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The starry night is a beautiful thing. But the science behind the cosmos is amazing. Come join us on a journey of space exploration, and learn some incredible facts about the universe!
Learn about dark flow, the big bang theory, and hear about the amazing journey of the voyager explorations. Brought to you by Zero2Hero.
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Transcript provided by YouTube:
it’s strange to think that more people have walked on the moon than have been
to the deepest parts of our ocean but with the development of recent
astronomical instruments and new scientific developments humans have been
able to delve deep into the universe and study its many wonders stay tuned to
find out exactly how massive the universe actually is
number ten you’re old well the universe is anyway in fact the universe is 13.7
billion years old give or take a hundred and thirty million years well to put
this into perspective our solar system is only about 4.6 billion years old life
on earth began about 3.8 billion years ago and humans like us Homo sapiens have
only been around for about 200,000 years literally a blink of the eye in the
history of the universe to date the universe scientists have examined the
day between when the Big Bang occurred and today and what they’ve discovered
has us downed at us before the Big Bang is the realm of speculation though and
cosmologists debate what if anything existed before that on the other hand
scientists have been able to trace the history of the universe back to within
the first seconds and minutes after the Big Bang this is impressive since we’ve
only been here for two hundred thousand years number nine it’s huge
the universe is very big the distance from the earth to the edge of the
observable universe is 46 billion light-years
this leads astronomers and scientists to calculate that the observable universe
is about 91 billion light-years in diameter distance is so large they are
incomprehensible but what does the universe consist of well it contains
billions of galaxies which in turn contain solar systems stars planets
nebulae black holes and much more there could be as many as 10 billion galaxies
that puts our own existence into perspective we live on a small
planet that orbits a dwarf star with the seven other planets that make up our
solar system but when we look beyond the boundaries of the solar system we
quickly realize that the earth and even the Sun are very small in comparison to
some of the super Giants astronomers have identified although it’s impossible
to imagine these sizes the Sun is about 109 times the diameter of the
well the largest stars in the universe can be thousands of times larger than
our Sun which is just beyond imagining although the universe is full of these
planets stars and galaxies they only make up about 5% of the total mass of
the universe so what makes up the other 95% number 8 our galaxy the Milky Way
not just a candy bar the Milky Way is the galaxy our planet and solar system
are situated in its diameter is between 100,000 and 180,000 light years and it
contains an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars and at least a hundred billion
planets it’s so big that even if humans created a spaceship that could travel at
the speed of light it would still take at least a thousand years to cross it
every star you can see with the naked eye is part of the Milky Way it can best
be seen as a ban of white light arching across the night sky today because of
light pollution you need to be in a really dark part of the world to be able
to see it clearly but back before the advent of electricity and large cities
our ancestors would have seen a much more detailed picture of the sky many
people throughout history have theorized about what exactly the Milky Way is such
as the Greek philosopher Aristotle the Persian astronomer abu rayhan al biruni
and the Andalusian astronomer Alvin pace just to name a few
not only that but there are countless of myths and legends about the origins of
the Milky Way and what it is but thankfully recent scientific
developments have given us tools to understand our existence outside of
stories number seven feeling hot hot hot what planet in our solar system do you
think is the hottest simple logic would have you believe that the planet closest
to the Sun Mercury would be the hottest right well it’s not instead at the
position of second planet from the Sun Venus holds the title for the hottest
planet in our solar system with a maintain temperature of 4
hundred and sixty-two degrees Celsius which is hot enough to melt lead but why
is Venus hotter than mercury well Venus has a thick atmosphere that traps the
runaway greenhouse effect whereas mercury barely has an atmosphere as a
result there is nothing to trap the sun’s warmth on mercury
this causes the temperature to drop as low as minus 173 degrees Celsius at
night it just goes to show that the most obvious conclusion isn’t always the
right one and this is definitely the case with space number 6 do you see what
I see we already mentioned that we live in the Milky Way galaxy so it should
come as no shock that every star you can see in the night sky is situated in the
Milky Way this means that we can’t see anything outside of our galaxy without
utilizing modern astronomical instruments but what do we see when we
look at the night sky well because light has to travel from so far away what we
see is an image of what our galaxy used to look like for example if it takes
light from a distant star 200 light years to reach Earth we would be viewing
what that star looked like 200 years ago another example is our closest star the
Sun it’s located only 92.9 million miles away which means that if the Sun stopped
burning we wouldn’t know about it for 8 minutes and 20 seconds to think of it
another way we are never viewing the universe in its current state only what
it used to look like astronomers are in effect the historians
of the universe number five forager one end – it’s not
only our neighboring planets that astronomers and scientists have
attempted a study by sending robots into space Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are
robotic probes used by an American scientific program to study the outer
solar system and beyond located 13 billion 34 million 348,000
and 240 miles away from the earth and Counting
Voyager 1 is the furthest human-made object in space in August 2012 it became
the first human-made object to enter interstellar space unfortunately though
the mission is expected to end in 2025 when the probes generators will no
longer have enough electric power to continue operating the equipment but the
Voyager robotic probes aren’t just pieces of scientific equipment each one
carries a gold-plated audio-visual disk that contains greetings in 55 languages
music pictures of Earth and scientific information in the event that they are
ever found by intelligent life-forms they are a message from us to them
perhaps one day in thousands millions or even billions of years from now
intelligent life-forms may one day find the echo of humanity floating around in
space and they’ll probably wonder while we’re shooting record players at them
number four black hole Sun black holes are like the nightmares of the universe
and they have puzzled astronomers and scientists since their discovery there
are three types of black holes known to scientists still are black holes which
are formed by the collapse of individual stars supermassive black holes whose
formation is not exactly known and intermediate black holes which could be
the result of stars in a cluster colliding in a chain reaction but what
exactly is a black hole well they are regions of space that have very strong
gravitational effects so strong that not even light can escape them due to their
nature astronomers are unable to directly view
them with modern scientific instruments and instead must rely on observing their
effect on nearby matter these mysterious features are found
throughout the universe and recently scientists have discovered one near the
heart of the Milky Way but thankfully the nearest one to earth is about 1600
light-years away number 3 Nebula uh Nebula is the name
given to an interstellar cloud of dust helium hydrogen and other gases some
nebulae are believed to measure millions of light years in diameter but even
though they are so large they are far less dense than any vacuum created on
earth so how are they formed well some of the result of gas is already in the
interstellar medium while others are believed to be created from materials
shed by stars in late stages of their stellar evolution so what is their
function well stars and planetary systems are
formed from the gas and dust within some of the nebula making them
stellar nurseries number two expanding universe the universe is expanding and
its rate of expansion is increasing but what does this mean well the idea that
the universe is expanding is a modern idea from the early 20th century but
knowledge that the rate of expansion is accelerating is more recent in the 1990s
it came as a shock to scientists to find that their measurements suggested the
expansion was not slowing down as previously thought but was in fact
speeding up so what’s making it speed up unsurprisingly we don’t know but recent
suggestions think it may be linked to something called dark energy and we’ll
get to that in a bit if the expansion of the universe is accelerating does that
mean that the universe is infinite again scientists don’t know but the general
consensus is that the expanding universe theory suggests it could continue to
expand forever at least humans will have enough time to develop the technology
needed to travel the universe number one invisible stuff everything we can see
and measure in the universe only makes up 5% of the universe
so what makes up the rest this has been a question that puzzles scientists and
astronomers alike it is now believed that roughly 70% of the universe is made
of dark energy a force that repels gravity while dark matter
an invisible substance makes up roughly the other 25% dark matter is impossible
to detect with current instruments but scientists are confident it exists due
to the gravitational effects it appears to have on galaxies dark energy is even
stranger and scientists have no explanation for what it is there are
theories but like dark matter our current instruments are unable to
measure it recent research has led some to believe that the repelling
characteristics of dark energy might be linked to the acceleration of the
expansion of the universe nearly everything in the universe is beyond
comprehension for most of us but dark matter and dark energy take it to a
whole different level thankfully scientists will continue investigating
this mystery and hopefully one day we will have a better understanding of what
makes up most of the universe tell us what you think about the mysterious and
invisible dark matter and dark energy in the comments below take a moment to
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This post was previously published on YouTube.