Astronomers Have Just Found the Weirdest Planet in Decades

Bright Side

Science fiction spent decades inventing exotic worlds, and then real space showed up and proved it can do way worse. Telescopes keep spotting planets warped by the gravity of dead stars, worlds with air that has no water or oxygen, and entire surfaces that look like oceans of molten rock. Some giant planets orbit so close to their stars that they’re basically getting cooked and ripped apart in real time. None of this looks like a movie set — it looks like reality glitched and forgot to reload the laws of nature. And the creepiest part is that these aren’t stories… they’re measurements, data, and math showing how brutal the universe truly is 🌌  Credit: Vela Pulsar: by NASA/CXC/Univ. of Toronto/M. Durant, et al. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vela_Pulsar_jet_seen_by_Chandra_Observatory.ogv Webb Sees Its First Star: by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio - KBR Wyle Services, LLC/Michael McClare, KBR Wyle Services, LLC/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez, KBR Wyle Services, LLC/Jonathan North https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photons_Received-_Webb_Sees_Its_First_Star_%E2%80%93_18_Times_(SVS14100).webm TESS Satellite: by NASA Goddard https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TESS_Satellite_Discovered_Its_1st_World_Orbiting_2_Stars_8FrlhrtVEW8.webm TRAPPIST: by ESO/L. Calçada/spaceengine.org CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_from_above_the_surface_of_TRAPPIST-1b.webm Star Wars / Lucasfilm Animation is created by Bright Side.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/   Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV  Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Our Social Media:  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brightplanet/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en   Stock materials (photos, footages and other):  https://www.depositphotos.com  https://www.shutterstock.com  https://www.eastnews.ru  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.

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00:00So, planets with two suns, like Tatooine from Star Wars, used to sound like pure fantasy.

00:07For decades, scientists believed these systems were too unstable to exist.

00:11Two stars tugging at a planet should fling it into space or drop it into one of the suns.

00:17Except, it turns out that nature didn't get the memo.

00:20Astronomers have found a planet calmly orbiting two stars like it's no big deal.

00:25This planet lives closer to its two parent stars than any other directly imaged planet in a binary star system astronomers have ever seen.

00:34Direct imaging means they saw the planet's light, not just its shadow.

00:39The whole system sits about 446 light-years away, so the light we see from it today left before humans ever built modern cities.

00:48This space monster is roughly six times the mass of Jupiter.

00:51And even more surprising, the planet is only about 13 million years old.

00:57That sounds ancient, until you zoom out a little.

01:00Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, which makes this planet basically a newborn in cosmic terms.

01:07The two suns of this monster orbit each other incredibly fast and complete a full loop in just 18 Earth days.

01:14That means their gravity constantly shifts, yanking space around them like a cosmic washing machine.

01:20Even so, the planet stays locked in its path, so it takes it 300 Earth years to finish a single orbit.

01:28So nobody fully understands how this planet formed in the first place.

01:32When two stars orbit each other this closely, their gravity usually tears apart planet-forming material before anything big can take shape.

01:41Scientists have only found a few dozen planets like this so far, and that's nowhere near enough to piece together the full story.

01:48To solve the mystery, they need more data.

01:52Another cool find that still needs more research is a planet so stretched by gravity that it looks like a lemon, not a sphere.

02:00This planet is nothing like the calm, blue and green worlds we see in space movies.

02:05It orbits a pulsar, which is basically a star's corpse.

02:08When a massive star expires, it collapses into an ultra-dense object that spins insanely fast and blasts radiation like a cosmic lighthouse.

02:19Being near one of those means game over for anything solid.

02:23And yet, this planet hangs on, barely.

02:26The gravity stretches it, pulling harder on the side facing the pulsar than the far side, like cosmic taffy.

02:33And here's where it gets extra unsettling.

02:37When scientists analyzed this planet's atmosphere, they didn't find water or oxygen.

02:43They found helium and pure carbon.

02:45No clouds, no oceans, no chance of life.

02:48According to everything we know about planet formation, this world shouldn't exist at all.

02:54So it might not be a planet in the normal sense.

02:56It could be the exposed core of a star that got shredded, leaving behind something stuck between planet and stellar cores.

03:05That's a pretty scary trend.

03:07The line between planets and stars keeps getting blurry.

03:10And speaking of scary, meet this guy.

03:13This system lives around two red dwarf stars.

03:16These two stars orbit each other at a distance similar to how far Jupiter sits from the Sun.

03:22Scientists found two Earth-sized planets and a third possible one squeezed right up next to the stars.

03:29One planet completes a full year in just over two days.

03:33Another takes about three and a half days.

03:35The candidate planet orbits even faster.

03:38To put that in perspective, these planets sit less than 2 million miles from their star.

03:43The Moon sits about a quarter million miles from Earth.

03:46So yeah, these worlds are close.

03:49When they combine data from space and ground-based telescopes, astronomers realized they were staring at something totally new.

03:57Planets that transit or pass in front of both stars.

04:01Most planets in double-star systems orbit only one star.

04:05And this setup shouldn't last long according to the rules of physics.

04:09But these planets exist anyway, calmly breaking the rules.

04:13So this guy proves that planet formation works in ways we still don't fully understand.

04:19And space clearly enjoys messing with our expectations.

04:23Now let's crank up the horror a notch.

04:26Astronomers made the first-ever 3D map of a planet outside our solar system.

04:31And not just any planet.

04:33This one is so hot, it literally tears water molecules apart.

04:37As the planet moved behind its star, the James Webb watched tiny changes in the star's light at different colors or wavelengths.

04:46Some colors get absorbed by water vapor.

04:48Others don't.

04:49By stacking all that info together, scientists figured out temperatures at different heights and locations in the planet's atmosphere.

04:56And that's how they learned that parts of its atmosphere heat up to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than molten lava.

05:05This super-hot planet sits about 400 light-years away and weighs around 10 times as much as Jupiter.

05:12It races around its star in just 23 hours.

05:15When you're there is basically a day.

05:17And because it's so close, the temperatures get so high.

05:22Winds try to move heat around, but they totally fail.

05:24Well, WASP-18b's atmosphere barely has any water and instead overflows with carbon monoxide.

05:32Astronomers once believed water should be common in giant planet atmospheres.

05:36This world proves water is optional, not guaranteed.

05:41Now, magma worlds are another perfect proof of that.

05:44There's a huge group of planets called sub-Neptunes.

05:48Planets bigger than Earth, but smaller than Neptune.

05:50For a while, some scientists hoped these worlds were Heishan planets.

05:54Covered in deep oceans of water or ice, wrapped in thick atmospheres.

05:59One famous example was K2-18.

06:02Its atmosphere showed methane and carbon dioxide, but almost no ammonia.

06:07But as it turned out, lava dissolves ammonia too.

06:11So the missing ammonia doesn't prove water at all.

06:14It could just mean the planet has a global ocean of magma instead.

06:19The researchers model how these planets heat up, cool down, and evolve over time.

06:24They asked a simple question.

06:26Do these planets ever cool enough to stop being lava worlds?

06:29And the answer was, almost never.

06:32When they tested thousands of known sub-Neptunes,

06:35they say almost all of them are likely lava worlds, not water worlds.

06:39In simple terms, these planets don't breathe water vapor.

06:43They breathe rock vapor.

06:45Their atmospheres come from magma boiling, not oceans evaporating.

06:49And that changes everything.

06:51Many worlds we once labeled maybe habitable turn into hellscapes the moment you run the

06:57numbers honestly.

06:58And that means space isn't hiding Earth clones, but mass-producing furnaces and other sorts of

07:04monsters.

07:04Take this bad boy, for instance.

07:07It sits only about 64 light-years away, which is uncomfortably close in cosmic terms.

07:13And it's the nearest hot Jupiter to Earth.

07:16From afar, it looks stunning.

07:18A smooth, deep blue marble floating peacefully in space.

07:22But that color hides something absolutely brutal.

07:25On this planet, it rains glass.

07:27Sideways.

07:29Winds scream across the atmosphere at around 5,400 miles per hour.

07:33Fast enough to shred anything instantly.

07:37The blue color comes from tiny particles of silicate, the stuff glass is made of, floating

07:42in the air.

07:43The planet's surface temperature hits about 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt

07:49rock.

07:50That heat turns those silicates into microscopic shards of glass that whip around the planet

07:55like a worldwide sandblaster.

07:58Standing there wouldn't hurt.

07:59You wouldn't exist long enough to ever feel it.

08:02And then, there's the darkest planet ever found.

08:06It reflects less than 1% of the light that hits it.

08:09It's darker than coal.

08:10Darker than black paint.

08:12Light just disappears into it.

08:14Not all planets even bother with stars at all.

08:17Astronomers have found rogue planets.

08:19Worlds kicked out of their solar systems.

08:22These lonely planets drift through space in total darkness.

08:25Frozen and untethered.

08:27With no sunrise ever again.

08:29Now, all of this shows us that our universe isn't designed for life.

08:34Life survives despite the universe, not because of it.

08:37Earth isn't typical.

08:39It's lucky.

08:40We're only at the beginning of this discovery era.

08:43Every year, new telescopes sharpen the picture.

08:46And every year, the picture gets stranger.

08:48The more clearly we see the universe, the less it resembles our imagination.

08:53And that's the most unsettling truth of all.

08:57That's it for today.

08:58So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends.

09:03Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the bright side.

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