Take a Virtual Reality tour of six REAL exoplanets (4K, 360° VR experience) | We The Curious

Come on... Hello? Anyone there? Can you read me? Ah! There you go. Beautiful, isn't it? The Milky Way. And to think that each of those hundred billion stars has its own planets, its own strange worlds. Imagine what it would be like to visit some of those

exoplanets

beyond our small solar system. Well today you don't have to imagine it, because I'm going to

take

you on a

tour

of six

real

exoplanets

. What you are about to see is based on the latest scientific research; and as we journey through the cosmos, we'll hear astrophysicists from the University of Exeter tell us about their search for planets beyond our solar system.

So, if you want to

experience

what it would be like to be on another planet, I highly recommend putting on a VR headset and a pair of headphones to

real

ly feel immersed. Feel free to pause the video here while you get what you need to start your journey. Okay, are you ready? Come on! I'm Elisabeth, I'm studying debris disk observations and trying to find debris disks and giant planets. So the planets will form perhaps in four or five million years as the star forms. The star then forms from a huge collapsing cloud of dust and gas and the center will fall inward and become a star.

But then there will be a whole cloud of dust and gas and stuff that will collapse into a disk that is made of the remains of star formation. And that disk, the individual pieces of dust, will collide with each other and sometimes can stick together. We don't really understand that yet. Sometimes they stick and other times they bounce. and no one really knows how they can stay together enough to start forming a planet. But as soon as you have a large nucleus, we call it "planetesimal." So it's maybe ten kilometers wide, that's big enough that gravity starts picking up the rest of the stuff nearby and then slowly it picks up more and more bits of dust and gas that fall to the surface and eventually it grows until become something similar to Jupiter or even larger than Jupiter.

I'm Professor David Sing and I study transiting exoplanets and their atmospheres. Well, hot Jupiters are gas giant exoplanets, but they orbit much closer to their star than Jupiter does to our own Sun. And they break orbits. In fact, they orbit so closely that the planets' dayside heats up to thousands of degrees Kelvin. And because they are so hot, much of the atmosphere around the planet evaporates. Something like when a comet gets too close to the Sun, you see a lot of evaporation from the comet, a similar process occurs with these planets; They orbit so close that much of the atmosphere is being expelled.

Because these planets are so close, we expect them to be tidally locked, meaning that the same part of the planet will always face the Sun. And what that does is set up a very large temperature contrast between day and night. evening. It is very hot during the day and will be a little colder at night. And this, in turn, will create large-scale weather patterns across the planet. This planet is so close that tidal gravity is beginning to distort the planet itself. If this particular planet were closer, it could actually break up, but what would it look like inside the atmosphere of one of these extreme gas giant exoplanets?

Let's find out. My name is Steph Lines, I am an exonephologist, that is, someone who studies clouds on extrasolar planets. So what we are looking at is the planet Osiris, also known as HD209458b, and these are extremely strong winds, going from the west to the east of the planet, from the night side date, the wind speeds are reaching about five kilometers. per second; which is about ten times faster than the concorde. Osiris has a temperature of around a thousand degrees Celsius, with these temperature ranges we are not really seeing water clouds like we have here on Earth.

But at these much higher temperatures, we have the kind of evaporation and condensation cycle of things like iron and silicates. So these planets could have molten iron rain and silicate or glass rain. Which is incredible, because with this five kilometer per second wind speed, this shower of glass and molten iron will lacerate you. So these are not particularly good places to visit. My name is Nathan Mayne and I study the atmospheres of planets we have discovered around distant stars. Our next destination is the surface of an aquatic world. This is a 'Super Earth', as they call it.

In our own solar system we have no planets that exist in the size range between Earth and Neptune. But actually, when we look at the galaxy, we discover that this is one of the most common shapes of planets. We believe that many of them have rocky cores. They are essentially terrestrial planets, but they likely have a huge ocean. They are now Super Earths, they are much larger than Earth and could have much stronger gravity. And they probably have much thicker atmospheres. That means that any terrestrial elements found on these planets, any rocky elements, will be eroded, suppressed and effectively destroyed.

As you can see, the surface is being distorted by huge waves. There are many reasons that could cause these waves: you have an ocean that is not interrupted by land masses, so many of these planets we expect could have moons or even multiple moons, creating the same tidal effects as their own moon cause in our oceans. on earth. Furthermore, many of these objects could actually be experiencing significant tectonic activity beneath the ocean surface, and these waves have no land mass to crash into. So they can actually build quite significant sizes. Our next destination is the area of ​​55 Cancri e.

This planet orbits so close to its central star that it is incredibly hot. We think of temperatures of a few thousand Kelvin, or a few thousand degrees. We know from how much this planet rocks its star due to gravitational interaction, that this planet is about eight times the mass of Earth. And we also know from its type of transit, when it eclipses the central star, that it is probably about twice the diameter of Earth. So this planet is incredibly hot and has a very strong gravitational field. So what you can see is a field of molten lava beneath you, where the surface has been disturbed and melted.

And a lot of that material can potentially be thrown into the atmosphere and what you end up with is a very soot-laden atmosphere, full of particles, molten rock and condensed rock and rain of silicate particles. And there will be huge amounts of charged material flowing into the atmosphere, leading to major thunderstorms. So sure enough, this is a pretty unpleasant place. Probably the closest thing to Dante's Inferno you can imagine; with a surface of molten lava, blocks of rain and constant thunderstorms across the planet. My name is Jessica Spake and I am interested in studying the atmospheres of exoplanets.

TRAPPIST 1e is a fascinating system. It was a wonderful surprise to find seven Earth-sized planets so close together around this small star. The star is actually about the size of Jupiter. It's really like a miniature solar system. So here you can see that the star is much cooler, redder and smaller. You can see that it looks very big in the sky here. That's not because the star is bigger, but because the planet is much closer to that star than we are to the Sun. So these planets can be very close and still be friendly. approximately the same temperature as the Earth.

We've discovered more than 3,000 exoplanets, but we've only searched less than a millionth of a percent of our galaxy. There are billions more worlds to be found in the Milky Way and billions more galaxies beyond our own. Each new planet we discover changes the way we see the universe and our place within it. But, so far, we have only found one planet Earth. Thanks to everyone who helped make this video possible. If you enjoyed it, share it, subscribe and watch our previous videos. Thanks for watching.