Journey to a Star That'll Explode Any Day Now

0:00Beetlejuice, a red super giant. This ball of boiling plasma is one of the largest stars in our galaxy, and one of the brightest. It's about 500 times larger than the sun, but Beetlejuice is pulsating, getting bigger and smaller. At its peak, it becomes 800 times its average size. If this star were a bucket, it would fit about 300 million suns, even though it's weight is only 17 times greater. And here, about 500 light years away is Earth. We launch our faster than light spaceship and set off on our journey to Beetlejuice. A few seconds, and we've already traveled 240,000 miles, and now are close to the moon. That's nine and a half trips around the Earth. A traditional rocket-powered spacecraft would take three days to get here. We're near Mars now. The flight to the red planet usually takes about seven months. Several rovers are now at work here, as well as the first ever flying drone ingenuity. The surface of Mars

1:02is three times smaller than that of Earth. The planet is also 10 times lighter. People hope to build a human colony here soon. Right beyond Mars, we have to wiggle and constantly dodge space rocks. This is the asteroid belt. It contains debris and space objects of different sizes and shapes. The biggest of them is series. Its surface is slightly larger than the area of Argentina, and its weight is about 1% of the moons. The total weight of the entire asteroid belt is 25 times less than the moons. Next, we pass gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. These are the largest planets in the solar system. They're also the heaviest, even though they don't have a solid surface. Then we travel by Uranus and Neptune. They're called ice giants. And at the very edge of the solar system, we see Pluto. It was once considered a full-fledged planet, but now it's not even on the list. After that, we're 4.3 billion miles away from our home. It took the new horizon's space

2:03probe about 9 years to get here. Hold on to your seat. We're speeding up. We're passing through the kite belt. There are lots of asteroids and blocks of ice here. These are some of the oldest building materials in our solar system. Billions of years ago, our whole world looked like a cloud of these asteroids. We're traveling further through dark space and reach the edge of the solar system, the heliosphere. All this time, we've been moving with the solar wind. But now, it starts to slow down, collides with the inner stellar wind, and heats up. This is called the termination shock. The Voyager 1 space probe got to this point in December 2004. We're moving to the region where the heliosphere ends and inner stellar space begins. This is the heliopause. In 2012, Voyager crossed this boundary and became the first ever human-made object in inner stellar space. But the message from Voyager reporting this event came to Earth almost a year later because of the huge distance. It took 35 years for Voyager 1 to travel all this way.

3:10And here it is. The probe is as long as a car and weighs like two motorcycles. You can see a gold plate on its hull. It's a message from people to potential civilizations out there. It has pictures of Earth's landscapes, recordings of human speech, and our DNA. As of 2021, Voyager has been operational for almost 43 years. The probe has traveled 14 billion miles. That's like 152 Earth to the sun distances, and it's still making its way through space at 38,000 miles per hour. Now, we're approaching the nearest star to our solar system. It's Proxima Centauri. We're so far from home that even light needs more than four years to travel this distance. If we used a traditional rocket, the trip would take us 73,000 years. The reason we wanted to get here was because of an Earth-like planet called Proxima Centauri B. It's 10% larger than Earth and slightly heavier. It lies in the habitable zone of its host star. It means that water might exist on the planet in

4:15its liquid state, and there can be life that forms here. But the star itself occasionally produces flares. Recently, its brightness increased almost 1,000 times. During that time, it emitted so much radiation that even if there were some forms of life on the planet, they probably ceased to exist. We're now more than eight light years away from Earth. The brightest star in our night sky is Sirius. Seriously. It's so bright that you can see it even during the day. But in reality, there are actually two stars, Sirius A and B. They orbit around a common center of gravity, and these stars are moving toward our solar system at almost five miles per second. That's the same as the maximum speed of a top of the line's super-car on Earth. Foot down, and we've arrived at a potentially habitable planet, 39 light years away from Earth. This is Trappist 1D. Its host star is a white dwarf. It's a cold star, 10 times smaller and lighter than the Sun. There are seven

5:18planets around it, but Trappist 1D is the most similar to Earth. It's only 30% smaller and three times lighter. But it has a rocky surface, and the temperature here is 48 degrees Fahrenheit. You'd feel comfortable here wearing a light jacket. There might be an atmosphere, mountains, seas, and oceans here, which means this planet might be suitable for a human colony. But it would take about 677,000 years to get here using traditional rockets. And here's our main goal, Beetlejuice. It takes nearly 8.7 million years to travel here from Earth in a current day spacecraft. This star is so big that our ship looks like a grain of sand on a giant beach. We have to jump back in time to find out what happened to this star. First, there was a beautiful nebula. It's a cloud of multicolored space dust and debris. Then, it began to shrink under its own weight. In the core of the nebula, a nuclear reaction began. Boom! And the star was born. At first,

6:21Beetlejuice was very massive and hot, but it didn't expand and remain stable. Let's look into its heart. The nuclear reactions in the star's core create a lot of heat and energy. This energy produces the force that pushes on the walls of the star from the inside and causes it to expand. But at the same time, the star is very heavy. That's why gravity pushes on it from the outside. If these two forces are balanced, the star remains stable. But over time, the star runs out of its fuel, helium and hydrogen. That's when heavier elements in the core join the nuclear reaction. When they burn, they release more energy and heat than gravity can hold. And the star starts expanding. That's what's happening to Beetlejuice right now. It's already so big that if you put it in the center of our solar system, its edge would touch the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Beetlejuice will continue to expand until it exhausts its fuel completely. Then, the gravity will win. The star will shrink in size,

7:24and then an enormous boom will happen. A supernova explosion will be so blinding that Beetlejuice will shine brighter than the moon in the night sky. Luckily, Earth is too far away for this explosion to cause any harm to people. A strong stream of matter that will be ejected from the explosion site won't reach the solar system until 6 million years later. Even so, the solar wind will stop this flow, so we'll be safe. Beetlejuice is likely to explode at any time in the next 10,000 years, but some scientists say it won't happen in the next 100 millennia. Back to the moment before the explosion of Beetlejuice, there can be another more interesting scenario. Gravity might compress the massive core of the star with such force that a black hole will appear in its place. Black holes are the heaviest objects in the universe. They have incredible gravitational force. Even light can't escape their gravitational trap. The Beetlejuice black hole will begin feeding on cosmic dust and whatever is left of the star. All this debris and light from

8:30other stars will get frozen near the event horizon of the growing black hole. For the first time in history, we'll be able to watch the birth of this mysterious object. But in reality, Beetlejuice is too light to become a black hole. Most likely, after the explosion, it'll turn into a white dwarf that will gradually fade until it becomes invisible.