You’ve heard the Soundgarden song, but how about a real Black Hole Sun collision? Most black holes are the remnants of massive stars. Would our Sun survive the collision, or could a black hole make some serious cosmic trouble for the ruler of our Solar System?
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00:00 Black hole Sun.
01:18 Singularity
02:09 Oort Cloud
03:45 Solar matter
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As you may have read somewhere, light only takes 8 minutes to cover the distance between the Sun and the Earth. Yes, that’s an insanely short time, considering that we are talking about 150 million kilometres! But the light that reach us is actually produced at the centre of the Sun, in its core, where nuclear reactions occur. So, have you ever asked yourself how long does light take to reach the surface of the Sun, starting from its centre?
Well, we may attempt to find a rough estimate. Consider that the Sun has a radius of “only” 696,000 kilometres (compared to the 150 million kilometres that separates it from the Earth)… so we would expect light to reach the surface in, let’s say, a few seconds, is it?
…you may be surprised to hear that this estimate is totally wrong! In fact, light takes… (drums)…. Thousands of years to reach the surface of the Sun!
Wait, what? How is that possible?
…curious to know how? Stick with us and we will tell you the answer in this video!
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Before talking about the journey of light from the centre of the Sun to the Earth, we need to do a short digression about light. Stick with us, it won’t be that long.
What is light? Well, light is something fascinating: in fact, it has a “dual” nature. What does it mean? It means sometimes it behaves as a wave, and sometimes it behaves as a particle. Let me tell you more.
In the past centuries, scientists believed that light was a wave. And they were right, but.. that was only half of the story. At the end of the 19th century, and precisely in 1900, in order to explain some weird phenomena that were puzzling scientists, the German physicist Max Planck postulated that light was actually consisting of particles, called “photons”. Planck’s idea found confirmation five years later, in 1905, when Albert Einstein (this guy again!) managed to successfully explain the “photoelectric effect” by using Planck’s idea. The photoelectric effect is a well-known phenomenon that occurs when light is shone at a material (metals, in particular) and electrons are emitted from its surface as a result. By thinking light as a wave, some aspects of this phenomenon could not be explained. For instance, if the frequency of light was under a certain threshold, no electrons were emitted from the material, no matter how strong the intensity of the light beam is. However, by thinking light as a “bunch of particles”, the photons, this effect could then be explained. In fact, each photon in the light beam carries a certain amount of energy, and when the photon hits an electron in the material, it gives all its energy to the electron, which is now able to “escape” the material. The energy of the photon depends on the frequency of the light beam: so if this frequency is lower than a certain threshold, the photon has not enough energy to allow the electron to “escape” the material. The intensity of the light beam only determines the number of photons in the beam: so it doesn’t matter if we increase the intensity, we will only have more photons, but none of them will be able to “free” electrons from the material, because none of them has enough energy to do that. For realizing this, Einstein won the Nobel Prize.
Now that we have realized that light consists of photons, let’s go back to our original topic: why does light take so long to reach the surface of the Sun?
To answer this question, we have to start by looking at what happens in the core of the Sun. As in every other star, the core of the Sun is the “motor” that produces all the energy and the light emitted by our star.
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The threat of World War III is on the horizon. What if this war went nuclear? With their arsenal of nuclear weapons, Russia seems like a likely contender to launch the world’s next major nuclear attack. What does the process of launching a nuke look like? Is it worthwhile for Putin to take Russia’s attack strategy nuclear?
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One minute, you’re setting up a new space station orbiting Jupiter. The next, you’re plunging right into the middle of a giant, red cyclone of death. What would the storm of all storms look like on the inside? How would it compare to storms back on Earth? And which one of Jupiter’s tremendous forces would strike the lethal blow?
Transcript and sources:
00:00 What If You Fell Into Jupiter’s Red Spot?
01:35 Thanks Blinkist!
02:57 Getting to Jupiter
05:02 Approaching the storm
07:22 Falling into Jupiter
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Why is the Moon receding from the Earth?
The Moon is moving away from Earth at a constant speed of 3.8 centimeters per year due to the energy transfer between the two celestial bodies.
The gravitational force that the Earth exerts on the Moon creates a tide on the lunar surface, which in turn exerts a tidal force on the Earth, slowing the Earth’s rotation and increasing the length of the Earth’s day.
This means that the days will be longer in the future, as will the months, since the further away the moon is, the longer it will take to go around the Earth.
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Ever feel like the Earth is just too small for the Solar System? Well, let’s make it bigger! Welcome to a new Earth that is just as big as Jupiter. Would the Earth get its own Great Red Spot? How would it interact with other celestial bodies, including Jupiter itself? Would Earth’s growth change the composition of space?
On an Earth of cosmic proportions the size of Jupiter, your body would get heavier with the higher surface gravity. How would you get out of bed if you weighed 11 times your weight? Would Earth attract the planets orbiting the Sun? Take a magical journey through space with us to find out!
Transcript and sources:
00:00 Supersizing Earth
01:57 Big humans, huge planet
02:44 A new form of gravity
03:56 Destabilizing the Solar System
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Dont’ miss our: Was There An Advanced Civilization Before Humans? The Silurian Hypothesis
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Earth is the only planet where we know for sure that life exists. And it is also the only planet in the solar system to have given rise to a technological civilization.
Whether other civilizations then exist beyond the solar system, we can only guess, but our ignorance on the matter is total. Of course, we know that there are countless planets: in nearly three decades thousands have been discovered, and starting from the ratio of the number of extrasolar planets discovered so far to the total number of stars observed, we can deduce by statistical methods that the potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way alone are probably more than 10 billion: too many even to count.
But there is one big problem: they are all beyond our reach, and by a lot.
Exploring the depths of space in search of another evolved civilization is therefore an undertaking currently beyond our capabilities.
But what if instead of searching in space, we search in time?
When we search for alien life we tend to look into the three dimensions of space, looking for planetary environments similar to our own. But there is perhaps another dimension to look into when searching for aliens, namely, that of TIME…
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“Some of our visual content is under an Attribution-ShareAlike license. ( in its different versions such as 1.0, 2.0, 3,0, and 4.0 – permitting commercial sharing with attribution given in each picture accordingly in the video.”
Credits: Ron Miller, Mark A. Garlick / MarkGarlick.com
Credits: Nasa/Shutterstock/Storyblocks/Elon Musk/SpaceX/ESA/ESO/ Flickr
00:00 Intro
00:20 The Silurian Hyphotesis video
5:25 a level of technology that allowed it to fly into space?
7:23 the extraterrestrial Silurians hypothesis!
635 light-years from where you are sitting, way out in outer space, lies a planet. The first planet to be discovered inside the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. Its name is Kepler 22-b. When a planet is located within a star’s habitable zone, it means that there is a chance that liquid water exists on its surface. And where there’s water, there’s also the possibility of life. Human life. What would the weather be like over there?
Transcript and sources:
00:00 Could this be Earth 2.0?
01:10 Exoplanets
04:10 Kepler 22-b might have an ocean
06:30 Growing plants
08:14 How would we thrive?
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In a matter of days, a nearby volcano will erupt, spewing debris and lava, and decimating your city. You know that fighting fire with fire usually makes things worse, but maybe you could fight fire with ice. What happens when lava suddenly cools down? How much ice would you need? Does adding ice to a volcanic eruption make it better or worse? Would an iceberg stop the volcanic eruption? What is sublimation? How does tephra form? Would Mount Michael be the ideal place to put an iceberg into a volcano?
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What If is a mini-documentary web series that takes you on an epic journey through hypothetical worlds and possibilities. Join us on an imaginary adventure through time, space and chance while we (hopefully) boil down complex subjects in a fun and entertaining way.
