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So what exactly is above the solar system? It would seem like the simplest thing in the world. You just take a rocket, point it straight up relative to the plane of the planets, launch it into space, and watch. But no, we can't. Or at least it's very, very, very difficult to do. And that's strange, because we've sent probes all the way to Pluto, billions of kilometers away. However, to rise above our own sun by flying straight up, as I said, is almost impossible. At such moments, it seems as if the laws of physics are simply laughing in our faces. So why is flying upwards, so to speak, more difficult than reaching the edge of the solar system? And what exactly would we encounter if we actually tried to get there?
All this cosmic mess starts with the Earth not standing still. Right now you are sitting in a chair or on a bed in your socks, watching this video and thinking that you are in a state of absolute peace. Well, it seems like it is, but not quite. At this very second, our planet is hurtling sideways in its orbit around the Sun at a breakneck speed of 30 km/s. For a second, just so you understand, the scale is over 100,000 km of opportunity. And any rocket we launch from Earth instantly inherits this crazy lateral velocity. If we fly to Mars, Jupiter, or even Pluto, they all rotate in roughly the same plane as Earth. At least we are already moving in the right direction. It's just like a walk in the wind.
Okay, I'm exaggerating, but the Earth has already done the lion's share of the work of this lateral movement for us. Yes, we still need a giant Monster rocket. This is obvious, but we are mostly speeding up in the same direction we were already flying. And that's it, we're on our way. But if we wanted to break this system and fly strictly perpendicularly straight up, this is where this free speed becomes our worst enemy. Look, we don't need to completely quench that 30 km/s and then accelerate upwards from zero. We need to pull another trick, redirect the velocity vector itself. But even a perfect 90° turn would require about 42 km/s of additional speed. This delta V is so high
that no conventional chemical rocket ever built by mankind would simply be able to do it. And diving into the sun won't be a magical salvation either. This only solves part of the problem. Yes, the spin effect is a trick where you turn on the engines while moving at a huge speed, so that the same turn-on gives a much larger change in orbital energy and is great for acceleration or braking. But changing the orbital inclination is much more effective when the spacecraft is moving slowly. Therefore, engineers have to be clever. They use the gravity of another planet to eject the craft. on a new trajectory. Which planet exactly? We
will get to that later. But let's imagine that we succeeded in this gravitational trick and we escaped from the plane. What's up there on the mountain? First we will have to cross the heliopause, the outer boundary of the heliosphere. It's this giant protective bubble that the sun blows around the entire solar system using the solar wind, shielding us from most of that nasty barrage of galactic cosmic rays. You can think of it as the solar system's own giant atmosphere. A kind of huge magnetized cocoon that protects us from the rest of the galaxy. For decades, scientists have drawn this bubble in the shape of a comet. with a rounded nose and one huge tail behind, which, in principle, is logical.
We are moving through the galaxy, so it is natural to expect some kind of trail to follow us. But in 2020, researchers combined data from several different space probes with computer simulations and came to a very different conclusion. There is no giant comet tail in their model. Instead, the heliosphere looks more like a deflated croissant. That's right. According to this model, we are flying through a cold, dark galaxy inside a giant, invisible croissant. But this croissant is still a trifle, because behind it lies the next big milestone. Oort Cloud. This is not some solid wall.
It is incredibly rarefied, but calculations show that it surrounds our system in the form of an almost spherical shell. So there, in the absolutely eerie pitch darkness, trillions of icy bodies could be drifting. Some of them are the size of Mount Everest. Any sane person, of course, will ask: "Wait, how do you know it's there if you've never seen it? It doesn't glow. It's simple. In 1950, the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort was studying the orbits of long-period comets and came across something unusual. And so, the Oort cloud was named in his honor. There are no magical coincidences here, of course. It turned out that these comets came from enormous distances, and flew to us literally from everywhere. This suggested that far beyond the
orbits of the planets, not a flat disk, but a giant spherical shell of icy debris is hidden. A real cosmic freezer, which still remains invisible to our telescopes. This is the whole irony of astronomy. We know about the existence of a giant cloud, but we don't have a single photo of it. To realize the true distances, it is enough to look at Voyager 2. This probe has been hurtling through the void since 1977 at a breakneck speed of 56,000 km/h. All due respect, but even at that rate it will take another 300 years or so to just touch the inner edge of this icy abyss. And to fly through it, 30,000 years. At
times like these, you want to ask the creators of this universe to turn up the speed settings a little, because traveling through space at that pace is unbearably boring, and everything would be fine if the Orta cloud just hung quietly in the darkness. But about 80,000 years ago, a wandering binary system known as Scholz's Star simply flew by and touched its outer edge. It sounds like the opening scene of a Hollywood movie about a comet apocalypse. But this cosmic tandem was traveling too fast and had too little mass to give us a full-fledged cometary armageddon. Yes, they probably collided a couple of icy chunks from their orbits, but it will take millions of years for that debris to reach our shores. In short
, these stars just dropped by to borrow some salt, and on their way out, they clumsily bumped into our Horatian cloud. Now let's leave the icy realm of the Horatian cloud behind and zoom out even further. Do you think the space around our entire system is just quiet, empty, and clean? Not at all. It's hazy out there. Right now, the solar system is hurtling through the Local Interstellar Cloud at breakneck speed. A region where gas and dust are slightly denser than the surrounding space. By our standards, it's still a near- perfect vacuum, but compared to the void nearby, it's a thick cosmic soup. Zoom out even further, and this tiny cloud is just a speck of dust inside a much larger structure. Welcome to the Local Bubble, a
colossal cosmic void thousands of light-years across where space is so cleared of matter, what's ringing. It's like an elite closed club of our galaxy, where someone did a total general cleaning, blowing out almost all the gas from there. And who ordered this cosmic cleaning? All traces lead to the most violent events in the universe, supernova explosions. It all started about 14 million years ago, when a real hell began in our sector. Over a few million years, 15 giant stars exploded here in a chain. Shock waves pushed all the gas around the edges, leaving behind a giant empty sphere. It is through it that our solar system is currently rushing. So yes, it's a pretty good area. 15 supernovas and almost no gas. But the explosions happened
millions of years ago and this bubble is completely transparent. It would seem that there should be no evidence left, but the clues lie right under our noses, or rather at the very bottom of our oceans. Scientists have taken deep-sea sediment samples and found something called Iron 60 in them. A radioactive isotope that is formed mostly inside massive stars and then ejected into space during supernova explosions or carried by intense stellar winds. On the sea floor, they found two large waves of this radioactive fallout from supernovae. One between dx and 3x million years old, and the other about 6-9 million years old. Of course, these atoms do not have passport data and registration numbers stamped on them.
each of the dead stars from the mountain. But the argument turned out to be reinforced concrete. The dust from the dead stars did make it all the way to the earth. It fell like rain. And now its remains are still resting on the ocean floor. To me, that's pretty cool. Except, as I said, millions of years have passed, and some of the evidence is still lying where it landed. But wait, that's where our literal journey straight up ends, or I'd be lying to you. From now on, we stop flying and crank up the galactic zoom to the max.
We zoom the camera far beyond the local bubble and the entire Milky Way galaxy appears in the field of view. We've generally been sold the idea that the Milky Way is some beautiful peaceful spiral that glows like in a movie. But where is it? As soon as you rise above the galactic disk, this perfect postcard picture instantly turns into a brutal crime scene. In the outer galaxy, it's this massive, sparse sphere that surrounds our galaxy, stellar streams stretch. Take, for example, the Sagittarius stream. This, ladies and gentlemen, is all that's left of one dwarf galaxy that the Milky Way has been methodically tearing apart with its gravity for almost billions of years. In fact, the Milky Way is a ruthless monster-Hannibal. It dragged its
little neighbor into orbit and is now stretching its stars into giant glowing threads that killing our galaxy from above and below. It looks beautiful in the photo. But in reality, it's one galaxy digesting another over billions of years. However, Star Graveyards are still children's toys. Let's go back to the very center of the galaxy, and then look straight up. There in the darkness hang Fermi bubbles. Sounds cute, eh. But what is this cosmic wonder anyway? These are two colossal regions of gamma rays, along with superheated gas and extremely high-energy particles. Each of them extends about 25,000 light-years from the galactic center.
25,000 light-years. Where does all this energy come from? I think you've already guessed. The main culprit, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Sagittarius A. There is a version that millions of years ago this giant chewed up a massive gas cloud and unleashed a giant wave of energy. So Fermi bubbles are literally consequences of this large-scale dinner. But it's too early to put an end to this investigation. Scientists have another working version, a powerful and sudden burst of star formation in the galactic nucleus. In essence, we have a giant crime scene spread out before us with two main suspects. Which theory is closer to you, choose. And in the midst of all this chaos, the entire galaxy somehow
holds together. The disk, the stellar streams, the hot gas and hundreds of billions of stars. So why doesn't it all just fly away into the void? Well, most of the rough work here is quietly done by the dark matter halo. An invisible, roughly spherical structure surrounding the Milky Way. It seems to contain more dark matter than all the stars, planets and nebulae in the galaxy combined. We have no idea what it's made of, but its gravity holds the entire galaxy in an iron grip. Listen, I know this whole dark matter thing seems a bit, well, so to speak, conveniently. Scientists looked at the calculations, the numbers didn't add up, so they just added a big portion of invisible matter. But look, its
effects keep cropping up everywhere. In the way galaxies rotate, in the way clusters of galaxies move, and in gravitational lensing, where invisible mass bends light. There's something there. Yes, we can't see it or directly record it yet. Hence the name is obscure, but obviously we can't just throw it out of the equations. But there's one inconvenient nuance. At the beginning, I convinced you that breaking straight up from the plane of the planets is almost fantasy. Like, you need either cosmic volumes of fuel or ingenious gravitational tricks. Only humanity was already flying upwards. And the most interesting thing is, we did it more than three decades ago. In 1990, the Ulysses probe went into deep space and instead of stupidly
pushing straight up from the ground, burning tank after tank of precious fuel, it first flew to Jupiter. Near Jupiter, Ulysses performed a brilliant gravitational maneuver. The giant planet redirected the probe into a trajectory inclined almost 80 degrees to the plane of the planets. And Ulysses became the first probe in history to pass over the north and south polar regions of the Sun. Not somewhere to the side, like Earth and almost all other spacecraft, but almost directly above and below it. In essence, physics itself opened the door for us from our two-dimensional prison. So why do n't we still have this beautiful photo of the solar system from above? Because Ulysses simply didn't have a camera.
Its mission was not at all to click pretty pictures for us to use as a background on our computer. It had serious scientific work: to measure the solar wind, the magnetic field and invisible streams of charged particles. So for almost 19 years, the probe simply wound circles over the poles of the sun, collecting unique data. That's it He never brought us the much-desired composite image of all the planets. But even if he had a camera, we still would n't have gotten those painfully familiar pictures from textbooks. There wouldn't have been any glowing lines of orbits or large, colorful spheres neatly arranged around the sun. Almost the entire frame would have been black. The sun would have been blindingly bright in the center, and
the planets would have looked like a few pitiful pixels, some of which would have been completely drowned out by the sunlight. To see the entire system, the probe would have had to fly much higher and carry a telescope that wouldn't be blinded by the sun and still be able to see the faint specks of planets. And this beautiful picture of the Solar System from above would have had to be stitched together from dozens of individual frames with drawn orbits and artificially magnified planets thousands of times just so we could see them. So in the end, we wouldn't have gotten a photograph, but just another diagram, only an incredible one. road. But recently, humanity finally got a chance to see the sun above its equatorial plane. In 2025, the
Solar Orbit spacecraft reached a vantage point nearly 17° south of the solar equator, giving us our first direct look at the sun's south pole. Yes, that doesn't sound super impressive. 17°, you might think, but up until then, we'd been photographing the sun almost exclusively from its equator. It's like seeing someone in profile all your life and then suddenly seeing their head. After further gravitational maneuvers near Venus, the Solar Orbiter's tilt should increase first to 24° and then eventually to 33°. But even then, it won't be able to photograph the entire solar system for us. And it's studying things like the sun's magnetic fields, the solar wind, and the fundamental mystery of how our star flips its
magnetic poles every 11 years. Another problem is that we haven't quite agreed on what a up. The plane in which the planets orbit is tilted about 60 degrees relative to the disk of the Milky Way. So if you fly straight up from the solar system, you won't rise majestically above the galaxy. You'll just cut through it, literally slicing through the thicket of stars and cosmic dust. There's no ceiling in space. The Earth, the solar system, and the entire Milky Way have their own completely different ideas about where the top is. We've been trying to find some kind of top above us all this time. First above the planets, then above the Sun, then above the entire galaxy. But the higher we go, the more obvious one thing becomes.
The problem isn't the route, the problem is the question itself. There's no universal up in the universe. Now we can finally answer the question that started it all. What's directly above the solar system? If you just head straight up relative to the plane of the planets, your route will look like this. First the edge of the heliosphere, then the interstellar medium, part of which is the Oort cloud. And everything. The Sagittarius stream and the Fermi bubbles are not the next floors directly above us. They are parts of a completely different, much more massive structure of the Smack Road, and
beyond it is simply the rest of the universe. And the plane of the solar system itself is not some kind of cage. In fact, it is just a memory. About 4.6 billion years ago, the sun and planets formed from a colossal cloud of rotating gas and dust. The cloud contracted, its rotation accelerated, particles crashed into each other, and physics gradually flattened this giant cosmic soup into a disk. In the center, the sun caught fire, and from the remaining material our worlds formed. So the earth is flying sideways not because someone maliciously put it on cosmic rails. It simply continues the movement inherited from the material from which it was formed. A movement that began long before the Earth itself even existed. For billions of years, all
the planets have been racing in roughly the same direction around the sun. like cars on a huge, endless ring. You can slide off it. Physics doesn't prohibit it. It's just that any sharp turn in space will cost you an absurd amount of energy. That's why our probes are nervously heading straight up. Instead, our probes are fiddling with gravity, catching the passing forces of Jupiter and Venus. They loop between orbits for years, squeezing every last drop out of every kilogram of fuel. We're not trapped in a flat world. We're just travelers in a grand three-dimensional universe where our ambitions are a little out of budget. And even if one day we gather all the resources and send a probe
high enough above the plane of the planets, point its camera back at the solar system, and take this historic shot. It probably won't even look like a textbook picture. And of course, someone is bound to look at this dark shot and say, "Wait, we wasted a few Billions of bucks for this nonsense?
