Prática de Shadowing: Why We Can Reach Pluto But Can’t Fly Above the Sun - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo
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So, what exactly is above the solar system?
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It seems like it should be the easiest thing in the world to find out.
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Just take a rocket, point it straight up relative to the planetary plane, launch it into space, and take a look.
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But no, we can't.
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Or at least it's really, really, really hard to do.
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Which is weird, because we've sent probes all the way to Pluto billions of kilometers away.
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Yet getting above our own sun by flying straight up is, like I said, nearly impossible.
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It's the point where the laws of physics look at us like we're complete maroons.
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So just why is flying up, so to speak, harder than reaching the edge of the solar system,
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and what exactly would we run into if we actually tried to get out there?
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This whole cosmic pickle starts with the fact that the Earth isn't standing still.
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Right now, you're sitting in your chair
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or on your bed in your socks watching this video thinking you're in a state of absolute rest.
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Yeah, that's kinda true, but not really.
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At this very second,
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our planet is hurtling sideways along its orbit around the Sun at a terrifying speed of 30 kilometers per second.
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Per second.
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To put that into perspective, that's over 100,000 kilometers per hour.
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And any rocket we launch from Earth instantly inherits this insane sideways speed.
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If we're flying to Mars, or Jupiter, or even Pluto, all of which orbit roughly in the same plane as Earth, at least we're already moving in the right direction.
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It's a breeze.
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Smooth sailing.
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Okay, I exaggerate, but the Earth has already done the lion's share of the sideways motion work for us.
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Yeah, we still need a big ass monster rocket, obviously, but we're accelerating mostly in the direction that we were already going, and that's it, we're on our way.
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But if we want to defy the system and fly strictly perpendicular, straight up, that's where this free speed becomes our worst enemy.
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Look, we don't need to completely cancel out that 30 kilometers per second and then accelerate upwards from zero.
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We need to pull a different trick, redirect the velocity vector itself.
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But even a perfect 90 degree turn would require about 42 kilometers per second of additional speed.
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That delta V is so absurdly high that no conventional chemical rocket ever built by humanity could possibly pull it off.
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And diving towards the sun isn't a magic fix either.
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It only solves part of the problem.
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Yes, the Oberth effect, this is the trick of firing your engines while moving extremely fast,
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so the same burn produces a much larger change in orbital energy, is great for speeding up or slowing down.
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But changing your orbital inclination is far more efficient when the spacecraft is moving slowly.
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So engineers have to cheat.
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They use the gravity of another planet to sling the spacecraft onto a new trajectory. Which planet?
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We'll get to that.
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But let's imagine we pulled off this gravitational trick shot and broke out of the plane.
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What's up there?
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First we have to cross the heliopause, the outer edge of the heliosphere.
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That's the giant protective bubble the Sun blows around the entire solar system with its solar wind,
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shielding us from much of that nasty barrage of galactic cosmic rays.
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You can almost kind of think of it like the solar system's own gigantic atmosphere,
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a vast magnetized cocoon protecting us from the rest of the galaxy.
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For decades, serious guys in glasses drew this bubble like a comet with a rounded nose
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and one enormous tail trailing behind it.
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Which makes sense, I guess.
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We're moving through the galaxy, so naturally you'd expect something streaming out behind us.
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But in 2020, researchers combined data from several different space probes with computer simulations and came up with a very different possibility.
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In their model, there's no ginormous comet tail.
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Instead, the heliosphere looks more like a deflated croissant.
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That's right, according to this model, we're flying through the cold dark galaxy inside a giant invisible croissant.
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But the croissant is nothing, because beyond it lies the next great frontier, the Oort Cloud.
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It isn't a solid wall,
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it's unimaginably sparse, but calculations suggest that it surrounds our system as a roughly spherical shell.
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So out there, in the absolute scary pitch black darkness, trillions of icy bodies could drifting around,
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some the size of Mount Everest.
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Any sane person would ask, wait, how do you know it's there if you've never actually seen it?
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It's not like it glows.
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Well, simple.
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In 1950, Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, what are the odds he was studying the Oort cloud, and his name was Jan Oort.
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Okay, yeah, it was named after him, obviously.
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Anyway, he was studying the orbits of long-period comets, and noticed something weird.
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A lot of them were coming in from mind-boggling distances, and, and this is important, from all directions at once.
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That meant that what lay far beyond the planets wasn't another flat disk,
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but a nearly spherical reservoir of icy chunks.
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Basically a gigantic cosmic deep freeze that we haven't yet observed directly.
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So yeah, that's astronomy for you.
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An entire cloud and not a single picture of it.
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The sheer scale of these distances is best illustrated by the legendary Voyager 2.
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This guy's been cruising through the void since 1977 at 56,000 kilometers per hour.
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Respect.
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But just to reach the inner edge of this vast cloud, it still has another 300 years to go.
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And to pass all the way through it, 30,000 years.
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30,000 years.
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It makes you kind of want to tell the devs of this universe, or God if you will, to bump up the travel speed a little because this is painfully slow.
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And it would be fine if the Oort cloud just hung out quietly in the dark, but about 80,000 years ago,
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a wandering binary system known as Schultz's star just flew by and grazed its outer edge.
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Sounds like the opening scene of a Hollywood comet apocalypse, But this cosmic duo was,
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thankfully, too light and too fast to send a global barrage of icy objects our way.
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It probably disturbed some objects, but they'd take millions of years to reach even the inner solar system.
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Basically, they came over to borrow a cup of sugar and clipped the Oort Cloud on their way out.
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Now, let's leave the frozen realm of the Oort cloud behind and zoom out even farther.
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Do you imagine the space around our entire system is just quiet and empty and clean?
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Not a chance.
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It's foggy.
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Right now, the solar system is hurtling at breakneck speed through the local interstellar cloud,
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a region where gas and dust are slightly denser than in the surrounding space.
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By our standards, it's still virtually a perfect vacuum, but compared to the emptiness nearby, it's a thick cosmic soup.
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Zoom out even more, and this little cloud becomes just a speck of dust inside a much larger structure.
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Welcome to the local bubble, a colossal cosmic void, a thousand light years wide where the density of matter is obscenely low.
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Imagine an exclusive VIP section of the galaxy where someone has swept out almost all of the gas.
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And who exactly is this almighty cosmic janitor?
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Well, all the clues point to the most violent events in the universe, supernova explosions.
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Starting around 14 million years ago, this neighborhood went absolutely nuts, with roughly 15 massive stars blowing up here,
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one after another, over the next several million years.
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These monstrous explosions pushed the gas out and away in all directions, leaving behind a rarefied cavity with dense walls,
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which is exactly what we're flying through right now.
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So yeah, nice neighborhood, 15 supernovae and almost no gas.
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But the explosions happened millions of years ago, and the bubble is completely transparent.
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You'd think there'd be zero evidence left, but the clues are sitting right under our noses, or rather, at the very bottom of our oceans.
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Scientists sampled deep sea sediments and found something called Iron 60 in them,
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a radioactive isotope primarily forged inside massive stars and then ejected into space during supernova explosions,
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or carried by intense stellar winds.
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Down on the seafloor, they discovered two major waves of this supernova fallout,
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one from about 2 to 3 million years ago and another from around 6 to 9 million years ago.
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It's not exactly a receipt with the home address of each dead star, but the evidence is rock solid.
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Dust from dead stars actually made its way all the way to the Earth, rained down, and now there's still some left at the bottom of the oceans.
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Pretty cool if you ask me.
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Anyway, like I said, millions of years have passed, and some of the evidence is still exactly where it landed.
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So, hold up, this is where our literal straight up journey ends.
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Otherwise, I'd be lying to you.
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From here on we stop flying and crank the galactic zoom to the max, pull the camera far beyond the local bubble,
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and the entire Milky Way galaxy comes into view.
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We've generally been sold on the idea that the Milky Way is some kind of beautiful, peaceful, glowing spiral like you see in the movies.
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Yeah, no. As soon as you rise above the galactic disc,
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that picture-perfect postcard instantly turns into a brutal crime scene.
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In the outer halo, that's the massive, rarefied sphere surrounding our galaxy, stellar streams stretch out.
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Take the Sagittarius stream, for example.
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That, ladies and gents, is what's left of one particular dwarf galaxy
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that the Milky Way has been methodically tearing to bits with its gravity for well nigh on billions of years now.
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The Milky Way is, in fact, a ruthless beast of a cannibal.
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It dragged its small neighbor into its orbit and is now smearing
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and smushing its stars in long glowing ribbons above and below its own plane.
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It looks beautiful in pictures, but in reality it's one galaxy digesting another for billions of years.
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But stellar graveyards are just child's play.
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Let's turn towards the very center of the galaxy and then look straight up.
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Hovering there in the dark are the Fermi bubbles.
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What Fermi bubbles?
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What the heck are those?
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Well they sound harmless, don't they?
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But they're not.
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These are two colossal regions of gamma ray emission, together with super duper heated gas and extremely high energy particles.
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Each one stretches about 25,000 light years from the galactic center.
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25,000 light years!
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Well just where does all that energy come from?
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I know you probably know.
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The prime suspect is none other than the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A-star.
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Millions of years ago, this monster is said to have feasted on a massive cloud of gas
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and then unleashed a gigantic burst of energy.
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If so, the Fermi Bubbles are the aftermath of that very event, or meal if you want to look at it that way.
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But the case isn't closed yet.
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have a second suspect, a powerful burst of star formation at the galactic center.
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Essentially, we have an enormous crime scene and two possible suspects.
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Take your pick.
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And amidst all this chaos, the entire galaxy somehow holds together the disk,
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the stellar streams, the scorching gas, and the hundreds of billions of stars.
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So why doesn't it all just fly apart and off into the void?
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Well most of the heavy lifting here is done silently by the dark matter halo,
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an invisible, roughly spherical structure surrounding the Milky Way.
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It appears to contain more dark matter than all the galaxies, stars, planets and nebulae put together.
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We've got no idea what it's made of, but its gravity holds the entire galaxy in an iron grip.
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Look, I know, this whole dark matter thing all seems a bit convenient.
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They looked at things and the math wasn't mathin', so they just added a big dollop of invisible matter.
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But look, its effects keep showing up all over the place, in how galaxies rotate, how clusters move,
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and in gravitational lensing where invisible mass bends light.
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Something's there.
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Yeah, we can't see it or detect it directly, so far, hence the name Dark,
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but obviously we can't just toss it out of the equations either.
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There is one awkward detail here.
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We started by saying that flying directly out of the plane of the solar system is practically impossible.
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It requires insane fuel reserves or extremely tricky gravity assists.
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Except that humanity has already flown up.
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A bit, anyway.
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And we did it over 30 years ago.
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In 1990, the Ulysses probe headed into deep space, and instead of trying to brute force its way straight up from the Earth,
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burning through tank after tank of precious fuel, it first flew towards Jupiter.
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Near Jupiter, Ulysses pulled off a brilliant gravity assist maneuver.
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The giant planet redirected the probe onto a trajectory inclined almost 80 degrees to the planetary plane.
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And Ulysses became the first probe in history to pass over the northern and southern polar regions of the sun,
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not somewhere off to the side like the Earth and almost every other spacecraft, but almost directly above and below it.
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physics actually let us out of our 2D prison here.
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So why the hell don't we have that beautiful top-down photo of the solar system yet?
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Because Lissy simply didn't have a camera.
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It didn't fly out there for pretty desktop wallpaper.
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It had a serious scientific job measuring the solar wind, the magnetic field, and and invisible streams of charged particles.
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So, for almost 19 years, the probe just looped over the sun's poles,
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gathering unique data, but never took that most desired family portrait of the planets.
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But even if it had a camera, we still wouldn't have gotten one of those familiar textbook pictures.
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There wouldn't be any glowing orbital lines, or large colorful spheres neatly arranged around the sun.
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Almost the entire frame would be basically black.
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In the center there would be a blindingly bright sun, and the planets would look like a few pathetic pixels,
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some of which would be completely drowned out by the solar glare.
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To see the whole system at once, the probe would have had to have flown much higher
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and carried a telescope that wouldn't go blind from the sun
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while also still being able to spot the faint specks of the planets. And
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that beautiful solar system from above picture would have to be
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stitched together from dozens of separate shots with drawn in orbits
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and planets artificially enlarged thousands of times just so we could see them.
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So in the end, we wouldn't get a photo, but just another diagram, only an incredibly expensive one.
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Recently, though, humanity finally began to be able to see the sun from above its equatorial plane.
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In 2025, a spacecraft called Solar Orbiter reached a vantage point almost 17 degrees south of the solar equator,
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giving us our first direct view of the sun's south pole.
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Yeah, that doesn't sound super impressive,
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big deal, 17 degrees, but until then we'd image the Sun almost exclusively from the level of its equator.
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It's like spending your whole life seeing someone only from the side, and then suddenly discovering the top of their head.
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After further gravity assists at Venus,
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Solar Orbiter's inclination should increase first to 24 degrees, then eventually to 33.
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But even then it isn't going to take a picture of the entire solar system for us.
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It's studying stuff like the sun's magnetic fields and the solar wind
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and the fundamental mystery of how our star flips its magnetic poles every 11 years.
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Another problem is that we haven't even agreed on what UP actually is.
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The plane in which the planet's orbit is tilted about 60 degrees relative to the Milky Way's disk.
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So if you fly strictly up from the solar system, you won't majestically rise above the galaxy.
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You'll just plow diagonally through it, right through the stars and dust.
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Earth has one up, the solar system has another, and the whole big Milky Way has a third.
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We've been trying this whole time to find another floor above us.
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First above the planets, then above the sun, then above the entire galaxy.
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But the higher we climb, the more obvious it becomes.
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The problem isn't the root, it's the question itself.
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There is no universal up in the universe.
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Now we can finally answer the question that started it all.
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What is directly above the solar system?
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If you just head straight up relative to the planetary plane, your route will look like this.
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First, the edge of the heliosphere.
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Then the interstellar medium with the Oort cloud extending through part of it.
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That's it.
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The Sagittarius stream and the Fermi bubbles are not the next floors right above us.
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They are parts of a completely different, much more massive structure, the Milky Way.
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And beyond that, it's just the rest of the universe.
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And the solar system's plane itself isn't a cage.
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In fact, it's really just a memory.
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About 4.6 billion years ago, the sun and the planets formed from a colossal spinning cloud of gas and dust.
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The cloud collapsed, its rotation sped up, particles smushed into each other,
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and physics gradually flattened this giant cosmic soup into a disk.
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The sun ignited in the center, and our worlds formed from the remaining material.
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So Earth is flying sideways, not because someone maliciously locked it onto cosmic rails.
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It's simply continuing a motion inherited from the material that formed it, one that began long before the Earth itself even existed.
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For billions of years, all the planets have been racing in roughly the same direction around the sun,
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like cars on a massive, endless roundabout.
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You can take an exit.
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Physics doesn't forbid it.
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It's just that any sharp turn in space will cost you an absurd amount of energy.
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That's why our probes don't blast straight up.
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They haggle with gravity instead, catching rides from Jupiter and Venus, hopping between orbits for years,
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and squeezing every last bit of performance out of each kilogram of fuel.
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We aren't trapped in two dimensions, we're just passengers traveling through a giant 3D universe on a shoestring budget.
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And even if one day we muster the resources
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and send a probe far enough above the planetary plane
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and point its camera back at the solar system and take that historic shot, it probably won't look anything like the picture in the textbook.
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And of course, someone will inevitably look at that dark frame and ask, wait, what?
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We spend several billion dollars on this crapola.
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Vocabulário e dicas de fala para esta lição
Esta aula de conversação de nível B2 usa o vídeo “Why We Can Reach Pluto But Can’t Fly Above the Sun”. As palavras que mais se repetem: solar, above, galaxy, sun, cloud. Este vídeo tem 242 frases e 3131 palavras para praticar shadowing. A fala dura 22:41. O falante mantém um ritmo estável de cerca de 138 palavras por minuto, confortável para o shadowing. Apenas 78% das palavras estão entre as 3.000 mais comuns do inglês, por isso o vocabulário é exigente.
Vocabulário principal deste vídeo
As 15 palavras mais avançadas do vídeo, com pronúncia e significado:
| Palavra | Pronúncia | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| cosmic adjetivo | /ˈkɑz.mɪk/ | cósmico |
| probe substantivo | /pɹoʊb/ | sonda |
| bubble substantivo | /ˈbʌbəl/ | bolha, borbulha |
| orbit substantivo | /ˈɔɹ.bɪt/ | órbita, círculo |
| galactic adjetivo | /ɡəˈlæktɪk/ | galáctico |
| disk substantivo | /dɪsk/ | disco |
| invisible adjetivo | /ɪnˈvɪzəb(ə)l/ | invisível |
| planetary adjetivo | /ˈplænɪˌtɛəri/ | planetário |
| stellar adjetivo | /ˈstɛl.əɹ/ | estelar |
| colossal adjetivo | /kəˈlɑsəl/ | colossal |
| croissant substantivo | /kɹəˈsɑnt/ | croissant, croassã |
| heliosphere substantivo | heliosfera | |
| spherical adjetivo | /ˈsfɛɹɪkəl/ | esférico |
| supernova substantivo | /ˌsuː.pə(ɹ)ˈnəʊ.və/ | supernova |
| orbital adjetivo | /ɔɹ.bət.l̩/ | orbital |
Phrasal verbs que você vai ouvir
| Palavra | Significado |
|---|---|
| pull off verbo | conseguir |
| blow up verbo | explodir |
| come up with verbo | pensar (em), alcançar |
| find out verbo | descobrir |
| get out verbo | sair |
| put together verbo | montar, construir |
| slow down verbo | desacelerar |
Gramática neste vídeo
As estruturas que o falante mais usa, com as palavras exatas do vídeo:
| Estrutura | No vídeo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — uma ação que começou antes e continua | guy's been cruising · We've been trying · have been racing |
| Present perfect have/has + particípio passado — uma ação passada que ainda importa agora | we've sent · has already done · you've never actually seen |
| Voz passiva be + particípio passado — o foco está no que acontece, não em quem faz | was named · been sold · is said |
Pronúncia para ficar de olho
O falante usa 56 contrações e formas reduzidas, como we're, isn't, don't. Diga-as na forma curta, do jeito que você ouve.
- Os sons de “th”: pathetic /pəˈθɛtɪk/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/
- Os sons de “sh” e “zh”: barrage /bəˈɹɑʒ/, gravitational /ˌɡɹævɪˈteɪʃənəl/, inclination /ˌɪn.klɪˈneɪ.ʃən/, sheer /ʃɪɚ/, dimension /daɪˈmɛn.ʃən/
- Palavras longas — acerte a sílaba tônica: invisible /ɪnˈvɪzəb(ə)l/, planetary /ˈplænɪˌtɛəri/, supernova /ˌsuː.pə(ɹ)ˈnəʊ.və/, gravitational /ˌɡɹævɪˈteɪʃənəl/, inclination /ˌɪn.klɪˈneɪ.ʃən/
Sons difíceis para falantes de português:
- Consoante final — sem acrescentar um “i” depois: cosmic /ˈkɑz.mɪk/, probe /pɹoʊb/, orbit /ˈɔɹ.bɪt/, galactic /ɡəˈlæktɪk/, disk /dɪsk/
- /l/ final — a língua toca o céu da boca, não vira “u”: bubble /ˈbʌbəl/, invisible /ɪnˈvɪzəb(ə)l/, colossal /kəˈlɑsəl/, spherical /ˈsfɛɹɪkəl/, particle /ˈpɑɹtək(ə)l/
- /h/ — um sopro suave, diferente do “r”: hurtle /ˈhɜɹt(ə)l/, heck /hɛk/
Como praticar com este vídeo
- Ouça o vídeo inteiro uma vez sem falar e anote as palavras que você não conhece.
- Faça shadowing frase por frase na velocidade normal, repetindo cada uma até o seu ritmo ficar igual ao do falante.
- Grave a sua voz e compare com o original, prestando atenção a palavras como cosmic, probe, bubble.
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.