A Brief History of Astronomy

[Music] foreign years after opening its eye to the cosmos the Hubble Space Telescope set its sights Upon A seemingly empty patch of Sky near the constellation Ursa Major staring into the void for 10 days the telescope captured 342 images in ultraviolet visible and infrared light the compilation revealed the Sea of galaxies stretching across time back to their very Origins Humanity glimpsed the true scale of the cosmos the invention of the telescope revealed our universe and repositioned the Earth within it that Cosmic perspective shifted dramatically the universe suddenly became this vast Place populated by galaxies like our own Milky Way in the 20th century our telescopes escaped the limitations of Earth's atmosphere once we had sent the first satellites into Earth orbit we had the possibility of sending observatories out into space the electromagnetic spectrum unlocked a realm of invisible light every time we do a new survey at a new wavelength we always find major discoveries we're looking right through the dust and we can see how the stars are being assembled how they are growing with Next Generation Optics we hope to Define our place within the cosmos every Discovery we have made has changed the way we see ourselves we should be proud that we can have Cosmic humility foreign [Music] s of years Humanity looked to the night sky in Wonder but with only the human eye to observe it our perception of the heavens was flawed when the ancient people looked into the night sky they saw that the stars were arranged in a fixed pattern and it just rotated around the Observer Aristotle emerged as perhaps the most prominent voice of Greek philosophy and he coined that phrase of the immutable Heavens where nothing would ever ever change many of the Ancients pictured a geocentric Universe our Earth at the center and the celestial bodies in orbit but not all early thinkers in ancient Greece aristarchus had suggested that perhaps the Earth might not be at the center of the universe and that maybe the sun might be at the center in the second century CE Hellenistic astronomers devised a model to explain the complex movements of the planets the eye could observe occasionally but regularly each wondrous path would briefly appear to move backwards with Earth fixed as the center of reality these retrograde motions were explained by adding epicycles to the planet's orbits all of astronomy was fixated on the concept that a circle is a perfect geometric figure and in order to keep circles as the fundamental way that things moved in the universe they had to put little circles orbiting around bigger circles [Music] several astronomers would question the Paradigm over the centuries then in the 1500s a Polish Cannon founded the heliocentric Revolution Nicolas Copernicus realized that the Motions of the planets that we could see in the sky would be much more elegantly explained if they were all moving around the Sun instead of around the Earth Copernicus was able to simplify ptolemy's picture and remove many of the epicycles it turns out in the end his circular orbits weren't exactly the solution at the turn of the 17th century in German astronomer Johannes Kepler did away with circular orbits and epicycles allowing each planet to orbit in an imperfect ellipse around the Sun you now had a very simple direct and clean model for how the solar system worked that mapped with reality [Music] just a few years later Humanity acquired clear scientific evidence that Earth was not the center of the universe thanks to pieces of precisely shaped glass astronomy is only as good as the instruments you have the invention of the telescope in 1608 revealed the heavens before the first telescopes were developed human beings could only see about 3 000 Stars when people first started looking at the sky through telescopes it was the first time a human sense had been extended it's a really simple invention really suddenly you could collect more light and still direct it into a human eye it uses a couple of lenses you put them together and you can magnify the objects that you're looking at you could suddenly stop building astronomy around just points of light in the sky which is what it had been all about before that Galileo Galilei was the first person on record to point his telescope Skyward he was able to make out the crated surface of the Moon and illustrate its phases in detail Galileo then trained his sights on Venus and discovered that it too went through phases he showed that the Milky Way was basically made up of stars rather than some sort of coagulated milk he showed that there were mountains on the moon and crisis on the moon but perhaps greatest discovery came as he observed the planet Jupiter that he was looking through his telescope and he saw what he thought were four stars around Jupiter he kept watching the Stars over the course of a few days and he saw those Stars rotating and so he published this discovery as the moons of Jupiter it changed the concept in the minds of astronomers that the Earth needed to be at the center of the universe telescopic sight had revealed a distant world with its own satellites however the telescope's ability to open up our universe had only just begun [Music] a clear night reveals that the stars are not randomly sprinkled across our Sky most collect in a long dense Trail sweeping through the heavens this Milky path that stretches across the sky which the Romans have called via lactia the path of milk and we call it today the Milky Way it's an amazing sight but you can't distinguish all of the individual Stars the Milky Way is really a collection of many billion stars which are individually too small to be seen while Galileo's telescope revealed the individual Stars the Milky Way's significance would not become clear until the late 18th century the brother and sister team of William and Caroline Herschel constructed some of the largest telescopes in the world there are different types of telescopes either you can use lenses which are made of glass and you pass the light through the glass these are called refractive telescopes there was a natural limit to how large you could make these telescopes based on lenses when you make a lens larger and larger it becomes pretty heavy that piece of glass bends under its own weight and it loses the perfect shape to which it has been manufactured in 1789 the herschel's completed the world's biggest telescope 12 meters in length great 40-foot telescope captured light not with glass but with polished metal mirrors you could make much larger without structural problems because you could put a piece of Steel underneath that would hold them in place and that was structurally much stiffer than a lens would ever be also they don't suffer from some of the problems or what we call in the business aberrations that the glass lenses do [Music] in the 1780s Herschel and his sister embarked on a project to map the Milky Way [Music] conceptually it's quite difficult these days to to think about just what an Endeavor this was these were two people looking out with a very large telescope that they'd built themselves mapping a forest from being within the forest you don't really know what it looks like from outside they measured the distances to what they called nebulae at the time and what they found was that these nebulae were actually usually clusters of stars and Herschel assumed that every Star would have the same sort of true brightness the same amount of light it emits so he figured if I just look into all directions in the sky and I count how many stars I see there I could work out the structure of the Milky Way that overall distribution of stars foreign it wasn't a correct assumption but it wasn't a bad one either because scientists in the face of a lack of knowledge a lack of understanding have to start somewhere knowing the exact point at which their telescope was pointed and calculating a star's distance based on how dim it appeared the herschel's slowly mapped the structure of the Milky Way they discovered that the Milky Way is like a flattened disc shape and the stars were not distributed uniformly across the whole of the sky in spite of their hard work the herschel's incorrectly concluded that our solar system was near the center of the Milky Way their sample of stars was too Limited the Milky Way consists of much more than just stars there are heaps of dust clouds and they are so dense that they obscure the light from the Stars the herschels were limited by the most nearby dust clouds surrounding us and that's how far they could see it would take over a century to reposition our home [Music] as the 20th century dawned the next record-setting telescope was completed 22 tons of moving Parts supported by a pool of liquid mercury to turn a gigantic mirror toward its targets [Music] the power of the 60-inch telescope in Southern California allowed astronomer Harlow shapley to embark on his study of globular clusters bound collections of stars that evolved from the same gas cloud you might think about it like a gigantic ball containing tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of stars crucially they are not in the plane of the Milky Way but a sphere all around the center you can see these clusters above the plane of the Milky Way below the plane of the Milky Way where there is no dust in the way that blocks your fuel shapley employed a certain breed of star Within These clusters to determine their distance from Earth it's hard to measure distance in and get a ruler and place it between the stars but it's a really important part of what we do one of the best ways to discover how far away things are is to look at a type of star called a seafood variable like Cosmic Clockwork cepheids vary their brightness over time and it's a stable pulsation where each pulsation might last for a week or up to a month japly knew that he could time those pulsations and derive the distance so you can take the Stephie Breville star put it far away and the light gets dimmer but we know what the brightness is because we know how it's pulsating the dimness tells us the distance calculating the distance of cepheid variables sharply revealed that just as our Earth is not the center of our solar system our solar system is not at the center of the Milky Way We Now know in fact that the Earth and solar system uh closer to the edge of our galaxy than to the center about 25 000 light years from the center of the Galaxy foreign 1917 the 60-inch telescope at Mount Wilson was surpassed by a new device at the same site [Music] weighing over four tons the 100-inch hooker telescope's mirror was forged from wine bottle glass coated in reflective silver American astronomer Edwin Hubble was offered a staff position at the observatory and soon set to work studying spiral nebulae foreign there was a big debate about the nature of the nebulae one part he said they are just glowing gas clouds and the other side said hmm we think that some of them might be whole Milky Ways or whole island universes to settle the debate Hubble measured their distances from Earth thought they were outside the Galaxy but other astronomers thought they were within the Galaxy in October 1923 while comparing separate photographs of the Andromeda nebula Hubble identified as cepheid variable star his calculation showed that it was 900 000 light years away far beyond where shapley placed the edge of the Milky Way it meant that Andromeda couldn't possibly be part of our own Milky Way galaxy it had to be a separate Galaxy a separate Island universe this was the moment when the Andromeda nebula became the Andromeda galaxy we were no longer the center of everything the universe suddenly became this vast Place populated by galaxies like our own Milky Way Hubble's follow-up discoveries swiftly convinced the great majority of astronomers that the Universe contained a myriad of galaxies perhaps as many as 100 billion the universe was Far bigger than we could possibly have imagined every Discovery we have made has changed the way we see ourselves as relation to this universe we become a smaller part of it we become a less privileged part of it we're on a tiny Rock that's orbiting a very average star and that star is one of 200 billion or so orbiting a pretty ordinary spiral galaxy and that's in a group of about 50 galaxies within a supercluster of probably Millions in a universe that is unimaginably big and possibly completely infinite [Music] truly explore the universe we had to see the invisible before the 19th century Humanity's view of the world was restricted to the visible spectrum then in 1800 William Herschel the same man who attempted to position our son within the cosmos exposed sunlight secret Herschel knew that Newton had split the light of the sun into the rainbow of colors he then wondered what would happen beyond that rainbow of colors he was interested in what temperatures the different colors of the rainbow might have but then out of Interest he moved one of his thermometers beyond the red edge of the spectrum and discovered that the temperature there was higher even than the hot red end of the spectrum and that told him that there was some form of radiation which may have been similar to the radiation of light but it carried with its heat and that was actually the discovery of infrared radiation he went on to be able to show that these infrared rays were the same kinds of rays as the visible light they were reflected and refracted these rays of energy Traverse and disperse across the vacuum of space but they are merely two sections of a continuous Spectrum from radio waves at the lowest energy to gamma rays at the greatest and that really set the stage for a detailed understanding of the broader electromagnetic spectrum astronomers were slow to adopt technology capable of detecting these rays [Music] but following technological developments spurred on by the Second World War the field of infrared astronomy blossomed con seat with eyes but our detect or cameras at the telescopes can actually capture that light infrared astronomy was a massive breakthrough because it allowed us to see through dust the star-forming regions where young stars are just forming an engulfed in dust when we use infrared light we're looking right through the dust which is transparent to infrared and we can see how the stars are being assembled how they are growing we've never been able to watch true infant Stars before the Advent of infrared Imaging Tire electromagnetic spectrum eventually became accessible with each band revealing different secrets of the universe our eyes are evolved to detect visible light but that's really only a fraction of the whole electromagnetic spectrum when we're looking at the UV we're actually looking at the stars and the hot gas and we're looking at the radio we're looking at the cold gas in the universe band of electromagnetic radiation is uniquely challenging to study [Music] even visible light as our ground telescopes are hindered by the very air Humanity needs to survive [Music] foreign we're very very fortunate to have an atmosphere for astronomers that's not so good as light comes from a star it's traveling in a straight line but then it gets perturbed through our atmosphere this is why stars twinkle if you take an image of that it just comes out blurred in order to limit the volume of atmosphere that we need to peer through the largest optical telescopes in the world tend to be built on the tallest mountains today astronomers and Engineers combat atmospheric Distortion with technology known as Adaptive Optics [Music] a technique that was proposed back in 1953 at that time the technology wasn't there to actually implement this idea but in the late 70s early 80s the people started thinking about how they could do that to counteract Distortion astronomers shoot powerful lasers into the sky we use a technique called laser guy Stars what you do is you propagate a laser beam into the night sky and you create an artificial star with it the laser hits sodium atoms on the edge of the atmosphere causing them to Glow the light travels down through the turbulent air and a telescope receives its point of reference computers analyze the distorted artificial star and create an inverse pattern that pattern is sent to a deformable mirror which uses magnets to bend it into shape and we push and pull on the surface with little actuators in the back it's like a bed of nails and they're like fingers which can move and distort it in a way which compensates for the errors introduced by the atmosphere because particles in the atmosphere are constantly shifting these adaptive mirrors have to adjust in real time up to a thousand movements per second the Distortion is canceled out revealing how the heavens appear before entering Earth's air [Music] and sometimes you can't even tell the difference between images that have been captured on Earth with Adaptive Optics and those that have been captured in space above the atmosphere entirely in 1995 the technology enabled the discovery of the very first brown dwarf the missing link between the largest planets and the smallest stars by resolving individual stars and tracking their motions at the heart of the Milky Way Adaptive Optics was also employed to identify the presence of a supermassive black hole but to truly unlock the heavens we would have to journey to them ah our atmosphere not only distorts images it also prevents some light from ever reaching our eyes we do some amazing observations of the Universe from the ground where we can but really the Earth's atmosphere blocks critical wavelengths very high energy gamma rays infrared ultraviolet the whole range the view from Earth's surface is insufficient if we truly hope to understand the universe it's kind of like if a doctor was trying to diagnose you and he only looked at one part of your body instead of your whole health the solution would be difficult but necessary we needed to deliver a telescope to space the more than two-ton oao spacecraft is this country's heaviest unmanned satellite it will carry nine telescopes once we had sent the first satellites into Earth orbit we had the possibility of escaping that atmosphere and sending observatories and instruments out into space to gather data without having to go through the Earth's atmosphere on December 7 1968 in just three weeks before the first crude flight around the Moon [Music] an atlas Centaur rocket carried the first successful space telescope into orbit [Music] orbiting astronomical Observatory number two earn the Monica stargazer [Music] it was put up by NASA and it was a UV telescope what Stargazer did was it looked at many many many stars and it actually told us that stars are hotter than the models had been saying they were astronomers have long believed that new stars are formed by the condensation of interstellar gas and dust with the oil we may be able to better understand process of star formation The Observatory also confirmed that comets are surrounded by vast clouds of hydrogen but most importantly stargaze approved the viability of an observatory in orbit with each subsequent decade new telescopes were carried to the heavens opening up the electromagnetic spectrum everything on Earth emits the infrared radiation our bodies do the Earth does the atmosphere does because it's all being heated by the sun's rays and so we often have to get our infrared telescopes out into space [Music] the infrared astronomical satellite a joint project between the U.S UK and the Netherlands launched in 1983. it is a new window into astronomical observations an opportunity to learn new things about the Stars [Music] every time we do a new survey at a new wavelength we always find major discoveries and those discoveries are almost never what we intended to find in the first place IRAs mapped 96 of the sky over its 10-month mission [Music] it pierced the dust of stars that had just erupted and revealed the magellanic clouds satellite galaxies of the Milky Way located about 190 000 light years away but Humanity's longest-serving infrared Space Telescope is NASA's Spitzer [Music] launched in August 2003 Spitzer entered Service as the year came to a close [Music] Spitzer was the first telescope placed in an earth trailing orbit circling the Sun at the same distance as Earth slowly drifting away from the planet over time this allows it to stay much colder because it doesn't have to deal with the glow emanating from Earth itself and by keeping the instrument colder you really reduce the background noise and you can see much fainter signals peering through dust Spitzer revealed Saturn's outermost ring Phoebe which starts about 6 million kilometers beyond the planet hidden Cradles of newborn stars and some of the most distant black holes in the universe even when it's liquid helium coolant ran out in 2009 its Mission continued [Music] it's a team turned around and said no we can still operate at some of the wavelengths it's okay we don't need the coolant for that and some of the most amazing stuff that Spitzer has done in those latter years were never predicted in the beginning of its Mission it was so productive right up until the very end Spitzer was officially decommissioned in January 2020. 16 years after it first opened its infrared eye however the Juggernaut of space public relations Outreach and Monument to Humanity's exploration continues to operate the Hubble Space Telescope Hubble really capitalized on some of the earlier developments with the Space Telescope we'll be able to look to much greater distances and therefore much further back into time much closer to the creation of the universe itself April 24th 1990 the Space Shuttle Discovery carried Hubble to its home in Earth orbit and liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope our window on the universe one month later Hubble was ready to begin its mission [Music] Universe can you take the uh but when the first images were downloaded something was wrong [Music] everyone was really surprised and shocked the image quality wasn't what they were expecting they were fuzzed out and blurred in a way that really had not been anticipated somewhere during the telescope's construction an error had been introduced when you build a telescope whether it's with mirrors or lenses you first have to take close attention to the shape the surface is to be polished exquisitely well Hubble's mirror had been polished a little too flat the curvature was off by 1 50th the width of a human hair in 1993 after extensive testing and simulations of the repair the shuttle Endeavor was sent to modify the telescope [Music] astronauts performed five spacewalks over 10 days [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it was too difficult to replace the mirror but because they knew how exactly wrong it was they were able to counteract that the analogy I like is put a pair of eyeglasses on all the instruments to compensate for the error this is it on January 13 1994 NASA announced that the new Optics were working once the evolved Space Telescope was fixed and it started to deliver amazing science [Music] the images throughout Hubble started returning were just striking we were able to see detail in these distant galaxies that had never before been possible layers of atmosphere that stars had expelled maybe 10 000 years ago and that now formed very intricate shapes I will also showed us visions of objects in our own solar system that had only been possible previously with space probes like the Voyages we were able to see For the First Time The Changing effect of seasons on Mars the way that the polar ice caps grew and shrank just seeing these scene as to mean more Earth-like it became like landscape photography over its lifetime Hubble produced some of our most spectacular and iconic images of the cosmos from The Pillars of Creation to the sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy [Music] and perhaps the most important photograph in astronomical history on December 18 1995 the Space Telescope began a 10-day mission known as the Hubble Deep Field staring at an apparent void near Ursa Major it was taking the most powerful telescope of the time and allowing it to stare at what was otherwise an apparently empty patch of sky for as long as we possibly could whereas most astronomical surveys were concerned with capturing the full breadth of the sky Hubble focused on a single location that would not be obstructed as the telescope circled the Earth the Harwood field is about the size of a coin so if you hold up a coin to the sky that's about the size of the Hubble Deep Field and what was there was astounding the resulting image revealed almost 3 000 galaxies sharp images of galaxies you could only dream to have seen on a photograph and it revealed just a plethora of different sizes shapes colors ages we do see how the spiral galaxies like our Milky Way but we also see these giant red elliptical galaxies we also see galaxies that are in the middle of colliding it's not just a pretty picture it reveals things that astronomers just didn't know about the nature of the universe each galaxy in the Hubble Deep Field resides at a different point in time when we observe galaxies and further and further distances from us what we're seeing is light that left those galaxies millions or indeed billions of years ago the most distant are shown as they were over 12 billion years in the past Hubble provided us a time capsule in a single compiled image we turned Hubble from a potential failure to what is today the most incredible instrument that Humanity has known to this time the Hubble Space Telescope had a few instruments initially that did a really good job but then as the technology evolved we were able to retrofit the telescope with even better instruments Hubble embarked on further Deep Field missions peering even farther into the cosmos with updated cameras providing surveys in both ultraviolet and infrared light with an almost infinite sea of galaxies scientists hope that somewhere lies a world like our own [Music] in the 16th century an Italian Friar named Giordano Bruno expanded the copernican notion of the cosmos Jordana thought that Stars were really far away solar systems of their own stars like the sun that would be orbited by their own planets on which there might possibly be life Bruno was deemed a heretic and burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition but the notion of exoplanets and life upon them did not die with him one of the most important question to answer of course is whether we are alone in the universe and that's why astronomers are actively looking for exoplanets in 1992 astronomers used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to observe a pulsar over 2 000 light years from Earth a pulsar is a really weird type of a star it's really the remnants of an old star that's gone Supernova and its core has collapsed down into very very small very Dense Star and it's spinning around very very rapidly sometimes more than a thousand times a second and beaming out kind of a lighthouse of radiation but their particular Cosmic Lighthouse had some mysterious irregularities some object was close enough to regularly exert a gravitational effect on its timing it turned out it wasn't just one planet but as many as three planets that were orbiting the pulsar and their orbital periods were able to be inferred from those timing measurements the first worlds beyond our solar system had been found [Music] in 1995 a pair of Swiss astronomers were watching not the core of a dead star but a star very similar to our own 51 pegasi located just over 50 light years from Earth its light was periodically getting redder then Bluer it was also wobbling in Space the movement caused by a smaller body in orbit while we might not be able to detect the presence of the planet directly we can detect their gravitational influence on their parents star the planet was about half the mass of Jupiter but orbited so close to its star that its year lasted less than five Earth days many of the solar systems we find have got these hot Jupiters large planets which orbit very close to their parent Stars they're the easiest ones to find they have the biggest effect on their parent star and so they tend to be the ones you find First as the New Millennium dawned a Fresh Field in astronomy flourished there have been some amazing discoveries of extrasolar planets including huge solar systems and a lot of the planets that we're finding are very big and very close to the Stars so these are enormous sort of Jupiter plus planets but within the orbit of mercury they come in all different shapes and sizes that planets that don't bear any resemblance to the distribution of our own solar system necessarily we're finding exoplanets around binary star systems and we're also finding different sizes of planets around Stars we've even discovered orphan planets planets that do not have a star to orbit where did these come from are they things that have been shot out of a solar system by gravity or are they things that formed in space some we've even seen directly through infrared telescopes picking up their heat sources as they dance around their star but despite all these observations the Earth remains special it's easy to say we're unique you know with a blue planet we've got all this water we have the most complex life that we're aware of so far but we don't really know our sample of the other planets is actually pretty tiny universe is a largely inhospitable place the holy grail for many Planet Hunters is the discovery of another world with the potential to support Life as We Know It astronomers are really excited about the idea of finding other Earths in the universe we believe they exists habitable zones are distances from a given star where liquid water a key ingredient to Life as we know it can exist upon the surface of an Earth-like world joining the quest in 2009 NASA's Kepler space telescope led the charge to discover earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone around their Stars [Music] if we are to find life anywhere else in the universe apart from the earth having liquid water is probably a good place to start looking but the habitable zone is not the same for every Star the more massive the star the brighter and hotter it burns so the planet must orbit farther away in order to retain water [Music] Kepler's sole scientific instrument was a photometer that continually monitored the brightness of approximately 150 000 main sequence Stars [Music] incredibly Tiny But periodic drops in brightness indicate that a planet is momentarily blocking a small portion of the star's light Kepler-186f was the first earth-sized planet found within the habitable zone over 500 light years from Earth in the constellation cygnus the rocky World orbits a red dwarf star if we're looking for planets that might Harbor life we really want them to be around as stable star like our sun a lot of the planets that have been found are around red dwarf stars now they're very unstable they're very faint most of the time but then they have huge eruptions of radiation which would probably kill any life forms on the surface [Music] there are over 4 000 confirmed exoplanets over half of those were discovered in Kepler's data we have discovered thousands upon thousands of planets around stars in the region around our sun but this is only a drop in the cosmic ocean but there's no rule that says planets have to be orbiting in the same plane that we are if Kepler is able to by chance detect thousands of exoplanets which just happen to be passing in front of a star we can then step back and go wow there are likely to be tens if not hundreds of trillions of planets just in the Milky Way galaxy and then if you think of all the trillions of other galaxies in the universe there would just be an unimaginable number of planets out there with an incredible array of possibilities Kepler ended its mission in November 2018 but the Baton has passed to other observatories both around the world and in space so I think as we discover Ed Cosmos we become smaller and less significant but our significance remains for an important reason and that is because we are still the only life forms known in the universe right here on planet Earth [Music] Humanity's Suite of telescopes from the ground to in orbit have opened up the cosmic history books [Music] Hubble brought us close to our universe's Inception but to go ever further back Humanity continues to advance our telescope technology Hubble's successor is the most complex and largest Space Telescope to date named after the man who headed NASA in the 1960s James Webb it's the biggest telescope we've ever put into space and it has an unprecedented capability to look into the early universe and look with great resolution at what the galaxies look like in the early Universe its 18 gold-plated mirrors combined to stretch six and a half meters across though it's a significant increase in collecting aperture and it's going to be able to look much deeper and further in the universe at the height of Hubble's power it could look back to a tenth of the universe's total age but not far enough to witness the births of the very first galaxies James Webb aims to look at the very first galaxies in the universe we don't know what they're going to look like we don't know what type of gas they're forming from unlike Hubble which originally studied visible light James Webb performs mostly infrared observations it will also see how massive black holes in the universe agreed matter and grow we know that we have black holes one billion years after the big bang which already have the mass of 20 or 30 billion Suns we don't know how to make them in such a short time foreign [Music] Space Telescope operates outside of Earth's orbit 1.5 million kilometers from the planet four times the distance of the Moon there are some very interesting points in space called LaGrange points LaGrange points are balanced between the gravitational forces of multiple space objects Webb orbits the Sun but remains in a fixed spot in relation to the Earth it's possible to locate spacecraft there so that they are always sitting at the same location relative to the Earth and the Sun it's never going to see Earth it's never going to see the sun directly it's always going to be looking out it's going to be scanning different areas of the sky it's looking exactly where we want to away from the stuff we know and out into the universe there it's five layer Solar Shield the size of a tennis court blocks the light from the sun earth and moon as well as heat from the spacecraft itself enabling web to obtain the deepest observations to date looking forward we should prepare for more surprises in 10 years we'll have a completely different take on how big the universe is and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger out there [Music] manipulating light we have revealed the heavens the invention of the telescope and then its subsequent improvements absolutely turned our understanding of the natural world on its head Humanity continues the search for our exact place in the cosmos 20 years ago we only knew of one solar system that had planets now we know of thousands that's amazing centuries of Discovery have challenged our preconceptions the wonderful thing about science and particularly studying the cosmos is that our perception is continually changing our new generation of telescopes will reveal even more it's important that we keep pushing the boundaries so that we never become complacent that we never stagnate we are constantly challenged by the things we discover and the things we attempt [Music]

Channel: Naked Science

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Keywords: documentary, doc, full doc, full show, documentary film, documentaries, HD documentary, history, space, future, nasa, space race, rocket, rocket launch, elon musk, space x, earth, orbit, NASA Documentary, terrestrial, astronaut, space science, science, galaxy, milky way, black hole, universe, nature, alien, big bang, cosmos, solar system, probe, james webb, star, andromeda, earth history, voyager, titan, europa, galileo, dart probe, dimorphos, asteroid, Hubble, telescope, Herschel, infrared, Spitzer, nebula

Id: JzK24xalyuM

Length: 51min 36sec (3096 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 29 2022