00:00Back in 2008, astronomers found a mysterious something orbiting a star called Fomalhaut.
00:07The star is very bright and sits about 25 light-years away from us.
00:12Trillions of miles, sure, but pretty close in space terms.
00:16It's in the constellation Southern Fish, the one that looks like a single fish floating
00:20in the southern night sky.
00:22It's a small and relatively dim constellation, but Fomalhaut is what makes it so special.
00:28In Arabic, this means mouth of the fish, and you might guess where that name comes
00:33from.
00:34It's the brightest star in the constellation.
00:37If you're in the southern hemisphere, you can easily spot Fomalhaut with the naked eye.
00:42For people in the northern hemisphere, it's visible in the fall, low on the southern horizon.
00:47But this constellation has a beautiful story.
00:51The myth says that this fish is the one that saved the deity Dersedo, who had fallen into
00:55a lake.
00:56So it became the symbol of rescue and protection.
01:00The fish in Pisces is said to be the offspring of the Southern Fish, forming a kind of family.
01:07At the same time, Fomalhaut is sometimes called the Lonely Star because it's one of the brightest
01:12stars and it's part of the sky, but it doesn't have many bright neighbors.
01:16Hey, I can relate to that.
01:19Just kidding.
01:20Fomalhaut is also a young star.
01:23It's only about 440 million years old.
01:26That sounds like a lot, but our Sun, in comparison, is 4.6 billion years old.
01:32And finally, it's surrounded by a giant ring of dust and gas.
01:36This is called a debris disk.
01:39It's like a dust cloud that serves as the birthplace of planets.
01:42It's like the Kuiper Belt in our own solar system, where Pluto lives, but on a much grander
01:47scale.
01:49But then, astronomers noticed something odd about this disk.
01:53It wasn't evenly shaped.
01:55This means that there's something that influences gravity nearby.
01:59A planet, perhaps?
02:01And when they took pictures of the disk, they found a faint glowing dot inside it.
02:06That was our mysterious gravity center, Fomalhaut b, or, how they named it later, Dagon.
02:13They immediately thought it was a planet.
02:15In 2008, it was a huge deal because scientists captured an actual image of it using the Hubble
02:21Space Telescope.
02:23Now that's a super rare thing, especially for objects outside our solar system.
02:28Not to mention such tiny things as planets.
02:30And the photos were fascinating.
02:33At first, everyone was excited about the new world.
02:36Scientists thought that Dagon was a massive planet, something maybe like Jupiter, a gas
02:41giant.
02:42They even guessed that it had an oval-shaped orbit, which means that it would take about
02:471,700 years to go around its star just once.
02:51That's one of the craziest orbits we've ever seen.
02:55But as they kept studying Dagon, they noticed that things don't add up.
03:00For starters, they couldn't find it in infrared light.
03:03Planets that big usually give off heat.
03:06And telescopes like Spitzer, which look for heat signals, found nothing.
03:11Weird, right?
03:12Also, the planet was moving too strangely.
03:15Its orbit didn't match what you'd expect if it were shaping the dust ring.
03:20So scientists started thinking, maybe it's not a planet at all.
03:24And as the doubts creeped in, the hype calmed down.
03:28In 2020, they noticed another strange thing about Dagon.
03:33It was getting dimmer and spreading out.
03:35And well, planets don't usually do that.
03:38Like clouds of dust do.
03:40This led to a new idea.
03:42What if Dagon isn't a planet, but the result of a massive collision?
03:47Imagine two big chunks of ice or rock smashing into each other at incredible speeds.
03:52That's what they think happened here, a giant space crash that led to lots of debris.
03:57That's how it got officially removed from the list of exoplanets.
04:02But then, in 2023, the new James Webb Space Telescope, which is even more powerful than
04:08Hubble, decided to take a closer look at Dagon.
04:12And when scientists looked at the data, they jumped back into the previous debates.
04:17Wait, it might be the planet after all!
04:20All this scientific back and forth led to Dagon getting dubbed the zombie planet.
04:26But after a while, astronomers finally found the middle ground.
04:30Dagon really turned out to be a dust cloud that's slowly disappearing.
04:35But there could still be hidden planets in the system.
04:38There's another ring of dust closer to the star that might be shaped by an unseen planet.
04:44There are many mysterious weird planets out there.
04:48TRACE-2b orbits a star 750 light-years away from Earth, much farther out than our Dagon.
04:54It's in a region of the sky that's been heavily studied by planet hunters.
04:59It was first discovered in 2006 by the Transatlantic Exoplanet Survey, an observatory with a bunch
05:06of cool telescopes that are used to find planets.
05:10They use a witty method for it.
05:12They observe the stars, and when they see unexpected dips in brightness, that means
05:17that something must be passing in front of the star, making it a wee bit darker.
05:22This is called the transit method of the planet discovery.
05:26When TRACE-2b was spotted that way, scientists took a closer look and confirmed it.
05:32It had a certain gravity pull that caused its star to wobble.
05:36But that also means that the planet should be gigantic, probably a gas giant like Jupiter
05:41or Saturn.
05:43But unlike Jupiter, TRACE-2b is much closer to its star.
05:48This makes it a special type of a planet called hot Jupiter.
05:51That's what we call gas giants that orbit so close to their stars that their atmospheres
05:57are scorched to extreme temperatures.
05:59Imagine if Jupiter was not only horrifyingly massive, but also almost burning.
06:05This planet is tidally locked to its star.
06:08This means that it always faces the Sun with one side, just like we can only see one side
06:13of our Moon.
06:14Its day side is blisteringly hot, but even the cooler night side has temperatures around
06:202,900 degrees Fahrenheit.
06:24But there was something very eerie about this new world.
06:28What really made it stand out was its albedo, a measure of how much light the planet reflects.
06:35Most planets, like Jupiter or even Earth, reflect a good amount of light thanks to clouds,
06:40ice, and other stuff.
06:41This is what allows us to see those planets, after all.
06:45But TRACE-2b is almost completely black.
06:49For some reason, it reflects less than 1% of the light that hits it.
06:53It's darker than coal or fresh asphalt.
06:57So why is that?
06:59After some thought, astronomers think it might be because of its atmosphere.
07:04Jupiter has bright, reflective clouds of a gas called ammonia.
07:07But TRACE-2b probably doesn't have those, since it's so close to its star, they'd
07:13burn up and get stripped away.
07:15So its atmosphere might be made up of chemicals like sodium, potassium, or titanium oxide.
07:22All of this stuff absorbs a lot of light, and if you look directly at that planet, you'd
07:27see it almost as a black hole.
07:31What's even more horrifying is that if you were floating in it, since it doesn't have
07:34a solid surface, these elements could make the sky above look like an endless void, even
07:40if it's daytime.
07:41Though you'd probably still see its star, even it would be completely surrounded by
07:46blackness, like light at the end of a tunnel.
07:50In that case, shouldn't it be completely invisible?
07:53Well, it kind of is.
07:55But it also emits a faint red glow, likely due to its scorching high temperature.
08:00And even though scientists have studied TRACE-2b for years, some questions remain unanswered.
08:07Why is it the darkest planet we've ever found?
08:10Is it possible that there are some unknown chemicals in its atmosphere?
08:14What hides beneath the darkness?
08:17These Jupiter-like planets are often crazy, like WASP-76b, for example.
08:22This is another gas giant located about 640 light-years away, this time in the constellation
08:29Pisces.
08:30Just like TRACE-2b, this exoplanet is tidally locked.
08:34One side has a temperature of over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the other side remains in
08:39constant darkness.
08:41But what's crazy about it is that the extreme heat on the day side vaporizes metals like
08:47iron.
08:48The planet has insanely strong winds, and they blow this molten iron to the colder side.
08:54And you guessed it, the iron gets solid under colder temperatures, and we end up with a
08:59horrifying iron rain.
09:01All this stuff sounds like science fiction, but it's real, waiting to be explored.
09:06That's it for today!
09:07So, hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your
09:12friends!
09:13Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the Bright Side!
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