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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 one percent 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 space probe about nine years to get here. Hold on to your seat. We are speeding up. We’re passing through the Kuiper 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 interstellar 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 Interstellar space begins. This is the heliopause. In 2012, Voyager crossed this boundary and became the first ever human-made object in interstellar 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. And 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, its 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 percent 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 its 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 serious, 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 Supercar 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 planets around it, but trappist-1d is the most similar to Earth. It’s only 30 percent 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 than 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 multi-colored 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, Beetlejuice was very massive and hot, but it didn’t expand and remained 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 remain being 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 and 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.
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