Speaker A
GRB221009A. On October 9th, 2022, something hit the planet Earth. It had traveled 2.4 billion years through space to get here.
Explore the most disturbing phenomena found in space, from deadly gamma ray bursts to cosmic rays damaging astronauts' brains.
Key Takeaways
- Gamma ray bursts pose a potential existential threat if occurring close to Earth.
- Space travel involves unique and deadly risks such as cabin depressurization and cosmic radiation.
- Extreme space phenomena challenge our understanding of physics and cosmic origins.
- Solar storms can have devastating effects on modern technology and infrastructure.
- There are still many unknown sources of high-energy cosmic particles in the universe.
What the video covers
- GRB221009A was the brightest gamma ray burst ever recorded, traveling 2.4 billion years to Earth and capable of destroying the ozone layer if it occurred in our galaxy.
- Soyuz 11 is the only space mission where humans died in space due to cabin depressurization caused by a ventilation valve failure.
- Verona Rupes on Miranda is the tallest cliff in the solar system, where a fall would last eight minutes in near-zero gravity and silence.
- Astronauts experience cosmic ray light flashes caused by high-energy particles passing through their eyes and brains, damaging cells without pain.
- The Amaterasu particle is a cosmic ray with unprecedented energy originating from an empty region of space with no known source.
- The 2012 Carrington Class CME was a massive solar storm that narrowly missed Earth but could have caused catastrophic damage to power grids and satellites.
- SGR 1806-20 is a magnetar that released an enormous burst of energy, briefly charging Earth's upper atmosphere.
- HD 189733b is a distant exoplanet with a harsh atmosphere of hydrogen sulfide and is slowly being destroyed by its star.
- AT2024TVD is a supernova-like event occurring far from any supermassive black hole, challenging current astrophysical understanding.
- The Great Attractor is a massive gravitational anomaly pulling galaxies, including the Milky Way, toward it at high speed.
Chapters
- 00:00GRB221009A: The Brightest Gamma Ray Burst Ever
- 00:48Potential Threats of Gamma Ray Bursts to Earth
- 01:45Soyuz 11: The Only Human Deaths in Space
- 02:36Verona Rupes: The Tallest Cliff in the Solar System
- 03:26The Slow, Silent Fall on Miranda
- 04:14Cosmic Ray Light Flashes Experienced by Astronauts
- 04:58The Amaterasu Particle: A Mysterious High-Energy Cosmic Ray
- 05:46The 2012 Carrington Class Solar Storm Near-Miss
- 07:08SGR 1806-20: A Powerful Magnetar Burst
- 08:27HD 189733b: A Hostile Exoplanet
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
It was a gamma ray burst, the most violent kind of explosion in the universe, also known as the BOAT, short for brightest of all time. Gamma ray bursts happen when a giant star collapses into a black hole or two
Speaker A
neutron stars crash into each other. The energy let loose in those few seconds was more than our sun will make in its entire 10 billion year lifetime, all aimed in one direction. If you had been in orbit that day, you would not have
Speaker A
seen anything. Gamma rays are a kind of light too powerful for human eyes to see, but the burst still left its mark, charging up part of Earth's upper atmosphere for hours, overwhelming the sensors on multiple satellites, and warping radio signals around the world.
Speaker A
However, that was from across the universe. If a gamma ray burst like this happened inside our own galaxy, pointed at Earth, the ozone layer would burn away within months. Every living thing on the surface would die. A gamma ray
Speaker A
burst this bright is only supposed to happen once every 10,000 years, but one hit us anyway. The next one is already on its way, and we will not know until it arrives. Soyuz 11. On June 30th, 1971, three men became the only humans
Speaker A
to ever die in space. Their names were Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev. They had spent 23 days on the world's first space station, and were now heading home. When their capsule separated from the station, the jolt knocked open a small ventilation
Speaker A
valve that was supposed to let air into the cabin during landing. Instead, it opened in the vacuum of space, 104 miles above the planet, and the cabin air rushed out within seconds. If you had been inside, you would have stayed awake
Speaker A
for about 15 seconds. During those seconds, your lungs would have emptied, and your body would have started to swell. The moisture on your tongue and in your eyes would have boiled, because a vacuum makes water boil even without
Speaker A
heat. The three men could have closed the valve by hand, but the lever was under their seats, and reaching it took longer than they had. However, from the outside, nothing looked wrong. Eleven minutes later, the capsule reentered the
Speaker A
atmosphere on its own, released its parachutes, and landed in Kazakhstan on schedule. When the recovery team opened the hatch, they found three cosmonauts still strapped into their seats with dark blue faces and dried blood under their noses and ears. They are still the
Speaker A
only humans this has ever happened to. Verona Rupes. If you stepped off the edge of this cliff, you would fall for eight full minutes before you hit the ground. Verona Rupes is on Miranda, a small moon of Uranus, and it is the
Speaker A
tallest cliff in our solar system. It was likely carved by an ancient impact that nearly broke the moon apart. Verona Rupes stands roughly 12 miles tall, more than twice the height of Mount Everest, and 10 times the depth of the Grand
Speaker A
Canyon. If you place the Empire State Building at the bottom and stacked 60 more on top, you would still be looking up at the edge. However, the strange part is not the height. It is how slow the fall would feel. Miranda is so small
Speaker A
that its gravity is barely strong enough to hold you down. Instead of plummeting, you would drift, falling slowly in complete silence, watching the cliff face slide past you for eight minutes.
Speaker A
There is no atmosphere on Miranda, no wind to feel, no sound to hear, no friction to burn you. You are alone with the cliff, the stars, and your body falling. When you finally reach the bottom, you would be moving at about 125
Speaker A
mph, which is fast enough to kill you instantly, and you would be awake the whole way down. But the fall itself would last longer than most songs.
Speaker A
Cosmic ray light flashes. If you closed your eyes in space, you would still see flashes of light. They look like bright dots, streaks, and small explosions in the dark, and each one fades within a few seconds. Apollo astronauts first
Speaker A
reported them in 1969, and every astronaut since has seen the same thing. The flashes happen because cosmic rays are passing through your eyes. The cosmic rays are tiny pieces of atoms moving at almost the speed of light thrown out by exploding stars. On Earth,
Speaker A
our atmosphere and magnetic field block most of them, but in space, nothing stops them and they hit your body all the time. What you are actually seeing is harder to think about. Every flash is a particle from deep space tearing
Speaker A
through your eyeball and sometimes through your brain, damaging cells as it goes. The light you see is your own cells being hit, and each flash is one of those hits. You feel nothing because inside the eye and brain there are no pain nerves.
Speaker A
Astronauts on the International Space Station see one or two flashes every minute day and night, and the disturbing part is you cannot turn it off. On a long mission to Mars, you would see millions, watching part of your own brain
Speaker A
die one flash at a time, and the damage would stay for the rest of your life.
Speaker A
The Amaterasu particle. On May 27th, 2021, a single particle from deep space hit the Utah desert. It was a piece of an atom smaller than a speck of dust, but it carried as much energy as a brick dropped on your foot. Its name comes
Speaker A
from the Japanese sun goddess. The Amaterasu particle was a cosmic ray moving at almost the speed of light, thrown out by violent events in space.
Speaker A
Most cosmic rays carry tiny amounts of energy, the kind you would never notice, but this one carried more energy than anything made on Earth, packed into a single particle thousands of times smaller than a cell. But the haunting
Speaker A
part is where it came from. Its path points back to the local void, a stretch of mostly empty space hundreds of millions of light years wide near our galaxy. There are almost no stars in that direction, no galaxies, and no
Speaker A
known source for that much energy. Whatever produced it does not seem to exist. This was not the first time we had seen something like it. In 1991, another particle hit Earth with even more energy called the Oh My God
Speaker A
particle. Several more have arrived since then, all from spots in the sky with no nearby stars, no visible galaxies, no known source. Something out there is making them, and we still do not know what it is.
Speaker A
The 2012 Carrington Class CME. The sun fired its strongest blast in decades on July 23rd, 2012. It was a fiery cloud packed with magnetic energy, wider than the sun, and moving at over 4 million miles per hour. The cloud crossed
Speaker A
Earth's orbit a week after our planet had passed that exact spot. Coronal mass ejections are billions of tons of hot gas thrown out by the sun at millions of miles per hour, slamming into anything in their path. Most are weak, and our
Speaker A
atmosphere and magnetic field handle them. But this one was Carrington Class, the same strength as the storm that lit up telegraph wires and started fires across the world in 1859. Yet the chilling part of the 2012 CME is what
Speaker A
would have happened if it had hit. The blast would have crippled power grids across continents, fried satellites in orbit, and knocked out GPS and the internet for years. Some estimates put the damage at over 2 trillion dollars, with parts of the world taking a decade
Speaker A
to recover. We did not see it coming. The storm was only spotted after the fact by STEREO A, a NASA spacecraft sitting off to the side of Earth. If Earth had reached that spot a week later, the storm would have hit us
Speaker A
head-on, and the world we know would have gone dark for years. SGR 1806-20. A flash from deep space partly charged Earth's upper atmosphere on December 27th, 2004. It came from a single star 50,000 light-years away on the far side
Speaker A
of our galaxy. In just 2/10 of a second, that single star released more energy than our sun gives off in 250,000 years.
Speaker A
The source was a magnetar called SGR 1806-20. Magnetars are crushed dead stars only about a dozen miles across, but they have the strongest magnetic fiel
Speaker A
rays that crosses the galaxy. And here is where SGR 1806-20 gets truly disturbing. Within a thousand miles of a magnetar, the magnetic force would pull every atom in your body out of place, ripping molecules apart before you knew what hit you. And if SGR
Speaker A
1806-20 had been 10 light years from Earth instead of 50,000, the 2004 flare would have stripped the ozone clean off the planet in a single pulse. About 30 magnetars sit in our galaxy, some of them closer to Earth than SGR 1806-20,
Speaker A
and they all twitch without warning. The 2004 flare was brighter in gamma rays than the full moon, even from halfway across the Milky Way. We do not know when the next twitch will come or which magnetar will produce it.
Speaker A
HD 189733b From far away, HD 189733b looks just like Earth, a peaceful blue marble drifting in space. It is roughly the same size as Jupiter and sits 64 light years from Earth, where it orbits a star very much like our own sun. Its
Speaker A
deep blue color was the first ever measured on a planet outside our solar system, back in 2013. HD 189733b is a hot Jupiter, a giant ball of gas trapped extremely close to its star. It orbits 13 times closer to its star than
Speaker A
Mercury is to our sun, close enough to lock one side in permanent day. At that distance, the day side reaches 1,700° Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt iron, and even the night side stays around 1,100°.
Speaker A
However, the peaceful look is a lie. Instead of water, the planet rains molten glass, blown sideways at over 5,000 miles per hour by winds that never stop. Those glass shards are sharp enough to shred you in seconds, and the
Speaker A
air smells like rotten eggs from clouds of hydrogen sulfide. The planet itself is slowly being torn apart by its own star. Its atmosphere is bleeding into space at over 100,000 tons every second, blown off by wind and radiation from its
Speaker A
star. In a few billion years, HD189733b will be gone for good. AT2024TVD. In 2024, a flash of light from a galaxy 600 million light-years away reached telescopes on Earth. It came from a tidal disruption event, the kind of
Speaker A
bright burst that happens when a black hole tears a passing star to pieces. Astronomers named the flare AT2024TVD and traced it back to a black hole that was not where any black hole should be.
Speaker A
The black hole was a supermassive one, weighing about a million times more than our sun. Supermassive black holes are giants the size of our solar system, sitting at the center of nearly every large galaxy, including our own Milky
Speaker A
Way. When one shreds a star, the flash can outshine its entire galaxy for months on end. Except AT2024TVD was found somewhere no supermassive black hole should be. It was not at the center of its galaxy, but drifting roughly 2,600 light-years off to the
Speaker A
side, all on its own. This is the first wandering supermassive black hole astronomers have ever caught in the act of eating a star. AT2024TVD is almost certainly not alone. When galaxies collide, they can fling these giants out of place, leaving them to
Speaker A
wander silently through space for billions of years. There could be many more drifting through galaxies we have already mapped, even our own, with no way for us to spot them until one swallows a star. The Boötes Void. If you
Speaker A
stood at the center of the Boötes Void and looked out, you would see almost no stars or galaxies in any direction. The Boötes Void is a roughly spherical region of nearly empty space, around 330 million light-years across. Astronomers
Speaker A
have counted only around 60 galaxies inside, and the void itself sits about 700 million light-years away from Earth.
Speaker A
A region of space that big in any normal part of the universe would hold around 2,000 galaxies packed with stars and gas. Most of the Boötes void is nothing but empty darkness, stretching for vast distances. In some parts of the void,
Speaker A
you could travel for tens of millions of light-years without crossing a single galaxy. Yet, the eerie part is what it would mean to live inside one. If our Milky Way sat at the center of this void, we would not have known other
Speaker A
galaxies existed until the 1960s. For all of human history, we would have thought our galaxy was the entire universe. The Boötes void is not the only one of its kind out there. Other voids of similar emptiness stretch across the universe, separated from each
Speaker A
other by long, thin walls of galaxies. Inside any one of these voids, an entire civilization could rise and fall many times over before any light from the nearest galaxy ever reached them.
Speaker A
Phoenix A. If you flew toward Phoenix A, you would see one of the brightest galaxy clusters in the known universe, all wrapped around a single dark heart at its center. Phoenix A sits roughly 5.7 billion light-years from Earth, and
Speaker A
it is the largest black hole astronomers have ever measured. It weighs nearly 100 billion times more than our sun, roughly the same as every star in our galaxy combined. The black hole at the center of our Milky Way is about 25,000 times
Speaker A
lighter. Most supermassive black holes are millions to billions of times the mass of our sun, but Phoenix A is in a class of its own. If Phoenix A sat at the center of our solar system, it would be wide enough to swallow Pluto's orbit
Speaker A
dozens of times over. Phoenix A did not start out this size. It has spent billions of years swallowing gas and stars from entire galaxies to reach this size. And today, it is still pulling matter inward as fast as ever. Even from
Speaker A
billions of light-years away, Phoenix A's hunger is on full display. Hundreds of new stars form in the surrounding cluster every year, all from gas pouring toward Phoenix A. Most of that gas vanishes into Phoenix A forever, growing the biggest black hole anyone has ever
Speaker A
found even bigger. The Great Attractor and the Dipole Repeller. Right now, our entire galaxy is being pulled through space at over 370 miles every second, dragged toward something we cannot see directly. The Great Attractor sits around 200 million
Speaker A
light-years from Earth, hidden behind the dust and stars of our own Milky Way. Its gravity is so strong that it pulls on galaxies hundreds of millions of light-years away. Astronomers first noticed it in the 1980s by watching how
Speaker A
galaxies around us move, all drifting in the same direction at once. They have figured out that the Great Attractor weighs roughly the same as tens of thousands of full-sized galaxies put together. All that mass drags the Milky Way and every galaxy near us straight
Speaker A
toward it. However, the Great Attractor is not pulling alone. On the opposite side of the sky, around 500 million light-years away, sits the Dipole Repeller, a huge empty region pushing us away by having so little mass. Together, these two regions are moving our galaxy
Speaker A
through the universe in a slow cosmic tug-of-war. Our galaxy has been caught up in this pull and push for billions of years before humans even appeared. Earth itself has been hurtling along the entire time without feeling a thing. We
Speaker A
cannot slow this motion or change direction, and no one will ever see what waits at the end of the pull.
Speaker A
If you'd like to see more videos like this, make sure to subscribe and feel free to drop suggestions for the next video in the comments.
Topics:gamma ray burstSoyuz 11Verona Rupescosmic raysAmaterasu particleCarrington eventmagnetarHD 189733bsupernovaGreat Attractor
