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The Space Beyond Earth
Space, Universe
In this video, discover how NASA has explored the space beyond Earth and our solar system with spacecraft like Voyagers 1 and 2, and how they’ve discovered thousands of planets outside of our solar system — also called exoplanets — with space telescopes like Kepler and TESS.
Tom Barclay: For the longest time, space seemed like a big, nearly empty place, and we were really only familiar with our home, Earth. But as we learned more, we realized there was actually a lot out there, including planets
orbiting the Sun, and even other stars.
To get to these more distant worlds, though, it helps to start thinking of space as a bunch of nested bubbles. Our first bubble is the magnetosphere—Earth’s invisible magnetic field that protects us from high-energy particles and radiation from the Sun, allowing life as we know it to develop and thrive. The next bubble, just past the solar system, is the Heliosphere - the edge of the Sun’s influence, where the particles and fields of interstellar space take over. The two Voyager spacecraft have left this bubble and are our first interstellar spacecraft! It took Voyager 1 35 years, and it took Voyager 2 41 years to travel this far.
The next stop is our nearest stars. The Alpha Centauri system, at just over 4 light-years away, is close by cosmic standards, but it would take either Voyager about 75,000 years to get there at current speeds. We clearly need to use other tools to look for worlds that far away.
Enter Kepler, a space telescope that radically changed our understanding of planets outside our solar system—also known as exoplanets. In finding thousands of new planets, Kepler showed that there are more planets in our galaxy than there are stars! But Kepler looked at only a small fraction of the sky, and many [on screen: the Kepler search region, which is approximately 3,000 light-years long] of the planets it discovered are too far away to study in much further detail.
And that brings us to TESS, our newest planet hunter. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite works like Kepler, and over the next two years, it will scan almost the entire sky. By looking at closer and brighter stars, [on screen: A comparison view of the Kepler and TESS search regions.] Kepler's is a 3,000 light-year long cone, and TESS is a 30-300 light-year wide sphere. TESS will find—and measure the sizes of—dozens of small nearby planets best suited for detailed investigation by powerful telescopes on the ground and in space, like the future James Webb Space Telescope. And by doing that, we might finally begin to answer the question of whether Earth is alone, or whether there are worlds out there like our own—small and rocky, covered in oceans and dense clouds, or even—possibly—capable of supporting life.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Music: "Virtual Memory" from Killer Tracks
Lead Producer: Chris Smith (USRA)
Lead Science Writer: Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)
Lead Animator: Chris Smith (USRA)
Lead Videographer: Chris Smith (USRA)
Videographers: Rob Andreoli (AIMM), John Caldwell (AIMM)
Country of origin: United States
Language: English
Released on: March 27, 2019
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