Why it’s impossible to go above and below the Solar System

This is what you think the solar system looks like. But nobody's ever been this far up to see it like this. It's impossible. Getting here to take this picture would be one of the most difficult things our species could do. And if we could, you'd be able to save thousands of lives. So why is it that we can send a spacecraft 25 billion kilometers away, but we can't simply go in a different direction, up? We'll get to exactly why this doesn't work, whether there's any way around it, and if it could work, how far could you go? What would you even see? Okay, so you want to soar over the North Pole of the Sun and the South Pole. Become a solar polar explorer, the first person to get a view of the solar system from above. You've got a spaceship and launch capability, but it's going to be hard. Why? Why is it easier to send a probe to Pluto than it is to travel above the Sun? I'll give you a hint. It's not the distance. We've done flybys of every planet in the solar system and beyond. We can do interplanetary, even interstellar travel. Is it the heat? I mean, the Sun's hot, obviously. At its surface, it's around 5,500 degrees Celsius. That's 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And the corona can reach 2 million degrees Celsius. Surprisingly, it's not the heat, either. The Parker Solar Probe once flew within 6 million kilometers of the Sun, handling temperatures of 1,400 degrees Celsius with its high-tech heat shields. We're good at building spacecraft for crazy hot and cold environments flooded with radiation. No, the problem is, and get ready for this, it's flatness. Yeah, absolute flatness. The solar system is flat. That's a real problem. And I'm not coming at you like a maniac telling you the Earth is flat. We all know the Earth is flat. Round, Peter. We all know the Earth is round. But the solar system is almost uniformly flat. Like a pancake. A quarter. Every planet, asteroid, and moon in our solar system moves on the same flat plane because of the way the solar system formed. It's called the ecliptic plane. So if you imagine the solar system as a ball, like a nucleus with electrons spinning about it, well, no, you're wrong. It's more like marbles on a big round table, sun in the middle and everything else orbiting around it. Now, we'll get into why it's such a flat table in a minute, but the fact that the solar system is so flat It's a big problem for you when you lift off with the purpose of seeing it from above. It's going to take some serious physics and horsepower. Now, you might be asking yourself, why the heck would you want to see the Sun's poles anyway? Well, if you live on planet Earth or off Earth, it would explain so much about the solar weather. What new science would we see if we imaged the sun's poles? What implications would that have for humanity? And answering these types of huge questions is where AI shines. But new tools are cropping up faster than ever these days. And personally, I've found it hard to figure out which tool to use when. That's where ChatLLM by Abacus AI comes in. Chat LLM is a one-stop shop where you can access top AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini Pro, Claude Opus, and more. And if you don't know which model to use, their Route LLM feature can automatically choose the best one for your prompt. So you could ask one model to explain black holes like I'm five, another to help research the history of dark stars, and then generate visuals, videos, or even a full presentation from the same platform. Chat LLM also includes AI image generation, AI video generation, and an AI PowerPoint generator that can build deep, researched, professional presentations. And with Abacus AI Deep Agent, You can create apps, websites, software, AI agents, chatbots, and more. Basically, it's like having an entire AI lab right in your browser. 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With better predictions, we could protect grids and communications networks and shut them down in advance. Astronauts could literally rearrange their spacecraft to shield themselves from a serious coronal mass ejection. This could save billion-dollar technical systems and save thousands of lives too. Look, the Sun is weird. Every 11 years, it flips the polarity of its poles. That means the North Pole and the South Pole switch places. Earth does this too, but only every few hundred thousand years or so. But when the Sun flips, that's when sunspots flare up, and Earth gets blasted with solar flares that can mess with our electronics. Those flares are caused by the Sun's flip-flopping magnetosphere. And a good chunk of that is driven by what's going on at the poles, which we can't see. So seeing what's happening at the poles has kind of become solar holy grail material. With that knowledge, we could better predict solar flares and storms to protect ourselves. So why haven't we just sent probes to check it out? Well, the inflexible problem of Delta V. Delta stands for change, and V stands for velocity. Delta V is the change in velocity a spaceship needs in order to pull off an orbital maneuver, like launching into orbit. The problem is, changing your velocity is wildly expensive in terms of rocket fuel. Why? Say you wanted to try this. Well, just point up and burn rubber, right? Aim your spaceship above the ecliptic plane and hit the gas. The problem is delta-v. Earth is traveling around the Sun at incredible speeds, about 110,000 kilometers per hour. And when your ship leaves Earth, it's also traveling super fast in the same direction. Basically, it inherits the sideways speed from Earth's orbit around the Sun. To make a sharp turn, you have to cancel that original speed before you can chart a new direction. You might think you understand turning, but do you? Imagine you're in a car, going forward, and you want to turn left. Simply turn your wheel, and all of your forward momentum gets converted into a new direction. You're able to do this because the tires on your car are able to grip the road and redirect that energy sideways. And if you think about it, when you're done the turn, you're not going in that original direction anymore. To say that in delta-v terms, your velocity in that original direction is zero. This is true if you want to make a turn in space as well, but in space? There's nothing to push off of, no rubber on the road. Any change in direction has to have a rocket pushing you in that direction. And to make a complete 90-degree turn, you still need to stop going forward. Otherwise, the best you'll ever do is continue forward and in the new direction at the same time, on some new diagonal direction. Now, changing planes is one of the most energy-intensive tasks in spaceflight. To perform a 90-degree turn, it would require burning so much fuel that it's physically impossible to brute force it. The biggest rocket on Earth is the SpaceX Starship, which carries over 4.5 million kilograms of fuel. And it has nowhere near enough fuel to provide the change in velocity we need. And it gets worse. Building a rocket that large with that much rocket fuel becomes an exponentially more difficult problem. Because the larger your rocket, the bigger the challenge. If you send up a huge rocket, you need more fuel to push that heavier ship into space. But that rocket fuel is also heavy, so you need a bigger rocket with more fuel to help push all that other fuel up. Basically, the ship would have to be so big it would be almost all rocket fuel. That's just not feasible. Thanks Delta V. Okay, that was a mouthful of an explanation. But if you want us to explain concepts like Delta V in a future video, put a comment below on what you want explained. I never took calculus in school, but I'll get somebody smart here at What If to explain it to me first. I want to learn about reverse osmosis. Like, reverse! Sure, whatever floats your boat. So how do you possibly get above the Sun? Well, like so many questions about our solar system, the answer is Jupiter. It's the biggest planet in the solar system, 11 times wider than Earth, and 318 times more massive. So its gravitational pull is 318 times stronger. That's important if you're going to see the top of the sun. You see, we used Jupiter's intense orbital momentum to help change the speed and direction of our spacecraft since the 1970s. Pioneer, Voyager, they used Jupiter's gravity to execute flight maneuvers known as gravity assists or gravitational slingshots. Basically, we fly real close to a planet and steal some of its kinetic energy To accelerate and change direction. Voyager 2 used the gravity of four planets to get where it is today, starting with Jupiter. You might know the Voyagers because they're famously still flying through interstellar space. But we also used Jupiter's gravity to change the speed and direction of a lesser-known spacecraft, Ulysses. Ulysses was launched from the space shuttle in 1990 and executed a gravity assist around Jupiter in 1992. That changed the direction of the Ulysses craft to a staggering 80-degree incline on the ecliptic plane. By the mid-90s, Ulysses passed over the Sun's poles and measured them with a whole host of instruments. We learned all kinds of things about the Sun and the heliosphere. Look, we learned that the solar wind is blasting out of the Sun's polar regions at 750 km per second, way faster than the wind from the Sun's equator. Of all the instruments that Ulysses carried into space, none of them was a camera. And it was still really far out from the Sun, just inside Mars' orbit at its closest. So Ulysses sensed the poles, measured them, but never imaged them. That means we've still never seen an image of the Sun's poles until 2025. Launched 30 years after Ulysses, the Solar Orbiter spacecraft took off in 2020 and chose a different path. It didn't head toward Jupiter. Instead, it used multiple Earth and Venus gravity assists to change its flight path out of the ecliptic plane. Over a period of five years, it got up to 17 degrees above the ecliptic plane, and it stayed close to the Sun. At its closest point, the orbiter and its huge heat shield were just 42 million kilometers out. It's closer to the Sun than Mercury. Finally, in March 2025, for the first time in human history, we saw images of the Sun's south pole. Of course, if you remember your middle school math and how to use a protractor, 17 degrees isn't a lot. So it's kind of like looking at the bottom of an orange, like this. Impressive? Sort of. It's the first glimpse. The good news is that the mission is still rolling, and with more gravity assists, that angle will climb to 33 degrees. We'll get better and better views of the solar poles. With that first peak, we imaged the poles and learned all kinds of things about the Sun. Like how the Sun shapes the heliosphere, that giant bubble of plasma that surrounds the solar system. How tangled up its magnetic fields are, and what those miniature solar flares named campfires are all about. In future, that might explain why the corona is so hot. Overall, it's doing what it's supposed to do. Understand solar weather, helping us predict the sun's behavior. There are other proposed missions in the works too. China is planning to launch the promising Solar Polar Orbit Observatory in 2029, which might get to 60 degrees or 70 degrees relative to the ecliptic plane. So we're getting closer to traveling above and below the sun. What if you figured out a way to get all the way to 90 degrees? What would you see? Okay, you figured out a way to use multiple gravity assists and some futuristic propulsion to delta-v your way into orbit around the Sun at 90 degrees. Maybe you've got one of those fancy solar sails that NASA's piloting. You would be the first to see the Sun and the whole solar system from above. You'd see the vast, flat solar system below you, and from your vantage point, it'd be kind of awesome. I mean, it's the Sun's north pole. And as you zoomed outward, you would see all the inner planets from above, from Mercury to Mars, and then the asteroid belt, and then the outer gas giants. And at some point, you'd probably ask yourself, Why is the solar system so remarkably flat? Like, all the planets are within a few degrees of the ecliptic plane. Mercury is the outlier at 7 degrees, but the rest are really within a few degrees. Well, you'd have to go back to the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago, when it was just a molecular cloud or nebula that gravity was pulling together. All that matter and dust gathered and started clumping up. And around that time, a nearby supernova's energy hit the cloud and it started churning. And as all the particles started to spin and bump into each other, a funny thing happened. You see, the formation of disks is really common in space when matter is rotating. You know, like Saturn's rings. In our case, the matter was all going in a circular motion around a single point and wouldn't stop. It's called the conservation of angular momentum. Everything keeps going around and around. But the particle's constant collisions cancel out the up and down movement. And that eventually brings everything together in a plane. The ecliptic plane is formed. At that stage, that's what we would call a protoplanetary disk. And after that, the planets and the Sun formed. So, jumping forward billions of years, there you'd be, floating above it all, taking a moment of wonder at the extremely flat solar system. Maybe some selfies, and then you'd be drawn towards seeing the bigger picture, going further out to the edge of the solar system, the heliopause. Yeah, if you flew way up above the planets you'd eventually reach the edge of the heliosphere. That's the bubble around the Sun and the solar system created by the Sun's solar wind and magnetic field. It stretches out to three times the distance to Pluto. And that far out, you'd be able to measure the shape of the heliosphere, which is something scientists are still studying. It might be round, or it might be croissant-shaped, or shaped like a teardrop, or a comet, or a tadpole. We don't know, because we've only studied it from two points. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. But you'd figure it out. And that's critical stuff. You see, the Sun's plasma blasts out into space, acting as a giant shield for us against cosmic interstellar radiation. Without the heliosphere, we'd all be toast. The heliosphere was first discovered by Voyager 1, which suddenly stopped detecting solar radiation and then picked up a huge increase in cosmic radiation in 2012. It wasn't hard to detect. There's about three times as much cosmic radiation outside the heliosphere as there is inside it. Now, we know that the Sun has provided us with energy since the beginning of time, but it seems it's also protected us from deadly radiation. And it's a dynamic system, too. The heliosphere shrinks and expands with the level of solar activity. It gets bigger when the Sun starts swapping poles. See, getting above and below the poles is critical to understanding how all these things work. Now, the further above the Sun you'd go, the more interesting other structures would get, and less disk-like. Like the Kuiper Belt, full of trans-Neptunian objects, which is more belt-like. Officially scientists say it's donut shaped, but the Kuiper Donut doesn't sound very scientific. And even further out, there's the Oort cloud, that big shell full of icy comets and planetesimals. We've never actually observed it, so when you'd be that far above, you'd finally be able to tell the actual shape. Maybe it's more belt-like or ring-like than we currently think. And at that point, above and below would start to kind of lose meaning. You would still be above the solar system, You'd hardly be able to spot the Sun anymore. You'd be in interstellar space, and you'd start to put the solar system into a galactic context. Like, where does it fit in the Milky Way? Well, looking down on the solar system wouldn't mean you're looking down on the Milky Way. The Sun sits above the galactic midplane, but the solar system is basically cruising around the galaxy on its side. Yeah, our nice, flat solar disk is at a 60-degree angle relative to the galaxy's elliptic plane. And it doesn't seem like the solar system always sits above the galactic plane either. Instead, it seems like we oscillate through the plane. We've been observing a nearby galactic structure called the Radcliffe Wave, a local part of the Milky Way, and its star clusters move up and down, doing the wave. So, if you kept track of your old planet Earth spinning around the Sun, it'd look something like this. Earth orbits the Sun on a flat plane. Our solar system orbits our galactic center at hundreds of kilometers per second, but it's spinning on its side at 60 degrees off-kilter from the galactic plane. And it's bobbing up and down. And of course, the Milky Way is hurtling through space as part of the Local Group of Galaxies, Which is part of the Virgo supercluster at the edge of the Laniakea supercluster. After a while, above becomes relative, inconsequential, really, in relation to the rest of the universe. And all this started because we wanted to see the Sun from one specific angle, above it. But what does the Sun look like as a sunset from every planet in the solar system? And what does a sunset on an alien planet look like? Well, click the video on screen now to watch that episode. Because that's a story for another WHAT IF.