James Webb Found a Galaxy Glowing With Signs of Life

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:01]Weird, unusual sounds out of nowhere are spreading all over our galaxy, constantly repeating, and it's something we've never heard before.

[00:00:11]Scientists discovered it in 2020, >> [music] >> and it was nothing like any of the other energy signatures they ever studied.

[00:00:20]Powerful and bright radio signals occurring from time to time, [music] mysteriously disappearing within a day.

[00:00:27]It doesn't fit the profile of any space body we know.

[00:00:31]The signal is a bit irritating, and it disappears without a schedule.

[00:00:36]When scientists tried to match the signal with some other telescopes, it was gone.

[00:00:42]Low-mass stars sometimes flare up with radio energy, but not here, since they mostly have X-ray counterparts.

[00:00:50]Very dense collapsed stars, like pulsars and magnetars, are also not a choice.

[00:00:56]The closest solution they got is a mysterious class of objects we know as the Galactic Center Radio Source, GCRT.

[00:01:04]It's a radio source that brightens and rapidly glows. It decays near the center of our galaxy and could help us unravel the mysteries of the universe.

[00:01:16]If you had a flying car that could go up at a speed of 60 mph, you'd only need 1 hour to get into space. The moon is a little bit farther, 250,000 miles, which is about 10 times the circumference of our planet.

[00:01:30]That means [music] a moon trip would be like taking a tour around the globe and doing it 10 times straight, which would take less than 6 months.

[00:01:39]A trip to Pluto would take over 800 years.

[00:01:43]Proxima b is the closest Earth-like neighbor we have. It's a small rocky world that orbits the closest stellar neighbor of our sun.

[00:01:52]It orbits the star's habitable zone, an area that's far enough from any star to moderate conditions. Not too cold and not too hot for liquid water to at least hypothetically exist.

[00:02:06]If you tried to travel to Proxima b at a speed of 25,000 mph, which is the speed of the Apollo moon rockets, it would take you over 112,000 years to get there.

[00:02:18]You might not be able to breathe there.

[00:02:21]No one knows if Proxima [music] b has an atmosphere.

[00:02:25]Humans explore the universe all the time, but we can only see around 5% [music] of the matter up there. And Albert Einstein was the first one that realized the empty space is not really nothing.

[00:02:37]The rest we can't see is actually made up of invisible matter, also known as dark matter. It's about [music] 27% combined with something called dark energy, which is 68%.

[00:02:52]If you try to pour [music] water into space, of course, outside of a spacecraft, it would immediately boil away or vaporize.

[00:02:59]That's because there's no air or air pressure in space. As air pressure lowers, the temperature you'd usually need to boil water at also gets lower.

[00:03:08]Keeping that in mind, water boils way faster on a mountain top than, [music] for example, at sea level. There's no air pressure in space, so water could boil at a very low temperature.

[00:03:21]Scientists believe that there are at least a couple of [music] billion galaxies out there. We don't know the real number and probably never will, but they tried to calculate it by counting how many galaxies we can see in a pretty small and restricted area of the sky.

[00:03:37]It may seem as if the universe was [music] filled with stars and a couple of planets here and there, but our home galaxy has at least 100 [music] billion planets.

[00:03:46]If you fill a balloon with helium and release it, you'll notice it floats very high. It'll go up into the atmosphere, but it won't go into outer space. The higher you go, the thinner the air in our atmosphere gets. Your balloon will rise up until the point where the atmosphere surrounding it has the same weight as the helium inside it.

[00:04:06]That will happen at approximately a height of 20 miles above the surface.

[00:04:11]So, this is as far as a helium balloon can rise.

[00:04:15]We don't really know how big the universe is.

[00:04:18]We can't see its edges, nor do we know if it even has an edge.

[00:04:22]We use technology to see out to a distance of around 14 billion light-years from our planet.

[00:04:28]This means we can see around 28 billion light-years in diameter across, starting with the outermost layer of our atmosphere that [music] ends at around 600 miles above our planet's surface.

[00:04:39]Although, the size of the universe is constantly changing and gets bigger through time.

[00:04:46]Mercury is [music] closest to the sun, so most people think it's the hottest planet, too.

[00:04:51]Still, Venus is the hottest [music] planet.

[00:04:55]It's the second planet away from our central star, around 30 million miles farther from the sun compared to Mercury.

[00:05:03]Mercury doesn't have an atmosphere, which is like some sort of a warming blanket that helps maintain the heat coming from the sun.

[00:05:10]Venus has an unexpectedly thick atmosphere, around 100 times thicker than the one we have.

[00:05:17]Its atmosphere doesn't let the heat out.

[00:05:19]It just keeps it and constantly makes Venus hotter and hotter.

[00:05:23]Also, it mostly consists of carbon dioxide that freely lets solar energy in, but it's less transparent to lose long wavelength radiations that the warm heated surface emits. The average temperature there is around 875° Fahrenheit, which is hot enough to melt tin.

[00:05:42]The maximum temperature on its neighbor, Mercury, is 800° Fahrenheit.

[00:05:48]In maybe two or more billion years, >> [music] >> it will be way too hot for life to exist on our precious planet.

[00:05:56]As the hundreds of millions of years go by, our sun will keep getting hotter and brighter. Eventually, temperatures will be so high our beautiful oceans will be wiped away. Since they produce 70% of the oxygen we need to survive, there'll be no life without them. All of this means that our planet will simply become a vast desert, something like Mars is today.

[00:06:21]Pluto, a very distant used-to-be planet, now dwarf [music] planet, is actually smaller in diameter than the entire US.

[00:06:29]The biggest distance [music] there, from Maine to northern California, is approximately 2,900 miles, while Pluto is only [music] 1,473 miles across.

[00:06:39]Pluto is very far, but the edge of our solar system is 1,000 [music] times farther away than this dwarf planet. But, astronomers found many space objects orbiting our sun way farther than Pluto, such as Kuiper Belt objects and trans-Neptunian objects. [music] There's also an Oort Cloud comet cloud that goes half a light-year from Pluto, also 1,000 [music] times farther.

[00:07:03]A neutron star is really heavy. Just a teaspoon [music] filled with it would weigh 6 billion tons. Neutron stars are something that remain from huge stars that have run out of fuel. The fading star explodes, and its [music] core falls apart. But, due to gravity, it forms an extremely dense neutron star. These stars typically have a mass of up to three suns, but the radius there is around 6 miles, because this is [music] one of the densest things in our universe, at least that we know about.

[00:07:34]The universe has a color, and it averages to be some kind of beige, or as they call it, cosmic latte. It also has its own smell that reminds you of seared steak or hot metal. At least that's something astronauts floating in space have said.

[00:07:51]If you want to build a space suit, get ready to work really hard. It takes [music] 5,000 hours to make it and will cost you a million dollars. A really good one will have 11 layers of material and weighs about 110 lb. And it needs to be comfortable. You'll need more space in there because you grow up to 2 in when in space.

[00:08:13]When you're floating around in space, [music] Earth's gravity doesn't have any impact on you. That's why the vertebrae [music] in your spine might expand and relax a little bit, which means you'll be maybe 3% taller.

[00:08:25]>> [music] >> For 6 ft, it's about 2 extra inches. Oh, don't worry, it's not permanent.

[00:08:31]As soon as you go [music] down to Earth, you'll shrink back down to your normal size within a couple of months.

[00:08:38]Space isn't the best option if you want to have a conversation with your friend because up there, sound doesn't travel at all. Molecules there [music] are so far apart that sound vibrations can't reach them, which automatically means they can't vibrate, so we can't hear them.

[00:08:56]Movies are not accurate with this. No one could hear [music] you screaming in space, too.

[00:09:02]We kind of live inside our sun. The sun is not just that big hot ball of light located 93 million miles away from us.

[00:09:10]Its outer atmosphere is way bigger. It extends far beyond the surface we can see. Our planet's [music] orbit goes through its tenuous atmosphere. The evidence is when gusts of the solar wind generate the southern [music] and northern lights.

[00:09:25]That means in some way, we live inside the sun. [music] Not just us, other planets, too, including distant Neptune.

[00:09:34]The heliosphere, which is what we call the outer solar atmosphere, extends to about 10 billion miles.

[00:09:44]Now, you've seen those breathtaking images from NASA. Stars born in [music] clouds of gas, tangled galaxies, colors that look fantastic and vivid.

[00:09:53]And then, someone suddenly says that this isn't real, that NASA edits all these [music] pictures. Well, guess what? They're right. NASA does edit their photos, every single one. The catch is [music] that it's not to deceive us, but rather to reveal what we could never see on our own.

[00:10:11]You see, color is a weird thing. [music] It's just waves of light and energy flying through space.

[00:10:18]When these waves hit some object, a banana, a chair, or even a dust particle, >> [music] >> the objects absorb some of the waves, eating a part of the spectrum. But some of it bounces back [music] into our eyes. That bounced light is what we perceive as the object's color.

[00:10:35]There's an entire spectrum of these [music] waves, from short ones to long ones. As they get longer, they move to the red spectrum and turn into infrared, >> [music] >> microwaves, and radio waves.

[00:10:47]As they get shorter, they move closer to blue and violet, turning into ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays.

[00:10:54]Now, right in the middle of that spectrum >> [music] >> is a tiny band we call visible light, which is the only part our eyes can see.

[00:11:02]That's the rainbow we all know and love, and it's [music] an exceedingly small part. So, you might say we barely see the world at all.

[00:11:12]When light bounces off something and gets into our eyes, our color-detecting cells, [music] called cones, send them to our brain.

[00:11:20]So, when we say banana is yellow, it means banana ate red, green, and blue waves >> [music] >> and reflected yellow waves into our eyes.

[00:11:29]So, the question is, >> [music] >> is space actually that pretty and colorful or is it all fake? Well, yes and no.

[00:11:37]Stars [music] emit light and it travels through space like an unstoppable train.

[00:11:42]It's flying there, chilling until it hits something. Dust particles, a planet, spaceship or an astronaut.

[00:11:50]Every time light hits something, some of it gets absorbed, some of it reflects and continues to travel. So, we get less and less light every time it hits something and when you enter a nebula, which is basically tons of dust particles around a gas cloud, light quickly starts to scatter and disappear.

[00:12:10]Nebulae, which is the [music] plural of nebula, also grow naturally from ionized gases like hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur radiating light in specific spectral lines, but it's super faint as well.

[00:12:24]Remember, our eyes see things only when light bounces off those things in our eyes.

[00:12:30]On top of that, the color detecting cones in our eyes, eh, aren't so great in that they need lots of light to activate. We can't see faint stuff unless there's something emitting light right there nearby, we wouldn't see anything.

[00:12:44]In other words, for us, the entire space would be like a room with lights turned off.

[00:12:50]The potentially beautiful nebulas and planets are there, but if you don't have a lamp nearby, you can't see them in all their glory.

[00:12:58]When there's lots of light around, rods take over. Another type of cell that's great for motion and dark vision, but terrible for color.

[00:13:07]So, in deep space, all we'd see are dim whites and grays.

[00:13:11]Now, if you were flying around on a spaceship, the stars would look sharp, white and non-twinkling.

[00:13:17]>> [music] >> You'd be able to see some reddish or bluish tints to the brighter ones like Betelgeuse or Rigel.

[00:13:24]But, a lot of things would be dim gray smudges at best.

[00:13:27]The Milky Way might appear as a cloudy band, not rainbowy like in astrophotography.

[00:13:34]Nebulae would look like faint, fuzzy clouds with no color, unless it's something that glows very brightly, like the Orion Nebula.

[00:13:43]In our solar [music] system, astronauts can see stuff thanks to the sun or when they're near illuminated planets or spacecraft. Planets like Jupiter and Mars retain some color for our eyes.

[00:13:54]Meanwhile, on Earth, the sky would look black during the day if we had no atmosphere.

[00:13:59]The sun would be a bright disc in a void [music] as seen from the moon.

[00:14:03]If only we had super sensitive cone cells that could detect light better than we do and see even faint things.

[00:14:10]Oh, wait, we actually do have technology for that. Long exposure cameras and telescopes. [music] Now, telescopes are great for that. They often use long exposures to gather light over minutes or entire hours. That lets them capture photons we'd [music] never collect with our eyes.

[00:14:27]When telescopes like Hubble or the James Webb take photos, they're not snapping pretty pics like those on Instagram.

[00:14:35]They're collecting all this raw, invisible data, numbers and faint light that's both within and beyond human vision.

[00:14:42]The James Webb Space Telescope [music] doesn't even see visible light. It's built to detect infrared or heat.

[00:14:49]Telescopes like that work like time [music] machines. They show not only distant galaxies, but also what those galaxies look [music] like billions of years ago.

[00:14:58]We see stars that have long since gone out and galaxies that [music] may have already disappeared.

[00:15:05]All because the James Webb can pierce through gas and dust and see galaxies so old that their light [music] has been stretched into infrared wavelengths as the universe expands. In other words, this telescope isn't made to let us take aesthetic [music] photos. Its main goal is to study the history of the universe.

[00:15:24]Now, at first, this stuff looks like grayscale or even black images. When the James Webb sends [music] data back, it looks empty. But, during post-processing, astronomers map wavelengths they received to visible colors. Every color in those pictures is chosen for a reason. It highlights specific wavelengths, [music] gases, or temperatures. In any case, it shows what would otherwise be completely hidden [music] from our eyes.

[00:15:51]Sometimes they show only stuff a human eye can see. Sometimes they shift [music] colors or add something to show elements or intensities.

[00:16:00]For example, [music] let's say you're studying a supernova, a star blowing itself to pieces. You need to see its debris clearly to understand what's going on. That means [music] you'd play with the contrast or adjust color balance to reveal specific gases and find pale objects near bright ones.

[00:16:17]Want to check out a weird rock on Mars?

[00:16:20]You zoom in, adjust [music] the lighting, boost the shadows.

[00:16:23]Photographers do this every day. So, scientists do it, too, because clarity means understanding.

[00:16:31]Even old photos from the Apollo missions have been touched [music] up in modern times. It's like restoring an old film so it looks crystal [music] clear instead of foggy.

[00:16:41]Without this editing, the most incredible discoveries of the past 2 years, those first galaxies, those newborn stars inside cosmic clouds, would just look [music] static.

[00:16:52]Is it possible to accidentally misinterpret color? Of course.

[00:16:57]For example, images we get of Mars are mostly red, but when we land on the planet, it's more colorful.

[00:17:04]Most of it is gold, yellowish, tan, or brown.

[00:17:08]The reason Mars looks reddish is due to rusting [music] iron in the rocks, Martian soil, and dust.

[00:17:14]It all depends on the lighting, atmospheric dust, and image processing methods.

[00:17:21]But, the fantastic colors themselves are not made up. Galaxies contain [music] billions of stars, gas, and dust, giving off incredibly rich color ranges.

[00:17:31]NASA's photos are basically translations.

[00:17:36]Now, here's an interesting take. Could we use goggles with night vision or some technology that makes our eyes notice light better? Like working with Hubble or the James Webb? Man, the sky would be insane. You'd never be able to sleep again.

[00:17:50]These magical astronomy glasses should greatly amplify faint light, enhancing and translating colors. Unfortunately, today's night vision tech won't cut it.

[00:18:00]Night vision goggles work by amplifying visible and near infrared light, but they display everything in green monochrome, not true color.

[00:18:09]Meanwhile, infrared goggles detect heat, not color.

[00:18:12]We need some goggles that raise photon sensitivities by 10,000 or so.

[00:18:18]If only we were lucky enough, like some animals. For example, snakes can see infrared, bees see ultraviolet light, and birds see more colors than we do.

[00:18:31]And we can't even imagine how they perceive the world.

[00:18:34]So, yeah, NASA edits their photos >> [music] >> because raw space isn't built for our eyes. It's dark, cold, distant, and silent. But, with a little translation, some math, some color grading, some visual storytelling, we can see the invisible.

[00:18:52]We can study the past and inspire more people to study [music] space in the future.

[00:18:59]It's been more than a year since the James Webb telescope, which had taken over 20 years to complete, was launched.

[00:19:06]And for such a relatively short time, the ultra-modern and most powerful in history piece of equipment has already made plenty of discoveries.

[00:19:15]By observing the universe at infrared wavelength, James Webb lets us see things no other telescope has ever shown before.

[00:19:23]The primary goal of this incredible piece of equipment is to study the formation of galaxies and stars that appeared in the early universe.

[00:19:33]For example, look at the closest to a stellar nursery, a region of space where new stars get born.

[00:19:39]NASA has shared an image from James Webb that shows a small star-forming region.

[00:19:44]If you look at the picture attentively, you'll see jets [music] bursting from infant stars. Around them, different colored clouds of cosmic dust are colliding with one another.

[00:19:54]The view is mesmerizing.

[00:19:56]>> [music] >> The red dust consists of molecular hydrogen.

[00:19:59]You can also notice that some stars have something like shadows. Those hint at the creation of what will later become planets.

[00:20:06]At first sight, the image may seem chaotic, but astronomers claim that it's a relatively small and quiet stellar nursery in comparison to some others.

[00:20:16]Many young stars there are similar in size to our sun or a bit smaller.

[00:20:20]The photo itself was taken with the help of Webb's Near-Infrared Camera, NIRCam.

[00:20:25]It's the observatory's primary camera that snaps images of the cosmos in two different infrared ranges.

[00:20:34]Another amazing discovery the Webb telescope has made is smoke molecules in a distant galaxy.

[00:20:40]It's the first time such molecules have been discovered so far away from our planet.

[00:20:45]The galaxy in question lies 12.3 billion light-years away from Earth. It most likely formed about 1 and 1/2 billion years after the Big Bang.

[00:20:54]Despite such a huge distance between the galaxy and our planet, scientists have managed to detect chemical compounds found in soot or smoke, and it's quite a big deal since it has pushed the record for detecting similar complex molecules back by around a billion years.

[00:21:09]This study has also confirmed the sheer power of the coolest piece of space equipment of all time. It managed to make this discovery despite the fact that the spectrometer needed for the measurements didn't perform to the fullest after having experienced a sudden and surprising degradation.

[00:21:29]The James Webb telescope has also helped to boost our understanding of exoplanets. Those are planets orbiting stars other than our own sun.

[00:21:37]At the beginning of 2023, the observatory spotted its first exoplanet, LHS 475b.

[00:21:44]It's located 41 light-years away from Earth and is approximately the same size as our planet.

[00:21:49]According to NASA, nowadays, James Webb is the only operating telescope capable of categorizing the atmosphere of Earth-sized exoplanets.

[00:21:58]The research team behind the discovery believes such results underline the precision of the telescope.

[00:22:04]They hope that it will help us locate many more rocky exoplanets that we might be able to colonize in the future.

[00:22:11]Even though at first sight it may seem that the universe is pretty empty, it's actually a very busy place, and Webb has all the necessary instruments to see all kinds of cosmic events happening out there. Just look at this image of WR 124. It's a star on the cusp of its explosive demise.

[00:22:31]In the image, the star is about to go supernova.

[00:22:35]It happens when a star runs out of its fuel and explodes at the end of its life cycle, releasing a giant cloud of space dust and hot gas into space.

[00:22:43]The star captured by the Webb telescope was at the Wolf-Rayet stage of its life.

[00:22:48]>> [music] >> That's a period when a star is shedding its outer layers before going supernova.

[00:22:53]The next amazing thing discovered by James Webb is a star-planet hybrid with very strange clouds.

[00:22:59]This bizarre world, VHS 1256b, is actually a brown dwarf. Those are bigger than planets, but too small to classify as stars. They emit some light of their own and are quite hot, but their mass is simply not enough to fuse hydrogen into helium like full-fledged stars do.

[00:23:16]Space bodies of this kind aren't actually brown. They occur in a wide variety of colors, but those are mostly invisible to the human eye.

[00:23:24]What we can see is the light they emit, and to us it appears to be dark orange or magenta.

[00:23:33]The brown dwarf discovered by the Webb telescope is almost 20 times the size of Jupiter. It orbits two red dwarf stars, and to complete one orbit, it needs over 10,000 years. Astronomers first found out about this unusual exoplanet in 2016, but at that time, they didn't classify it as a brown dwarf, and thus couldn't explain its puzzling reddish glow.

[00:23:57]Now, thanks to the James Webb telescope, they know the space object's origin.

[00:24:03]Anyway, back to those clouds.

[00:24:05]As you know, clouds on Earth are made of water vapor, but those on the brown dwarf are different. [music] They seem to be made of sand. It looks like good old sand from Earth, but it's actually not. The clouds are made of tiny particles of silicate.

[00:24:20]Another recent discovery involves several large galaxies that scientists believe were born not long after the Big Bang. They aren't supposed to be there, and no one expected to find them, but the James [music] Webb space telescope has spotted them.

[00:24:35]These galaxies, as massive as our home Milky Way, are full of mature red stars.

[00:24:42]Astronomers have analyzed the light coming from them and estimated their age 5 to 700 million years after the Big Bang.

[00:24:49]It means that they came into being when our universe was very young, almost a baby.

[00:24:56]But the most bizarre about these galaxies is their tremendous size and the age of the stars dwelling there. The data received by the telescope don't coincide with the existing ideas about what the universe looked like and how it evolved in its early years. It also doesn't match the earlier observations made by Hubble.

[00:25:18]And here, James Webb has captured a distant region of space in unprecedented detail.

[00:25:23]This section of space [music] is known as Pandora's Cluster. In the image, you can see three massive clusters of galaxies coming together and forming a mega cluster. The combined mass of these clusters acts as a powerful gravitational lens.

[00:25:38]And thanks to this natural magnification effect, scientists can see other galaxies in the region.

[00:25:44]Astronomers claim that the most recent image of Pandora's Cluster is stronger and deeper than they have ever seen.

[00:25:52]James Webb has also managed to spot thousands of young stars never seen before in the Tarantula Nebula.

[00:25:58]This space formation got its nickname because of the appearance of dusty filaments spotted in previous images.

[00:26:06]It's the biggest star-forming region in the local group, which includes the galaxies nearest to the Milky Way.

[00:26:12]The Webb Telescope's images have helped to shed light on the composition of the Tarantula Nebula.

[00:26:17]The telescope has also detected protostars, infant stars in the process of gaining mass.

[00:26:23]Astronomers expect that these protostars will eventually form and shape the nebula further.

[00:26:28]Among other discoveries made by the James Webb Telescope, you can see the birth of 50 distant stars. Some of them power protoplanetary disks, which might later form solar systems light-years away from our own.

[00:26:40]Here's one more image from James Webb.

[00:26:42]You can see a supermassive black hole that has a mass of 9 billion suns. It's so ginormous and ancient that scientists are struggling to explain its existence.

[00:26:54]Astronomers have also discovered a distant ring of dust, rock, and gas that contains a chemical called methylcation.

[00:27:01]It's known as a molecular building block of life, and it makes most of the organic material on our planet.

[00:27:07]James Webb helped researchers see powerful sandstorms on a planet 235 trillion miles away.

[00:27:13]Astronomers were happy to discover this treasure chest of countless tiny sand particles.

[00:27:22]Now, look at this.

[00:27:24]Do you recognize this image? Those are the so-called Pillars of Creation.

[00:27:28]But, this new view shows us just how star-speckled that dusty [music] region actually is.

[00:27:33]You can compare the new photo with the one taken by Hubble in 2014. This is astonishing proof of scientific progress.

[00:27:44]A new super-Earth has been spotted by astronomers, and it's quite intriguing.

[00:27:50]This planet, called TOI 715b, is about 1 and 1/2 the size of Earth, which is why it's called the super-Earth. It's also relatively close to us in space [music] terms, only 137 light-years away. For comparison, most [music] exoplanets are hundreds of light-years away, and all the interesting stuff, like black holes and nebulas, are usually more than thousands of light-years away from us. So, could it be habitable?

[00:28:19]The habitable zone is an estimate of where a planet might have the right conditions for liquid water.

[00:28:25]This is what we call some distance from the star where the temperatures on the planet should be okay-ish, and water should stay liquid on its surface.

[00:28:34]It's not super precise, because it depends on a bunch of factors, like the type of star, how reflective the planet is, its size, and so on.

[00:28:43]Also, just being in the zone isn't enough for water to actually be there.

[00:28:48]The planet also needs the right kind of atmosphere and a few other things. So, we invented a stricter definition in 2014, the conservative habitable zone.

[00:28:59]It's a more precise term defining the best candidates that have liquid water.

[00:29:03]Otherwise, we get too many potentially habitable planets that are not actually habitable at all.

[00:29:10]The CHZ is based on how much energy a planet gets from its star compared to Earth. If a rocky planet gets between 40 to 85% it's considered to be in the CHZ no matter how far away it is from its star. These planets have a higher chance of being habitable. And yes, TOI 715b is located there.

[00:29:36]This super-Earth orbits the M-type star, also called red dwarf. It's a star that's much smaller and cooler than our sun, about a quarter of the sun's size and mass. But, if the planet is located in the habitable zone, it's actually a better option for life. Red dwarfs live much longer than our sun, a yellow dwarf. This also means that they have more time to form little creatures on their planet. And this red [music] dwarf really is older than our star. Our sun is 4.6 billion years old and this star is 6.6 billion years old, >> [music] >> give or take a few hundred million.

[00:30:12]It doesn't have much magnetic activity, so it's not [music] dangerous. It doesn't flare up like younger red dwarfs. These flares can be super strong and might even hurt planets by taking away their atmospheres. Although some planets around it do have thinner atmospheres, it seems like this red dwarf has already gone all out. These red dwarfs are where we're looking for planets that could support life right now.

[00:30:38]Our super-Earth is really close to its star, zooming around it in just 19 days.

[00:30:44]Since the star is small and the planet is so close, the planet passing in front of its star happens a lot and looks really clear. This makes it easier for telescopes like the James Webb to study its atmosphere without needing too much time.

[00:30:59]Now, speaking of the James Webb Space Telescope, it's bringing us into a new era of understanding distant planets beyond our solar system. Imagine being able to see what gases make up the air on a planet millions of light-years away. James Webb will help us to find worlds that could support life.

[00:31:18]Right now, it's trying to figure out whether TOI 715b has an atmosphere. If it does, its atmosphere might be easier to spot compared to a planet that's drier and denser. And then, we might get even more hype because it would look like a good place for life.

[00:31:35]On top of all that, there might be another planet in this system also in the habitable [music] zone. We're not sure whether it's really there. It's just a candidate with a crazy name. But, if it turns out to be real, >> [music] >> it would be about the size of Earth.

[00:31:50]Also, it would be the smallest planet in the habitable zone ever spotted by the TESS telescope.

[00:31:58]Now, another cool thing about TOI 715b is that it can not just have water on it, but be an entire water world. An ocean planet is a type of planet that has an ocean covering its surface or has subsurface oceans. They might not have much dry land because the water can cover everything. Sometimes, the entire planet can be covered in other liquids like lava or ammonia.

[00:32:23]When it comes to planets outside our solar system, we can't see surface water directly with our current technology.

[00:32:30]Instead, scientists look for water vapor in the atmosphere as a hint there might be liquid water below. And of course, we wonder if these planets can have life.

[00:32:40]Hopefully, not in the form of Leviathan-like monsters.

[00:32:44]Our models show that planets with oceans might be pretty common in our galaxy.

[00:32:49]This means there could be lots of ocean worlds out there waiting to be discovered.

[00:32:56]But the most important part about TOI 715b is that it's in the so-called small planet radius gap.

[00:33:05]If we give the planets a lineup, there will be those that are bigger and smaller than Earth. But there's a sudden gap in planets that are about from 1 and 1/2 to 2 times bigger than ours. Where are they?

[00:33:17]This gap is interesting to scientists because it tells us something about how planets form and change over time. It's not that planets don't form in this size range. They actually start off larger and then lose some of their mass like a balloon gradually deflating.

[00:33:33]Perhaps it happens because of how they orbit their stars, with stars blowing away some of their mass as they dance around it, as our sun does with gas from comet tails.

[00:33:44]This gap holds a lot of mystery, and planets like our new super-Earth are clues that can help us unravel it. We aren't sure [music] whether it exists around red dwarfs. Maybe it's a gap in how dense these planets are rather than in their actual size. So, studying our discovered planet is even more interesting. It'll help us learn more about distant stars and their planets.

[00:34:07]Now, I mentioned TESS a while back.

[00:34:10]NASA's TESS, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, has been in space for 6 years now and has been incredibly successful.

[00:34:18]NASA launched TESS because we already found over 5,000 planets orbiting other stars, mainly thanks to the Kepler telescope. But Kepler mostly found large planets, not necessarily like Earth. We decided to focus TESS on finding smaller Earth-like planets around nearby bright stars, making them easier to study with future telescopes.

[00:34:43]Here's how it works. The camera observes stars and looks for changes in their brightness. If the brightness suddenly drops for a while and then gets back, it could mean there is a planet passing in front of it. But stars can dim for other reasons, too. For example, flaring up or having dark spots on their surface, which is why we need to be careful with this data.

[00:35:05]TESS shows us the size and orbit of these [music] planets. Then ground telescopes help determine their mass.

[00:35:12]With these three parameters, we can figure out what the planets are made of and if they're rocky like Earth or gassy like Jupiter. Yeah, you want to avoid Jupiter after taco night.

[00:35:26]One example of TESS's discoveries was the TOI 700 system. There, it discovered its first-ever Earth-like planet, TOI 700d.

[00:35:36]This exoplanet also orbited a red dwarf >> [music] >> and it's even closer to us, about 100 light-years away. Unfortunately, it's unlikely to be habitable because the temperatures there are crazy.

[00:35:49]Another big discovery was made in the AU Microscopii system. TESS discovered a planet about four times the size of Earth and another nearly three times Earth's size. This system has become a key area for studying how stars and planets form and change over time.

[00:36:05]TESS has also spotted a variety of other exciting finds, including supernova, hot worlds, and so on. And as it enters its sixth year, we can only expect more exciting findings to come.

[00:36:21]So get this. Earth might be actually located near space highways that could connect us to other worlds. That's because our sun sits right in the center of a giant bubble filled with hot gas, carved out by ancient supernovae. And this bubble [music] likely has tunnels linking us to distant galaxies. So, does it mean it's time to develop space tourism? Well, let's figure it out.

[00:36:47]Most of us think space is just planets [music] floating around in eternal darkness.

[00:36:52]But new research hints at the possibility that it might not be really true. It turns out our whole solar system is actually sitting inside a giant bubble of hot thin gas. And it [music] gets even better. Scientists now think there might even be a weird cosmic tunnel or channel [music] made of the stuff. It supposedly stretches out toward far-away stars.

[00:37:17]Astronomers spent years mapping [music] the sky. And after they put all the data together, they found something that looks like a long pathway of hot, low-density plasma, which is basically that very thin super hot gas.

[00:37:32]And this so-called channel reaches out from around us to distant constellations. [music] Researchers from Germany confirmed this discovery using data from a space telescope called eROSITA. We'll talk about it a tiny bit later.

[00:37:47]Now, interestingly, scientists discovered [music] that our solar system sits inside something called the Local Hot Bubble a long time ago. This bubble is actually a huge area, about a thousand light-years wide. It was created when several stars exploded in giant supernovae millions of years ago.

[00:38:08]Those explosions heated up the gas around them, and basically carved out this bubble of hot low-density space.

[00:38:16]And their shockwaves created weak points in the bubble around us, eventually forming interstellar tunnels. That cosmic event was so huge that the leftover hot plasma is still floating around us today.

[00:38:31]Now, to understand this bubble better, [music] scientists used eROSITA, which is an X-ray telescope. It scans the sky looking for soft X-ray light.

[00:38:41]>> [music] >> That's a kind of light we can't see with our eyes. It comes from hot gas, old supernova leftovers, and other structures in space.

[00:38:50]They also compared eROSITA's new information with older data from another [music] X-ray telescope called ROSAT.

[00:38:57]And finally, putting all this information together, they were able to make a much clearer map of what's around our solar system. Mind you, this wasn't easy. They had to divide the sky into thousands of tiny pieces [music] and carefully measure faint signals coming from warm gas, empty pockets of dust, and other stuff floating in space.

[00:39:19]But, their effort paid off. After sorting through [music] everything, they managed to figure out the faint glow of hot plasma around us.

[00:39:28]It proved we were not just [music] drifting through empty space. We're inside a giant burned-out bubble created by extinguished [music] stars. But, what really surprised scientists was the discovery of some kind of channel. It looked like a long tunnel in space, [music] cutting through the hot gas around us, and connecting our part of the galaxy to star systems far away.

[00:39:53]They also found signs of another channel pointing toward the [music] Canis Major constellation. And those might not be the only ones.

[00:40:01]The data suggests [music] there could be a whole network of such paths branching out through space. Each one works like a hidden back road.

[00:40:11]Scientists [music] used to guess that the space around our solar system might have little pockets or rooms [music] carved out by old exploding stars.

[00:40:20]We could probably imagine them like caves inside outer space.

[00:40:24]But no one had the necessary tools to actually prove it. But now, thanks to that new data from the eROSITA telescope, they finally have a clear picture.

[00:40:35]The telescope showed that the space around us wasn't just empty. It's full of hot thin gas and strange shapes, including tunnels and bubbles. This proves at least part of what older scientists predicted. We're living inside a giant bubble of hot gas, and that bubble connects to other bubbles through long low-density channels.

[00:40:57]The new study also shows that the pressure inside our bubble is lower than scientists [music] expected. This might mean the bubble isn't closed. It could be open in some directions, letting that hot gas flow out into other parts of space.

[00:41:13]In short, this hot bubble isn't simple at all. Parts of it might be open pathways, and other parts look blocked off.

[00:41:22]Being inside it is kind of like trying to walk through a forest. Some areas have clear trails, and others are packed with trees.

[00:41:30]>> [music] >> And even though astronomers have mapped big chunks of the bubble and found these strange channels, there's still a lot they don't fully get.

[00:41:39]Some paths look like they're made of a bunch of connected empty pockets, and others look totally closed.

[00:41:46]To understand the whole picture, we'll need [music] better tools and more data.

[00:41:51]Hopefully, with stronger X-ray telescopes, deeper sky scans, and better computer models, we'll finally understand the nature and structure of the bubble we're living in.

[00:42:02]We might be able to make a kind of map of those hidden channels, and learn how they affect things like cosmic [music] rays, dust, and the solar wind around us.

[00:42:12]Now, speaking of telescopes, we can't help but mention the one that helped us figure out the very existence of the bubble around us.

[00:42:19]The thing is, scientists have been trying to understand a faint glow of low-energy X-rays that seem to cover the whole sky.

[00:42:27]For many years, they [music] weren't sure where this glow was coming from.

[00:42:31]And then, the NASA-supported DXL mission finally helped to solve the mystery.

[00:42:37]Researchers [music] used old but reliable detectors that first flew on a rocket in the 1970s.

[00:42:44]With these instruments, they confirmed that most of this X-ray glow came from a huge area of extremely hot gas around us.

[00:42:52]It was named the Local Hot Bubble.

[00:42:56]Back in the 1990s, another X-ray mission called [music] ROSAT made pretty good maps of the sky. And it found something surprising. Comets gave off soft X-rays, [music] too.

[00:43:08]Later, scientists realized this happened when the solar wind, fast particles [music] from the sun, collided with neutral atoms. This process, called charge exchange, can happen almost anywhere [music] in space.

[00:43:21]Because of this, some scientists started to doubt whether the Local Hot Bubble was really the main source of the X-ray glow.

[00:43:29]So, to test [music] this, DXL launched on December 12th, 2012, from New Mexico.

[00:43:35]The rocket flew high above Earth's [music] atmosphere for about 5 minutes, giving the instruments a clear view of space. The goal was to look at a worst-case situation [music] where lots of charge exchange might occur.

[00:43:49]Right now, our solar system is [music] moving through a cloud of cold gas in space, known as the Local Interstellar Cloud. That's also nicknamed the Local Fluff. Cute, right?

[00:44:01]Neutral [music] hydrogen and helium atoms from this cloud move through our solar system at very high speeds.

[00:44:08]Hydrogen gets affected [music] easily by different forces, but helium mostly follows the pull of the sun's gravity.

[00:44:15]Because of this, the helium forms a focusing [music] cone, a region with extra helium that Earth passes through every December. This cone [music] is the perfect place to look for charge exchange, since it holds more neutral atoms than usual.

[00:44:30]But, what happens during charge exchange? The solar wind comes from the sun's [music] corona, the star's superheated outer layer. The particles in the solar wind have lost many of their electrons. [music] When one of these particles hits a neutral atom, it can steal one of the atom's electrons. The stolen electron briefly gives off a soft x-ray. This is how the glow is created.

[00:44:55]Now, to compare things, the researchers also looked at old ROSAT data from 1990, taken in a direction away from the helium cone, where charge exchange should be weak. By putting everything together, the scientists found that only about 40% of the soft x-rays come from inside our solar system. The rest, the majority, comes from the local hot bubble. This means the huge cloud of hot gas around us really is the main source of the x-ray glow.

[00:45:26]But, let's get back [music] to the discovery of the space intergalactic tunnel. It's a valuable lesson for us that space might look calm and empty when we look up, but that's not true.

[00:45:38]Space around us actually contains dust, plasma, radiation, magnetic fields, and mysterious [music] tunnels.

[00:45:47]All of these things mix and swirl together, making space [music] much more complicated than a simple vacuum.

[00:45:55]Right now, four tiny Earth-like planets are chilling around one one the closest star systems to us.

[00:46:02]We're talking second closest.

[00:46:05]These little rocky worlds are each about 20 to 30% the mass of Earth. So, not quite Earth 2.0, but still pretty solid.

[00:46:14]Will one of them become our new home one day?

[00:46:17]Well, all of them are pretty close. So, future humans might actually visit them someday. Not like next year or anything, but >> [music] >> we could potentially send missions there.

[00:46:28]Don't expect any extraterrestrial neighbors, though.

[00:46:32]Those planets probably aren't home to life, or at least not anything we'd recognize.

[00:46:38]Let's take a look at them.

[00:46:40]The planets are called Barnard b, c, d, and e. How creative, huh?

[00:46:50]The innermost has a mass of 26% of Earth.

[00:46:55]The second one is a bit bigger with a mass of 30% of Earth.

[00:46:59]The third one has 4% more mass than the previous.

[00:47:02]And the outermost is No, it's not the biggest. Actually, it's [music] just a baby with a mass of 19% of Earth.

[00:47:10]All the planets are likely rocky, like the inner planets of our solar system.

[00:47:15]They orbit their star very closely.

[00:47:17]That's why they only need a few days, under a week, to make a full circle.

[00:47:23]Now, what about that star these little guys are circling? It's called Barnard's [music] Star. Astronomers have always had a hunch there might be at least one planet orbiting it. First off, this star is super close, in cosmic terms, of course.

[00:47:38]Only the Alpha Centauri trio is closer to us.

[00:47:43]Barnard's Star is just under six light-years away, which is basically next door.

[00:47:48]At the same time, it's not like our sun.

[00:47:50]Barnard's Star is a red dwarf, the [music] most common kind of star out there.

[00:47:55]It's got only about 1/6 the mass of the sun.

[00:47:59]But red dwarfs are [music] a gold mine for learning about planets outside our solar system. And studying Barnard's star can help scientists figure [music] out what planets around single stars, like our sun or this red dwarf, are like.

[00:48:13]Or what kind of environments red dwarf planets might have.

[00:48:17]And most importantly, we might finally find the answer to this super important question. Could any of these [music] places actually support life?

[00:48:27]For the longest time, scientists thought there might be a big Jupiter-like gas giant hanging out near Barnard's star.

[00:48:34]All because the star has a little wobble.

[00:48:36]It looks as if it shifts towards and [music] away from Earth over time. So something might be tugging on it.

[00:48:43]Interestingly, it wasn't [music] a giant planet doing the pulling. According to a study from March 2025, it's actually four smaller [music] rocky planets.

[00:48:52]Each about four times the mass of Mercury.

[00:48:56]One day, they ganged [music] up and started tugging on the star together.

[00:49:01]These planets are incredibly close to their star. So close that they can whip around it in just [music] a few days.

[00:49:09]Sadly, because of that, they might be way too hot for anything like life.

[00:49:14]Besides, since these four seem to explain all the star's movement, the researchers think there's probably nothing else orbiting the habitable zone.

[00:49:24]So, there's no Earth 2.0 orbiting around Barnard's star.

[00:49:28]Still, it's an awesome find, especially since this star is basically our cosmic neighbor.

[00:49:34]Plus, [music] the system might not stay off limits forever.

[00:49:38]With nuclear fusion engines or light sails, [music] futuristic propulsion systems that could make the trip way faster, way faster, we might probably go there one day.

[00:49:48]And then, [music] we'll finally figure out if these worlds are really lifeless and maybe even colonize them.

[00:49:56]Now, let's see how scientists found the star's hidden planet.

[00:50:00]Normally, astronomers spot exoplanets when they catch them crossing in front of their stars and blocking some light.

[00:50:07]But Bernard Star is tricky because in our view, it's like we're looking from above the system. So, its planets don't block the light in the usual way.

[00:50:16]That's why they call it the great white whale of planet hunting.

[00:50:20]To get around this, researchers used a super sensitive instrument called Maroon-X attached to the Gemini North telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano.

[00:50:31]Over 112 nights spread out across 3 years, the telescope picked up tiny changes in the star's movement.

[00:50:38]These shifts let scientists figure out how many planets must be tugging [music] on the star, as well as estimate their sizes.

[00:50:46]At first, they found three planets.

[00:50:50]But then they used another device deliciously [music] called Espresso and located at the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

[00:50:58]>> [music] >> And only after a shot of this Espresso did they find a fourth planet.

[00:51:03]By combining the data from both instruments, they were able to more or less confidently say their findings were solid, not just random glitches in the data.

[00:51:13]Even though red dwarfs like Bernard's Star are the most common type of star in the universe, most are way too far for us to see planets around them easily.

[00:51:23]These new findings suggest that small rocky planets could be pretty common around these stars. And that's huge for future discoveries.

[00:51:33]Now, finding new exoplanets is cool and all, but it might be even more exciting to dwell on their birth and evolution.

[00:51:40]And a recent study has made the sweetest discovery ever.

[00:51:43]>> [music] >> Newly born exoplanets might actually look like Smarties, that popular British candy, rather than spheres.

[00:51:51]We've always kind of assumed that baby planets are born ball-shaped, but they might be oblate spheroids instead.

[00:51:57]>> [music] >> A team of scientists from the University of Central Lancashire in England used computer [music] simulations to build a model of the formation of planets in dense gas discs surrounding [music] young stars.

[00:52:11]After that, they compared these models with actual observations and noticed >> [music] >> that the young planets took pretty unusual shapes.

[00:52:20]The thing is that even though almost 6,000 exoplanets have been discovered so far, >> [music] >> astronomers still don't have a clear understanding of the sequence of events marking their birth and early evolution.

[00:52:32]But this new research might finally shed light on this process.

[00:52:37]So, the astronomers [music] examined the formation mechanisms of gas giant planets like Jupiter and came to the conclusion [music] that planets built up from their centers.

[00:52:47]After that, [music] the researchers focused on the initial shapes of such planets.

[00:52:52]They were also interested in how they could encourage the growth [music] of these planetary seeds.

[00:52:57]How could they turn into such massive planets, some of them bigger than our solar system's largest giants?

[00:53:06]According to the standard theory of the formation of planets, such growth happens gradually [music] and smoothly.

[00:53:12]First, dust particles start to stick together, turning into larger and larger objects.

[00:53:17]This process lasts for a very long time and is known [music] as core accretion.

[00:53:23]It's the model of planet formation scientists favor.

[00:53:27]There's another theory, according to which [music] planets' birth might happen over shorter periods of time.

[00:53:33]This data involves [music] a protoplanetary disc, a disc of gas which makes up 99% of its mass and dust, around 1%.

[00:53:43]This disk orbits a newly formed star, and hypothetically, planets [music] might form from this cloud.

[00:53:50]Protoplanetary disks are likely [music] to be common byproducts of star formation. They might range in mass from 0.001 to 0.3 solar masses.

[00:54:02]Inside [music] such disks, matter slowly moves inward, and dust particles grow bigger >> [music] >> to the size of pebbles.

[00:54:10]At one point, after 2 to 3 million years, a giant rotating protoplanetary disk breaks into pieces, and that's how baby planets [music] are born.

[00:54:20]This theory is known as the disk instability model.

[00:54:24]As for the model built by the team, it seems to support this second, less [music] favored theory, rapid planet formation through disk instability.

[00:54:34]All because this theory [music] explains how large planets can form relatively quickly at pretty large distances from their host stars.

[00:54:42]As for the weird flattened shape of these newly formed planets, it might be due [music] to the material falling onto them.

[00:54:49]Most likely, it goes mainly to the poles of new planets.

[00:54:54]One of the main conclusions of the research is that the appearance of young exoplanets, as we see them from Earth, may vary [music] depending on how they're angled.

[00:55:03]If Earth is directed face-on to an exoplanet, it will seem that the latter has a traditional spherical shape.

[00:55:10]But if seen on edge, a baby [music] exoplanet will look like a real smartie.

[00:55:16]The team is going to continue to investigate the formation of planets with the help of an improved computer model.

[00:55:22]They believe they can find out the role the environment around a young planet plays in affecting [music] its shape and formation.