00:00Back in 2008, astronomers found a mysterious something orbiting a star called Fomalhaut.
00:07This star is very bright and sits about 25 light-years away from us.
00:12Trillions of miles, sure, but pretty close in space terms.
00:15It's in the constellation Southern Fish, the one that looks like a single fish floating in 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 from.
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.
00:41For people in the northern hemisphere, it's visible in the fall, low on the southern horizon.
00:47But this constellation has a beautiful story.
00:50The myth says that this fish is the one that saved the deity Dursedo, who had fallen into a 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 stars and it's part of the sky, but it doesn't have many bright neighbors.
01:17Hey, I can relate to that.
01:18Nah, just kidding.
01:19Fomalhaut is also a young star.
01:22It's only about 440 million years old.
01:26Now, that 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.
01:38It'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 scale.
01:48But 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?
02:00And when they took pictures of the disk, they found a faint glowing dot inside it.
02:05That 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 Space Telescope.
02:22Now, that's a super rare thing, especially for objects outside our solar system.
02:27Not to mention such tiny things as planets.
02:30And the photos were fascinating.
02:32At first, everyone was excited about the new world.
02:36Scientists thought that Dagon was a massive planet.
02:39Something maybe like Jupiter, a gas giant.
02:42They even guessed that it had an oval-shaped orbit.
02:45Which means that it would take about 1,700 years to go around its star just once.
02:51It's one of the craziest orbits we've ever seen.
02:54But as they kept studying Dagon, they noticed that things don't add up.
02:59For starters, they couldn't find it in infrared light.
03:03Now, planets that big usually give off heat.
03:06And telescopes like Spitzer, which looked 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.
03:32It 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.
03:54A giant space crash that led to lots of debris.
03:58That's how it got officially removed from the list of exoplanets.
04:02But then, in 2023, the new James Webb Space Telescope,
04:07which is even more powerful than Hubble,
04:09decided to take a closer look at Dagon.
04:11And when scientists looked at the data, they jumped back into the previous debates.
04:16Wait, it might be the planet after all.
04:19All this scientific back and forth led to Dagon getting dubbed the zombie planet.
04:25But after a while, astronomers finally found the middle ground.
04:30Dagon really turned out to be a dust cloud that's slowly disappearing.
04:34But 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.
04:43There 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,
05:05an observatory with a bunch of cool telescopes that are used to find planets.
05:09They use a witty method for it.
05:12They observe the stars, and when they see unexpected dips in brightness,
05:17that means that 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.
05:35But that also means that the planet should be gigantic, probably a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn.
05:43But, unlike Jupiter, TRACE 2b is much closer to its star.
05:47This makes it a special type of a planet called hot Jupiter.
05:52That's what we call gas giants that orbit so close to their stars
05:55that their atmospheres are scorched to extreme temperatures.
05:59Imagine if Jupiter was not only horrifyingly massive, but also almost burning.
06:04This 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 of our Moon.
06:15Its day side is blisteringly hot, but even the cooler night side has temperatures around 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit.
06:23But there was something very eerie about this new world.
06:27What really made it stand out was its albedo, a measure of how much light the planet reflects.
06:34Most planets, like Jupiter or even Earth, reflect a good amount of light thanks to clouds, ice, 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.
06:56So, why is that?
06:59After some thought, astronomers think it might be because of its atmosphere.
07:03Jupiter 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 burn up and get stripped away.
07:15So, its atmosphere might be made up of chemicals like sodium, potassium, or titanium oxide.
07:21All of this stuff absorbs a lot of light.
07:25And if you look directly at that planet, you'd see it almost as a black hole.
07:30What's even more horrifying is that if you were floating in it, since it doesn't have a solid surface,
07:36these elements could make the sky above look like an endless void, even if it's daytime.
07:41Though you'd probably still see it's dark, even it would be completely surrounded by blackness, 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.
07:59And even though scientists have studied TRACE 2b for years, some questions remain unanswered.
08:06Why is it the darkest planet we've ever found?
08:09Is 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 Pisces.
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 constant darkness.
08:41But what's crazy about it is that the extreme heat on the day side vaporizes metals like iron.
08:47The planet has insanely strong winds, and they blow this molten iron to the colder side.
08:53And you guessed it, the iron gets solid under colder temperatures, and we end up with a horrifying iron rain.
09:01All this stuff sounds like science fiction, but it's real, waiting to be explored.
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