Name: What If Jupiter Never Existed?
Uploaded: 2017-03-06T15:28:58.000Z
Duration: 3 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Over the past few decades, scientists have discovered and confirmed over one thousand

exoplanets, which are planets that orbit other stars.

And those star systems have quite a few differences from this one.

See, most solar systems have their larger planets orbit their host star closer than

In fact, in 1995, the exoplanet 51 Pegasi b was discovered, which has half the mass

of Jupiter but is 20 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun.

These types of exoplanets, which are creatively called “Hot Jupiters”, are quite common

in other solar systems, but weirdly, they are missing from ours.

So why are our largest planets so far away from the Sun?

Well, to be honest, scientists aren’t quite sure...BUT, that hasn’t stopped them from

And this is where the Wandering Jupiter idea comes in.

Some scientists believe that when our solar system was a little youngin, the Sun was potentially

But then our good friend Jupiter moved inward, whose gravitational pull changed the orbits

of these planets, causing them to collide with one another and, ya know, smashed them

into pieces, some of which were hurtled into the sun.

However, as Jupiter later retreated, being pulled away from the Sun by the formation

of Saturn, any leftover debris eventually formed into the rocky planets we know today:

And this does a good job of explaining why the inner planets are younger than the outer

So, essentially, if this is actually what happened, if it weren’t for Jupiter, life

Now, that’s not saying that life wouldn’t be possible at all, but Earth may not have

ever formed if Jupiter hadn’t come in and destroyed what was here before.

And not only is Jupiter potentially responsible for allowing Earth to form in the first place,

See, in the last decade alone, Jupiter has been hit by at least five comets or asteroids.

In fact, recent images from March 17th, 2016 show that Jupiter was hit by a small object*.

And these impacts are just the ones we’ve seen…some scientists predict that these

collisions probably happen once to five times every month.

And if it weren’t for Jupiter’s huge gravitational force deflecting these objects away from Earth,

you humans may have been struck by them instead.

BUT, there’re also the theory that Jupiter *might* steer space rocks our way, possibly

causing impact events -- so it might still be a little bit evil.

So let’s all be grateful that Jupiter exists.

I mean, if it didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be here watching this video, and that would

On the topic of hypothetical questions, what if Earth doubled in size?

There’s also a  link in the description if you’re on mobile.

Make sure you come back every Monday for a brand new video.

As always, I’m Blocko and this has been Life Noggin.