A still taken from the ending of Super Mario 64. Artificialraven on YouTube Nintendo's Mario series is the best-selling video game franchise in history. And with moves like Mario's, it's no mystery why so many people enjoy navigating the little Italian plumber through his fantasy world of princesses, castles, and magical mushrooms. But there's a fundamental flaw in the game: Based on what we know about our universe, Mario World physically couldn't exist.

This tiny yet surprising flaw in the game was recently discovered by the PBS video series Space Time, which used some simple math and basic physics to determine which kind of planet Mario lives on.

How does Mario jump so high?

You'll notice in the GIF below that Mario has some very impressive jumping skills:

At first you might think Mario can jump so high because he is on a planet that is smaller than Earth and, therefore, has weaker gravity.

The Moon, for example, has about one-sixth Earth's gravity, which means you can jump six times higher on the Moon than on Earth using the same leg power. But that's not the full story.

The crucial detail is not how high Mario jumps but how fast he falls.

Although you can jump six times higher on the Moon, it would take six times as long to fall back to the ground as it would on Earth. If Mario fell that slowly, it would make for some pretty boring gameplay.

Because Mario moves relatively quickly through the air, he must be on a planet that has pretty strong gravity. You can easily calculate how strong the gravity in Mario World is with two simple parameters:

How high Mario jumps.

How long it takes Mario to fall to the ground.

By crudely measuring these factors, Gabe from Space Time determined that in the 1990 game "Super Mario World," Mario jumps about 2 1/4 times his own height and takes approximately 0.3 seconds to fall to the ground.

After crunching the numbers, Gabe calculates that Mario is on a world whose gravity is eight times as strong as Earth's. Keep in mind that most humans can't withstand anything stronger than five times Earth's gravity before passing out.

To put this into better perspective: If you weigh 150 pounds on Earth, you would weigh 1,200 pounds on Mario's planet!

So how does Mario jump so high with all of those pounds weighing him down?

Pure leg strength, Gabe concludes. He must do a lot of dead lifts off-screen.

In fact, if Mario were on Earth, his strength would allow him to jump higher than 90 feet. To achieve that kind of height, he would have a liftoff speed of more than 50 mph!

Mario's jumping ability does slightly vary between different games, so gravity's force will also vary. But in general people have found that this value is between five and 10 times as strong as Earth's gravity — stronger than anything we experience on a daily basis. You might reach five g's when you're speeding through a 360-degree loop on a roller coaster.

Which planet is Mario's?

No planet in our solar system even comes close to the kind of gravity on Mario's many worlds. Jupiter, the largest planet orbiting our sun, has about 2 1/2 times Earth's gravity. So if you weighed 150 pounds on Earth, you would weigh 375 pounds on Jupiter. That's not even close to the gravity on Mario World.

Though Mario's planet is not in our solar system, could it be outside of it, in another star system far from Earth? Because of our search for planets outside our solar system, we know there are plenty of weird planets out there. But are they weird enough?

Through NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, humans have found more than 1,800 planets orbiting stars other than the sun, thousands of light years from Earth. Could one of them have conditions similar to those on Mario World?

First, Mario clearly lives on a rocky planet with an atmosphere similar to Earth's. But its gravity is also eight times as strong as Earth's — is such a planet possible?

Unfortunately for Mario, a planet like this doesn't seem likely to exist in our universe because of how we think large planets form. To have a lot of gravity a planet must have a lot of mass, and the planets that are even close to being large enough seem to be gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn, with no ground to speak of.

The known planet with the strongest gravity checks in at about four g's — about half the gravity that Gabe calculated on Mario World.

So as Earth-like as Mario's world may appear on screen, there is no planet in the universe that would give us moves like Mario's.

Check out the PBS video below: