What If You Lived on an Extreme Planet with Fire Oceans

0:00Magma Oceans' supersonic winds scorching hot days and instead of rain, a bunch of rocks falling on your head. Just another one of those days, huh? Astronomers recently discovered a new super planet out there. K2-414B is an exoplanet that's around 200 light years away and in serious need of a new name. An exoplanet is just a fancy way of saying that a planet orbits its own star in another solar system. The Earth orbits the Sun, so this planet has its own orbit party going on. So what makes K2 a bunch of numbers so scary? Picture our beautiful little blue planet Earth. Now imagine that all the volcanoes in the world suddenly erupted at the same time and lava covered the oceans and seas. Firey hurricanes, thousands of times faster than normal, blow all over the place, 24-7, and it starts raining rocks every now and again.

1:01Rocks, like on your head, thankfully not in your head. This scary planet came into our lives about two years ago. Scientists are still studying it. So what's a typical day life? For starters, you can forget about breathing. Oxygen decided to take a pass on this planet. You'd have to get used to sodium, silicon monoxide, and silicon dioxide, which is, as you guessed, not great. And that's just scratching the surface. Who knows what other chemicals are lying around. And yes, magma oceans. The planet's surface is covered in molten magma as far as the eye can see. This lava planet orbits really close to its star, which is why the surface is like a fireplace. The closest planets to our sun are Mercury and Venus, but this planet is even closer. And what's even more weird is that half the planet is in constant daytime, the other half night. It's tidalock, just like our moon is. No matter how long you stare at it, you'll never see the other side.

2:04That's why the all day, everyday scorching firey site is so hot and overflowing with magma oceans, while the other side is in a constant state of deep freeze. If the magma doesn't burn you, you've still got big problems and please don't look up. It's raining rocks. On Earth, water turns to steam, rises up, becomes clouds, cools, and falls as rain. Over there, on planet Fireball, it's exactly the same, except for its rocks people. The planet so hot, it vaporizes rocks. Oh, and don't forget the supersonic winds with speeds up to 3,000 miles per hour. Imagine your head getting blown off your head at five times faster than an airplane. The strongest wind on Earth was the tropical cyclone Olivia that hit Australia. It was blowing at 250 miles per hour. Now imagine 12 times that. On the sunny side of the planet, you're looking at a roasting 5,000 degrees. The hottest it ever got on Earth's surface was in California, 135 degrees.

3:07It's pretty common for it to get near that temperature in the Sahara Desert, but that kind of heat's not exactly enough to make rocks evaporate. If you grew up near a desert, you already know how dry and hot it always is, but did you know that deserts can reach freezing temperatures? A desert, by definition, is a large area with little or no rainfall. That means no water vapor to keep the temperatures from going insane. In the daytime, the sun heats up the desert like an oven, but when the sun sets, the heat packs up and hits home and it can get really cold. Some deserts have even reached minus 40 degrees at night. But wait, shouldn't deserts have snow if it's that cold? Well, some deserts have had a bit of snow here and there, but because there's no water vapor, there can't be that much snow. Just dry, freezing sandy Sahara nights. Now the Sahara Desert's actually not the largest desert on Earth. It's Antarctica, five million square miles of icy dryness,

4:11almost no people, and a whole bunch of cute penguins. Penguins technically live in a desert. Back to the Fireball Planet, this time, the night side. Never ending darkness and extreme cold, about minus 330 degrees, adding some supersonic winds, Earth's coldest minus 130 degrees at a research center in Antarctica. So how does this jalapeno pepper exoplanet stack up against some of our neighbors? Well, Mars isn't exactly livable either. It's the red planet, so you'd think it'd be hot most of the time. But it's usually freezing. Well, way below freezing. And if you're planning a weekend getaway to Mars, you can leave the umbrella at home. Nah, it doesn't rain rocks, and it actually hasn't rained there for millions of years. At least Mars has days and nights, and it's like Earth in other ways. Mars Equator is steamy hot, and it gets pretty cold at the north and south poles, just like Earth.

5:13Scientists even discovered all bits of carbon dioxide snow there. The entire planet is actually covered in carbon dioxide, with a splash of nitrogen here and there. Scientists even reported intense snowstorms on Mars, but because it's mostly carbon dioxide, it's not your typical snowstorm. It's more like a dry ice storm. That's the stuff they use in fog machines. Mars isn't the only place where climates are going cuckoo. Jupiter's famous for its gigantic storms. Not like the ones we know on Earth. I'm talking about storms that last for centuries. The great red spot on Jupiter is actually a 400-year-old storm, and you could fit four whole earths inside of it. So it's been around for a while, but it's nowhere near as intense as the storms on K2. Venus also has intense rain, but it's not made of rocks. It sort of works. It rains sulfuric acid. That stuff can give you severe skin burns and rip nasty holes through your umbrella.

6:17Venus' atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide, which acts like a net to trap in the sun's radiation, and it's insanely hot. No magma oceans, though. Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and doesn't even have an atmosphere. That means no storms, clouds, rain, wind, whatever. Mercury is kind of like a desert here on Earth. No water vapor and no rainfall. That means temperatures shoot up during the day and drop like crazy at night. The K2 exoplanets, like the most extreme parts of all of our solar system, all rolled into one scary planet. But we're not headed there anytime soon. We haven't even been to Mars yet. That's all way off in the future and 200 light years is a really long travel time. If we're going to move anywhere anytime soon, we'll probably want to set up camp on the moon. No magma oceans, no warp speed winds, nice temperatures. So where would we even start?

7:19Well, the main issue is that drones and remote control robots are getting more and more advanced. It's way cheaper to send them over to map out the moon for us while we're safe here on Earth. And if we ever want to begin space exploration for real, we'd need a proper space base. And what better place than our little shiny moon? So why do we even study those far off planets? What's the point? Well, planets are like people. They're all different ages and live in all different places. The more of them we study, the more we can understand why there's life, a K.A. us on Earth and not on any other planet so far. When we see crazy new planets, we get crazy new ideas, which can turn into awesome inventions that make our lives easier. Even just going into space gives us new ideas. Scratch-proof lenses, some firefighting equipment, water filtration systems, wireless headsets, invisible braces,

8:20that tiny vacuum you'd use to clean those crumbs in from between your couch cushions, they were all invented to help astronauts work better in space. And now they make our lives better every day. Baby, we'll figure out a new energy source someday, thanks to a far off planet or star. Or we might discover a new compound and we'll make our building stronger or more energy efficient.