How Was Foo Created?

The giant gray hole collapses and everything goes dark. Lumi wakes Nom up in a brand-new Solar System… then, at the edge of the Kuiper belt, the stars go out one by one: PLANET X — the "10th planet", heavier than dozens of Jupiters — opens its eyes. It snaps Pluto's orbit, strips Triton from Neptune, turns Jupiter's moons into billiard balls and dives at the Sun. Nom bites, Nom pulls, Lumi pushes, Lumi builds a wall of light… not enough. At 2:30: TICK. Time freezes. Only Nom and Lumi can move — and something is whispering "foo… foo…". To find out who did it, they open a tesseract that sees every universe and fall into an error universe. There, a gray sphere is asleep. It has no mass, it eats information… and it only knows one word. Chapters 0:00 Who froze time? 0:10 After the gray hole 0:41 A brand-new Solar System 1:02 The Kuiper belt 1:12 Planet X 1:32 The giant planets 1:52 Earth's orbit 2:04 Planet X vs the Sun 2:30 Time stops 3:25 Who did this? 3:45 The multiverse cube 5:00 The error universe 6:15 It wakes up 6:40 Its other side 7:06 The Event Horizon Halo 7:30 Home 7:50 Dark matter 8:25 What is dark matter? For the curious: the time freeze, the gray sphere and this Planet X are fiction. "Planet Nine" is a real proposal in the science literature (roughly 5–10 Earth masses) but has not been found; something ~30 Jupiters heavy would be a brown dwarf, and NASA's WISE survey ruled out anything that big near the Sun. The Kuiper belt, Arrokoth, Jupiter's four Galilean moons and tides are real. Time really does slow down near strong gravity; stopping it completely is not a thing. About 85% of all matter is dark matter — we only see its pull. What do YOU think dark matter is? WIMPs, axions, tiny black holes… or Foo's family? Comment your guess 👇 Subscribe to Predators SIMULATOR and tap the bell for the next episode. Sources • The story: Foo, its two personalities, the time freeze, the Event Horizon Halo and Planet X as drawn here are fiction. The real science around them is listed below. • Planet X / Planet Nine: A hidden "Planet Nine" of roughly 5–10 Earth masses, a few hundred AU out, was proposed to explain the clustered orbits of distant Kuiper-belt objects (Batygin & Brown 2016; mass/orbit update 2021). It has not been found. A body of ~30 Jupiter masses would be a brown dwarf; NASA's WISE survey ruled out anything that big (even Saturn-sized) out to about 10,000 AU. The Planet X in the video is a "what if". • Kuiper belt: A ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune, about 30–50 AU from the Sun; it includes Pluto and its moon Charon (a binary pair that orbit a point between them) and Arrokoth, the two-lobed "snowman" visited by New Horizons in 2019. Typical temperatures there are around 40 K (about −230 °C). • Jupiter's moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto were discovered by Galileo in 1610. Uranus is tilted on its side (about 98°); Triton orbits Neptune backwards (retrograde) and is thought to be a captured Kuiper-belt object. • Tides on a star: A massive body passing close to a star raises tides on it and can strip plasma from it (as in close binary stars and tidal disruption events). • Time: Time really runs slower in stronger gravity and at higher speed (gravitational and velocity time dilation), measured with atomic clocks and corrected for in GPS. No known physics stops time completely for the rest of the universe. • Tesseract: A tesseract (4D hypercube) has 8 cubic cells, 24 square faces, 32 edges and 16 vertices; what we can draw is its 3D shadow. • Multiverse: The string-theory "landscape" may allow around 10^500 possible vacua (universes with different laws). This is a hypothesis with no observational evidence. • Information paradox: Hawking (1976) argued that black holes might destroy information, which conflicts with quantum mechanics; whether information is truly lost is still debated. • "foo": "foo" (and "bar") are placeholder names programmers use for things that have no real name yet. • Dark matter: About 85% of the matter in the universe is dark matter (Planck 2018: ~26.8% of the energy budget vs ~4.9% ordinary matter). It is seen only through its gravity: galaxy rotation, gravitational lensing, the Bullet Cluster (2006), the cosmic microwave background. Simulations show it forms a cosmic web of filaments, with galaxies at the nodes. Candidates include WIMPs, axions and primordial black holes; none has been detected directly. • Cartoon licence: Nom (a black hole), Lumi (a white hole) and Foo are characters. Sizes and distances are squeezed so everything fits on screen.