Why Is Space Freezing Cold When the Sun Is SO HOT?

You may think the Earth is pretty big, but the sun makes up almost 99.9% of the mass of the whole solar system. The rest of the mass is made up by the planets and their satellites, asteroids, comets, gas, and dust. It's around 93 million miles, 150 million kow away from our planet, but it keeps us warm every day. Its temperature is about 10,000 af 5,30 sun7° wel, but the space surrounding it is still cold as ice. To understand this, we need to distinguish between heat and temperature. Heat is the energy inside some object.

Temperature is something that tells us if that object is hot or cold. When the heat is transferred to that object, it makes its temperature go up. When the object is losing heat, the temperature goes down. Heat can be transferred in three different ways. The sun does it through radiation. That means it's releasing heat in the form of light.

Your body radiates heat two as infrared waves. That's why thermal imaging cameras will detect you're in the room even at night. The hotter the object, the more heat it will radiate. The temperature only affects matter. Since space is mostly a vacuum, it doesn't have enough particles for heat to transfer in any other way than through radiation. When the heat coming from the sun gets to an object, the atoms start absorbing energy. But the heat can't transfer since there's no matter in space, those rare atoms and molecules in space will absorb the heat and they'll simply stay that way. While the cold vacuum will stay cold. There's a lot of matter inside Earth's atmosphere. So, the energy of the sun can transfer easily. But if you put an object outside of the Earth's atmosphere in direct sunlight, it would end up heated to 250F because it's a matter made of atoms and molecules. The temperature of the vacuum is 454F to 27. That means depending on where you are, space can either burn or freeze you. The sun isn't actually yellow. It emits light over a wide range of wavelengths. We can tell both its temperature and color by the peak in its spectrum. For instance, cooler stars will appear red and hotter stars will be blue with yellow, orange, and white stars in between. When it comes to the sun, the spectrum peaks at a wavelength we'd usually call green, but our eye perceives it differently. So, this shade of green, in combination with other wavelengths from the spectrum, is going to look white to the human eye. We generally see the sun as yellow because our atmosphere scatters blue light more efficiently than the red one. During sunrise and sunset, there's more red light in the spectrum of the sun, which gives us amazing sceneries. Sunspots are parts of the sun's visible surface that are on average way cooler than the sun itself. They overlap with parts that have an increased magnetic field. These parts don't allow the release of heat to the sun's visible surface. That way, the rest of the sun's surface is three times brighter than those sunspot. That contrast makes them appear almost black.

If we could take a sunspot apart from the sun and place it somewhere in the night sky, it would be different, as bright as the moon when we see it from the Earth. All the planets in our solar system spin in the same direction.

Because they were formed from one protolanetary cloud. Except for Uranus and Venus, they have probably had some strong impact on them that made them spin in the opposite direction. But it's different with galaxies. They don't usually form from the same cloud of dust and particles. Also, they're not randomly distributed across space. They come in filaments, dense, slender strands of dark matter and galaxies with voids in between. Proto galaxies are linked by gravitational forces in small areas of space. This is probably because of the distribution of dark matter throughout the universe. The matter in the filaments moves in a corkcrew motion and goes towards the densest area. So there might be a common direction galaxies tend to spin, but it's mostly random. There's a possibility we'll see a lunar elevator one day. Yep. A cable anchored to the surface of the moon. It would stretch 250,000 mi, 40,000 to 336 QN. We wouldn't be able to directly attach it to our planet because both Earth and the Moon are moving, but we could keep it terminated high in our planet's orbit.

Some researchers believe we could build such an elevator for a few billion dollars. The moon has resources we could definitely use. A rare form of helium found there could be of use in fusion power stations on our planet. Also, we could take some other rare elements, neodymium, and use them in smartphones and the rest of electronics. So, after around 53 trips up and down, the elevator could pay for itself. The cable would be as thick as a pencil, but its weight would be around 40 tons. It could even be made of materials we already have here on Earth with no need to invent something. There could even be a combination of two elevators. A spacecraft would winch up an elevator from the surface of our planet to a space station. Then it would be flung towards the moon. There would be another elevator to finally lower it down to the surface of the moon. Planets in our solar system have predictable and stable orbits. But gas giant collisions could have happened at an early stage when a planetary system was still forming. In case of a head-on collision, two gas giants would merge. They wouldn't end up losing their mass, the material in their gaseous envelopes, or the ones in their solid cores. Such a collision at a higher speed would cause the loss of the major part of the envelope gas and very high speeds. Boom. Both planets are gone. It's different if it's not a head-on collision. If two cores manage to completely avoid each other, gas giants won't merge, but they'll lose some of the mass. Gas giants might even change their shape due to such collisions. Astronomers found out there's a galaxy SPT048 TR47 extremely far away from us that looks similar to our Milky Way. We now see it as it was when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old and now it's 13.8 billion years old. It took over 12 billion years for the light to come from this faraway galaxy and reach our planet. This galaxy is peaceful, stable, and surprisingly non-kaotic.

Unlike all other galaxies that were quite turbulent in their early stages, to leave the Milky Way, we'd have to travel around 25,000 lighty years away from the center of the galaxy or 500 lighty years vertically. Our galaxy is a disc of stars that spreads around 100,000 lighty years across and is 1,000 lighty years thick. The sun, its central star, is located halfway from the center of the galaxy and close to the middle of the disc in the vertical direction.

We're here. While leaving the galaxy, we'd have to go further than its edge to get away from the halo that surrounds the Milky Way. Old stars, diffuse gas, and globular clusters. If you wanted to go even further to see the Milky Way in all its glory, you'd have to travel 48,000 light years vertically. At this moment, we don't even have a telescope we can send there. There are central stars that eat planets. Our solar system is stable, unlike many other planetary systems. So, we don't have to be afraid the Earth or some other planet will change its orbit and go towards the sun.

But at least a quarter of other planetary systems with orbiting stars similar to our sun have a pretty chaotic past. In some of them, there are planets that used to move around and their unpredictable migrations may have disrupted the paths of some other planets or even pushed them outside of their orbit. That means some planets probably have fallen into the central star. When that happens, the planet gets dissolved in the outer layer of the star, which means it gets eaten. Look at this blazing monster. It's a white dwarf. These stars are known for gobbling up passing objects. And one day, these objects might be the planets of our own solar system. According to a new study, parts of the solar system will be pulled into a white dwarf star, crushed up, and eventually ground into a fine dust like coffee beans in a blade grinder.

You like that analogy? White dwarves are the final stage of a star's life. It's a small but very dense star that is typically the size of a planet. The result of a low mass star exhausting all the nuclear fuel in its center and losing its outer layers as a planetary nebula. When our sun turns into a white dwarf, and it is bound to happen, it'll destroy the asteroids and moons around Mars and Jupiter. They will be pulverized by its gravity. Earth though will be swallowed up even before the sun turns into a white dwarf. But it won't happen for another 6 billion years. Researchers working on this topic have come to such conclusions by observing what happened to space bodies, asteroids, moons, and planets that were passing close to three white dwarfs. For 17 years, they observed and analyzed transits. That's when the brightness of a white dwarf dips because of an object in a stable orbit passing in front of it. In the case of white dwarfs, we can predict such transits and use them to study the stars themselves and celestial objects passing by them. So, when something gets too close to a white dwarf star, the stars immense gravity rips it into smaller and smaller pieces of debris. The team has also found out that transits of such debris are chaotic.

Plus, this debris is oddly shaped, which means that it is being devoured further.

The first white dwarf used for studying the transit process, this guy, ZTFJz 328 1211, seemed steady and well behaved over the last few years. Well, until scientists found some evidence of a massive catastrophic event that occurred in 2010 or so. The next star, ZTFJ0923 pool 4236, dims irregularly every couple of months before brightening again. And the third white dwarf WD11455 5ver 1 used to behave close to theoretical predictions. It had transits that varied in numbers, shapes, and depths. But the latest study has shown that the transits are now completely gone. And this indicates the unpredicted nature of transits. One minute you see them, the next they're gone. The reason might be the chaotic environment they have to exist in. As for our own solar system and our planet in particular, its fate looks pretty sad. Earth will be swallowed by the expanding sun even before our star turns into a white dwarf. As for the rest of the solar system located further from the sun, some of the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, as well as some of Jupiter's moons, will be destroyed later. They are likely to get dislodged and travel too close to the white dwarf. At the same time, astronomers aren't 100% sure that it's exactly what will happen with our solar system.

Well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see for like 6 billion years. Speaking of white dwarfs, scientists have recently found one that has a bizarre metallic scar on its surface. This blemish could have formed after the star ripped up and ate a tiny planet orbiting it. White dwarfs with traces of metal in their atmospheres aren't rare. These traces are left by planets falling into stars affected by their gravity. Experts have long thought that such metals should be distributed evenly across the surface of such polluted white dwarfs. But a new study has discovered a white dwarf with a weird concentrated patch of metal. This star WBD Musk 310 was monitored over a period of 2 months with the help of the very large telescope in Chile. The researchers found an opaque patch of metal. It was located over one of the stars magnetic poles and blocked some of the stars light as it rotated.

Based on this position, astronomers concluded that the material could have been funneled into the star by its powerful magnetic field. This process is similar to the one causing auroras on Earth, where charged particles follow the magnetic field to the surface. The planet destroyed by the white dwarf was most likely very small, around the same size as asteroid Vesta in the solar system, which is a mere 525 km across. Its debris is now prominently displayed on the host's stars surface.

It makes it easier for researchers to examine what the planet's geocchemistry was before it was devoured. Such a study might even turn out to be one of the best ways to observe small worlds beyond the solar system, even if such a world has already met its demise. There might be many more scarred stars like this one. The one in question was the first, but probably not the last. Even better, astronomers have already discovered two white dwarfs that seem to have similar scars. Making repeat observations of such stars might help us unearth, pardon the pun, no, I meant to do that, unearth even more secrets and make more discoveries.

Another bizarre white dwarf discovered not so long ago seems to have stopped cooling due to the formation of internal crystals. It challenges existing theories on star aging and also questions the methods of stellar age estimation, but scientists might have understood why it may be happening. White dwarves are believed to be dead stars. They keep cooling down over time, and normally this process can't be reversed or paused. But in 2019, the European Space Ay's Gaia satellite discovered a number of white dwarf stars that had stopped cooling for more than 8 billion years. It might mean that some white dwarfs can generate a lot of extra energy, which is at odds with the classical dead star theory. At first, astronomers couldn't figure out how it might happen. In the end, more than 97% of stars in the Milky Way galaxy turn into white dwarfs. Astronomers have long thought that such stars are at the end of their lives. After depleting their nuclear energy source, they stop producing heat and cool down.

Eventually, the dense plasma in their insides freezes into a solid state and the star solidifies from inside out. The whole process can take billions of years. But the new research claims that in some white dwarves, this dense plasma doesn't simply freeze. Instead, its solid crystals forming upon freezing become less dense than the liquid and start floating upward. They displace the heavier liquid downward. The movement of heavier material toward the center of a white dwarf releases gravitational energy. And this energy is enough to interrupt the stars cooling process and halt it for billions of years. This explanation actually matches all the properties of the unusual white dwarf population.

But this is the first time such a transport mechanism has been seen in any type of star. And that's incredibly exciting. A totally new astrophysical phenomenon. But why does it happen in some stars but not in others? It most likely depends on the composition of the star. You see, some white dwarf stars are formed by the merger of two different stars. When they collide and form a white dwarf, it changes the composition of the star, which allows the formation of floating crystals.

This discovery might mean that astronomers will have to review the ways they use to determine the age of stars. At the moment, white dwarfs are often used as age indicators. The cooler a white dwarf is, the older it's believed to be, but now we already know about possible delays in the cooling process of some dwarfs. It makes the popular age determination method more unreliable. Some stars of a given temperature may be billions of years older than we previously thought. The recently uncovered transport mechanism within white dwarfs means that some of these stars can be shining as bright as normal for billions of years. This complicates age dating and the use of white dwarfs to reconstruct the formation of our galaxy. Hey, stay tuned.

The solar system is full of mysterious objects that come from everywhere. In October 2017, researchers in Hawaii spotted a mysterious thing that they dubbed Uma Mua. This means a visitor from a far away land in Hawaiian or that's a really big cow. It followed an escape orbit. It literally escaped from its planet's gravitational pole like throwing a ball into space, never to return. This meant that this weird thing arrived from somewhere outside of our solar system. There were tons of theories about what it was, from a simple asteroid to an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Scientists even thought it was a chunk of nitrogen ice from a Pluto-like planet. Its strange shape only added to the mystery. The big changes in the light curves show that this thing could either be elongated like a tube or more flat like a pancake.

This thing was unlike anything we've seen before. Umuam Mua didn't behave exactly like a comet or an asteroid.

Comets are icy and form bright tails when they pass near the sun. While asteroids are basically just rocks and don't form tails. Umuam Mua has no tail and doesn't release gas like me. But it's not your average rock either. Its surface is very shiny, almost like polished metal. When it passed by the sun, it sped up like it had a rocket on it. And it wasn't the sun's gravity that gave Umuam Mua this sudden boost.

Scientists aren't sure what caused it.

So, what in the world was that thing? After years of study, scientists now think that Umuwamua is probably a comet with frozen hydrogen on its surface. This hydrogen reacted with sunlight, speeding up the comet and changing its path. Um, likely got all that hydrogen from being exposed to tons of cosmic rays for a long time. It got some nice red tint from them as well.

Um, was a visitor from a young chaotic solar system where collisions and migrations happen all the time. Such systems often toss many small objects around. It might have been pushed out by a planet like Jupiter whose gravity is so insanely strong that it can fling huge things into outer space.

The same thing often happens with comets here. Umuamoa already left our solar system. Although similar objects visit us, sometimes about once per year. To learn more about these mysterious guests, astronomers plan to send a probe to chase Umuamua. Will use Earth's and Jupiter's orbits to slingshot it fast enough to catch up with the comet. But some of the unexpected visitors stayed a bit longer.

In October 2019, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took a photo of a bluish comet trailing dust and gas. It was already in the solar system at the time, around 418,429,440 km away from Earth, somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. We saw the glowing dust surrounding it, but we couldn't yet see its nucleus since it's way too small. Well, small is relative here. This thing is about 975 m across which is like the length of nine football fields. In March 2020, Hubble images showed that a small fragment of the comet broke away from the nucleus.

That means that the comet is very active unlike Umuamua. As we observed it further, we found out that the nucleus is a loose mix of ice and dust particles. Its surface is also very similar to others with rough areas and smooth blankets of icy dusty debris.

The comet was discovered by an amateur astronomer, Gennady Borisovv. So, it got the name Comet 2 I Borisov. Comet 2 I Borisov. Congratulations. Scientists quickly confirmed it came to us from outside our solar system. And this thing sure was an enthusiastic tourist. It traveled at a breakneck speed of about 177,28 kmh. That's fast enough to circle the Earth four times in just 1 hour.

This visit was fascinating for several reasons. Most comets in our solar system come from the Kyper belt or the Orort cloud. The Kyper Belt is a region of space beyond the orbit of Neptune. It's like a big distant ring around the sun filled with many small icy objects. All of them are ancient leftover pieces from the time when our solar system was still very young. The Orc cloud is much farther. It's like a giant bubble around the solar system. Also filled with super old icy objects. Most long period comets come from there. But where did the comet 2 I Borosov come from? We still don't know for sure. Scientists say that it likely formed in another star system which could be either younger or older than our solar system. Would be weird if there was a third option, NASA. Anyway, it might have been kicked out from its home system just like Umuwamua. Although comet 2 Ibor is too small to hold onto its own atmosphere, it developed a coma when it approached the sun. Coma is a funny name for that beautiful glowing cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the comet's nucleus. It forms when the sun's heat causes the comet's ice to vaporize, releasing dust and gas into space. This one was friendlier than Umuamua and gave us some more time to study it. As a result, we learned more about its cool unique traits. For example, it had never interacted with another star. But unfortunately, Boris had to leave, too. Now, it's on a path that will take it back into interstellar space. However, there are many more visitors to come. And you might have heard of this one, the great comet of 1996. That's what we called the comet Hayakutake.

Hayakutake. It was also named after the astronomer who discovered it, Yuji Hayakutake. In a beautiful coincidence, it was discovered on New Year's Eve on March 25, 1996. This thing passed by incredibly close to Earth, only about 0.1 astronomical units away, a bit farther than the moon. It passed over the North Pole. This made it one of the closest comet encounters in 200 years.

It was visible worldwide, and it looked very bright and beautiful in the sky, stretching widely. And it didn't stay for one night only. It got more and more visible during March, becoming one of the brightest objects in the night sky by the end of the month. The comet only fully faded by the end of May. It's a long period comet, which means it takes hundreds of years to orbit the sun. The last time it visited was about 17,000 years ago, and now its orbital period increased to 70,000 years. But don't be upset. There are other comets that will brighten our days and nights. Besides, some space objects prefer to stay around for longer.

There's this asteroid with a multi-elabic name caha that to pronounce is above my pay grade. This name in Hawaiian means the mischievous one of Jupiter. Luckily, scientists had mercy on us and dubbed it BZ. Hey, speaking for all the other narrators, thank you. It's a small asteroid only about 2.9 km in diameter.

You can guess from the name that it shares an orbit with Jupiter. But there's a cool catch. The asteroid moves in the opposite direction which is known as a retrograde orbit. The unusual asteroid was discovered on November 2014. It orbits the sun for about 11 years and 8 months, sometimes passing inside and outside Jupiter's orbit. It's been this way for at least a million years, and it will remain so for about a million more. But why does it move so unusually?

Bzed might actually be an interstellar immigrant. Perhaps it passed by our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago around the time when the sun was just forming. Then it got captured by gravity but saved its opposite orbit. Or maybe it came from the Orort cloud. Then it could get its weird orbit from the mysterious planet 9, a hypothetical planet that's believed to exist in our solar system far beyond Neptune.

In any case, this asteroid gives us more insight into the history of the solar system and how organic materials can travel to us from outer space. At any given time, there are thousands of objects in our solar system that come from outer space. They stay here for different lengths of time. But sometimes we get lucky and they end up teaching us a lot about interstellar space.

In May 2024, stunning auroras adorning the night sky demonstrated all the power that solar storms emit as radiation. But sometimes our sun does things that are far more destructive. I'm talking about solar particle events. During these events, blasts of protons coming directly from the surface of the sun can shoot out like giant cosmic search lights.

According to records, an extreme particle event hits Earth every thousand years or so. It often causes bad damage to the ozone layer and increases levels of ultraviolet radiation closer to the surface of our planet. Luckily, Earth's magnetic field acts as a powerful protective cocoon for our planet, fending off electrically charged radiation from the sun. In its normal state, this field functions like a ginormous bar magnet with field lines rising from one pole, looping around the planet, and dropping at the other pole.

This pattern is sometimes called an inverted grapefruit. This vertical orientation of the magnetic field at the poles allows some ionizing cosmic radiation to get through the field as far down as the upper atmosphere. There, it interacts with gas molecules and produces the glow we know as auroras.

But over time, Earth's protective bubble changes. In the past century, the North magnetic pole moved across northern Canada at a speed of about 40 km per year. Plus, it weakened by more than 6%.

Even more shockingly, according to geological records, there have been periods of time, as long as centuries and millennia, when our planet's magnetic field was super weak or entirely absent.

But we'll talk about those tragic times later. It's easy to imagine what our planet would look like without its protective bubble. If you look at Mars, the red planet lost its global magnetic field long, long ago. And once this field disappeared, most of Mars' atmosphere vanished, too. In May 2024, a strong solar particle event hit the planet. It disrupted the operation of the Mars Odyssey spacecraft and made radiation levels at the surface of the red planet rise around 30 times higher than what a person receives during a chest X-ray. The sun's outer atmosphere constantly emits a changing stream of electrons and protons, the solar wind.

At the same time, the surface of the star also produces bursts of energy, mostly protons, during solar particle events. These bursts of energy have a connection to solar flares. Extremely powerful bursts of electromagnetic radiation that can last from minutes to hours. Protons are way heavier than electrons and carry more energy. That's why they can reach lower levels of Earth's atmosphere, exciting gas molecules in the air. These excited molecules emit X-rays invisible to the unaded eye. Dozens and hundreds of relatively weak solar particle events happen during every solar cycle. Now, let's speak about solar cycles for a minute. You see, from a distance, the sun seems to be calm and steady. But if you zoom in, you'll see that its surface is constantly seething and churning. It keeps transforming from a uniform ocean of fire to a chaos of warped plasma and back again in a repeating cycle. Every 11 years or so, the magnetic field of our star gets tangled up. Imagine a ball of tightly wound rubber bands. That's what it looks like at such moments. And then at one point, it snaps and flips completely turning the north pole into the south pole and vice versa.

Right before this event, the sun steps up its activity. It starts to spit out giant blobs of fiery plasma, emit powerful streams of radiation, and grow planet-sized spots. This period has the name of solar maximum. It's a rather dangerous time for Earth since it gets regularly hit by solar storms. Such storms have the potential to disrupt communications and damage power infrastructure. Even worse, solar storms can harm astronauts working in space and even make satellites crash into the planet. As the cycle ends, it fades back to the solar minimum and then a new cycle begins. Anyway, back to our solar particle events.

Researchers have found traces of extremely strong solar events happening throughout the history of Earth. And some of them were thousands of times stronger than anything our modern instruments have ever recorded. Such extreme solar particle events happen approximately every few millennia. The most recent one occurred around 993 CE.

Beyond the immediate effect they have, solar particle events can kickstart a chain of chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere. And these processes often lead to depletion of ozone, which isn't a good thing. Ozone absorbs harmful solar UV radiation, which can damage not only our eyesight, but also the DNA of living beings. Plus, changing the amounts of ozone in the atmosphere can impact the climate. In a recent study, researchers used large computer models to examine how extreme solar particle events affect Earth. They found out that if a solar proton event arrives during a period of time when our planet's magnetic field is very weak, then ozone damage can last for 6 years and the level of UV radiation might increase by 25%. Boosting solar induced DNA damage by around 50%.

And apparently this dramatic combination of a weak magnetic field and extreme solar proton events happens quite often. And some researchers believe that it may even explain a few mysterious occurrences in the past of our planet. For example, the most recent period of weak magnetic field started 42,000 years ago and lasted for around 1,000 years. This period included a temporary switch in the north and south poles. Several major evolutionary events happened during that time. For example, the last Neanderthalss disappeared in Europe along with the extinction of marsupial megapona in Australia. Yeah, sadly we won't see giant wombats and giant kangaroos anymore. One more even bigger evolutionary event might also be linked to Earth's geomagnetic field.

Multisellular animals appeared at the end of the Edidiaine period which started around 635 million years ago and it occurred after a 26 million-year period of extremely weak or even absent magnetic field. The rapid evolution of different groups of animals in the Cambrian explosion about 539 million years ago might have also been related to high UV levels and geomagnetism. The simultaneous evolution of hard body shells and eyes in multiple unrelated groups could have been necessary to detect and avoid harmful incoming UV rays. A complete reversal of Earth's magnetic poles might have a serious impact on the climate of our planet.

Luckily, such flips don't happen overnight. The entire process stretches over thousands of years. Plus, even though the magnetic pole weakens during a pole reversal, it doesn't disappear completely. That's why the magnetosphere continues protecting the planet from cosmic rays and charged solar particles.

Even though there might be some amount of particulate RA dation that will make it to Earth's surface. Our planet's magnetic fields are generated by moving electric charges. If some material allows these charges to easily move in it, it's called a conductor. Metal is a great conductor and we often use it to transfer electric currents from one place to another. In this case, the electric current is negative charges called electrons moving through the metal. The current is what generates a magnetic field. Earth's outer core is made of liquid iron and nickel. In other words, there are layers and layers of conducting material inside our planet.

Currents of charges are constantly moving throughout the core and the liquid metal is also moving and circulating there generating the magnetic field. This magnetic field in turn produces something resembling a bubble around the planet. It's called the magnetosphere and it's located above the uppermost part of the atmosphere. This layer shields and deflects high energy cosmic ray radiation which otherwise would be extremely hazardous to people and other forms of life on Earth. The magnetosphere also interacts with the ionosphere, the layer of our planet's atmosphere containing loads of ions and free electrons and capable of reflecting radio waves. The interaction between these two layers and magnetized solar winds is what scientists call space weather. The solar wind is normally mild and there's no space weather whatsoever.

On July 23rd, 2024, Europe's Solar Orbiter spacecraft observed a super powerful solar flare erupting from the far side of the sun. This flare wasn't the most extreme ever recorded, but still we got extremely lucky this time not to get fried by it. Such solar flares often cause longived raging radiation storms. And if such a storm moves in the direction of Earth, it can lead to worldwide blackouts. Before we go deeper into details of that potentially disastrous solar flare, we need to figure out what exactly this solar phenomenon is. Solar flares occur because the magnetic fields in the atmosphere of our star are moving non-stop.

When the sun is approaching its solar maximum, and that's the most active period of its 11-year long cycle, which is, by the way, exactly what's happening now, its magnetic fields get more and more tangled, making our star look like a enormous ball of tangled rubber bands.

They loop around, cross over one another, cut one another off, and then reconnect. Ever seen iron filings sprinkled on a bar magnet? These filings line up along the magnetic lines of force. Like that, the hot plasma on the surface of the sun is at the mercy of the magnetic lines of force. Sometimes when the magnetic fields interact with each other, some plasma gets disconnected from the fields and its particles accelerate to immense speeds and send powerful radiation to space.

That's what a solar flare is. Other times, our star throws off massive amounts of matter. Those events are coronal mass ejections, CMEs. Just one CME can contain as much as 20 billion tons of material. If that material were rock, it would create a mountain about 4.4 km across and almost 0.8 km tall.

The ejected material often travels at a speed of over 1.6 million kmh.

Solar flares and CMEs are the most powerful explosions in the solar system, releasing unimaginable amounts of energy. Solar flares have their own classification according to their strength. The smallest and weakest ones are A and Bclass. Then there are C and M-class solar flares and the strongest are X-class flares. A number from 1 to 9 and in some cases a larger one accompanies each letter that's similar to the RTER scale for earthquakes. A and B-class flares are too weak to affect our planet. As for C-class flares, they may have small noticeable consequences.

M-class flares can cause short radio blackouts at the poles and weak radiation storms that can still harm astronauts. But the most dangerous of them all are X-class flares. There are flares more than 10 times more powerful than X1. That's why the classification of X-class flares can go higher than 9.

Now, let's get back to that recent solar flare. It was X14 class 1. Now, we already know that it means it was an extra strong flare. Other large flares astronomers have detected recently include an X12 solar flare that happened on the 20th of May and an X10 flare that occurred on the 17th of July. All of them have come from the backside of the sun. If we talk of the earth's side of our star, the largest solar flare that has been recorded so far within this solar cycle happened on the 14th of May.

It was an X8.7 flare that led to radio blackouts and a strong geomagnetic storm leading to magnificent auroras all over the world occurred a few days earlier.

Powerful coronal mass ejections accompanied this storm. As for the July X-Class flare, it was so powerful that it could have ended up tragically for us. Luckily, all that magnetically charged plasma blast that accompanied the flare didn't travel in our direction. If it had, it would have been quite the solar storm. Auroras would have been incredibly impressive and a wee bit terrifying in their magnificence. But at the same time, such a dynamic blast of energetic particles hurling our way could have caused major technological problems and electrical blackouts like the event in 1989 which severely harmed Quebec's power grid or a much much earlier catastrophe that still managed to cause a lot of harm to the world. I'm talking about the Carrington event which occurred in 1859 and was the first documented solar flare affecting our planet. It happened on the 1st of September and was named after Richard Carrington, the solar astronomer who witnessed the flare through his own telescope and sketched the sun's sunspots. According to scientists, that flare was the most powerful documented solar storm over the last 500 years. The Carrington event triggered auroras that were visible as far south as the Caribbean. It led to severe interruptions in telegraph services all over the world, even shocking some telegraph operators and sparking fires after discharges from the lines ignited telegraph paper. Another major solar flare that erupted on the 4th of August 1972 destroyed long-d distanceance phone communication across a few states, including Illinois. This event even made the American Telephone and Telegraph Company redesign its power system for transatlantic cables. Now, let's move to March 1989 when two super powerful CMEs triggered a geomagnetic storm which in turn set off a power blackout in Canada on the 13th of March. This blackout left around 6 million people without electricity for 9 hours. It is said that the flare disrupted electric power transmission from the hydro Quebec generation station and melted a few power transformers in New Jersey. And still this solar flare was nowhere near the power of the Carrington event. The Bastile Day solar storm took its name from the French national holiday because it occurred on the same day on the 14th of July in 2000. It was an X5 class event that caused some satellites to shortcircuit and resulted in radio blackouts. It's still one of the most highly observed solar storm events. From October to November 2003, our star unleashed a series of large solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and they did reach Earth and slam into its atmosphere. Those solar storms, aka Halloween storms of 2003, caused aircraft to be reroded, impacted satellite systems, and led to power outages in Sweden. Besides, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory couldn't fulfill its functions during this solar onslaught. On the 28th of October, 2003, the sun sent a whopper of a solar flare our way. The fire was so powerful, it overwhelmed the spacecraft sensor that was measuring it. The sensor topped out at a whopping X28, but later scientists figured out that the flare had reached a peak strength of about X45. One more thing that made the Halloween storms so scary was that they happened during a time in the solar cycle when solar activity is usually quiet. That's 2 to 3 years after the solar maximum. According to NASA's statistics, just 17 powerful flares erupted from our star during that time.

The sun spewed out another X-class solar flare on the 5th of December, 2006. It was an X9class flare that disrupted satellite to ground communications and GPS navigation signals for around 10 minutes. That solar storm was so powerful it even damaged the solar X-ray imager instrument on the GO 13 satellite. It sustained damage to several pixels of its detector. In February 2022, SpaceX experienced the terrifying power of our star when a devastating geomagnetic storm destroyed 38 Starlink satellites worth tens of millions of dollars. It happened shortly after they were deployed. Unfortunately, Starlink satellites are especially vulnerable to geomagnetic storms since they're released into extremely low altitude orbits between 96 km and 193 km. They also rely on their onboard engines to overcome the drag force and raise themselves to their final altitude of around 563 km over the surface of the planet. The thing is during a geomagnetic storm, Earth's atmosphere absorbs energy from the storm, heats up and extends upward. It results in a denser thermosphere which means more drag and it can be a serious issue for satellites. That's exactly what happened. The batch of newly released Starlink satellites didn't manage to overcome the increased drag and started to fall back, eventually burning up in the atmosphere. The Hubble Space Telescope was put into a low Earth orbit in 1990.

If you think about it, it has had over 30 years of experience looking at various space objects. It was named after astronomer Edwin Hubble and was built by NASA. It is also part of a group of devices called NASA's great observatories along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope was built to explore the universe and answer some of its biggest questions, such as how galaxies form and evolve and how the universe itself has changed over time.

The telescope has made many important discoveries, including providing evidence of the existence of dark matter and helping to determine the rate of expansion of the universe. One of the most famous images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is the Pillars of Creation. It's a photo of a region of the Eagle Nebula where new stars are born. The photo, which was taken in 1995, shows massive pillars of gas and dust towering above the nebula. It has become one of the most iconic images of the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope continues to operate and make important scientific discoveries despite some initial technical difficulties. In 1993, a problem in the telescope's main mirror was discovered, which affected its ability to focus light properly. A repair mission was sent to the telescope in 1994 to fix the problem, and since then, the telescope has continued to work perfectly. One of the most interesting discoveries made by this amazing telescope is actually pretty recent. A report based on the data from the Hubble Space Telescope shows that there is a faint glow in space around the solar system that cannot be explained by anything we know to exist because they have yet to figure out the source. Astronomers call this mysterious glow ghost light. We do know that this light is not coming from the stars or galaxies near the solar system.

nor is it coming from dust on the solar systems plane. The researchers are not sure what the source of the light is, but they think it might be tiny particles of dust and ice left by comets. But it's only a theory that has not been confirmed. When we study the universe, we often find bright things like planets, stars, and galaxies. But from time to time, we discover some light coming from places where we didn't expect to see it, like from between planets. This light may be coming from deep within our solar system, and it may be a new phenomenon that hasn't been studied before. In other words, there may be something at the center of our galaxy that produces a lot of light. Spacecraft Voyager. I also captured images showing a lot of light coming from the edge of our solar system. How come we haven't noticed this until now? Well, because most of the light in pictures taken by the Hubble telescope comes from things close to Earth. But people usually ignore this light because they're interested in things like stars and galaxies that are farther away. We've never actually looked closely at the amount of light in the universe and where it comes from.

Scientists have been using the Hubble to find faint galaxies that may have been missed before and which may be the source of this dim glow. They found that there are not enough such galaxies to account for extra light in the sky. It's not a lot of light though. It is like the glow from 10 fireflies, but it doesn't make it less important. It shows that we may be missing something. Let's look at some other important discoveries we've made with the help of Hubble. Like dark matter, which we can't see but know is there because of its effect on gravity. It makes up for about 23% of the universe. By looking at how it affects light, the Hubble telescope helped make 3D maps of where dark matter is. These maps showed that dark matter seems to be getting clumpier over time, which means it behaves very similarly to how gravity does. The Hubble telescope also discovered two new moons around Pluto named Nyx and Hydra and studied the dwarf planet's changing surface.

Additionally, it's found the mass of planet Ays, which is larger than Pluto.

This helped scientists realize there may be similar objects in the Kyper belt, a region outside our solar system. This led to Pluto being reclassified as a dwarf planet. Further observations of these distant objects could help us understand the evolution of our solar system. Gammaray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe. And for a long time, no one knew where they had been coming from. Hubble helped us find out that these bursts happened in galaxies producing a lot of stars and having few heavy elements. This suggests that gammaray bursts happen when big stars collapse into black holes. These galaxies have lots of big stars that fall apart quickly. And the stars there don't have much heavy stuff, so they can turn into black holes. In 1994, the Shoemaker Ley 9 comet collided with Jupiter. Hubble captured the whole event in detail like a resourceful journalist. The impact broke the comet into a lot of small pieces which resulted in 21 other visible collisions. The largest impact created a fireball and a dark spot on Jupiter's surface. Hubble's observations not only sparked public interest in cosmic impacts, but also provided new insights into Jupiter's atmosphere. To move forward with our list of discoveries made by the Hubble telescope, we also need to talk about black holes. They are points in space where gravity has so much force that even light cannot escape it. The gravity becomes so strong that matter gets squeezed into a very small space. We know that this can happen when a star like the sun nears the end of its life.

At the beginning of its life, a stars hydrogen ignites in its dense hot core.

Because of gravity, it tries to draw its own mass into a tiny point. As long as it has the energy generated by the hydrogen fusion, it also pushes outward.

If we look at it this way, the life of a star depends on a delicate balance between these forces and it can last millions or even billions of years. Once that energy is exhausted, the only force remaining is that of gravity. So some stars become black holes. Since light itself cannot escape their pull, we can't visualize black holes. For the human eye, they are invisible. We need special tools and unique telescopes to help us point them out in the universe. Hubble found that most galaxies with a central bulge of stars likely have super massive black holes.

It has also noticed a strong connection between the sizes of these black holes and their host galaxies which might help us understand how the universe has changed over time. Then what is a super massive black hole? You might ask. Go ahead, ask it. It is a very large black hole that is typically found at the center of a galaxy. It is millions or even billions of times more massive than the sun. These black holes are so powerful that they can swallow stars and even entire galaxies. Scientists are still exploring these mysterious objects, but they believe that they play a crucial role in the formation and evolution of galaxies.

Before Hubble, we didn't really know how old the universe was. It often led to weird paradoxes like the one where stars discovered by astronomers were older than the universe itself. But by figuring out the approximate rate at which the universe is expanding, Hubble helped us narrow down its age, about 13.75 billion years. Trying to figure out the exact age of the universe is an important question. That's because most astronomers think that the universe has not existed forever, but appeared in one really hot and dense fireball called the Big Bang. I wasn't around then. In April 2023, astronomers found something exciting, a runaway black hole. This thing is moving through the universe at an incredible speed, about 3.5 million mph. It's 4.5,000 times faster than the speed of sound. They found it accidentally. Researchers noticed that there was some weird straight line in Hubble images. After some digging, they realized there was a moving black hole.

As it moves, it compresses the gas on its path, literally creating new stars along its journey. So, it's leaving a beautiful long trail of stars behind it.

And when I say long, I mean it. Its tail is 200,000 lighty years long, which is like the length of two Milky Ways. Turns out one end of this star trail connects to a distant small galaxy. This is probably where the black hole came from.

Most likely there were two super massive black holes whirling around each other.

And then another galaxy came along with its own super massive black hole and ejected one of the original ones like a mean kid, which is why it's called Runaway.

There might be a ninth planet with the very original name, Planet 9, in our solar system. If it exists, it's probably somewhere far beyond Pluto.

Astronomers think so because some rocky objects near Neptune move in a weird way, as if they were influenced by the gravity of a large unseen planet. Planet 9 might be a gas or ice giant seven times the mass of Earth.

One of the ideas is that it could have existed in our solar system but then bumped into something huge and ended up with a crazy long orbit around our sun.

If we actually discover it, it could change our understanding of the solar system. A new telescope is coming soon, equipped with the largest digital camera ever built, and it will start scanning the sky in 2025. Maybe it will finally spot this mysterious planet.

Another awesome discovery was made in 2023. The James Webb Space Telescope found over 500 planet-like objects in the Orion Nebula. Some of them are roughly the mass of Jupiter. So, they're literally called Jupiter mass binary objects or jumbos. They just float out there with no stars. And they're not really stars or planets themselves.

What's even crazier is that in about 42 pairs of them, the objects are orbiting each other. even though planets aren't supposed to do that. On top of that, such large objects shouldn't form and exist without a star at all. So now astronomers are trying to explain this.

Perhaps jumbos have formed in places where there was enough stuff for big planet-like objects, but not enough for stars. Or maybe all of them were ejected from their star systems for some reason.

Who knows? But now we definitely need to study them.

The black hole in the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A star, used to be super weird. Luckily, it didn't run away like that other one, but it was completely crazy in the past.

Astronomers found two super massive structures called the Fermy bubbles and aerosa bubbles. They span about half the width of our entire galaxy, and they've been towering over the Milky Way for over 2 million years now. And scientists think that it's our black hole that created them. It seems like when it was at its peak activity, it had a wild energetic eruption that lasted about a 100,000 years. This event probably left these bubbles. In 2023, the James Web Space Telescope took a striking superdetailed image of the so-called Herbig Harrow objects. These objects are called Herbig Harrow 46/47.

They're basically young stars surrounded by beautiful patches of nebulosity. You can see the stars being surrounded by a dis of material that feeds them as they grow for millions of years. They're located at about 1,470 lighty years away. But they're actually not our main topic of discussion. What's much more interesting is this weird thing right below them. A space structure that looks like a question mark. What is this thing? No one knows for sure. It has an orange red color which hints that it might be super distant, far from our galaxy, maybe even billions of light years away. Some think that this strange question mark is probably the result of two or more galaxies merging together. One of them was a bit curved, so it's probably a distorted spiral galaxy. The curve might be the tails being stripped off as they spiral towards each other. The other one was rounder and smaller like a regular spherical one. The gravity games never fail to amaze us. Astronomers started searching for extraterrestrial mega structures. They think that if there's another intelligent civilization out there, they could have built something incredibly huge to power their technology. For example, like Dyson spheres, hypothetical structures around stars that use the stars energy as fuel.

Astronomers analyzed some historical telescope data that detects infrared signals. They spotted some weird signals that could hint at the presence of these structures. In total, there are seven such candidates right now. All of them are coming from red dwarf stars, which are redder, smaller, and less massive than the sun. Another research institute found 53 potential candidates. They're still not sure what exactly causes these signals, but it could be not Dyson spheres, but some huge debris. It looks like there are some mysterious structures in the center of our galaxy. In 2023, the James Web Space Telescope has taken a detailed picture of the Sagittarius Sea region. It's right near the center of the Milky Way.

This image showed a dense area where stars are forming. There were many young stars and dark clouds that blocked the light from the stars behind them. That's a very packed place with about 500,000 stars of different ages, sizes, and colors. This place is very chaotic and extreme. Now, scientists are using it to study star formation. But the weird part is that they noticed something else. the large region of ionized hydrogen. It looks like cyan in the image. This area is about 25 lightyear long surrounding the lower side of dense cloud. And it looks like there are some needleike structures. They seem to be located randomly and astronomers have no idea what they are. So now they have to study this in more detail. Astronomers have found a super rare massive galaxy. It's called JWST7329 and it's absolutely ancient.

Our entire universe is about 13.8 billion years old, but the stars in this galaxy seem to have formed around 13 billion years ago. So just around 800 million years after the Big Bang. Also, this venerable elder has four times more mass in stars than our Milky Way does today.

This strange discovery challenges what we know about galaxy formation and the nature of dark matter. Everything we know tells us that galaxies shouldn't have formed so early. There shouldn't have been enough dark matter for that.

But here we are. So perhaps our models need some revision.

There was an incredible astronomical event called AT2021LWX, which is also called Scary Barbie. It was an unbelievably bright burst of energy that happened on April 13, 2021. It's one of the most energetic space events ever observed. No galaxies or quazars were nearby. So, what in the world happened? At first, astronomers thought that it was caused by a super massive black hole pulling in a massive star.

But after some studying, they think it's probably because a giant black hole had some crazy dinner. It probably ate a large amount of gas, possibly a giant molecular cloud. The Titanic black hole in question is between 100 million and a billion times the mass of the sun. This is one of the most massive known and active black holes. Astronomers found the oldest strand of the cosmic web ever seen. The cosmic web is what we call a huge structure of the universe that's made of interconnected filaments of galaxies and dark matter. They're like a framework for galaxies and other structures playing a crucial role in their formation. The filament we're talking about is made up of 10 closely packed galaxies. It's unimaginably huge, stretching over 3 million lightyear, and it looks like the newly discovered strand is very ancient. It occurred only 830 million years after the Big Bang.

It's probably anchored by a luminous quazar. This discovery makes us question how exactly galaxies are formed and what exactly happened to our universe after the Big Bang.

Well, it turns out black holes might not be as elusive as we once thought. They might be hiding within stars. In this case, the extra mass of some of these space lanterns could explain weird gravitational effects in the universe. Previously, dark matter was the cause of these phenomena. The black holes I'm talking about might be those itty bitty ones that appeared at the dawn of time when the universe was just a baby. And they may still be lurking in the hearts of giant stars.

A team of scientists say the idea might be quite plausible. Astronomers could detect such trapped black holes by the vibrations they produce on their stars surfaces. And if there are many of them out there in the cosmos, they might function as the very dark matter that holds the universe together. Almost any black hole was once a massive star that collapsed in on itself and became incredibly dense.

Black holes have immense gravitational pull. Even light can't escape their clutches. People often think that black holes work like vacuums pulling space inside. But that's not the case. Black holes can only swallow stuff that is extremely close. Usually space objects venturing into their event horizon.

That's a black hole's point of no return. Once you cross this border, there's no escape.

In 1971, renowned physicist Stephven Hawking suggested another origin of black holes. If we took the thick soup of particles that appeared moments after the Big Bang and the birth of the universe, we'd be bound to find some spots dense enough to collapse and create black holes.

Such holes which got the name of primordial black holes could range in size from microscopic to gigantic. If they were pervasive and numerous enough, primordial black holes could act as dark matter, knitting the cosmos together with their enormous gravity. And dark matter is believed to make up 85% of all the matter in the universe. So what's the matter? Ha! Astronomers have been searching for primordial holes by looking for flashes that would occur when they pass in front of distant bright objects magnifying their light like a lens. But they haven't spotted even one yet. On the other hand, if a primordial black hole was tiny enough with a mass like that of an asteroid and a diameter as minuscule as a hydrogen atom, the flashes wouldn't be bright enough to be detected by such surveys.

Then the team researching the phenomenon of primordial black holes decided to consider the consequences of a universe where dark matter was made entirely out of tiny black holes. They concluded that one of such teensy holes could be dashing through the solar system at any given time. Some might occasionally get trapped within gas clouds giving birth to new stars ending up in their centers.

The next step of the researchers was to build a model of a black hole existing in the very core of a star where hydrogen atoms undergo fusion and produce light and heat. At first, they didn't see anything unusual. Even a super dense stellar core is mostly empty space. And it wouldn't be easy for a microscopic black hole to find matter to consume there. That's why its growth would be incredibly slow. It could take longer than the lifetime of the universe for this tiny hole to eat a star. But what if a larger hole as massive as the dwarf planet Pluto or asteroid series appeared at the center of a star? Then it would get bigger in a matter of a few hundred million years.

The material would keep spiraling into the black hole, creating a disc that would heat up because of friction, emitting radiation. Once the black hole grew to the size of Earth, it would start emitting even more radiation, shining extremely brightly. It would also be churning up the stars core, and the star itself would turn into a black hole powered rather than a fusionpowered object. Such entities were dubbed Hawking stars. To cool off, the exterior of a Hawking star would form a red giant.

That's what our sun is likely to turn into as it gets older. But a red giant star with a primordial black hole at its center would be cooler than the star that has reached this stage through regular means. Such stars are known as red stragglers. To find out whether they indeed host a black hole, astronomers might need to tune in to the frequencies at which stars vibrate. Since a Hawking star would mostly affect the interior of the star rather than its topmost layers, the star would thrum with a certain combination of frequencies, the waves created in the process could be detected in the way the stars light would pulse and throb. So all scientists need to do now is to study the already known red stragglers and figure out whether any of them show the characteristic vibrations of a black hole.

Should we worry about the sun? Since our star hasn't reached its red giant stage yet, we can't know whether it'll turn into a cool red straggler. What we know, though, is that our star might contain those tiny black holes that formed in the Big Bang. But now, we have no means to check whether they're indeed there. Currently, our star is around the midpoint of its existence. Middle age hm. It creates energy non-stop by fusing hydrogen atoms within its core. Once it runs out of hydrogen in its core, it will enter its red giant phase and begin to collapse. It will happen in about 5 billion years. Don't hold your breath.

And the phase itself will last for a billion years or so before our star depletes its fusible materials and loses its outer layers. It will leave behind a tiny white dwarf star half as massive as the sun and around the size of our planet. In some cases, when the gravitational collapse of a stars core is complete, the stellar remnants turn into a black hole. But that's not the fate awaiting our sun. You see, our star just doesn't have what it takes to become a black hole. It's not heavy enough. There are a few conditions that can affect whether a star can turn into a black hole, including its composition, rotation, and the processes that lead to its evolution. But the main requirement is still the right mass. Stars with 20 to 25 times the mass of the sun can potentially experience the gravitational collapse needed to form black holes. In other words, the sun is simply too small to form a black hole. But what would happen to us if it did? You might assume that if the sun turned into a black hole, our planet would be doomed to be pulled into it.

But do you remember the basics? Black holes aren't giant space vacuum cleaners just sitting there and waiting for a new planet or star to get their hands on.

Mwah. But black holes don't have enough gravitational force beyond that created by their incredible mass. And if the sun were to turn into a black hole, which will not happen, this hole would still have the same mass as our former star and Earth's orbit around this newly formed black hole, wouldn't change, but all other things would change dramatically. The sun, which is currently around 695, Jner 36 km in radius, would shrink to a mere 3 km in radius. But you wouldn't be concerned with the absence of the bright yellow sphere in the sky since you'd have many more pressing issues on your hands. Our planet's main heat source would be gone, leaving us frozen in the dark. Without this source of energy, photosynthesis would immediately stop, disrupting entire food chains. Eventually, all life on Earth would be extinguished. But rest assured, our hard, barren rock of a planet would continue in its orbit.The sun burns with relentless fury, its flames reaching across the void—yet space remains an unforgiving abyss, colder than the depths of a frozen world. Heat without touch, fire without warmth—the cosmos obeys a rule we rarely question. Light travels freely, scattering in brilliance, but warmth requires something more—a vessel, a medium, a way to hold its embrace. In the silence of space, there is nowhere for heat to linger, no hand to carry its fire.

But if the stars blaze in endless fury, why does the universe still shiver? Let me know in the comment section and don't forget to subscribe and like. Thanks for reading untill next time.