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for a star running into a black hole normally ends in a spectacular light show and its destruction just one star that astronomers know of managed to survive an encounter with a black hole as heavy as 400 000 suns it happened in a galaxy about 250 million light years away from earth astronomers with really powerful equipment noticed bursts of x-rays that raged in space every nine hours they thought they must be mayday signals from a star trapped by a cosmic abyss the star was an average red giant when it met its new friend for the first

time when they got too close to each other the hungry space monster couldn't resist the temptation and snacked on its guest when it was done with the star's outer hydrogen layers all that was left was the star's core eventually the poor thing turned into a white dwarf but for some reason the giant space monster couldn't finish the meal and trapped it in its orbit for later instead ever since the now white dwarf has been traveling in nine hour laps it stays far enough from the hole so it won't fall in or get swallowed its journey

isn't going super smoothly because of gravity the orbital path is constantly rotating after two days it resembles a spirograph pattern as the black hole keeps snacking on it the star keeps losing its mass and growing in size its own orbit is becoming more and more circular scientists believe one day it will be able to spiral away from its mean friend and turn into a planet the size of jupiter in a trillion years that's 70 times longer than the universe has existed so far so it might not ever happen the milky way alone has hundreds of

millions of black holes and there are way more beyond it they might feed on other stars and release them in other galaxies the telescopes that exist now might not be strong enough to spot them most galaxies including our milky way have super massive black holes at the center they can be billions of times heavier than the sun others of their kind are only three times the mass of the sun the nearest black hole to the earth was spotted one thousand light years away just around the corner in galactic terms it's in a star system you

can see with an unaided eye scientists found it when they notice a star behaving weirdly it was a giant rotating like crazy they guessed it must have a powerful gravitational companion the hungriest black hole astronomers have spotted so far weighs as much as 34 billion suns and is about six times bigger than the one at the center of the milky way it eats the equivalent of one sun every day sometimes black holes even devour others of their kind that happen to be too close to them before you get on a spaceship to escape to some

safe no black hole galaxy here's some good news even though they're super massive they don't have a radius large enough to destroy earth and even the hungriest of them are safe to watch from a distance no black hole should come closer to our planet than the sun for as long as the universe has existed multiplied by 10 billion times in the unlikely case one of these scary things passes by neptune it could affect the earth's orbit that would be no good in theory anything can turn into a black hole the only difference between it and

the sun is the material their centers are made of it's incredibly dense in those huge space monsters in reality there's just one known way to make a black hole it has to be the gravitational collapse of a super massive star 20 to 30 times the mass of the sun so the sun will never ever become a black hole trash isn't just a problem in earth's ocean cities and forests there is a thing called space junk which is any human-made object that's been left in space and now serves no purpose there's also natural debris from meteoroids

and other cosmic objects there are currently over 500 000 pieces of space debris orbiting the earth at speeds high enough to cause significant damage if they were to collide with a spacecraft or satellite nasa does its best to track every single object to ensure that missions outside earth can reach their destination safely have you ever looked up at the night sky and tried to count all the stars yeah good luck our galaxy the milky way not the candy bar the galaxy has about 100 billion stars but other estimates put it at over 200 billion since

calculating the exact amount is an almost impossible task even for astronomers as for the entire universe there are at least a billion trillion stars that's a one with 21 zeros after it for comparison that means there are more stars in space than there are grains of sand on all of earth's beaches when the planets in the solar system were just starting to form earth didn't have a moon for the longest time it took a hundred million years for our natural satellite to appear there are several theories as to how the moon came into existence but

the prevailing one is the fission theory is that where somebody went fishing caught the moon on a hook and dragged it over into earth's orbit no i made that up the fission theory proposes that the moon was formed when an object collided with earth sending particles flying about gravity pulled the particles together and the moon was created it eventually settled down onto earth's elliptical plane which is the path that the moon orbits a trip to the nearest star apart from the sun would take you 5 million years on a commercial airplane that's what i call

a long haul flight it would take you about a hundred thousand years to travel from one end of our milky way galaxy to the other at the speed of light on a plane that's just too many zeros to fit into a single screen the sun can fit about a million earths inside it but there's a star called uy scooty that's about seventeen hundred times larger than the sun almost everything in space is connected with everything else by gravity star systems are part of galaxies galaxies are part of clusters and clusters are parts of superclusters the

largest known supercluster in the universe is the hercules corona borealis great wall that's a name it's more than 10 billion light years wide mars has the largest natural formations in the solar system the mountain three times taller than everest the canyon almost seven times longer than the grand canyon and the crater that could fit half the amazon river across it although the big bang theory is the most viable one researchers still find evidence against it for example one theory suggests there's an axis around which the whole universe rotates it's aptly named the axis of evil

there's a supermassive black hole at the center of almost every major galaxy including ours black holes can attract not only stars and planets but also other black holes eventually merging and becoming one with a much greater mass the spinning movement and enormous gravity of black holes sometimes makes it throw jets of matter into space traveling at almost the speed of light there's a thing called the great attractor it's a gravitational anomaly outside our galaxy that can't be seen but is known to attract the milky way and lots of other galaxies toward itself the highest mountain

in the solar system is olympus mons on mars it's three times as high as mount everest the earth's highest mountain above sea level if you were standing on top of olympus mods you wouldn't understand you were standing on a mountain its slopes would be hidden by the planet's curvature the moon's gravity is only 17 of the earth's if your weight was 100 pounds on our home planet you'd only weigh 17 pounds on the moon you would be able to walk a distance six times longer and carry a weight six times heavier there or just hire

somebody from nasa to carry it for you though it's easier to walk on the moon it's more dangerous too an astronaut's foot in a heavy space suit sinks into the moon's ground up to six inches deep long distance jumps are uncontrolled and dangerous because the moon's surface is full of deep craters one of the things jupiter is famous for is the great red spot a giant spinning storm this phenomenon used to be so gigantic that it could fit two or even three earths but the spot is shrinking right now it wouldn't fit more than one

earth if two pieces of the same kind of metal touch in space they bond and get permanently stuck together it doesn't happen on earth thanks to water and air that keep pieces separate the moon is not an ideal sphere it's shaped more like an egg because of the earth's gravity the base of the egg shape points toward our planet normal visible matter for example planets and stars make up just five percent of the universe the rest consists of invisible dark energy that's 68 and dark matter about 27 it leaves us with 95 percent of space

we know nothing about the mysterious kuiper belt lies behind the orbit of neptune it's filled with massive icy objects the most curious thing about this phenomenon is its movement pattern the only explanation astronomers have neptune is hiding a ginormous planet this hypothetical planet has already got the name planet nine all we have to do is wait until its existence is confirmed or not you won't be able to wear a hat on venus ever and just try to stand on your feet the planet is insanely windy its upper winds blow 50 times faster than the planet

rotates what's more these fierce winds never stop and can get even stronger with time want to get away you'll have to travel 11 billion miles away from earth before ever leaving the solar system take your google maps with you you probably heard of methane gas a byproduct of natural processes such as volcanic activity and cows anyway this gas is not only a part of the martian atmosphere but also the thing that confuses astronomers to no end the thing is that the volume of methane on mars keeps wavering and scientists just can't figure out where it

might be coming from can there be cows on mars as you may remember pluto used to be a planet but was stripped of this title in 2006 later it was reclassified as a dwarf planet gee make up your mind but the most unexpected fact about this celestial body is that its diameter is smaller than that of the us see for yourself the greatest distance across the country from maine to northern california is about 2 800 miles as for pluto it's only 1473 miles across in fact if you laid pluto right down in the middle of

the united states you'd crush the heck out of iowa kansas and nebraska bad idea the planet uranus or uranus you can't win either way rotates on its side and astronomers have no idea why the planet has chosen such an unusual position the culprits could be ancient mega powerful collisions but so far it's just a theory by the way this is the only planet laying on its side our sun is insanely massive want some proof well 99.86 percent of all the mass in the solar system is in the mass of the sun in particular the hydrogen

and helium it's made of the remaining 0.14 is mostly the mass of the solar system's eight planets a light year is the unit of distance covered by light in a single year light moves a little more than one hundred eighty six thousand miles per second so one light year is almost six trillion miles which reminds me our milky way is one hundred five thousand seven hundred light years wide really trust me there's a whole lot of water floating in space astronomers discovered a huge vapor cloud that's 140 trillion times the mass of the earth's ocean

water but don't worry it's 12 billion light years away so we won't drown in that stuff anytime soon saturn's rings weren't discovered all at once it happened gradually and they were named alphabetically based on the time scientists found them they go like this d c b a f g e which of course spells dick bafke there's a giant red spot on jupiter that's bigger than earth astronomers confirm that it's a perpetual storm that has been going on for centuries color me weightless astronauts only wear orange spacesuits during launch landing or when they're in the spaceship

for survival and rescue purposes their white suits are equipped differently to help them survive in outer space the closest neighbor to our milky way is the andromeda galaxy it's 2.5 million light years away and you can see it on a clear night with an unaided eye and by the way in a little more than four billion years our galaxy will collide with the andromeda galaxy according to some predictions the galaxies won't survive but our solar system will place your bets it takes 243 earth days for venus to complete a rotation around its axis but it

takes 225 earth days for the planet to orbit the sun that means a day on venus is longer than a year now we always see the same side of the moon no matter where we are on earth that's because the moon rotates around the earth at the same speed it rotates around its own axis outer space isn't a perfect vacuum it contains not only stars and planets but also clouds of interstellar dust space plasma and cosmic rays those are atom fragments dashing from the outskirts of the solar system one phenomenon people should be worried about

while exploring space is cold welding if two pieces of the same kind of metal touch in space they bond and get permanently stuck together it doesn't happen on earth since water and air keep pieces separate astronauts on board the international space station don't use their feet to walk they float around so in orbit the skin on their feet becomes very soft and starts to peel off that's why they have to take their socks off very carefully otherwise skin cells will break free and float around in the almost weightless environment earthquakes on the moon or more

correctly moonquakes aren't something from science fiction they don't occur as often as on our planet and when they do it happens closer to the center of the satellite scientists think moonquakes might be caused by the gravity of earth and the sun one of the moons of saturn rhea might have a ring system consisting of three narrow bands if astronomers managed to confirm it it'll be the first time people discovered rings around a moon a that's nothing i've had rings around my collar for years normal visible matter for example planets and stars makes up just five

percent of the universe the rest consists of invisible dark energy that's 68 percent and dark matter about 27 percent add it up and there's 95 percent of space we know nothing about in its darkest areas space is freezing cold minus 454 degrees fahrenheit but try orbiting earth in the sunlight and you'll understand how scorching 250 degrees feel that's one of the reasons astronaut spacesuits are white this color is the best to reflect the heat from the sun