energy quantization and the critical threshold of energy needed to be able to extract a hydrogen atom with its valence electron from oxygen. The minimum energy that can perform this phase transition turns out thanks to quantum mechanics to fall within the blue portion of the visible light spectrum though life has found a way to absorb 3 red photons to produce an equivalent amount of energy to blue light. Any kind of light with less energy is effectively useless for aerobic photosynthesis which needs to dissociate water as a source for molecular hydrogen for carbon fixation.
Ultimately because this is a property of the eigenstates/energy levels of an oxygen atom it should apply equally for any other star and thus be generalizable.
*However on the basis of the black body spectrum M dwarf stars and quite possibly k dwarf stars just don't produce enough photons with this threshold of energy.*
Sure its at least possible that organisms could evolve some mechanism of absorbing many lower energy photons to release/produce a blue equivalent energy transition like Earth cyanobacteria have done for red light but this becomes increasingly improbable to evolve on its own the more photons are required to perform this chemical reaction.
The presence of this particular reaction is likely important as it makes the availability of the reverse reaction aerobic respiration mechanistically plausible to emerge as a biologically controlled process. After all on its own aerobic photosynthesis has the greatest limitations of any known chemosynthetic or photosynthetic reaction because the minimum energy threshold is so high that chemosynthetic reactions or lower energy photons (green light or infrared light etc.)
The more our galaxy and universe is studied, the more unique we find out our solar system and planet are.
There's about the same level of relative uniqueness all across the universe. We're just one of many very particular unique situations.
@@watamatafoyu Not all of them in same place at once.
A solar system that got more idiots compared to all empty solar systems and inhabited xenos lifeforms.
@Wulfheort that's pretty dumb. Also you know it's a question without the question mark if you have 2 braincells. Can't beleive you had to make a point on my spelling.
@Federico Alcala - While that’s a lovely romantic thought - and something well worth considering as we watch capitalist big industry destroy our one and only habitat - it might be more accurate to say that, as we discover more and more about the universe, the greater the number of discrete categories we discover for our taxonomy of celestial objects.
I always took issue with the idea that we must be in a common solar system. We have an unusually large moon, are in an unusually stable position in the habitable zone, WITH that moon, and haven’t been blasted away with gamma ray bursts.
Yet another reason to preserve our planet because of how rare it is in the universe
By nuking it.
-Mahatma Gandhi
Capitalism would probably put it up for SALE......?THEY LIVE!
Doing good so far with all the band aid solutions and an ongoing sixth mass extinction
The planet isn't ours, we belong to it. It will live far beyond our death.
It will preserve itself its been around longer than we know and has dealt with worse than us
One of the biggest issues that nobody really addresses that we are looking at light that has been traveling for billions of years meaning that by the time we see it it probably no longer exists or has changed so much that by the time we get there should we leave right now it would have changed way more than it would have by the time we even saw it.
Or y'know, become inhabited by aliens Xd
Light from other galaxies can be that old but light from stars in our galaxy is more like thousands up to like 100 thousand.
@@MultiSpeedMetal And how much has our world changed in the last one hundred thousand years?
@@justsoicanfingcomment5814 If we're looking for habitable planets one hundred thousand years lag doesn't really make a difference. Life also exists for billions of year's before intelligent life is supposed to spawn. Most planets we’re looking at are much less than one hundred thousand lightyears away.
@@MultiSpeedMetal name one and how far.
Life existing on our planet is a miracle and now even moreso... since our Sun is a mere 6% makeup of sizes of stars.
6% is a really high chance for things to occur, is like one in 16 chance... we have a whole universe and 6% of that is HUGE that doesnt sound like a miracle
6% in this regard is like aiming for the broad side of a country with a .22
That fact that we’re here means that life is at least common enough to exist once. I don’t know if I’m summarizing that correctly
@@Ryquard1 When combined with having a moon the right size at the right distance between the star and it's planet in the right proportion to bring about the right chemistry to bring about life and weather patterns for life to transition to... Then all the right life building organic and inorganic matter, water in a proper state, just among some of the few things that have to be perfect, yeah... I consider us lucky..
Most likely, you are much less than 6% of the people you know. It's not a miracle that you exist just because those other people you know also exist.
Please make a video explaining just how the heck they "braced" the telescope against the solar wind.
Nice save there too😉, “kind of like how you’d lean against a wall to stabilize yourself whilst taking a pi… a picture”😅. Never needed a wall for a photo 😋
They made a shield. The temperatures were very low behind it
In a video discussing Kepler discoveries it is necessary to make a brief stop to describe Bayesian statistics, and why the number of planet candidates discovered by Kepler is likely to be serious undercount of the actual number of planets orbiting those stars.
There's hundreds of videos like this on RUclips, discussing exoplanets and whatnot, and the common trend I notice among most of them is to be veryyyy misleading about the reality of doing astrophysics with telescopes like this. There's countless different variables that could account for a change in a star's brightness, and the ability to distinguish whether or not a planet is habitable is nearly impossible, not to mention the planets that never pass in front of their stars, leaving those never to be researched. Its like looking at tv static to get information about the big bang. Its like looking for a single particular grain of sand amongst the vastness of the Sahara. No measurement with the technology we have today will ever give a clear reading as to whether or not am Exoplanet is habitable, it's just not information you can gather reliably
Ultimately, it's very hard to draw conclusions about life planets with life when we literally have a sample size of _one._ The only life we know exists is Earth life, so while extraterrestrial life is likely quite different, we have absolutely no way of telling how different it could be or in what ways. We know that Earth can support life, so the only planets we can firmly say can support life are one's identical to Earth in every way.
Life on earth is like we know not because of sun, but because of chemistry. Sun just allowed to grow basic proteins in something more complex.
Honestly. The more and more I see that paints the simple fact of our existence as an exceptional absurdity, the harder it is to belive it was all an accident. Whether we exist within a simulation or by the hand of some divine maker, it feels easier to assume one of those than to belive our existence is just a cosmic prank.
"like how you might stabilise yourself against a wall when you're really drun ..... taking a picture"
I'm kind of surprised this isn't in SciShow Space, but fascinating topic nonetheless 😁😁
SciShow Space got shut down and folded into SciShow.
@@jasonpost913 :(
*kinduvv
@@jasonpost913 I figured something like that happened
I knew that Sol was relatively young compared to most stars, and about Kepler's stability problems, but I had no idea how unusual our sun was. Somewhat surprised it was never brought up in school. Never payed attention to how old the textbooks might've been for that to be a reason, but I should've been in the right age range compared to Kepler's mission starting to have heard about the unexpected differences in our sun from the average G star... Assuming the curriculum wasn't super out of date and the teachers not paying attention to the taught subject😅
AWESOME I LOVE SCISHOW
The other thing to consider if we do find another life-bearing Earth-like planet, is whether or not it's actually habitable, which involves many more factors than we normally think of. I'm not talking oxygen in the atmosphere and liquid water to drink, I'm talking compounds and microscopic life.
Not a lot of people know, but our body's ability to interact with resources is just as much physics as it is chemistry. This doesn't really change anything in regards to simple, symmetrical compounds, such as water, but as soon as we get to complex, asymmetrical compounds, such as sugar, life hits another roadblock due to handedness. This is where that physical part comes into play. Proteins, enzymes, pretty much everything that makes you tick, especially rely on handedness to perform organic functions, like digestion.
Add in the fact that life has been evolving on Earth very much isolated from the ecosystems of other worlds, and we have a recipe for not only common colds that are life-threatening, but also food that doesn't feed us. Even if the atmosphere is safe, there's liquid water, the planet is magnetically shielded from radiation, macroscopic life forms can be competed with, and somehow the illnesses are survivable, all it would take to kill all future colonization attempts is wrong-handed sugar molecules... assuming said planet's ecosystem runs on something we would call sugar.
That isn't to pessimistically say we should never try for a second island in space - that's insanely valuable for our species - just that there's that many more ways for things to go wrong, and possibly only one way for things to go right.
Lol, "O.G. data" in the closed captioning instead of "original data" at 4:39. Makes me chuckle and I'm guessing that the CC isn't auto-generated. Little things like this make me happy.
If our Sun was noisier, odds are that we wouldn't have any electronics on our surface...
"the sun isn't normal"
When day breaks here we come
Thanks to the SciShow team for including references in the description box. ❤
The Earth and the Sun are uncannily perfect.
For Dinosaurs and humans. Also plants and animals.
But it only takes one asteroid or large enough meteor and...
More like life perfectly adapted to the system we're in
Thank you for this. it's always fun to see how progress of us exploring space is going.
We know so much, yet so little about our universe. I hope I'm alive and coherent when the first earth-born person sets foot on another planet
The paradox of our knowledge. It always blows my mind how much we know about the universe and excites me to imagine how much we have left to discover.
What if we reclassified moons as planets...
@@grasshopper8901 We already talked about this, and it is why pluto got kicked out of the club.
@@sportyeight7769 I'm talking about ALL moons. Don't let the smaller people feel left out of the club, they pay membership dues just like everyone else!
Something to note: to detect a planet that way, it must orbit on the plane that will allow a transit path across the star. If we are looking perfectly edge on, the larger the more pronounced dimming would be. Makes me wonder how small the number is of such systems?
Lovin the space coverage lately, cool stuff
I don't mean this in a negative way, but it's interesting how biased we are to look for planets similar to our own in the search for life regarding missions like these.
I understand it's because carbon atoms ( the basis of all life on Earth ) are pretty stable and that water is a good bonding agent and the heat and radiation from a home star is likely a good trigger to get the process of life going- but in doing so we ignore or brush aside potential candidates for non-carbon based life.
Addendum: I guess what I was trying more to say was.
Yes, we should allocate missions toward information we know as it's better than to look for speculative forms of life.
But it's a shame that we don't have examples or can't compare what environment would be good for non-carbon based life and so we're limited to the constraints of what life forms are available on Earth- all carbon based.
We don't brush it aside?!?!? You think no one has considered such? We can only go based on what we know, and we need to start somewhere. It makes sense to start with what we do know, and put our limited energies into that.
@@tisjester That's true and I agree. I just meant in the aspects of these missions specifically.
But I suppose someone in a field studying non-carbon life or possible alternate forms of evolution could benefit from all the data obtained, as often we look back at data regarding an unrelated project and find something which helps to support our hypothesis.
@@chronicsheepdeprivation8441 Again this would be due to limited resources. Or they are taking it into account as the data is already there, and anyone that is so inclined can use that data to make their own conjectures. It is not like there is no research into non-carbon based life. These missions are looking at many stars at once so that data is there - those that are doing research on earth like planets will be concentration on that data. Those that want to look at other things can do that too.
@@tisjester Yeah, it makes sense to allocate more resources to something we understand would be habitable to something like us rather than spend a lot of time, effort, and money seeking unproven options.
We've never seen a non-carbon based life form before so it kinda makes sense that we're not looking for them. We don't even have a clue _what_ that would look like.
The star BI 253 is a main sequence O-type stars (O2V). It is massive at ~97 solar (masses) but a dwarf since it is fusing hydrogen in its core. ( Not a dwarf compared to other stars but to itself when it evolves off the main sequence and becomes a giant.)
This video was so SO much more interesting than what I assumed from the title. The title simply implied that a telescope f*cked around and found out. 😹
The nearest star to Earth, other than our Sun, is Proxima Centauri, which is located about 4.24 light-years away. To determine the time it would take to travel to Proxima Centauri at 100 times the speed of sound, we need to make a few calculations.
The speed of sound in Earth's atmosphere is approximately 343 meters per second (depending on various factors like temperature and altitude). Therefore, traveling at 100 times the speed of sound would be 100 times 343 meters per second, which is 34,300 meters per second.
To convert this speed to a more commonly used unit for astronomical distances, we'll use kilometers per second (km/s). 34,300 meters per second is equal to 34.3 kilometers per second.
Now, we need to calculate the time it would take to cover a distance of 4.24 light-years (which is about 40 trillion kilometers) at a speed of 34.3 kilometers per second.
Time = Distance / Speed
Time = (40 trillion kilometers) / (34.3 kilometers per second)
Calculating this, we get:
Time ≈ 1.17 trillion seconds
To convert this time to a more understandable unit, we can divide it by the number of seconds in a year:
Time ≈ 37,000 years
So, traveling at 100 times the speed of sound, it would take approximately 37,000 years to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. This is a significantly long time, considering the current capabilities of our spacecraft.
I’ve known all my life that the sun is a G. The true solar homey!
Never been so early, always interesting to learn with this channel
Just scream out "FIRST" like you want to lmao
Yeah?
Where are the first comments
Interesting vid as always, but have to admit, I was briefly derailed by wondering what space-horses would look like.
I love that they saw the gyroscope fail and decided to basically start sailing on the sun.
Humans are finally realizing how rare life is and we still take it for granted. Probably wouldn't observe these planets up close until 5000 CE
We still don’t know how common, or how rare life is. Just because the sun is less active than other stars, that doesn’t mean life couldn’t evolve in a more active star
We won't make it that long
Life is like Chicken Man.
It's everywhere. It's everywhere!
Jesus is Lord.
It's amazing that we can only find planets whose orbital plane is perpendicular, or close enough to being perpendicular, to kepler's viewing angle and yet we have still found some. Any orbit that is beyond the star's diameter of brightness is very difficult to spot, if not impossible.
From a potential "Earth Twin" standpoint there is only one. Kepler-442b. It checks almost all of the boxes (barely). And it is the only one we know of where the possibly of photosynthesis being able to occur on the surface exists. So if we are going to start anywhere with Webb or Plato, it's there.
4:38 I love how the captions call it "O.G. data".
"Space. Nothing can make you feel more special and insignificant at the same time"
-Some rando I can't remember
I don't understand how people can feel insignificant knowing they are one of the few people on the one planet in the universe with life. Like, at any given point you could become the most interesting person in the whole universe. You are one of the most important things for life in the universe just by being alive.
If anything, I feel performance pressure :P
@@9nikolai and yet, what is ones impact on the universe? In an near infinite amount of variables, posibilities, situations and events, what does a tiny spec of dust that we call Earth mean? As far as we know, it can be destroyed or made uninhabitable by a simple passing of another celestial body or an aimless impulse of radiation even, and those are not as infrequent, even tho the cosmos has grown much calmer.
I'm sorry if my reply makes one dread. As I know, the universe may be cold and uncaring, but it is human to care and seek, or rather, give meaning to the events of life, no matter how small they may be, even compared to ourselves. So, in the end, one does matter, to themselves, to their close ones, to their ambitions, if to nothing more.
@@9nikolai As someone else said, we could go extinct tomorrow from a random gamma ray burst that was impossible to see coming. We would have no warning at all since a GRB moves at the speed of light. And if it hits us we'd be gone almost instantly. People feel insignificant when thinking about the universe because in all it's vastness it feels so forever out of our control. At the end of time, if some being wrote a book about the entire history of the universe, it's possible as a species we'd fail to even be worth mentioning in that history book.
@@hamsterfromabove8905 At least we have gigant magnetic shield of sun for that case.
@@tlotro625 You could also die from your roof suddenly collapsing. That doesn't make your life impactless.
If you want humanity or Earth to have impact on the universe at large, consider this:
-Either, we are the only life in the universe, in which case there isn't really anything _to impact_ other than ourselves, who we have complete impact over. Sure, we might die, but we're going to do so anyway, so we might as well make our short time meaningful on other people. Even if they too will die, you can at least improve their life.
-Or, we are not the only life in the universe, in which case there are two possibilities as I see it:
-Either we can interact with other life in the universe (visit each other, communicate) and they'll soon enough be little else than foreigners from another land, in which case we'll be back to the scenario where we are the only ones in the universe, but at a bigger scale.
-Or we can't interact with any other life, in which case we might still be observed by future life in the universe. Say life forms on a planet far away from us, and they start looking up at the stars.They notice regular signals in the cosmos, point their attention toward its source and sees this beautiful planet with intricate metal objects in its orbit. Not only will they have discovered life elsewhere in the universe, but they know it's possible to go to space based on the unnatural things in orbit. This would undoubtedly skyrocket their development.
The only way for us to be impactless on the universe is if there are secretly huge civilisations exploring the cosmos and they decide to remove Earth to make a highway or something, but even then we'd at least have impacted them a little.
Maybe this planet was made to be the exact and only place life could exist. Almost like it was created for us by an omnipotent being, and we were created for it.
Or that we created god in our image to explain our existence.
In the universe, there could be so many variations of stars and planets orbiting each other that are completely different from our solar system. Example, there could be a red giant sun with planets orbiting around it, but there could also be a yellow sun like hours orbiting at the same time. The red sun creating its own habitable zone, while the other orbiting yellow sun creates its own as well. Two stars in one solar system that create several habitable zones for life to flourish. Imagine the life that could evolve. Lets not forget that we observe only but a patch of the known universe, we're not even close
You hold your space horses, young man!
Another "proof" to what I've been arguing for, for years: The rare Earth theory.
The large moon, the creation of it. The relative long steady time, Big outer planets to save Earth from asteroids and comets. The right Sun and at a perfect distance to it.
And many other.
No, though I can see how someone might take this video that way. Kepler was never going to be able to detect many Earth-sized planets because small rocky planets are, well, small. There are likely many more planets orbiting the stars which Kepler observed but the limitations in telescope size and mission duration meant that Kepler was not going to detect them.
The thing is, what other factors and properties that would benefit life could exist on Earth, but don't? Maybe having a ring like Saturn would help, maybe two giant moons are better, who knows? It's kinda hard to say that Earth is the perfect planet to host life when we don't know what other factors could benefit it's existence. We can't make conclusions with a sample size of 1
Perfect for us to exist, sure. But what dictates that those parameters are the only way life can exist?
@@ThaFuzzwood It's just like the puddle argument. A sentient puddle will look at the world around itself. It will see the hole it's sitting in and think to it's self how lucky it was that they were in the only hole in the world that was perfectly shaped for them. However, the sentient puddle may fail to be self conscious enough to realize the hole was not made for them. Rather as water they changed shape to suite the place it was provided.
We don't know how abiogenesis works. But we do know life is very adaptable on Earth. We don't know if Earth was perfect conditions or if life perfectly adapted for the conditions present on Earth.
is it possible the noise may be from various particles in the space between us and the stars occluding some of the light?
That noise do exist, and it is much worse outside of solar system. But it is well known and very specific, not interfering with a light.
Wow, I didn’t know Kepler is still operational. Thanks!
Thanks for linking the images!
Earth has a few things that make it a bit of an oddity - indeed, one is the relatively gentle sun it orbits, and the other is the gargantuan moon that orbits it and makes it a seasonal and tidal world that has the proper mix of conditions to allow weather. Weather is key to the formation of life, as lightning is a powerful energy source that can supply the heat of formation for RNA - and since RNA can behave like a mini-protein, it’s the first building block of life as we know it. Incidentally an atmosphere rich in carbon compounds and nitrogen is also key.
Its not easy to find the G star....
Yeah, its only like trillions of them outhere.
Can a plannet that is tidally locked have habitable space all the way out to the AU associated with a yellow star?
Thanks for getting this out in a bite sized video. Appreciated.
I guess that’s another point for the rare earth hypothesis then
Wohoooo 😮
If there was a way I could show all of my comments in “This Exoplanet (insert planet designation) around red dwarves could be habitable/home to life” videos I say “ I’m no expert but I think our greatest chance at finding life as we know it would be looking at G type main sequence stars with similar metallicity exclusively. Planets around red dwarves in their habitable zone only has a sliver of surface where at minimum single cellular organisms could potentially develop .
Its proposed however that within the gigantic corona of an M star is a very habitable zone, much better than the arrangment for life bearing earth planets we are under.
Some theories even suggest that in our pre history we were once in a different solar arrangement, and may have been within the brown dwarf star corona that is now Saturn.
As obscure and wrong as such an idea sounds to a crowd like this, it is from a theory that incorporates and explains the mysteries and surprises we discover in cosmology as we advance our observations.
One strong point to make: Our cosmological theory is based on a pre space age idea. It studies one very obvious effect of matter and made it the engine of existence. Its not really working out though, now the data has to be shoe horned into the accepted theory any way it can. In studying just gravity as the cause of everything, it has cornered itself into confusion.
Gravity is not energy. It is not charge. Our accepted theory is deeply unfinished, and now it's becoming flawed. It says one half of matter's property is everything.
I always thought it was foolish to make assumptions about other solar systems and stars based on our own solar system and star. There's really nothing to suggest that our sol system is typical and that we should make assumptions about other systems based on what we know about ours. It always seemed far more likely that our system is highly atypical, and likely in ways we're not even aware of. I think we're still just scratching the surface of how different our system is from nearly all the others out there.
In retrospect, it's clear that the assumption should have been that Earth was extremely unlikely. Plug something like the probability that a planet would form under the right conditions that were stable is around 1/1,000,000 and that intelligent life would form on that planet is around the same and how many intelligent species does that give you within 1,000 parsecs? One?
The Kepler team not realizing our Sun is comparatively quiet surprises me, because I learned that fact, surprisingly, from a _science fiction novel_ that I read not long after its release in 1988... [Edited: correct year]
Name?
@@johnbash-on-ger "Spock's World", by Diane Duane.
@@Ice_Karma How do you know it's not just a random science technobabble thing they threw in there just to seem interesting without the writers knowing if this is true or not?
@@johnbash-on-ger A fair question. I _don't_ actually know that she didn't just make it up. For the little it's worth, it wasn't just "random science technobabble ... they threw in ... to seem interesting", but I don't want to bore you with details about the context.
I think that this aids to the idea that the Fermi Paradox is a False one. I suspect that the conditions that are needed for life to persist are far more specific and precise than most researchers will admit.
You guys sure upload a lot of space-related stuff!
How do you make a galaxy moan? You find its g-star.
astronomers: never talk to me or my son again
Yet more evidence that basing our research on the Mediocrity Principle is one of the dumbest scientific ideas we have ever had. Kudos to the teams for managing to adjust the missions after the fact, though.
If the mediocrity principle is flawed, then, we are super super rare or we are littered with alien life arround us, and sincerely i dont know which ones is more terryfiying
@@Ryquard1 being alone isn't terrifying at all
@@Ryquard1 The alternative is the Anthropic Principle, which posits that our existence necessitates the conditions that enable our existence. Which generally means we should not make assumptions about what we expect to find - but does not invalidate searching nevertheless.
@@Ryquard1 well considering they're breaking that aliens exist I don't think so lo
Excellent video
Thanks SciShow!
They call me "Mellow Yellow."
-El Sol
I love it how Plato’s name so often comes out as ‘playdough’
5:07 now i'm imagining what a space horse looks like.
Fun that you're talking about Kepler satellites and even mentioned Kepler 22-B, and yet I haven't seen a comment from DAD.
Well-written and researched.
We subscribed.
Thank you. There is a good show "Raised by Wolves". They end up on Keppler 22b.
There are some other interesting foyays into exoplanet research-- The CoRoT telescope launched in 2006 had similar missions, and the amount of data it obtained was so substantial and essentially impossible to automate going through, and there wasn't enough manpower to analyze the data for exoplanets in any reasonable timeframe. The solution? In 2017, a citizen-science project was launched to crowdsource the analysis through a game called EVE Online!
I spent a lot of time analyzing exoplanet data through EVE alongside many other players, which was both a very cool experience and seemed to yield them pretty good results-- They then simply had to go through the player-estimated transit data and verify its veracity, which is a much less analytically intense task than trying to pick out the pattern from the noise raw for all that data.
I can't post links, since YT will nuke them, but if you look on EVE's website for its news articles, /encouraging-signals-a-project-discovery-update , you'll find some information on how that analysis was going and the kind of methodology being employed
So a point... beyond the discovers that were its primary mission, from this, we learned that other stars behave significantly differently than ours (and that may be important for life), we learned new analysis techniques, we have a practical example of how to utilize the effects of the solar wind, and we learned different observational techniques to be able to obtain the data sought for. This is a most effective demonstration that even in "failures", science progress because you learn so much from having to work around problems that make the next effort that much more successful (and introduces more problems that create more innovation and even more useful techniques and technologies!)
5:14 hold your space horses! 🦄😂
A Toast to the Brilliant Peoples and Technologies That Ever Expand Our Knowledge of the Unknown.
TD;DW: The sun is weird because it's rare, most stars in this galaxy are either really small or really big, both of which can be bad for humans. It's also really "quiet" or isn't as active as most other stars of its type, meaning less radiation being released. Both of these, perfect size and noisiness, are massive contributors to humanities advancements in technology, which is required for space travel and colonization.
Kepler 22-B, that's the place for me. WOO!
Science can be done even if the original assumptions where wrong - always something to learn, no money wasted (as some might think). Even outright failures can be important. In this regard science is different to economy.
LOL "hold our space horses" LOL
Isn't what we're looking at also 1000 (or far more) years into the past because of how long it takes the light to get to us from these stars? I know 1000 years (1400 for Kepler star) is pretty insignificant in astronomical time, but maybe these stars have chilled out (literally) since what we're seeing. Solar flares seem to occur less often in older stars from my brief research.
But like you said, 1000 or 1400 years is less than a blink of an eye astronomically. I’m not an astrophysicist but I would not expect significant changes over such a short time.
I think we're too anthropocentric in our search for alien life.
You only have to witness life on Earth in extreme environments to realize that life is incredibly resilient, and can flourish in unbelievably hostile territory.
Earth 2.0 orbiting Sun 2.0 is a chance, but probably many more situations could produce 'life' of some sort.
Problem is I think there's a limit to how much we can really explore with the resources available so I think we need to pick our targets carefully