Space Discoveries That Broke Astronomy | Science Was Wrong

 

Space is an endless void of potential scientific discoveries and we're learning new things about it on a daily basis over the years scientists and especially astronomers have theorized countless things about space many of which have turned out to be true very hot under tremendous pressure so you try to push nature to its extremes in order to make measurements and then make them very precisely so you can get uh you can get the measurements of nature however perhaps unsurprisingly giving the infinite complexities of our universe those scientists occasionally get their theories wrong Pluto had it coming from the beginning it was it was like it was never really belong Pluto's orbit crosses that of another planet that's no kind of behavior for a planet in one of the most famous examples Pluto was initially believed to be a planet we believed this for 75 years however in 2006 it was established that Pluto hasn't cleared the neighborhood around its orbit meaning it hasn't become gravitationally dominant and doesn't actually fulfill the criteria to be classified as a planet it was

 then reclassified as a dwarf planet

 but that's far from being the only space discovery that changed the initial theories of astronomers welcome to Science Reads and today we'll be taking a look at the most fascinating discoveries that have challenged the way we view the universe what's behind a black hole for many years it was believed that any light that made its way into a black hole wouldn't be able to escape from it in theory that meant we would never be able to see anything that's behind the black hole in question however in July of 2021 astrophysicists at Stanford university reported the first detection of light from behind one seeing bright flares around a black hole is very normal for astronomers but even a basic understanding of the phenomenon tells us that the far side of a black hole is a very strange place for light to come from Einstein's theory of general relativity did predict it would be possible to see such a thing one day courtesy of a process known as gravitational lensing but it was never confirmed and most astronomers disagreed with him until now that is Stanford's Dan Wilkins explains how this was possible by saying the reason we can see that is because the black hole is warping space bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself the black hole in question was a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 800 million light years away which does make it somewhat different to those observed before it however it could still completely change our understanding of how they work going forward alien megastructure in early 2018 the results of a year-long crowdfunded investigation into the star KIC 8462852 came in and they completely quashed astronomers theories that its strange dimming was being caused by an alien megastructure that being said the investigation did result in astronomers being a lot closer to knowing what was causing the star's odd behavior the star which is also known as Tabby's Star or Boyajian's star is located nearly 1500 light years from earth and is approximately 50 percent larger than our own sun and almost 1 000 degrees hotter than it observations made by the Kepler space telescope between 2009 and 2013 informed us that this otherwise relatively normal star does indeed experience sporadic and intermittent dimming and a recent historical analysis of it showed that changes to the object's overall brightness can last for centuries astronomers hadn't seen anything like it which led to a number of theories including the one about the possibility of it being caused by an alien megastructure however the results of the aforementioned crowdfunded investigation which were published in the astrophysical journal letters

 and explained how astronomers managed to chronicle four distinct dimming episodes affirmed a less wild theory which proposed that the star is surrounded by what appears to be nothing more than ordinary space dust Tyler Ellis an astronomy student at Louisiana State University and a co-author of the new study explained that the data collected effectively rules out the possibility of an alien megastructure although he did also admit that it's a tricky issue because we haven't really established precisely how an alien civilization might build such a thing or the types of materials they would use ellis told Gizmodo if we can assume that the construction would be done with normal building materials then we would expect that it would be opaque and absorb light monochromatically this would result in an overall dimming of the star without selectively absorbing particular colors this is exactly the opposite of what we are reporting is this the only one of these stars out there with space being very much unexplored scientists and astronomers are looking to the James Webb Space Telescope to provide a detailed look into this most mysterious star in June of 2020 scientists discovered an intriguing astronomical object that had never been observed by human eyes before it was more massive than collapsed stars which are known as neutron stars but had less mass than black holes such black neutron stars were not thought possible but that theory was smashed by this recent discovery and it means the very notion of how neutron stars and black holes form and evolve is going to require a major rethink from here on out it was an international team in the united states and Italy who made the groundbreaking discovery and they did so using the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory in Louisiana and the virgo interferometer in santos Stefano a Maserata Charlie Hoya PhD student from Cardiff University in wales who was also involved in the study while working for the Ligo Virgo scientific collaboration discussed how the exciting new discovery would challenge and change our understanding of the concept he told BBC news we can't rule out any possibilities we don't know what it is and this is why it is so exciting because it really does change our field while Laura Nuttall a gravitational wave expert from the university of Portsmouth's institute of cosmology and gravitation added the reason these findings are so exciting is because we've never detected an object with a mass that is firmly inside the theoretical mass gap between neutron stars and black holes before more cosmic observations and research will need to be undertaken to establish whether this new object is indeed something that has never been observed before or whether it may be instead be the lightest black hole ever detected how planets are formed up until the early 1990s astronomers believed planets were formed in a neat order starting with small rocky planets near the sun and ending with larger gassy and icy planets further away from it given that that's how our solar system is structured it was assumed it would be the same for them all however once we began to discover planets outside our solar system that theory was proven wrong in 1995 when astronomers identified the first exoplanet to closely orbit a star similar to our sun they were shocked it was big and gaseous and it looked more like Jupiter than any of the other planets in our solar system this resulted in it becoming known as hot Jupiter countless additional exoplanets

 have been discovered over the years and they continue to defy previously accepted theories with their strangeness some appear to be made of water with small rocky cores while others orbit a set of binary stars you know similar to Luke Skywalker's home planet in the Star Wars movies exoplanets even sometimes appear to move in the opposite direction to their parent star's rotation while others make it all the way around their parent star in just four days even more bizarre are the multi-planet systems where as many as five planets can be so close to each other that were they in our solar system their orbits would fit inside the small gap between Venus and earth Dr. David Sing world-renowned exoplanet

 scientist from the university of Exeter

 tells us that these planets bulk densities suggest that they could be made from anything ranging from styrofoam to lead Didier Queloz professor of astrophysics at University of Cambridge added there may be as many different planets

 in the universe as ways to form them

 then the question is how rare are we in our solar system that's why we want to look for the planets that's why we want to understand the formation scenario to answer how rare the earth is the evolution of the universe in June of 2021 a discovery was made that indicates a deep flaw in our understanding of the very nature of the universe itself and it could in fact have a serious impact on scientists understanding and perception of how the universe has evolved you see astronomers discovered a huge formation in deep space that they called the giant arc of galaxies because of its unique and exciting shape the arc is made up of a group of nearly identical sized galaxies at a distance of 9.2 billion light years the whole thing is around 3.3 billion light years wide and is one of the largest structures ever discovered in the cosmos astronomer Alexia Lopez of the University of Central Lancashire in England

 explained the flaw posed by this discovery by saying it is becoming difficult to ignore the growing number of megastructures beyond what is considered theoretically feasible according to cosmologists the current theoretical limit of the universe is calculated at about 1.2 billion light years which makes the giant arc almost three times larger can the standard model of cosmology account for these huge structures in the universe as just rare flukes or is there more to it than that the established model of cosmology called the cosmological principle states that on very large scales the universe is homogeneous or smooth in all directions with each part of the universe more or less the same as any other part of it with no major inconsistencies or bumps one or two of these massive structures

 could be considered a coincidence or flu but recent data shows more and more of

 these structures continuing to emerge

 with more questions than answers we wait anxiously for the next big discovery are there any other theories that you would like to know more about or maybe there's one you feel will be proven wrong tell us in the comments if you enjoyed the article please make sure you leave it a like and subscribe to our channel for more great articles like this