We’ll start with one of the most recent and shocking discoveries of 2020. Perhaps our solar system has life beyond earth. This is Venus, the second planet from the sun and the sister of our home planet.
It’s called so because it has a similar size and mass, but the conditions on it are simply terrible. The temperature on its surface reaches 890 degrees fahrenheit because of the greenhouse effect and the atmospheric pressure on it is as strong as if you were 3 000 feet under water, but in this hostile world there can actually be life.
For many years there have been discussions on this subject. In 2007, scientists discovered there once had been an ocean on venus, that is in the distant past. There could have been some form of life, but in the fall of 2020 there was an epic argument in which scientists tried to find out whether life on venus exists.
Right now, in september, the discovery of a new life marker on venus was announced. The alma telescope. In the atacama desert found phosphine gas above the planet and the amount of this gas suggested that it may have been produced by certain microorganisms, but already in october the data was analyzed again and the new results indicate it was an error.
So today we consider venus to be uninhabited once more, but who knows maybe soon we’ll get new data and new disputes will arise in scientific circles and while some scientists are scratching their heads and still concentrating on venus, others have looked into distant Space and discovered 24 planets on which life can exist and on all of them living conditions are much better than on earth.
Such planets are called super habitable. These super planets must be 1.3 times larger than the earth and twice as massive. Thus they will have stronger gravity and, as a consequence, a denser and warmer atmosphere, so the climate on super habitable planets must be similar to the tropical climate on earth.
This will ensure the maximum diversity of living organisms. The host star of such a planet must be a red dwarf. They’re much smaller than the sun and not so bright, but their lifespan can reach 70 billion years for comparison.
The lifespan of the sun is seven times shorter and it’s already past half of it slow and steady wins the race. It will give enough time for potential life to develop and evolve, and here’s, a suitable planet.
For the title of super habitable kepler-1649c in 2020, it was named the most similar planet to earth. It’s, only six percent larger than our home world. It orbits a red dwarf a quarter. The size of our sun.
The planet is in the habitable zone of the star and makes a complete circle around it. In 19.5 days, the climate on kepler remains a mystery. It’s known to receive about 75 percent of the light we get from the sun, so the temperature on its surface may be close to earth’s, but we still don’t know the composition of the atmosphere and Other necessary conditions for life to appear there.
The next discovery is one of the most amazing spectacles ever seen by humanity. It’s, the collision of a star with a black hole. In september 2019. Scientists began watching how, for six months, a sun-like star was being spaghettified light from this event, traveled 215 million light years, and we saw a star about 860 000 miles wide slurped up by a black hole.
This black disc is so heavy that it has incredibly strong gravity, nothing can leave its gravitational field, and now we see a star slowly approaching it. First the glowing light layers of the star begin to stretch towards the black hole.
It looks as if the star is simply unrolling like a ball of thread. Then we see this hot plasma lingering at the edges of the black hole and it may seem these particles are now orbiting it, but it’s, just an illusion.
This ring of light is called the event horizon the black hole curves, not only space but time as well. This close to it time slows down to the observer. It looks as if the light near the edge of the black disk has almost stopped, but in fact it has long been absorbed by the dark abyss when a black hole eats a certain amount of star material.
It starts spitting it out. Powerful beams of energy are ejected at speeds of over 6 000 miles per second. This is the light that attracted scientists attention. In the end, the black hole has completely absorbed about half of the star and spit out the other half into space, and even though we watched this process for only a couple of minutes, it was happening for six months, and here is one of the youngest planetary Systems that humanity has ever observed, au microscopii, it’s, so young there’s, still a disc around it from the debris this system was made of.
But this time we don’t even hope to find life here. The host star of this exoplanet continually emits radiation flares that would wipe out any form of life from the planet’s surface the planet that orbits this dangerous star is called a you mcb, and it’s.
Just a newborn baby by astronomical standards, it’s, so close to its star that it makes a complete circle around it in 8.5 days. The age of this planet is only 12 million years, so at the time au mcb was born.
Mastodons walked on the surface of our planet and meadows and savannas were covering the earth’s face so you and i can consider ourselves old-timers, because the age of the earth is almost 4.5 billion years.
The next discovery took place in early 2020 and it’s very similar to a landscape from science fiction. It’s, a planet with two suns; well, more precisely. It doesn’t orbit around a single star, as we are used to in our solar system, but around a binary star system.
Toi 1338. The first big star is like the sun. The other is a red dwarf, which is three times smaller. These stars completely circle, each other in a little over 14 days. The planet that orbits these stars is the size of saturn, which is much larger than the earth.
Although the sunsets and sunrises there look incredibly beautiful, this planet is unlikely to be suitable for any form of life. It’s outside the habitable zone of its host stars, so it probably doesn’t have liquid water mysterious radio signals from outer space have also been received.
In 2020, we’re. Talking about fast radio bursts scientists recorded such signals before, but recently they have managed to prove that they are repeated after a certain period of time. The new data have forced the scientists to come up with a very bold theory that their source may be a magnetar.
A magnetar is a neutron star that is small and has a huge mass compared to ordinary stars like the sun, but they have the strongest magnetic field in the entire universe. Their lifetime is very short, though only one million years, but what baffled scientists the most this year was discovering that the moon is rusting.
Corrosion needs oxygen and water to take place, but the moon, doesn’t have its own atmosphere to have both the main theory says. The solar wind is to blame. It moves at great speed and scrapes oxygen from the upper layers of the earth’s atmosphere.
The wind continues to carry oxygen molecules through space and eventually they reach the surface of the moon and cause metal ore to rust. By the way, the signature red color of mars was created because of the rust.
For a long time, there was an atmosphere and water in combination with iron. On its surface, it triggered a long process of rusting which has lasted since ancient times. Another stunning discovery was found on the surface of the moon with a stratospheric telescope.
It’s, an aircraft that carries a telescope. The plane raises it to an altitude of eight miles, and this allows it to have a picture quality comparable to that of space telescopes and with the help of such an unusual observatory, scientists were able to find water on the surface of the moon.
Water molecules were found in one of the largest craters on the visible side of the satellite, but the number of water molecules is still extremely small there. The sahara desert has about 100 times more water than the surface of the moon.
