00:00 Saturn's iconic rings will disappear in less than two years.
00:04 Soon, we won't be able to see Jupiter's great red spot.
00:07 Pluto's atmosphere might vanish any day now.
00:11 Even the universe itself could be slowly evaporating right at this moment.
00:16 But let me start from the very beginning.
00:18 Saturn's rings won't vanish forever, at least in the near future, but they will seemingly
00:23 disappear from view.
00:25 This phenomenon is caused by the planet's tilt as it orbits the Sun.
00:29 As a result, the eye-catching rings adorning the gas giant will get invisible to stargazers
00:35 in 2025.
00:37 This outrageous disappearance occurs because Saturn's thin rings turn edge-on.
00:42 It's like holding a sheet of paper horizontally at eye level parallel to the ground so that
00:47 only the edge of the paper can be seen.
00:50 Something similar happens to the gas giant's rings.
00:53 As the seasons on the planet progress, instead of the southern side of the rings tilted our
00:57 way, we start seeing the northern side.
01:00 But then the planet tilts again, revealing the southern side once again.
01:05 Such a ring-plane crossing happens every 15 years when our planet passes through the gas
01:09 giant's ring plane.
01:12 The last time this phenomenon occurred was in 2009.
01:15 Afterward, the rings gradually became visible again over the course of several months.
01:21 This time the rings will be on edge in March 2025.
01:25 Then they will slowly come back into view and disappear again in November of the same
01:29 year.
01:30 Soon after that, the rings will reappear, first becoming visible to the largest telescopes,
01:35 later for everyone else to see.
01:37 At the same time, further into the future, the rings might cease to exist for good.
01:43 Astronomers have concluded that Saturn's rings, which mostly consist of ice and rocky
01:47 dust from smashed asteroids, are younger than we thought.
01:51 They're losing tons and tons of mass per second all the time, and it's likely to
01:56 be a few hundred million years at most before they vanish completely.
02:00 Let's move to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.
02:04 This immense raging storm might stop spinning in the next 20 years.
02:08 The storm in question is larger than our planet.
02:11 It was first spotted in 1830, but observations from the 1600s mention the presence of a giant
02:17 spot on Jupiter too.
02:19 If it was the same Great Red Spot, then we can say that the storm has been raging for
02:24 centuries.
02:26 The storm's vortex has remained so powerful thanks to Jupiter's 300-400 mph jet streams.
02:34 But like any other storm, the Great Red can't keep raging forever.
02:38 It's been shrinking for a long time.
02:40 In a decade or two, it's predicted to turn into GRC, the Great Red Circle, and who knows,
02:46 maybe it will later turn into the GRM, the Great Red Memory.
02:51 In the late 1800s, the storm was more than 35,000 miles across, four times the diameter
02:58 of Earth.
02:59 But when Voyager 2 flew past Jupiter in 1979, the storm had already shrunk almost twice
03:05 its original size.
03:07 And this shrinking is still happening.
03:09 In 2017, the GRS spanned the width of a bit more than 10,150 miles, less than 1.3 times
03:17 the diameter of Earth.
03:20 Moving on, Pluto's atmosphere is going through a weird transformation.
03:25 This icy dwarf planet sitting over 3 billion miles away from Earth in the region of the
03:29 Kuiper Belt drew astronomers' attention in 2018 when it passed in front of a star.
03:35 With such a powerful source of light illuminating Pluto, researchers managed to examine the
03:40 dwarf planet and its atmosphere.
03:42 They came to a shocking conclusion that Pluto's atmosphere is refreezing back onto its surface
03:48 as the dwarf planet gets colder and colder.
03:52 Astronomers used several telescopes in different spots in the USA and Mexico to observe Pluto
03:58 and its thin atmosphere, which is mainly made of nitrogen.
04:02 This atmosphere is supported by the vapor pressure of ice on the surface of the dwarf
04:06 planet.
04:07 For around 25 years, Pluto has been moving further away from the Sun, and its surface
04:12 temperature has been gradually going down.
04:16 Pluto is really far from our star at the moment, but at one point it will start getting closer
04:21 in other regions of its incredibly huge orbit.
04:26 Besides Jupiter's great red spot, Saturn's rings, and Pluto's atmosphere, we're also
04:31 losing stars.
04:33 But stars don't vanish, right?
04:35 For thousands of years, scientists believed that lights in the sky were fixed and unchanging.
04:41 Even after they realized those lights were physical objects, just like the Sun, they
04:45 were still sure that stars went through major changes extremely slowly, on timescales of
04:50 millions and billions of years.
04:54 In reality though, the most massive stars, which can be hundreds of times heavier than
04:59 the Sun, can go through sudden catastrophic events.
05:03 For example, once they reach the ends of their lives, they pass away in blinding explosions
05:08 of supernovae, shining for months on end and visible across hundreds of millions of light
05:13 years.
05:15 But there are stars that seem to just wink out of visibility.
05:19 It should be impossible.
05:21 And over the past years, a group of researchers tried to figure out whether there's actually
05:25 a chance of such a phenomenon happening.
05:28 They started to compare data collected over decades of observations.
05:32 The project is called VASCO, the Vanishing and Appearing Sources During a Century of
05:37 Observations.
05:38 The scientists are interested in all kinds of disappearing objects, but they're hoping
05:43 to find a star that was steady and present for a long time, and then just vanished without
05:48 a trace.
05:49 Even if you point a super powerful telescope there, you'll still see nothing.
05:55 Our current understanding of space and its laws suggest that stars change very slowly
06:00 over long periods of time.
06:03 Dramatic disappearances are supposed to leave noticeable traces behind.
06:07 Of course, it doesn't mean that all stars should shine steadily.
06:10 The sky is filled with stars that change in brightness and pulsate.
06:15 But VASCO is about something very different.
06:18 They want to find something that goes from a completely steady star to vanishing entirely.
06:23 Such a phenomenon hasn't been documented yet, and such a discovery might lead to new
06:28 physics.
06:30 And now let's move on to the most disturbing part, the one about the evaporating universe.
06:35 According to a famous theory proposed by Stephen Hawking, black holes, the densest objects
06:41 in the universe, evaporate over time.
06:44 They lose mass in the form of bizarre radiation.
06:47 But a new study claims that Hawking radiation, or something very similar to it, might not
06:52 be limited to black holes.
06:54 It's likely to be everywhere, and it could mean that the universe is slowly but surely
06:59 evaporating right in front of our eyes.
07:03 Now Hawking radiation is something no one has ever observed, but theories and experiments
07:08 suggest that it can actually exist.
07:11 Let's see how it works.
07:13 There's a misconception that black holes are cosmic hoovers, slurping up everything
07:18 that comes too close with the help of their immense gravitational pull.
07:23 In reality though, black holes don't have more gravity than any other body of a similar
07:27 mass.
07:28 What they're famous for is their density, incredible amounts of mass packed into a tiny,
07:34 tiny space.
07:35 Within a certain proximity to such a dense object, gravitational pull becomes so powerful
07:40 that it becomes impossible to escape.
07:43 Even the speed of light in a vacuum is enough, and that's the fastest known thing in the
07:48 universe.
07:50 At the same time, anything massive or dense enough can produce a serious curvature of
07:54 space-time.
07:56 In simple words, the immense gravitational field of these objects makes space-time wrap
08:01 around them.
08:02 Even though black holes are the most extreme example, space-time also curves around other
08:07 super-dense objects, like white dwarfs, and neutron stars or galaxy clusters.
08:14 It means that any super-dense and supermassive object can have some sort of radiation similar
08:19 to Hawking radiation.
08:21 And after a very, very long period of time, it could lead to everything in the universe
08:26 evaporating, following the fate of old supermassive black holes.
08:32 If it turns out to be true, it will change our understanding not only of Hawking radiation,
08:37 but also our view of the universe, and its, and our future.
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