Astrum Space - Unsolved Mysteries That Have Confused Scientists For Years

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

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Amuramua is gone now. It is past Neptune's orbit and is far enough out that no telescope can study it ever again. Its origins and nature remain a mystery that still stokes hot debate in the academic community to this day. Was it a fragment of a broken planet, flung our way from a distant star? Was it a piece of alien technology, either accidentally or deliberately sent to our solar system by enigmatic intelligence? Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, there are still academics who put forward both theories as plausible.

anomalous nature makes it difficult to classify as either a comet, an asteroid, or something artificial. But it might be important to reach such a classification, as six new objects have been detected in our solar system that share Amoramura's most bewildering trait, its ability to accelerate, with no clear explanation for where such acceleration is coming from. I am Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. And today we will be exploring Amoamua and these six new fittingly named Dark Comets, and exploring the theories that have arisen in the last few years as scientists attempt to explain something that has so far defied clear explanation.

As a quick recap, Amuamua is the first recognized interstellar object to arrive in our solar system. It did so on the 19th of October 2017, and was spotted by the Hali Akala observing. in Hawaii. Scientists quickly noticed that there was something strange about this object. It was small, perhaps between 100 and 1,000 meters long, and was believed to have an unusual shape, perhaps a cigar, or a flat dish. Its trajectory and speed made it clear that it would eventually leave our solar system,

so scientists reasoned that it must not have come from here. The object was thus given the Hawaiian name Amua Mua, meaning scout, or first distant messenger. As the first of its kind that we know about, although admittedly definitely not the first interstellar objects have passed through our solar system, as there are trillions of possible candidates out there that have likely done the same, scientists were excited to study Amu Amoamua. To learn what characteristics it might have that made it similar or dissimilar to objects found in our own solar system. As they did so, they began to notice certain abnormalities.

While a moor-mour was initially classified as a comet, it became apparent that a moor-mour lacked a coma or a cometry tail, making it more similar to an asteroid. However, this lack of coma became a puzzling issue when a more-mour was seen accelerating away from the sun on its slow way out of our solar system. The rate of acceleration was minor, only about 17 meters per second when it was nearest the sun, and yet this was enough to cause a stir in academia. Amur-a-a-moor was not doing what physics said it should do. In the next few months, scientists were able to observe it.

Amur-a-moor was deviating from its path. In physics, objects can only accelerate when they are pushed, so scientists began to try and explain what was pushing Amur-a-a-moor. A few initial hypotheses were quickly ruled out. This did not seem to be simple solar winds, giving a small nudge. While it is a recorded phenomenon for the small trace particles fired off from the sun to push at objects in space, this small force was not enough to explain Amuamu's acceleration, assuming it was an ordinary asteroid.

I should note that this is an assumption, as even the best photos of Amuamuahua on only showed a tiny speck, making it difficult to say for sure what it looks like. Most theories about its shape come from the variations in its light curve, brightness of which rose and fell uniformly as a more and more travelled. This wouldn't happen on a round object, but would happen for a tumbling, irregularly shaped object like a disc or a cigar. reached for another example in our solar system of accelerating objects, comets. As comets travel close to the sun, the ice within them warms and sublimates, turning into gas and spouting

off from the comet's main body. This outpouring of gas and dust forms the comet's signature tail, but it also gives the comet a little push, acting like a little thruster on the side nearest the sun that accelerates the comet away from the source of all that heat. But, as I mentioned, scientists could not detect all that dust and gas. They looked, but it didn't seem to be there. This absence gave rise to more exotic theories. Let's take a look at an argument between two theorists with two theories. The first theory was the most headline catching.

Harvard professor Avi Loeb promoted in numerous papers that a muir could represent alien technology. He argued in 2018 that solar winds could provide the acceleration seen with Amour Amour more and more, but only if Amour was actually much thinner than scientists originally assumed, between 0.3 and 0.9 millimeters thin. As a 1,000 meter long, 1 mm-thin-thin object was unlikely to peer in nature, Loeb argued that this had to mean it was artificial, a light sail, created to catch solar winds, and use them to accelerate through space from one star to another. This theory met the resistance from other members of the academic community.

Darrell Seligman, our second theorist, and a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, counted by co-authoring a paper in 2020 that said that perhaps the reason no outgassing was detected from Amoamu was because Amur was emitting an invisible gas, such as hydrogen. This would not have been detectable using the telescopes that were trained on Amoamur. Seligman proposed that Amour was entirely or largely made of such hydrogen, a hydrogen iceberg that was sublimating thanks to the warmth of the sun, and it was that sublimation that was causing the push. Loeb disagreed.

A few months later, he co-wrote a paper asking where exactly this hydrogen iceberg could have come from. He showed mathematically that the starlight in the interstate. instead of vacuum was warm enough that any hydrogen iceberg that formed in even the nearest densest molecular clouds would have melted before they got here. Loeb was still convinced that an alien explanation was the most probable. His refutation was strong enough to send Seligman back to the drawing board who dropped the hydrogen iceberg idea.

However, Seligman continued to play around with the idea that Amur Moore had been moved by escaping pure hydrogen gas. Initially, he didn't have an explanation for how this could be, until in 2023, he met with University of California Assistant Professor Jennifer Bergner, who pointed to experiments in labs where water ice in extremely cold conditions, hit with radiation, could trap pockets of hydrogen, only to release it later, when warmed up, as the ice structure rearranged itself. As it happened, water ice is much more plentiful in space, space, and so is radiation. Cosmic radiation could be enough to provide the pre-baking that would be needed.

Between the two of them, Seligman and Bergener wrote a paper, arguing that Amour Moore needed a new category entirely. It wasn't a regular comet, or an asteroid, but rather a dark comet, one with a coma that was invisible but present. Their explanation accounted for Amur-Mor's acceleration, and also for the lack of dust. as dark comets would not need to release dust as they were simply reconfiguring their structures and releasing the pockets of invisible gas, rather than blast and gas out from its surface like a small, gassy volcano.

While this was not enough to convince Loeb, who co-authored two more papers in the next month that accused Seligman of bad maths, while also continuing to push his alien spaceship model, Seligman was already considering the next step in his own logic. began to wonder, if Omoor Moore represented a dark comet, could there be other dark comets out there? He, Bergena, and others began pouring through the data of objects already existing in our solar system. They might not be interstellar, but was there anything else in the solar system accelerating

when it shouldn't be? Sure enough, they found six that matched their criteria. Six objects that showed non-gravatational, non-solar wind-based acceleration that couldn't be explained away by any known mechanism. These objects were small, some just as tiny as 3 meters across. They looked like asteroids and didn't have remarkable features. They were near Earth objects, all orbiting close enough to Earth that missions to them were extremely viable, and they were all exhibiting signs of acceleration.

To be clear, such acceleration was very minor, small enough to have been overlooked previously. These objects aren't zipping around the solar system from planet to planet like spaceships. They are not interstellar objects. But just like Amoamur, science cannot currently account for their motion, especially given that they do not have any visible signs of outgassing. And intriguingly, one of them is already scheduled to be visited by 2031. 1999, K-Y-26 is due to be visited by the Japanese Hayabusa 2 probe, an asteroid sample return mission that was launched in 2014 and finished its primary mission six years later,

but since has been given a mission extension to visit other asteroids in the Near Earth Apollo Group. 1998 KY-26 is rotating quickly, once every 10 minutes, and Hyabusa 2 will aim to perform a fly-by to learn more about this water-rich, tiny object for the benefit of future human missions to Mars. Once it's there, perhaps it will become clearer what the source of 1998 KY26's strange acceleration might be. It's still not obvious who among the various scientists out there is right about a moa-mua. Given that it's now out of our reach, perhaps we will never know.

But it's undeniably intriguing that more objects exhibiting strange, range acceleration have been detected, and highly likely that they will shed further insights into Amur Moore's possible nature and origins. If they are found to accelerate through invisible outgassing of hydrogen, Seligman will stand validated. But if a little hatch opens up and a small alien form peeks out to wave at us before accelerating off out of the solar system, then we might regret not listening more closely to Loeb. I think the former is more likely than the latter, as there is no way 1998 KY26 is a light

sail, we have excellent imaging of this one. But either way, it will be fascinating to study. Of course, in the end, it might prove that neither theory is correct. That's the wonder of science. The more we explore the universe, the more we encounter strange and unexpected phenomena. And as we learn more about them, the better our theories become. Perhaps one day we will encounter more objects like a more and more from outside our solar system, which may lend further weight to a particular explanation.

The search, even for dark objects that currently act under invisible forces, always fills me with a marvelous curiosity. Once 2031 rolls around, perhaps that itch for answers will be scratched. Or perhaps we will simply be faced with more questions, only time will tell. The Hunt for Alien Life. It is an endeavour that has inspired scientists to send data collecting rovers to the surfaces of other planets. Astronomers have listened out across the sky with radio telescopes.

Messages and data-carrying satellites have been launched out the other way. Countless people have poured countless hours into searching for even the slightest signs that we are not alone. We have done all this because in the infinite vastness of our universe, it is incomprehensible to some of us that we represent the only time that life has arisen. And it would be the profoundest discovery humanity has made so far if we learned that we are not. Of course there are many people out there who claim that while humanity has been seeking evidence of alien life, that same life has been spending its time seeking to discover us.

have claimed that aliens have already visited us, and are even here currently hiding and invisible. Here, sadly, the evidence starts to get questionable. There have been so many hoaxes, faked videos filmed on grainy, shaky cams, or even genuine mistakes where natural phenomena or satellites are taken for UFOs, that many people are now a little wary of entertaining such theories. There have even supposedly been times where the US government has deliberately, subtly propagated UFO conspiracy stories to draw attention away

from their real top-secret technological projects, like the stealth bomber. All in all, ascribing extraterrestrial origins to these phenomena is often factually incorrect, and poor science, and because we do not understand something does not mean we should jump to the idea that it must be aliens. And yet, if that's true, why did NASA, the US name, Navy, and other agencies in the US government, join forces in 2022 to discover the growing number of UFO sightings. The answer surprised me.

It's because it turns out they have no reasonable choice. There is now such a growing wealth of evidence, good, sound, scientific evidence from multiple powerful detection devices, and reliable, regular military pilot accounts of phenomena that cannot be explained by modern technology or our understanding of science, that the rational thing to do is to investigate with an open mind. However strange it might be to admit, it is no longer reasonably possible to do anything, but agree that something weird is going on. Now it is only a question of asking, what could it be?

I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum, and today I will show you exactly what has caused the US government to start taking. identified flying objects meandering through their skies much more seriously. The first UFO sighting in modern times was by an American businessman named Kenneth Arnold in 1947. As he looked out across Mount Rainer, Arnold claims he saw nine present-shaped silver objects travelling at several thousand kilometers per hour through the air. He likened them to sources skipping on water in the way that they moved.

He initially thought they might be secret military jets, but later he and other witnesses of these Crescent craft wondered if they might have been extraterrestrial in nature. The media picked up his turn of phrase about the sources, and the idea of flying sources entered the national consciousness. Before long, other people started reporting alleged UFO encounters. The US became enraptured with the idea of UFOs. However, the US military did not take this idea quite so seriously. While initially they were understandably alarmed at the report of unknown aircraft moving around in their airspace, particularly coming right after World War II, the programs they set

up to investigate UFOs were eventually shut down in 1969. Project Blue Book, the last of these programs, collected 12,618 UFO reports, but ultimately concluded that they were almost all misidentifications of natural phenomena or just man-made aircraft. With such a damning report to go on, the US government officially pulled funding from the project, and investigation into UFO sightings officially ceased. Partly as a result of Project Blue Book's findings, a certain degree of stigma became associated with seeing a UFO. Anyone who claimed to have done so was often ridiculed or considered crazy.

it came down to a question of evidence. If aliens were real and were visiting our planet, where was the proof of their evidence? Of course, to answer that, we need to define what we would consider to be reliable proof. Let's imagine that a person came up to you and claimed that they'd seen a silver disk shoot across the sky at a speed far faster than any airplane was capable of. Would you consider a single person's account to be proof that he'd seen an alien spacecraft, Well, not necessarily. Human memory is unreliable.

Even if you trust the character of the person in question enough to believe that they weren't lying to you, they might be misremembering details, or maybe had misjudged how fast the spaceship they saw was going due to some optical phenomenon. Ah, they cry, but I recorded it on film. You look, but unfortunately, the video they provide is grainy and only gives you a blurry glimpse of the spacecraft. Is that proof? Again, you might well be skeptical.

Even if this video is not a deliberate hoax, and it's so easy to fake film these days, it could be a digital artifact or some broken pixel in the camera, and it could just be some natural or man-made phenomenon neither of you had seen before. So what would be a good proof of alien spacecraft? Ideally, for me, I would like evidence that were seen by multiple trustworthy people, the more the merrier. It would need to be recorded by multiple pieces of hardware to eliminate the risk of it being glitchy technology, and it would have to evidence characteristics that completely ruled out

it being any man-made phenomenon or natural event. Best of all, it would be repeatable. If it kept occurring, it would provide more opportunities for study to rule out other causes. Which brings us to the event that started things all off again, in 2004 and the USS Nimitz. The Navy aircraft carrier was travelling through the ocean near Southern Carolina in November of that year on a routine training exercise. Another nearby vessel, called the USS Princeton, had recently received upgrades to its radar, and had started noticing strange aircraft in the area. These crafts descended from 80,000 feet to 20,000 in a blistering speed, before vanishing

out of sight entirely, or later shooting back up again. After a few days of this, the Princeton called the Nimitz, asking them to send someone to see what was going on. To F.A. 18F. Super Hornet Jets were scrambled. Each jet had a weapons camera, but no weapons, as this was only meant to be a training exercise. Each jet had two pilots on board. Upon arriving at the scene, all four pilots quickly spotted what they were looking for. A strange, tick-tack-shaped object was moving weirdly, zipping back and forth above a frothy, boiling

patch of water in the sea below them. It had no visible means of propulsion, no wings, no rotors. It was about the size of a jet and a whitish colour. The objects suddenly stopped its zigzag. It had seen them. It whipped around and travelled up towards the jets, as if it were intending to meet them in the air, but then rapidly accelerated away, faster than anything the pilots had ever seen before. Baffled by what they'd witnessed, the pilots returned to base, only for the radio operator

to inform them that they'd begun tracking the craft again, except it was now over 60 kilometers away. It had got there in under a minute of leaving the pilot's view. This was an object seen by four trained, professional pilots on the clock, aircraft cameras, and modern, advanced, ship-based radar from one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world. This ticks many of the boxes for good, reliable sources of evidence. This report was logged, and nothing else was initially done with it. might just point to this being a strange story if it wasn't for this authenticated footage that we have of it, confirmed by the US government in a freedom of information request.

But the strangest thing about this was that it kept happening. The phenomenon is currently repeating. Navy and Air Force pilots were spotting strange objects in the sky so frequently, some were claiming that it was almost a daily occurrence. Many were embarrassed to mention what they'd seen, fearing ridicule. That said, it became so common that the Navy started handing out cards to be kept in Navy pilot kneeboards in their cockpit about what to do in the event of such a sighting. Between 2004 and 2024 reports came in from Navy personnel of seeing unidentified objects

in the sky, 80 of them being observed by multiple senses, 11 accounts of near misses with jets, only ever one being positively identified. Between 2021 and 2022, sensing that there might be something to all this after all, the Navy began destigmatizing reporting and started actively encouraging its pilots to record what they saw. 247 new reports came in and an additional 119 incidents were reported to have happened in the past. Sure enough, that's almost one every other day. In total, the number of unidentified objects had risen to 510. So, what were these objects? Their natures and probably their origins varied.

Some behave like drones, with the Navy detecting radio signals coming to and from them. Only, they stayed up in the air far longer than any drone on the market was capable of doing. Some were more like aircraft, traveling in formations, exhibiting unheard-of acceleration, Some could both fly and submerge underwater seemingly at will. Some acted like balloons, albeit with unknown means of remaining up in the air, sometimes defying wind currents by remaining completely motionless or even moving against it. No doubt, of those 510, some will simply be glitches in technology. This strange triangle in the sky is thought to not really be that shape.

Instead, the unique design of the night goggles is thought to be distorting the light in this apparent drone, in a similar effect to lens glare, but uniquely tailored to this technology. However, it's still concerning that the Navy does not know what these drones were doing, circling a US Navy vessel while it did training exercises at night. The Navy started calling these objects UAPs, or unidentified aerial phenomena, in the hopes of removing the negative connotations associated with UFOs, and this has changed again recently to unidentified anomalous phenomena. And while they do not want to assume that this is alien in origin, they're also not ruling

it out. They reported their findings in a congressional hearing on the 17th of May 2021, and now are regularly and somewhat transparently publishing reports for the general public about the ongoing investigation, provided it doesn't give away too much about classified sources or technology they are working on. Right now, they are attempting to collect as much data as possible, knowing that it will lead to better science. And that right there is the biggest shift of all.

When you see the US government reaching out to the wider community to ask, what are these things we keep seeing, it certainly confirms that there is something to see. All in all, it certainly makes you wonder. Of course, all this might end up being technology belonging to rival nations. After all, governments around the world are always developing new secret technologies, and they are hardly likely to admit to them. However, it's telling that America does not seem to believe that these things are theirs, according to the UAP Task Force's report, neither do they know of them belonging to other countries.

I'll leave you with this final quote by NASA Chief Bill Nelson. NASA is one of the agencies working with the UAP Task Force to figure out the nature and origins of these phenomena. They are lending the task force experts to help rule out any natural phenomena that NASA is aware of. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building,

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Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. And they don't know what it is, and we don't know what it is. We hope it's not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology, but it's something. And so this is a mission that we're constantly looking. Who is out there? Who are we? How did we get here? How did we become as we are? How did we develop? How did we civilize and are those same conditions out there in a universe that has billions of other suns in billions of other galaxies?

It's so large, I can't conceive it. But what do you think? Could these phenomena have innocent human explanations? Or are you convinced that there's something more to them? Something that can only be explained by alien life. Post in the comments below what you think, and let me know if you've enjoyed this topic. If so, I can explore this subject more, particularly when the US government releases their next report later this year.

In the Milky Way alone, there are thought to be 100 billion planets. Of these 30 million are thought to exist in Goldilocks zones. that are just the right distance away from their sons to support life, while also containing the right mix of chemical elements that life like ours can arise from. In all the 13 billion years of the universe's existence, if just a tiny fraction, if just 1% of these went on to become civilizations

capable of reaching out into the cosmos, then we should be seeing signs of thousands, if not millions of alien races running across our galaxy. And so, in the words of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, in his famous Fermi paradox, where is everyone? I'm Alex McColligan and you're watching Astrom. Today we will be exploring some of the possible answers to this question, because although we don't know for certain whether aliens exist,

there are actually some surprising barriers that might stop us from seeing them even if they do. Let's start by addressing the elephant in the room. Maybe there's no one to see. In our last video, we explored the possible odds of alien life existing and found that if it was true that it's quite difficult for life to arise from non-living materials, or if it's unlikely that life would go on to become intelligent as we have done, then it's entirely possible that there would be no ships or signals in the sky simply because there are no aliens. We would be the first ones to ever make it this far. All other planets could be empty and desolate.

It would then be our opportunity to spread out across the universe and discover all these empty rocks, and the only life we'd ever encounter is whatever we brought with us from Earth. While this is a perfectly reasonable possibility, there is no conclusive evidence to prove it wrong. This is not the only explanation that exists for why the sky isn't full of signals. We should also be aware that we are constrained by a surprising natural limitation. For us to discover or make contact with an alien civilization, one of two, Two things needs to happen.

Either we need to send out a message to an alien civilization and then have them send a message back to us, or the alien civilization needs to have made the first overture, messaging us directly. There are different ways of doing this. For instance, we might be sending spaceships to each other, or we may be using unmanned probes, but there are significant issues with doing anything other than sending messages. Sending a spaceship is a tricky business. At the current speeds our spaces are capable of, it will take potentially millions of years for an astronaut to reach their destination.

The Voyager 2 probe took about 49 years to even leave our heliosphere. The nearest star is four light years away. In other words, it would take over 81,000 years to get even there, or about 2,700 human generations, and that's assuming that we have aliens as our closest next-door neighbors. Even if we make allowances for technology to improve, it takes colossal energy to accelerate an object up to light speeds. Actually, it would take more energy than exists in the universe for reasons we won't get into here. Mass just does not like to travel at those speeds. So, unless we or our alien friends are able to come up with some kind of work around,

most likely the easiest way to communicate with other civilizations is to send them radio signals. In fairness, it's not implausible that this speed cap will one day be broken. Scientists have hypothesized some promising things involving moving the space around you in warp bubbles rather than by moving yourself directly. The speed of light limit only applies to movement within a local area, so if it's your local area that's moving, you're fine. We actually have examples of this in nature around black holes, which I explore in one of my other videos.

But until that becomes a scientific reality, let's just go with the fact that it's much easier to call than to visit in person. It's significantly easier and cheaper to send out light or light. radio waves, as simple as turning on a sufficiently large light bulb. So let's assume that this is how our first contact with aliens will occur. Even here, however, we hit a roadblock. Radio signals and light are more than capable of travelling at relativistic speeds. It's called the speed of light for a reason after all.

However, that's its limit, light speed. Just less than 300 million meters per second. No signal can go faster than that, and this in turn limits how far we are able to see through space. Any signal from us would need to travel out across space before reaching alien life, and then, even if they decide to respond immediately, their response would need to travel all the way back, if they decided to respond. Let's imagine that happens, though. We only invented the radio in the mid-1890s,

so we have not really been able to do this for very long. As such, we would only be able to exchange a message with aliens who lived at most 60 light years away from us. 60 years for a signal sent out in 1900 to reach the alien civilization and 60 years for it to come back. Our galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across. So the 60-year light bubble we have we could have communicated with is truly tiny.

In fairness, this limitation goes away if the aliens contact us first. After all, we are now receiving light in the James Webb telescope that has been travelling for 13 billion years from nearly the beginning of the universe. If an alien civilization came into being around 2 billion years ago, and they've kept existing since then, that means they now have a 2 billion light-year bubble from which we could technically see them. A 10 billion-year-old civilization now has a 10 billion light-year bubble. But if they were 10 billion light years away and only 9 billion years old, they would be completely invisible to us. Assuming that such far-away aliens exist, why aren't we seeing any of them?

Where are their signals? Well, this line of thought may rest on a faulty assumption, that there haven't been any signals coming in from the stars. There have been signals. We're just not sure what they are. Let's explore this with a fascinating example. In 1961, in their pursuit of evidence for the existence of alien life, which is worth noting because it opens up the possibility of confirmation bias, researchers at the Ohio State University finished work on a specialized telescope called Big E.N.

It was the size of three football pitches, and worked on a similar basis to modern-day telescopes, in that it captured signals using its large mirror on one end, and bounced them through smaller mirrors on the other into two receivers in the centre, where the results were then processed. You may notice that these captured dishes are just wireframes, though, not true mirrors. This is because Big Ear was a radio telescope. wasn't trying to see with visible light. The way Big Ear worked meant that it was more limited in its motion than a telescope that could rotate in any direction. Big Ear could only tilt its

primary reflector up and down, which meant that it was somewhat limited to only listening to a point in a narrow strip of space at any one time. This was cheaper and easier to design, and the designers had an idea that would let them get around Big Ear's limitations. They built Big Ear at just the right orientation so that the rotation of the planet would be what turned it left and right. With the Earth turning it one way and with its tiltable reflector adjusting it along the other axis, you could point Big Ear towards any point in the sky if you have enough patience. Quite a clever solution. Big Ear's direction of attention would sweep around the night sky in large circular arcs, listening out to try to spot any unusual signals that

we did not have a natural explanation for. And sure enough, in 1977, Big Ear found something. On the 15th of August, a 72 second long pulse of radio waves came in that were 30 times more powerful than anything Big Ear had heard before in the background chatter of the universe. It was so out of the ordinary that the researcher who found it wrote wow on the computer printout when they saw it, giving it the historical name of the wow signal. It was incredibly uniform. It rose in intensity, peaked, and then dropped back down in a smooth motion instead of the erratic fluctuations you might have expected from cosmic radiation.

This indicated that whatever had made the sound was broadcasting consistently, kind of like the beam of a lighthouse sweeping out across the stars, with us turning to look at it and then turning away again. Except it wasn't consistent. Due to Big Ear's design, researchers had to wait a few minutes before the second ear of Big Ear moved to look at that particular patch of space the wow signal had come from. And when they got there, the signal had vanished. Ever since then, despite checking back in from time to time, we have never heard another wow signal come from that region of space to this day.

So what was it? A fault in the machinery of Big Ear? A passing comet that threw out a momentary burst of signals, or an alien civilization trying to communicate. The fact of the matter is, we don't know. It's possible that the wow signal has a perfectly natural explanation. After all, when the regular, consistent pulses of x-rays from pulsars were first discovered, some people thought that they were aliens trying to communicate before the real explanation was found.

Maybe we will one day find another wow signal and we'll see that it was nothing alien in origin at all. But there's a technical point that needs to be made here. If I were the scientist in charge, I would point. point my telescope at the point in the sky that the wow signal came from and would wait to see if anything else came from there. If I didn't, another signal might come in and I'd miss it. But consider the way Big Ear was constructed, it rotates only within the rotation of the Earth. It physically can't stay looking at the same place for more than a few moments. As such, we have no idea whether more signals came in from that region of space or not.

hundreds could have come in over the next several hours, including an entire orchestra performance. But as Big Ear wasn't listening in that direction for more than a moment in the day, it would have only heard a single note. This highlights a conscious decision on the part of organisations like SETI, who are seeking intelligent life in the universe. Because resources are limited, and space is vast, they lack the time and funding to take a telescope and point it for potentially decades on end at a single place, just to see if aliens want to talk to us again from that spot. Instead, they favour broad sweeps of space to cover as

much ground as possible, hoping to get a lucky hit. If they were fishing, rather than leaving their line in the water at a single point, they're casting and casting, seeing if anything bites immediately and moving on if nothing does. This approach is more reasonable than my analogy makes it sound, as aliens are not fished to be attracted to a lure or scared off by a splash of a telescope looking at them. And although the first process is more methodical, there's every chance that if you just sweep your telescope across the sky, you will encounter some evidence or signal. The problem comes with the follow-up. There have actually been numerous signals like the wow signal that radio telescopes have picked up over the years. Strange and unusual

bursts that we have no current explanation for. But because we aren't focusing on them and thoroughly following up over years of continued, dedicated study, we are missing a lot of information, and as a result we end up with weaker conclusions. Which brings us to our conclusion. Perhaps we are seeing no aliens simply because of our method. Of course, these are just a few of many possible theories. For this video, I've tried to focus on some of the technical limitations to finding signs of alien life. However, there are other, more theory-based explanations that lean more on speculation.

They are fascinating though, and give us interesting insights into our own civilization. So if you've enjoyed this subject, then I'll go into them in another video. Do you think there are aliens up in the night sky? If so, why do you think they've not spoken to us? Be sure to leave your ideas in the comments below. The search for alien life is a difficult one. How would we know that aliens exist? An obvious answer would be if they visited our planet en masse, if, like in the film Independence

Day, their sources floated above every city in the world. Or perhaps if their envoys met with us, shaking hands with our world leaders, while cameras broadcast at the moment on national television. Or maybe if they started trading with us, and their inventions and resources began appearing in our everyday life. There is, fortunately or unfortunately, not much evidence that this has ever happened. But while visits from aliens would certainly be preferable, that's not the only possible way aliens could prove their existence to us. It's much more plausible that they would do so with their signals.

We've spent a lot of time on this channel discussing some of the reasons why aliens might not have talked to us, but on the flip side, what are the strongest pieces of evidence that they have already done so? Which signals are considered the best candidate so far for a message from an alien civilization? I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. And rather than explain why we haven't heard from aliens, today let's look at a lot of the at where perhaps we already have. Obviously, when it comes to alien signals, there is some ambiguity as to what exactly we are looking for.

Aliens are, after all, alien. We are not quite sure what to expect from them, as they will have likely evolved in conditions different to our own, and may well have cultural outlooks that make perfect sense to them, but are completely obscure to us. Their definition of a good way to say hello to the universe might be very different from ours. Researchers looking into possible signals from other planets have to remain very open-minded about what an extraterrestrial signal might look like. But that means such signals can get confused with signals from natural sources that we simply do not understand yet.

How can we tell the difference? Let's look at a few examples to show you what I mean. In 2019, as part of the Breakthrough Listen initiative, the Park's Mariyang Telescope in Australia was observing Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to our own. It was recording data to learn more about stellar flares. But when SETI researchers, a collective term for the search for extraterrestrial life, went over the data it had collected sometime later, they found something unusual. A signal, which later came to be known as BLC1.

Could the star closest to our own actually harbour advanced alien life? The signal was fascinating, as it could not easily be explained away by conventional sources. It lasted for several hours, which is longer than the time it normally takes a human satellite to pass by overhead. It had signal drift, its frequency was shifting, which implied possible movement relative to the telescope, so it likely wasn't coming from a stationary object creating interference on Earth. One of the most compelling things it had going for it was its thin, narrow-band signal. In nature, radio waves are never so narrow in their range. They always fluctuate. Unless there

exists some natural source out there we've not discovered yet, the only thing that produces such a concise signal as this is technology, either human or alien. When no obvious explanations for existence could be found amongst human sources, naturally scientists wondered, could this be the signal from alien life they had been looking for? Along with the wow signal, which we looked at in a previous video, BLC1 is one of the strongest candidates for signals that may have been created by alien civilizations. And yet, even this signal has its drawbacks. Scientists could not link it to any sources of obvious images.

interference from technology on Earth, but on closer examination of the data, it did match other radio wave signatures that came up on other days of the search, except these other signals occurred no matter what direction the telescope was pointing in. Neither were they able to detect BLC1, the signal from Proxima Centauri, with later observations. So while they don't know exactly what interfered with the telescope to produce BLC1, the odds of it being interference are nonetheless quite high. Let's take a look at another candidate, a somewhat mouthier, SHGB02 plus 14A. When one of the first SETI experiments, Project Osmer, was started in 1960 by Frank Drake,

it began on the basis that if alien life were to communicate with the rest of the universe, they would do so at frequency 1420 megahertz. The logic behind this was that this was the frequency emitted commonly by hydrogen, one of the most widespread elements in the universe. Aliens looking to establish communication with other civilizations might use such a frequency as a sort of common ground, a wavelength that probably holds a special significance to any race. This might have been a leap of logic, but it certainly made SHGB02 plus 14A of interest later. Because this signal, let's just call it SHG for the rest of the video, for the lack of a punchier

name, did indeed broadcast at this exact wavelength. SHG was spotted on three separate occasions in 2003, using the Aricebo telescope and the computational power of 5.2 million home computers as part of the SETI at Home Initiative, a rather cool program that is sadly no longer running. S.HG had no obvious explanation for his origins in nature, and it didn't appear to be interference. But it was also too weak to say for sure whether it was clearly technological or not. On top of that, its location was peculiar. It came from a spot devoid of stars up to 1,000 light years away from Earth,

and although it experienced drift, it did so in a manner that made scientists suspicious. If a signal originates from a planet, then there are a few things we might reasonably infer. A signal being broadcast from a planet, either on the surface or in orbit just above it, would likely experience some Doppler shift as it alternated from moving away from us to coming towards us through the circular path it was taking in space. There would also be movements where it dropped out of view entirely as it moved behind the planet. While SHG did indeed experience fluctuation in its signal frequency, ranging from 8 to 37 hertz per second, this would only come from a planet that was rotating 40 times faster

than Earth, which seemed high. It was also strange that each time the signal was spotted again, no matter where it had been when it had last been cited, it always began at 1-420 megahertz. The odds of you looking at an orbiting transmitter on three separate occasions and each time spotting it, starting off at the exact same location, is incredibly slim, which is what you'd need for this to make sense. This observation pointed to it being, more likely, SHG was some kind of glitch in the technology.

By looking at the process by which the BLC1 or the SHG signals were evaluated, we gain an interesting insight into how SETI determines whether something might be of alien origin. To me, it is a method that lines up best with this quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the words of his famous detective Sherlock Holmes. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Each time researchers came across a new signal, they began by eliminating all possible alternatives. Could it be interference, from a passing satellite? Is there anything in nature that we know of that could be producing this effect?

Can we in any other way explain why this signal is here and behaving the way that it does? So far, alternative explanations have been found for these contenders for alien communication. Even on the occasions where human interference can be ruled out entirely, that still leaves open the possibility that these mysterious signals might just be undiscovered natural phenomena, And that is precisely the current discussion around the last candidate for alien signals I'd like to leave you with today. Fast radio bursts. If an alien civilization were ever to be detected, it might not be intentional on their part.

Powerful engines activating or beams firing all might release bursts of energy that give away a galactic civilization, which makes fast radio bursts, or FRBs, interesting. They are, just as the name suggests, very fast bursts of radio waves. We have detected hundreds of these strange millisecond long bursts across the sky. Scientists theorized that there might be thousands of them occurring every single day. They have mostly been detected outside our galaxy, but one was detected within the Milky Way in 2020, so they're not completely foreign to us. They seem to be coming from extremely powerful magnetic fields, and as of yet, scientists have

no clear idea about what their origin might be. There are plenty of theories. Perhaps they are emitted by neutron stars, or maybe black holes, but there is no proof that puts any one theory over another, including that of alien technology. The Chime Telescope in Canada has a unique design that makes it ideal for detecting these fleeting blips in the cosmos. Avoiding the pitfall of other telescopes, rather than pointing at any one point in the space, Chyme's multiple cylindrical parabolic reflectors are able to draw data from an entire swath

of the sky at the same time. It began detecting in 2018 and is still going strong to this day. It has detected FRBs that are repeating, as well as one that is definitely associated with a magnetar star. Perhaps all FRBs can be associated with such stars. Perhaps not. But that is just the point. Perhaps one day we will be able to identify the origin of all FRBs

and will know that they have a perfectly natural origin. Perhaps the search for alien life will have to begin afresh. But there is always that tantalizing hope, that slim possibility, that one day a scientist rule out signal after signal that finally one will come in that defies alternative explanation. If all other explanations can be ruled out, we can say for certain that no natural source caused this. Then, in the words of that great detective, we will have no choice but to accept the improbable.

So these are some of the best candidates for signals from another planet, but even they come with massive strikes against them. We have not yet found a signal that conclusively points to the existence of aliens. That is not to say that we never will. It's never aliens, right up until the moment where it is. In recent years, researchers have documented a number of weird atmospheric phenomena on Earth that were previously unproven or even unknown. There are transient luminous events like red sprites, blue jets, gigantic jets and elves.

There are noctaluson clouds, and rarely seen variants of familiar phenomena like green lightning. and red auroras. These are just a few of the incredible occurrences we've been able to observe and verify. Yet, despite amazing advances in our technology and research capabilities, there are still phenomena that are almost completely outside our ability to prove them. Of these, none is stranger and more terrifying than ball lightning, an alleged electrical occurrence so mind-boggling that it sounds, well, made up. Ball Lightning has been reported so many times and received so much scientific scrutiny that it occupies an unusual place between science and folklore.

But unlike most myths, Ball Lightning has a mounting body of evidence that suggests we should not only take its existence seriously, but we might already have proof that it does. So what is ball lightning? How are scientists attempting to reproduce it in laboratories? And if it is a real phenomenon, as many experts believe, why is it so difficult to prove? I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. Join me today as we look at the fascinating history of ball lightning encounters, examine some of the most intriguing new theories out there, and learn about stunning laboratory experiments.

that are attempting to get to the bottom of one of science's strangest unsolved mysteries. For centuries, accounts of ball lightning have come from all over the world. The stories vary, but many agree on certain details. The phenomenon appears as a bright burning orb, sometimes golf ball sized, and sometimes much larger. It's usually white or blue, but can also be red, orange or yellow. The phenomenon is said to last between one and several seconds, float in a slow path, at times changing direction, sometimes even erratically, and has been alleged to pass through walls

and windows unscathed. According to some reports, the ball lightning fizzles. In others, it explodes violently, causing severe damage, leaving behind an odour that has been described as sulfurous. At its most destructive, ball lightning has been reported to maim and kill people, and to blast apart heavy walls, doors, and ships. Now on this channel, we don't accept anecdotal evidence as proof, no matter how compelling. Only observation, control testing, and repeatability can confirm a phenomenon scientifically.

So, with that in mind, let's look at a few of the alleged ball lightning encounters I find most intriguing. In 1739, the Catherine and Mary were sailing down the Gulf Coast of Florida when it ran into a deadly thunderstorm. According to an eyewitness, a large ball of fire fell from the element and split our mast in 10,000 pieces, killed one man, another had his hand carried off, and had it not been for the violent rains, our sails would have been a blast of fire. That's quite a story, but it gets weirder.

In 1753, Georg Richman, a renowned professor and electrical researcher, was attending a conference in St. Petersburg when he saw a storm approaching. Bringing an engraver to record his observations, he hurried to conduct a kite experiment like the one Benjamin Franklin had performed the previous year. As reported afterwards by the engraver, Richman was conducting the experiment when a fiery blue orb crawl down the string, fatally striking him, and he was conducting the experiment, knocking the engraver unconscious. The reported autopsy found a coin-sized red mark on the professor's forehead and injuries consistent with electrocution. But maybe the most compelling eyewitness account comes from 1963 when R. C. Jenison, a researcher at the University of Kent,

was flying late at night from New York to Washington. Jenison was sitting in the cabin shortly after midnight when the plane became enveloped in a bright electrical discharge. Within seconds, a bright glowing sphere about 20 centimetres in diameter emerged from the pilot's cabin and travelled the length of the aircraft. In 1969, Genison published his observations in precise detail in the pages of Nature magazine. Due to credible reports like Genisans, scientists have taken the phenomenon seriously and put forward numerous models. to explain it. One theory proposes that ball lightning could be a hallucination triggered by the magnetic field close to a lightning strike. Citing similar hallucinations experienced during epileptic seizures,

this theory suggests that ball lightning could be a figment of the stimulated occipital lobe. However, if true, it would seemingly contradict reported damages caused by ball lightning, such as the death of Georg Rickman. Another hypothesis proposes that ball lightning is a contained plasma reaction, like St. Elmo's fire, the phenomenon famously observed on the masts of ships, when the voltage between the air and the ground is great enough to break the air molecules into highly excited particles. According to this theory, the plasma in ball lightning becomes a self-contained bubble that behaves as a soliton, a self-reinforced wave that maintains its shape. shape and moves a constant velocity. Don't worry if you find this confusing. We're touching

on a pretty complicated subject that even researchers are still struggling to understand. One of the most promising hypotheses was proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinnis at the University of Canterbury Christchurch in the year 2000. This model proposes that a powerful positive lightning strike can vaporize molecules in soil, causing energizing nanoparticles that then react with oxygen in the air to produce light and heat. And remarkably, this model is supported by a strange incident that occurred 10 years ago in Lanchu, China. Remember when I said that there weren't any verified recordings of ball lightning? Well, that may not be entirely true. In July 2012, researchers from Northwest

Normal University had set up spectrometers. to record ordinary lightning when a powerful lightning strike produced a glowing wide orb. The orb had an estimated glow 5 metres across, which turned red as it travelled for 10 metres before ascending into the air. All this was recorded with high-speed video, which sadly hasn't been made public, and a spectrometer reading, which has. The spectrometer confirmed emission lines from silicon, calcium and iron. all common in soil. So, if this observed phenomenon was in fact ball lightning, as it appears,

then it adds strong evidence to support the vaporized silicon hypothesis. But the model doesn't account for certain behaviours described in ball lightning encounters, such as the ability to pass through solid matter. So what does this mean? Well, either those accounts are wrong, or ball lightning could actually be a collection of separate phenomena. In addition to proposing theoretical models, scientists have attempted to reproduce ball lightning in laboratories with incredible results. One experiment at the Max Planck Institute reported producing a ball lightning-type effect when researchers discharged a high-voltage capacitor into liquid water.

In 2006, researchers at Tel Aviv University conducted an experiment by pointing a microwave drill made up of a magnetron and a microwave beam at a strip of solid silicon. When the researchers pulled the beam away, the drag produced a tiny ball of plasma, nearly identical in appearance to reports of ball lightning. An astonishing result, to be sure. But is this laboratory-produced phenomenon the same? same as the ones reported in nature? It's very possible, but as of right now, we simply don't know.

Another experiment conducted in 2018 came to even more stunning conclusions. Using advanced experimental engineering, physicists successfully created as Chancair-Skyrimian, a quasi-particle that is like a tangled three-dimensional magnetic field. getting too complicated, what the researchers did was apply an external magnetic field to a system of rubidium atoms near absolute zero. The magnetic field controlled the atoms in such a way that they all spun facing the same direction on the knot surface, while twisting unusually on the inside. In other words, the magnetic field maintained a stable spherical configuration, able to do things like squish or deform while still retaining its essential properties.

This discovery could have major implications for quantum computing, but researchers also believe the synthetic magnetic field they created models the expected electromagnetic field of ball lightning. This theory will require a lot of follow-up research, but it's a promising discovery that could explain some of ball lightning's alleged characteristics, such as the ability to pass through solid barriers. My very educated mother just showed us nine planets. This phrase was one of the mnemonics designed to help me in my youth to remember the names of the planets in our solar system.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. It's a little outdated, as in 2006, Pluto lost its status as the ninth planet, meaning my very educated mother could no longer show us nine planets, only eight. But what if I was to tell you that there might exist another planet? an object five times the size of Earth that is floating out in the furthest reaches of our solar system. Perhaps my mother knows what she's talking about after all. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum.

Join me today as we explore the fascinating evidence for this ninth planet, the thus far undiscovered planet X. And explain why some scientists predict that it's there with 99.6% certainty, while others believe it's nothing but smoke and mirrors. So how do we go about discovering new planets in the first place? Discovering planets can be a tricky business. If I was to show you an image like this one, you might immediately get a sense as to why. Can you see a planet here?

The answer is probably yes, and I'm not just talking about the Earth along the bottom, which is admittedly a very easy planet to spot. The stars is in this photograph. However, it looks incredibly similar to the stars around it. All are simply sparkling dots in our night sky. The first challenge for mapping out the heavens for any would-be astronomers is identifying which of all these objects is actually a planet in disguise. So it's incredibly impressive that early human astronomers were able to figure out which was which

more than four millennia ago, using nothing more than careful observation. By watching the night sky every night and making intricately detailed star maps, Babylonian astronomers were able to chart the motions of these celestial bodies and identify which were orbiting around our solar system and which remained roughly in place. Stars, being so far away, would not appear to move, unlike the planets which were much closer. Not a bad piece of deduction. This observational method was able to identify the first six planets in the solar system, everything from Mercury to Saturn. However, it fell short of identifying planets past that.

The more distant a planet became, the harder it was to spot with the naked eye. The next planet, Uranus, was almost too far away to see. As such, its discovery had to wait until the invention of the telescope in the early 1600s. Even after that, it took until 1781 before Uranus was officially discovered, and when it happened, it was quite by accident. Astronomer Sir William Herschel was in his garden in England one evening and was searching for comets using a homemade 6.2-inch telescope. He just stumbled upon Uranus by chance. He initially thought it was a comet, although over time he and other scientists realized that it must have been a planet from signs like its lack of a tail. They named it Uranus after the father of Saturn, who in Roman mythology

was also the father of Zeus or Jupiter, thus keeping up with the naming convention. Once they knew where Uranus was, astronomers realized that they'd actually seen it before. In star charts dating as far back as 128 BC, there were possible references to it, although all these identified it as a star rather than a planet. It took a telescope to zoom in enough on Uranus to be able to tell the difference and officially get it recognized as to what it was. Interestingly, here the trend changes. It was not only with a telescope that the final planet Neptune was discovered, but with maths.

After a few decades of observing Uranus and plotting out its orbit, a man named Alexis Boulevard published an astronomical table detailing the orbit of Uranus, basing his calculations on Newtonian physics. However, there was a problem. As astronomers watched Uranus, they realized that it failed to follow the path, Boulevard had predicted. They spent some time working out why this might be. Maybe they had made some errors in the Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination

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who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com. slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Their observations. Maybe Newtonian physics was not correct. It wasn't until 1845 that a French mathematician, Erban Le Verrier, properly explained the solution. There had to be another planet influencing Uranus. Uranus's orbit was being perturbed by something. This perturbanes could be exactly and precisely predicted mathematically if there was another planet pulling on it, altering its orbit slightly. So detailed were Leverier's calculations that they even told astronomers exactly where this extra planet needed to be for all of this to work. Astronomer Johann Godfried Gale

looked there, and sure enough, to within a degree of Leverrier's calculations, he found Neptune. Just like with Uranus, it quickly turned out that Neptune was not a completely new discovery. Once they knew where it was and where it orbited, astronomers could look back through their records and were able to find other references to it. Although it could not be seen by the naked eye, Galileo managed to spot it with his telescope back in 1612. He even recorded it on a second occasion, and noted it had strangely moved between the two times

of recording, although apparently he did not appreciate what this meant. In the end, Galileo and others who saw it believed it was seen. simply another star. Only Ghalay knew that what he was seeing was a planet, and so was credited with the discovery of Neptune. Neptune's discovery was significant, as it marked a fierce time a planet had been located in our solar system through mathematical prediction, rather than through observation. It wouldn't be too long before astronomers tried to do this same thing again. Which brings us to Planet 9. Let's jump forward to 1903. At that At that time, Percival Lowell published a book where he believed that the existence of

Neptune did not sufficiently explain irregularities astronomers were observing in Uranus and other celestial bodies in our solar system. Lowell became convinced that there had to be another planet out there, something large enough to affect the other planets' gravities, which he called Planet X. Searching for Planet X became a lifelong passion of his. He poured years of his life into the search, and even after his death, he was a life. death encouraged others to keep looking for it by donating $1 million in funding towards it.

His efforts managed to prompt the later discovery of Pluto in 1930, although this small dwarf planet was ruled out from being Planet X because it was too small. To this day, after 100 years, Planet X or Planet 9 still has not been officially discovered. So why do we think it is there at all? Well, just as it was before Neptune, not all the objects in the solar system are orbiting as we would expect. This was emphasized in 2016 by astronomers Mike Brown and Constantine Batigen, who were studying Kuiper Belt objects.

The Kuiper Belt is a region of space out beyond Neptune, covering from 30 to 55 astronomical units from the Sun. Brown and Batigen noted that 14 of these Kuiper Belt objects were clums. jumping in an unusual way at a particular point in their orbit around the Sun. They argued that this was evidence that something was bringing them together, attracting them and pulling them into the orbits that we see. Brown and Batigen continue to claim this theory to this day, and are continuing their search for the planet they believe must be there.

According to them, Planet X exists to a 99.6% certainty. If their claim is true, Planet X is large. With a mass at least five times that of Earth, planet X will most likely orbit between 300 and 520 astronomical units out from the Sun. For a point of reference, this is extremely far out. Neptune orbits 30 astronomical units from the Sun, one astronomical unit being the distance from the Sun to the Earth. This means that while it takes Neptune 165 years to complete one orbit, it could take

the supposed planet X, around 10,000 years to complete just a single orbit. From Planet X, the Sun would appear about as bright as the Moon, making it a cold and dark place even during its daytime. There is some debate about whether Planet X would have formed within our solar system, or whether it was captured in the Sun's gravitational pull from a passing star, or perhaps it was a rogue planet just drifting through space. However, not all astronomers are convinced that Planet X exists. In 2020, there were two astronomical surveys that identified objects in the Khyber Belt,

the Outer Solar System's Origin Survey, and the Dark Energy Survey. Between them, they identify over 1,000 Khyber Belt objects in this space, but did not observe any bunching or strange perturbances in their orbits. This has led astronomers to attribute other factors as the explanation for Brown. and Bathegan's observations. Perhaps the 14 bunched objects were just observation bias. After all, these objects are very difficult to spot. Perhaps their bunching looks like that because of insufficient data. Or perhaps the bunching is real, but there are other explanations, such as gravitational occultation, from when Neptune passed through that area early in the

solar system's history. Most pressingly of all is the pertinent question, if you're If Planet X is there, why haven't we seen it? Thanks to modern computers and telescopes, it is easy to check the areas where Planet X is supposed to reside. We have photographed vast swaths of the night sky already in minute detail, and although La Veria's calculations allowed Neptune to be found after just an hour's searching, no such outcome has happened from Brown and Bathegans. They have searched through existing astronomical data, and have already examined over

half of the possible locations of Planet X. No planet was found in any of these places. Even I myself have participated in a citizen science project on Zuniverse, where you can search Gaia data for Planet 9. And while this citizen science project has accidentally discovered a whole host of nearby brown dwarfs and stars, Planet 9 still alludes us. This does not completely rule out Planet X's existence, though. There are still a few explanations for why this planet remains elusive. With an orbital period of 10,000 years, it is possible that the planet just happens to be hiding in a particular portion of its orbit where it is difficult to spot, for instance next to a cluster of stars that obscure it with their brightness, or at its

appealing, the furthest point in its orbital arc from the sun, where it would be too dim for all but the largest of telescopes to see. Or the possibility always exists that we have spotted it. Just like with Uranus and Neptune, perhaps a photograph of Planet 9 already exists, but has simply been misidentified as a star. With so many billions of stars to keep track of, and again with Planet X's 10,000-year orbit time, it would be forgivable if it took a few years to notice that one star was not in exactly the same place it had been when it was last photographed. And so, the search goes on through at least two methods. Though searching for Planet X have enlisted the help of the Subaru Telescope, a device powerful

enough to scour even the hypothetical furthest reaches of Planet X's orbit. If it is out there, within the next five years or so, it might be spotted. Meanwhile, astronomers like Brown and Bathegian continue to run searches of the existing data, hoping to spot the one dim dot amid billions that is ever so slightly out of place. It's tedious work. However, it's intriguing. With the last few planetary discoveries, amateur astronomers were instrumental in finding the planets in our solar system. Whether or not they recognized it, both Uranus and Neptune were discovered by people just pointing their telescopes at the sky one night.

Of course, the 9th planet might not be there at all, or it might be so far away that you would need a powerful telescope like Subaru to see it. But maybe not. Whether it's by scouring the data or by doing a little amateur astronomy, perhaps it won't be Brown or Bathegan who discovered the real 9th planet in our solar system. Perhaps it will be us. So if you think you might want to have a go yourself, I want me to do a little tutorial on the Zuniverse Citizen Science project, let me know in the comments. Personally, I find this kind of thing pretty fun, and who knows, even if we don't find Planet 9,

we might just be the first ones to discover something else. Thanks for watching! This video was in part made possible by all the astromnoughts on Patreon. If you think these videos add some educational value to the world and want to give them more stability than the algorithm, you can become a paid member on Patreon to contribute towards their creation. When you join, you'll be able to watch the whole video ad-free, see your name in the credits, and submit questions to our team. Just sign up with a link in the description.

Once again, a huge thank you from myself and the whole Astrum team. Meanwhile, click the link to this playlist for more Astrom content. I'll see you next time.