The Most Disturbing Planets Ever Found

This is our home, Earth, a small blue planet orbiting the Sun. This world is well known to us, but out there in the far reaches of our galaxy there are completely different worlds that have nothing to do with the environment we know. Some of them have incredible storms where it rains glass, some of them are on the verge of extinction, and some shouldn't even exist according to our laws of physics. There are even worlds that don't even have a Sun to orbit. It is precisely these fascinating yet disturbing worlds that we will be looking at today, and we will also look at what would happen if you tried to set foot on one of these planets. Okay, let's get started. PSRB 1257 plus 12. The zombie solar system. When we think of solar systems, we imagine something familiar. A star in the middle, planets orbiting, maybe a little light and warmth. PSRB 1257 plus 12 is the exact opposite. What was once a normal star is now just a rotating carcass. A pulsar, so dense that a single teaspoonful of it would weigh several billion tons. And orbiting this dead star, in a zone of permanent radioactive radiation, are three confirmed planets. These planets were a historical turning point. They were the first exoplanets ever officially confirmed, discovered in 1992 by Alexander Volstian. Scientists had searched for years for planets around sun-like stars, and then the first ones appeared around a dead star. Whether they survived the death of their star, or formed anew from the debris of the supernova, both are almost inconceivable. What prevails there today is clear. No protective magnetic field. No life. Only constant bombardment with X-rays. Burned out. Sterilised. Dead. And what would happen to you there? The answer is short. The pulsar's radiation would destroy your DNA within seconds. No amount of protective gear in the world could stop it. Your body wouldn't burn. It wouldn't freeze. It would simply cease to function, quietly and silently, while the pulsar indifferently continues to spin. HD 80606 b. The temperature nightmare. Most planets have a more or less steady orbit. HD 80606 b does not. Its orbit is so extremely elliptical that it comes very close to its star at times, and is then far away again. A constant oscillation between two extremes. The result? When it approaches its star, the temperature rises by almost 700 degrees in less than six hours. No other known world experiences such temperature fluctuations in such a short time. The atmosphere reacts with gigantic shock waves and storms that spread across the entire planet at supersonic speeds. It is less a planet than a cosmic experiment in what matter can withstand, and what it cannot. Imagine standing there at the moment it approaches its star. Within minutes, the temperature would rise by hundreds of degrees. The air itself would become a weapon, boiling hot with shock waves that would engulf your body like an explosion. No slow burning. A sudden, complete collapse of everything that keeps you alive. LTT 9779 b. The planet that shouldn't exist. According to the laws of physics, some things simply shouldn't exist. LTT 9779 b is one of them. This planet is a so-called hot Neptune. A gas-rich planet that orbits extremely close to its star. The problem? Such planets shouldn't be able to survive there. The intense radiation from a nearby star should completely blow away the atmosphere of a Neptune-sized planet within millions of years, leaving behind only a barren, rocky core. Scientists call this empty zone around hot stars the Neptunian Desert. No hot Neptune can survive there for long. LTT 9779 b has survived there. For billions of years. How? That's the question science hasn't yet fully answered. One theory suggests that its atmosphere is so massive that even after billions of years, enough radiation remains. Another explanation is that it only recently moved into this orbit. None of the explanations are entirely convincing. What makes it even stranger is that its atmosphere contains titanium oxide and other metallic compounds, making it one of the most reflective objects in the known universe. LTT 9779 b reflects about 80% of the light that hits it, more than Venus, more than almost anything else. A planet that shines like a mirror in a zone where it should have disappeared long ago. HD 189733 b, the planet of glass rain. From a distance, HD 189733 b looks beautiful. A deep, rich blue, almost like Earth as seen from space. But this resemblance is a lie. The blue colour doesn't come from oceans, but from silicate particles in the atmosphere. Tiny shards of glass hurtling around the planet in a permanent storm at 8,700 kilometres per hour. No Earth storm even comes close. The strongest hurricane ever recorded on Earth had wind speeds of about 300 kilometres per hour. HD 189733 b is almost 30 times faster. These glass particles don't fall gently. They hurtle horizontally through the atmosphere, grinding, cutting and destroying everything in their path. Stand on the surface, the winds would engulf you in milliseconds, not blow you away, grind you down. The glass particles would scour skin, tissue and bone like sandpaper at high speed. What would remain would be little. In an atmosphere that is simultaneously over 1,000 degrees hot, probably nothing at all. Gliese 436 b, the burning ice. 320 degrees Celsius and yet full of ice. Gliese 436 b sounds like a contradiction, and it is. The planet's enormous gravitational pressure compresses water molecules so tightly that they cannot evaporate, even in extreme heat. Ice held solid by sheer gravity while the surface glows. And as if that weren't enough, the planet is losing itself. A vast cloud of hydrogen streams from it into space, a trail of its own atmosphere like a candle burning at both ends. What would happen to you there? The 320 degrees would burn your skin in seconds, tissue, muscles, everything. But even before you could really feel it, the atmospheric pressure would squeeze your body from all sides, like an invisible fist slowly closing. No dramatic death, no final moment of realisation. OGLE 2005 BLG 390 LB, the frozen nightmare. There's cold, we know. Siberian winters, Antarctic storms. And then there's this planet. Minus 220 degrees Celsius. Absolute zero is minus 273. This planet isn't far off. It orbits a faint dwarf star that barely emits any heat as far away as Mars is from our sun. Even the atmosphere here is likely frozen solid. Discovered through a gravitational lensing effect, a cosmic serendipitous find that showed us ice deserts like this might be more common than we thought. What would happen to your body there? First, your skin would react. Frostbite in seconds, not minutes. Your blood would stop flowing. Your muscles would become rigid. Your lungs would collapse on your first breath. No protective suit in the world could withstand this cold for long. Eventually, all warmth would be drained from you, silently and completely. What would remain would be a perfectly preserved body, frozen for eternity on a planet no one will ever visit. NGTS 10b, the dying planet. Some planets die slowly, over billions of years, almost gracefully. Not NGTS 10b. This planet orbits its star in less than 19 hours. Mercury takes 88 days. NGTS 10b hurtles so close to its star that tidal forces are pulling it down into the depths, piece by piece. The closer it gets, the stronger the pull, the faster its end. A vicious cycle with no escape. Scientists estimate about 38 million years left. On a cosmic scale, a blink of an eye. Eventually, the forces holding it together will no longer be sufficient and it will begin to break apart. We are currently watching a planet die. And your body there? Tidal forces would tear it apart even before it reached the ground. No burning, no impact, simply ripped apart, silently, into nothingness. Beta Pictoris b, the storm giant. Most planets orbit their star peacefully. Beta Pictoris b does not. This young gas giant is a planet in chaos, born in a still turbulent planetary system surrounded by dust, debris and immense energy. It is almost 10 times more massive than Jupiter and still extremely hot because it is only a few million years old. Its atmosphere practically glows in the infrared with temperatures exceeding 1,700 degrees Celsius. But heat is not its most impressive feature. It is the storms. On Beta Pictoris b, gigantic gas currents race around the entire planet. Turbulence forms in its heated atmosphere that could swallow entire continents on Earth. Clouds of silicates and metal particles swirl through the upper layers while enormous jet streams circle the planet. A single storm could be larger than Jupiter's great red spot and considerably more intense. This planet is no quiet gas giant. It's a storm planet, a place where the atmosphere transforms into a wild, chaotic ocean of heat and wind. Imagine standing there, or rather, floating. There would be no solid ground beneath you, only ever denser layers of incandescent gas. Winds would whip at you at thousands of kilometres per hour while lightning flashed through the dark cloud layers. The heat would slowly dissolve any form of matter. Not a single deadly moment, but a planet that would swallow you piece by piece in its storm. And those were just a few of the almost infinite number of worlds out there that make it clear just how good and special Earth really is. A planet with liquid water, with a breathable atmosphere, with temperatures where life is not only possible but thrives, with a magnetic field that protects us from radiation, with a sun that is warm enough but not too hot. All of that sounds obvious, but it isn't. The planets we've been talking about today illustrate this more clearly than any statistic. Because the universe is not a hospitable place. It is a place of extremes, of indifference, of physical violence on a scale we can barely comprehend. Glass rain, burning ice, radiation that destroys DNA in seconds, temperatures at which matter simply ceases to exist. That's the rule out there, not the exception. Earth is the exception. I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope to see you again next time.