00:00At breakneck speed, this mysterious object is zipping through our galaxy.
00:05It's moving at a staggering 1 million miles per hour.
00:08That's so fast it might potentially escape the Milky Way altogether.
00:13While scientists are trying to understand exactly what this space weirdo is,
00:17we're going into space to learn more about it.
00:20The object is currently moving at a distance of 400 light years away from Earth.
00:25Let's have a closer look and try to figure out if it could be a runaway probe.
00:30Nah, it's way too large for that.
00:32The object is around 30,000 times the mass of Earth and 8% of the mass of the Sun.
00:38What a giant!
00:39Such a size places it in a category that Dr. Darren Baskill,
00:43an astronomy lecturer at the University of Sussex,
00:46describes as somewhere between a star and a planet.
00:50Stars moving at such extreme speeds are super rare.
00:53Only one or two out of every thousand local stars travel so incredibly fast.
00:59So, if one day you found a star moving as rapidly as our cosmic enigma,
01:04you'd see it leave our home Milky Way galaxy in just a few tens of millions of years.
01:10In terms of space and cosmic distances, it's a blink of an eye period of time.
01:15After all, such stars can live for tens of billions of years.
01:20Even though the mysterious object is only moving at 0.001% of the speed of light,
01:26it's still potentially fast enough to eventually break free from the gravitational pull of our galaxy
01:32and fly into intergalactic space.
01:36Let's put this speed into perspective.
01:38J1249 is traveling 2.6 times faster than the fastest space probe ever launched.
01:45I'm talking about the Parker Solar Probe.
01:49The Parker probe reached this speed in June 2024 while looping around the Sun.
01:56J1249 was discovered by citizen scientists volunteering for NASA's Backyard Worlds,
02:02Planet 9 project.
02:04These volunteers sift through online images taken by NASA's Wide Field Infrared Explorer
02:10and NEOWISE missions.
02:12They're looking for anything interesting.
02:15Three of those volunteers spotted a faint, fast-moving object as it moved across WISE images.
02:22When they realized what they were looking at, they were incredibly excited
02:26but thought someone had already reported the space object.
02:30But surprisingly, that wasn't the case.
02:33At the moment, most scientists believe that CWISE J1249 could either be a low-mass star
02:39or a brown dwarf.
02:42That's a type of star that is larger than a planet but too small to support nuclear fusion in its core,
02:48like our Sun does.
02:50In other words, such stars don't have enough mass,
02:53and their cores can't burn their star fuel, radiating starlight.
02:57That's why brown dwarfs, often referred to as failed stars, are smaller and cooler than the Sun.
03:03They even have complex, planet-like atmospheres, which have clouds and molecules.
03:09For example, H2O.
03:12Anyway, to confirm or disprove this theory,
03:15astronomers continued to observe the object with the help of ground-based telescopes.
03:20Soon, they found out that the object had an unusual composition,
03:24with much less iron and other metals, compared to typical stars or brown dwarfs.
03:30It allowed NASA to claim the unthinkable.
03:33J1249 could be one of the oldest stars ever found in our galaxy.
03:38OK, that's certainly a game-changer, but why is this potential star moving so fast?
03:44The research team has a few theories.
03:47For example, the object might be the remains of a binary star system
03:52where its companion, a white dwarf, exploded in a supernova
03:56after pulling too much material from J1249.
04:00Another possibility is that our mysterious traveler may have originated from a cluster of stars
04:06that dispersed after coming across two black holes.
04:10According to experts, one way to get to such extreme speeds
04:14is to fall toward an object and miss it.
04:18Such gravitational slingshots are how space probes are accelerated to extreme speeds,
04:23which allows us to explore the solar system up close over reasonable timescales.
04:29The same technique could also explain the speed of J1249.
04:34The star could have been born in the crowded center of our galaxy.
04:38Then it might have fallen toward a star, missed,
04:42and in the process was accelerated to extreme speeds.
04:48Well, let's leave astronomers to search for more evidence to confirm this exciting theory.
04:53Meanwhile, we're heading further, to the binary star system 55 Concrete.
04:59It lies 41 light-years away from Earth and hosts an amazing planet,
05:0555 Cancri e, also known as Janssen.
05:09This is a scorched super-Earth, 8 times the mass of our planet,
05:14and it orbits its star in just over 17 hours.
05:18Yep, the year on this planet is shorter than one day on Earth.
05:22Plus, it's 25 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our Sun.
05:28No wonder the planet's surface reaches blistering temperatures of 4,350 degrees Fahrenheit.
05:35That's hot enough to melt nearly any known metal.
05:39Back in 2010, a study found out that the host star of 55 Concrete e
05:44had an unusually high carbon-to-oxygen ratio.
05:48If this ratio was also true for the planet,
05:50it would mean that 55 Concrete e might have huge quantities of carbon.
05:56And the coolest thing? It would be in the form of diamonds!
06:00It'd make this space body a literal diamond planet!
06:04Sadly, some follow-up studies discovered that the carbon-to-oxygen ratio on the planet
06:09was less extreme than originally thought.
06:12It makes the idea of a diamond-encrusted world less feasible.
06:16On the bright side, planets don't always have to match the composition of their host stars exactly.
06:22If some other process topped up the carbon on 55 Concrete e,
06:26it could still be the most precious planet known in the universe.
06:30Definitely worth a visit.
06:33But let's leave the diamond planet behind and fly to Vega,
06:37which holds a special place as one of the brightest and most important stars in the sky.
06:42The brightest of other stars is measured against the brightness of Vega on a special magnitude scale,
06:48where Vega's magnitude is zero.
06:51A star with a magnitude of 1 is 2.5 times dimmer than Vega,
06:56and a star with a magnitude of negative 1 is 2.5 times brighter.
07:01Vega is also a pole star, although not at the moment.
07:06Right now, Earth's axis points toward Polaris, the North Star.
07:11But Earth's axial tilt draws a circle over 26,000 years,
07:15and Vega will again be the pole star in about 12,000 years.
07:20Just you wait.
07:21But the coolest thing about Vega, which sets it aside from other stars,
07:25is that it's not shaped like a perfect sphere.
07:28Unlike the Sun, which rotates slowly and is almost spherical,
07:32Vega spins very fast, completing one rotation in just 12.5 hours.
07:38And it causes it to bulge at the equator, taking on an egg-shaped appearance.
07:44And now, get ready for the most dangerous encounter of them all.
07:48But first, I must warn you.
07:50Even though space is unimaginably vast, it's populated extremely sparsely.
07:56The universe's average density is equivalent to six protons in 35 cubic feet.
08:02But some areas, known as voids or supervoids, contain even less matter.
08:07These regions are enormous and can span 30 to 300 million light-years,
08:13and there's almost nothing there.
08:16There are also places in the universe where time and space are distorted
08:20in ways that challenge our human comprehension,
08:23like binary black hole systems,
08:25where two massive black holes dance around each other before eventually merging.
08:31As they spiral closer, they release immense gravitational waves
08:35that ripple across spacetime.
08:38The first detection of such waves was made by the Laser Interferometer
08:42Gravitational Wave Observatory in 2015,
08:45when it recorded the final collision of a black hole pair.
08:49In the final 20 milliseconds before the merger,
08:52the black holes released more gravitational energy
08:55than the total energy emitted by all the stars in the observable universe
08:59during the same period.
09:01But that's not all the universe has to offer.
09:04Once you start exploring, you can come across exoplanets,
09:07like CoROT-7b, where rock clouds form and send pebbles raining from the skies,
09:14or KELT-9b, the hottest known planet
09:17with surface temperatures reaching 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit,
09:21or TRES-2b, the darkest planet ever discovered.
09:26It absorbs over 99% of the light it receives,
09:29making it blacker than coal.
09:32So, as you can see, in the vast, almost incomprehensible scale of the cosmos,
09:37mysterious, fast-moving objects, strange planets, and immense voids
09:42all serve as a reminder of how much we have yet to learn about the universe.
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