Space Mysteries in our Solar System - Do Black Holes Create New Universes?

lurking within Dense Star clusters [Music] or wandering the dust Lanes of the Galaxy [Music] where they prey on Stars or swallow planets whole our Milky Way May Harbor millions of black holes the ultra dense remnants of dead stars but now in the universe far beyond our galaxy there's evidence of something far more ominous a breed of black holes that has reached incomprehensible size and destructive power [Music] just how large and violence and strange can they get [Music] a new era in astronomy has revealed a universe long hidden to us high-tech instruments sent into space have been tuned to sense high-energy forms of light X-rays and gamma rays that are invisible to our eyes and do not penetrate our atmosphere on the ground Precision telescopes are equipped with technologies that allow them to cancel out the blurring effects of the atmosphere they are peering into the far reaches of the universe and into distant cauldrons of light and energy in some distant galaxies astronomers are now finding evidence that space and time are being Shattered by eruptions so vast they Boggle the mind we are just beginning to understand the impact these outbursts have had on the universe on the shapes of galaxies spread of elements that make up stars and planets and ultimately the very existence of Earth the discovery of what causes these eruptions has led to a new understanding of cosmic history back in 1995 the Hubble Space Telescope was enlisted to begin filling in the details of that history astronomers selected tiny regions in the sky between the Stars [Music] for days at a time they focused Hubble's Gaze on remote regions of the universe [Music] these Hubble Deep Field images offered incredibly clear views of the cosmos in its infancy [Music] what Drew astronomers attention were the tiniest galaxies covering only a few pixels on Hubble's detector most of them do not have the grand spiral or elliptical shapes of large galaxies we see close to us today instead they are irregular Scrappy collections of stars the Hubble Deep field confirmed a long-standing idea that the Universe must have evolved in a series of building blocks with small galaxies gradually merging and assembling into larger ones see evidence of this pattern by looking out into the universe many galaxies are gyrating around one another some are crashing together others ripping each other apart gravity calls the tune as these galaxies draw together exchanging stars and gas and over time merging to form larger composite galaxies [Music] this came to be known as the hierarchical picture of cosmic history in which the universe evolved from the ground up with its structures growing larger and larger over time [Music] foreign operating at the Subaru Observatory atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano examined one of the deepest galaxies known whose light has taken nearly 13 billion years to reach us it was a messenger from a time not long after the universe was born thank you this object is known as a quasar short for quasi-stellar radio source a small region in its Center is so bright that astronomers believe its light is coming not from a collection of stars but from a single object of at least a billion times the mass of our sun this Beacon is generated by gas falling onto the object and heating up to extreme temperatures the only thing known to generate this much power is a swirling cauldron where space suddenly turns dark as it merges into a giant black hole [Music] for astronomers the question was how did this black hole get so big so early in the history of the universe [Music] it likely got its start in an early generation of stars often known as population 3 stars made up of hydrogen they are thought to have been hundreds of times the mass of the sun [Music] these giant Stars burned hot and fast and died young [Music] a star is like a cosmic pressure cooker in its core the crush of gravity produces such intense Heat at the moment the star dies if enough matter falls into its core it can collapse to a point forming a black hole the first generations of stars and black holes burst under the cosmic scene in a time of incredible turbulence [Music] within primordial gas clouds stars were being born in dense knots they gave rise to black holes that began to swallow more and more matter a computer simulation of the early Universe shows just how quickly these voracious monsters were able to grow the project by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University was designed to recreate a region in the early universe that measured over a hundred million light years on the side it shows what took place in the first one billion years of cosmic history this virtual universe is set in motion by equations describing the properties of gas the energy released in starbirth and the outward motion of time and space the result an intricate Cosmic web with gravity drawing matter into filaments and Knots like a vast tangle of interconnected Spider's webs inside the densest regions is where the largest galaxies and black holes grew here circles indicate the appearance of black holes deep in the data foreign as they gain weight by eating up their surroundings the circles grow larger the few in the largest galaxies reach Ultra massive proportions billions of times the mass of the sun [Music] these black holes were not just swallowing gas Chandra x-ray Observatory was dispatched to look into distant galaxies for black holes on growth spits scientists looked for pockets of gas and Stars glowing hotly in x-ray light [Music] what Chandra found was that the core of some distant galaxies contained hot pairs twin supermassive black holes Drawn Together by gravity [Music] a cause by Nature resist this dark marriage as the two approach each other they go into an orbit that could last virtually forever [Music] to learn what allows them to merge we go back to the ideas developed by Albert Einstein he said that when massive bodies accelerate or whip around each other they literally disturb the fabric of space [Music] causing it to Ripple like a disturbance on a pond when these ripples move outward they carry with them the energy of the pair's orbit causing them to spiral closer when this dance of death comes to an end that's when the pair joins together to form a larger black hole that moment may be approaching for a quasar called OJ 287 at three and a half billion light years away flare-ups in the surrounding region have led astrophysicists to conclude that another black hole is flying around it by measuring the Giant's gravitational hold on its companion astronomers estimate its mass at 18 billion solar masses for a Time OJ 287 was the largest black hole ever detected it no longer is deep in the heart of the coma Galaxy cluster a mere 321 million light years away lies a giant elliptical galaxy known as NGC 4889 astronomers used several large telescopes to measure the speed at which stars are orbiting around the center they used that data to calculate the mass of the central object a whopping 21 billion solar masses give or take a few billion theoretically there are no limits to how much weight a black hole can gain and yet even the largest black holes and their host galaxies seem to obey limits what holds them back has to do with the way clusters of galaxies evolve a pattern long noted by scientists foreign simulation shows the evolution of a galaxy cluster in the early universe the gravity of the entire region draws small galaxies by the thousands along with great streams of gas into the center so why doesn't the central Galaxy and the black hole that resides within it capture all this matter why don't they swallow the entire cluster you can see the answer in a region called ms0735 at two and a half billion light years away it appears invisible light to be a typical Galaxy cluster in x-ray light you can see that it's enveloped in a cloud of hot gas measured at nearly 50 million degrees hollowed out of this Cloud are two immense cavities up to six hundred thousand light years across that's enough room in each to stuff 600 galaxies the size of our Milky Way now add in a radio image of the cluster you can see two vast streams of matter pushing out from the center that's a giveaway that the cavities were formed by an eruption in the core of the giant Central Galaxy two jets shooting out of a central black hole have launched blast waves that plowed through the gas that makes up the intergalactic medium the energy it took to carve out these x-ray cavities is remarkable [Music] the equivalent of several billion supernovae according to one calculation foreign -0735 has been referred to as the largest single eruption recorded since the Big Bang it was generated by a black hole that weighs in at around 10 billion solar masses black hole Jets like this have been seen all around the universe including in our own Cosmic neighborhood this is the famous m87 Galaxy at the center of the Virgo Galaxy cluster around 50 million light years away astronomers have been intensively studying the black hole that lurks in its heart and recently estimated its mass at 6.6 billion solar masses it Powers a pair of high-powered jets that are plowing through the Galaxy but how does a black hole a creature famous for hiding in the dark emit this much energy think of a black hole as the eye of a cosmic hurricane rotating by all the stars gas and other black holes that fall into it as this matter flows in it forms a spinning donut-like feature called an accretion disk which works like a Dynamo the spinning motion of the disc generates magnetic fields that twist around and channel some of the inflowing matter out into a pair of high energy beams or jets how much energy depends on the black hole's gravity and how much matter has already crashed through the Event Horizon is this just another frightening spectacle of nature or is it part of a more profound process at work the largest black holes in the universe probably Rose between 10 and 12 billion years ago the age of the quasars by releasing energy in the form of jets they heated up their surrounding regions this prevented gas from collapsing into the central Galaxy and allowed smaller galaxies on the periphery to form and grow but the impact of the black holes did not stop there this Chandra image of the Hydra a Galaxy cluster shows the same immense hot cavities glowing in x-ray light as well as a jet blasting out of its Central Galaxy gas along the edge of the jet was found to contain high levels of iron and other metals probably generated by Supernova explosions in the center by pushing these Metals into regions Beyond a black hole seeded more distant galaxies with the elements needed to form stars and solar systems like ours the black holes in these more remote galaxies then seeded their own environments foreign this is what might be happening in Centaurus a also known as the hamburger Galaxy in x-rays you can see a jet erupting from the center [Music] peering through the dense dust lanes that dominate our line of sight astronomers have come to believe that it's actually two galaxies in the act of colliding this computer simulation shows the effect of such a merger on black holes as the two galaxies pass by each other the pull of gravity disrupts their spiral shapes forcing huge volumes of gas into their cores as the black holes begin to feed they emit blast waves that push much of the loose gas out beyond the boundaries of the new Galaxy [Music] foreign [Music] steps of this Cosmic dance the two black holes merge and emit one final blast [Music] to think that our Earth our solar system ourselves are the beneficiaries of these far away monsters [Music] the largest black holes have played dual roles in a great Cosmic struggle they are the product of gravity's Relentless inward pull the force that has drawn matter into galaxies clusters and the structures they form [Music] but with their incredible power they emit energy that pushes back on gravity foreign [Music] these strange and Powerful objects have become the master architects of space and time [Music] bye on this busy crowded planet as life changes and evolves from second to second at the same time the Arc of the human lifespan is getting longer 67 years is the global average up from just 20 years in the Stone Age modern science provides a humbling perspective Our Lives indeed even that of the human species are just a blip compared to the earth at 4.5 billion years and counting and the universe at 13.7 billion years it now appears the entire Cosmos is living on borrowed time it may be a blip within a much grander sweep of time [Music] when we now will time end [Music] our lives are governed by cycles of waking and sleeping the seasons birth and death understanding time in cyclical terms connects us to the natural world but it does not answer the questions of science what explains Earth's past its geological errors and its ancient creatures and where did our world come from how and when will it end in the revolutions spawned by Copernicus and Darwin we began to see time as an arrow in a universe that's always changing the 19th century physicist Ludwig boltzmann found a law he believed governed the flight of times Arrow entropy based on the second law of Thermodynamics holds that states of disorder tend to increase from neat orderly starting points the elements living things the Earth the Sun the Galaxy are all headed eventually to states of high entropy or disorder nature fights this inevitable disintegration by constantly reassembling matter and energy into lower states of entropy in cycles of death and rebirth will entropy someday win the battle and put the brakes on times Arrow or will time stubbornly keep moving forward [Music] we are observers and Pawns in this Cosmic conflict we seek Mastery of times workings even as the clock ticks down to our own certain end our Windows into the nature of time are the mechanisms we use to chart and measure a changing Universe from the mechanical clocks of old to the decay of radioactive elements four telescopes that measure the speed of distant objects [Music] move in sync with the 24-hour day the time it takes the Earth to rotate once well it's actually 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds if you're judging by the Stars not the Sun Earth got its spin at the time of its birth from the bombardment of rocks and dust that formed it [Music] but it's gradually losing it to drag from the moon's gravity that's why in the time of the dinosaurs a year was 370 days and why we have to add a leap second to our clocks about every 18 months in the few hundred million years we'll gain a whole hour the day night cycle is so reliable that it has come to regulate our internal chemistry [Music] The Fading rays of the sun picked up by our retinas set our so-called circadian rhythms in motion that's when our brains begin to secrete melatonin a hormone that tells our bodies to get ready for sleep [Music] in the light of mourning the flow of melatonin stops our blood pressure spikes body temperature and heart rate rise as we move out into the world [Music] our days and our lives are short in Cosmic terms but without Minds we have learned to follow times trail out to longer and longer intervals we know from precise measurements that the earth goes around the Sun every 365.256366 days much of the solar energy that hits our planet is reflected back to space or absorbed by dust and clouds [Music] the rest sets our planet in motion [Music] you can see it in the annual melting and refreezing of ice at the poles in the ebb and flow of heat in the tropical oceans or cycles of chlorophyll production in plants on land and at sea these Cycles are embedded in still longer Earth Cycles ocean currents for example are thought to make complete Cycles ranging from 4 to around 16 centuries moving out in time as the Earth rotates on its axis it makes a series of interlocking wobbles called melanchovic Cycles they have been blamed for the onset of ice ages about every 100 000 years [Music] then there's the carbon cycle plants capture it from the air of the sea it finds its way into soils or ocean sediments as plants Decay or as waste passes out of the food chain [Music] it can take a volcanic explosion or a dramatic lowering of sea levels to release this carbon back into the air often after millions of years the processes that shape a planet-like ours play only the smallest of roles in the evolution of the universe so to Glimpse times broader arcs we must look to cycles that govern the larger Cosmos the reigning theory is that the Universe began in a sudden expansion of space the Big Bang [Music] with entropy uniformly low this was the time of the tiny subatomic particles like quarks and leptons stirred into a hot soup they combined into atoms setting in motion the primordial era there's cool as it ballooned growing dim and falling into what's known as The Cosmic Dark Ages after several hundred million years larger clumps of matter had Drawn Together these isolated pockets of gas became dense enough to heat up and ignite so began the era of stars [Music] in this glorious age the universe ceded the rich Cosmic Landscapes we see in our telescopes trillions upon trillions of stars lit up galaxies all across the cosmos the Ark of this era is defined by the life cycles of stars which vary according to their sizes stars shine because gravity crushes matter into their cores the energy released pushes outward and balances the inward force of gravity this battle between energy and gravity is Raging in stars all around the universe but in large Stars about 10 million years after their birth gravity begins to gain the edge when the mass concentrating in the core of the star reaches a critical threshold the core collapses in on itself the energy released in the collapse causes the star to explode in a blast of light and debris that's visible across the cosmos thank you [Music] in the wake of this Supernova shock waves can cause nearby clouds of dust and gas to collapse and ignite to form generations of smaller stars like our sun a byproduct of star formation solar systems form in the collapse of the surrounding solar nebula the life cycle of planets especially those in close is tied to that of their apparent Stars as stars like our sudden age they grow hotter and more luminous [Music] billions of years from now that will spell the beginning of the end for our home planet as Raging solar winds begin to blast away at our atmosphere surface water will gradually disappear rendering Earth uninhabitable finally the sun will begin to swell growing so large that it actually envelops the Earth friction with the sun's outer edges will cause this once Blue World to gradually spiral inward [Music] unless they are large enough to go supernova most stars end their lives in more of a whimper than a bang as shown in this gallery of dying Stars captured by the Hubble Space Telescope foreign solar winds push their outer layers so far out they blossom in spectacular displays [Music] that's just what happened about 12 000 years ago to the star that spawned the famed Helix nebula on the inside spokes of denser gas stubbornly resist the star's Relentless winds the star itself is now a dim cooling Remnant called a white dwarf it's the size of Earth but about 200 000 times more dense this is likely what's in store for our son a distant civilization May scan it for planets but by then they won't see Earth this battle between energy and gravity repeats in every corner of a galaxy like ours with gravity drawing gas clouds into Stars and stars burning themselves out on a variety of time scales in time though as the mass of the Galaxy collects in successive generations of small Stars it will grow dimmer and dimmer [Music] some galaxies will see a temporary rebirth if their Mass gets stirred up and combined with another that's what's destined to happen to our Milky Way at just about the time our sun begins to swallow our planet any remaining earthlings will see the stars of the Andromeda galaxy looming above the plane of our Milky Way as shown in this simulation the two are likely to tear each other apart if it's a direct hit the stars in both galaxies will gradually join together in a gigantic Galactic puffball known as an elliptical galaxy [Music] all the turbulence of the merger could stimulate a wave of new stars being born reinvigorating the new larger Galaxy [Music] desktops like this in which Galactic neighbors merge will be common as the era of stars moves into its later stages but a wholesale thinning out of the universe is inevitable in filaments of galaxies these voids are like ever-expanding bubbles where the bubble walls touch you can see filaments of galaxies as the bubbles grow the filaments will stretch and break the distance between galaxies will widen at a faster and faster pace eventually no matter where you are in the universe you will see only a few isolated clusters of galaxies huddled together with little connection to anything else and few Clues to how they got there [Music] at more distant reaches of time tens of billions of years from now the sky will grow darker and darker as everything recedes away from everything else a good place to be in those long Twilight years of the Stellar era is a place where gravity and energy have forged an extended truce perhaps a place like this not much larger than our planet Jupiter a red dwarf is one of the smallest and dimmest stars in our universe they have been shown to Harbor planets close enough that their dim Rays can sustain liquid water and life Brown dwarfs and red dwarfs form the vast majority of stars in our galaxy in fact combined their Mass exceeds that of all the large Stars because they burn so slowly they'll be the final beacons of the Majestic age of stars an era that will extend out to 100 trillion years [Music] even as their host galaxies grow dim another process will begin to transform these small outposts over time chance encounters between objects will perturb their orbits sending some toward the center of the Galaxy and others out into the void in This Way galaxies May gradually evaporate with ever denser concentrations of matter accumulating in their cores as that happens the universe begins to take on a new character welcome to the degenerate era in which the universe is populated by red and white dwarf stars steadily Cooling and by the charred remains of supernova explosions neutron stars even though these dead stars have used up their nuclear fuels they continue to produce small amounts of energy they scoop up and annihilate Dark Matter particles that manage to stray into their grasp here is where Cosmic Evolution slows to a crawl it's expected that protons the building blocks of all atoms will slowly degrade turning into subatomic particles that then Decay into photons all the protons in existence date back to the early moments of the universe their eventual Decay will Mark the end of the degenerate era around a billion billion billion billion years after the big bang that's a one followed by 40 zeros our picture of what happens after that depends on what we learn in the coming years beneath the border of France and Switzerland in one of the largest physics experiments ever undertaken 100 meters underground the Large Hadron Collider was built to accelerate particles in opposite directions through a giant ring 27 kilometers around when they reach nearly the speed of light scientists will bring them into ferocious collisions one goal to define the final time Horizons of our universe as well as the final moments of its most persistent objects black holes ranging from Millions to tens of billions of times the mass of our sun occupy the centers of large galaxies today as those galaxies age over trillions of years of time much of their mass will spiral toward the center and into the jaws of Evermore ravenous black holes conceivably these black holes could end up weighing as much as a Galaxy but when they finally stop growing will they too be subject to the ravages of time according to the physicist Stephen Hawking the answer is yes he proposed a theoretical process of Decay that scientists are hoping to test in high energy particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider the idea is that throughout our universe particles of opposite charge constantly well up in the vacuum of space they normally destroy each other but when this happens at the Event Horizon of a black hole one particle can be pulled in while the other escapes that has the effect of slowly siphoning energy and mass from the hole if this is true then even black holes are eventually doomed but finding out for sure is not easy creating a micro black hole it seems will take more energy than any Earthbound collider can pack that is unless there's more to Nature into gravity than we thought the key lies in whether the universe we know is part of a more complex Cosmic reality beyond the three spatial Dimensions plus time that we experience in our everyday lives [Music] we may be like an insect living on the two-dimensional surface of a pond unaware of the deep and complex reality below it foreign extra Dimension could intersect our world on an extremely tiny scale According to some scientists when particles Collide at very high energies the additional gravity needed to create a micro black hole could come from the extra dimension they'll know a black hole is there when they see the shower of particles predicted by Hawking's Theory its presence will open a brief window to a deeper Cosmic reality while shedding light on the ultimate future of our universe [Music] based on Hawking's Theory a black hole observed today will take its last gasp when the clock strikes 10 to the hundredth years from now a number known as a Google [Music] that's the end of the universe as we know it but look beyond that to say 10 to the Google a googolplex years if you wrote all the zeros in that number in tiny one point font it would stretch beyond the observable universe will the great Arrow of time have come to rest by then not if modern theories are correct they hold that our universe is part of a much larger Cosmic cycle of birth and death with whole new universes coming into being in the space beyond our own the time Horizons of our universe may well be a blip in this grander scheme of things back to Earth now we are products of the Great era of stars and witnesses to its great spectacles of gravity and energy no doubt there are other beings somewhere out there who are attempting to comprehend the universe they too May invent the idea of time and develop their own theories on where it's all leading their discoveries and ours will not survive the entropy at work in the universe as we all go the way of the Stars and as our universe gives way to Grand new eras in the life of the cosmos [Music] in a great Cosmic pinball game we call our universe foreign how does energy Stitch the cosmos together fit within it we now climb the power scales of the universe from atoms nearly Frozen to Stillness to Earth's largest explosions from Stars colliding exploding distant Realms so strange and violent they challenge our imaginations where will we find the most powerful objects in the universe [Music] foreign [Music] energy is very much on our minds as we search for ways to power our civilization and serve the needs of our citizens but what is energy where does it come from and where do we stand within the great power streams that shape time and space energy comes from a Greek word for activity or working physics it's simply the property or the state of anything in our universe that allows it to do work whether it's thermal foreign electromagnetic [Music] chemical or gravitational the 19th century German scientist Hermann Von helmholtz found that all forms of energy are equivalent that one form can be transformed into any other foreign the laws of physics say that in a closed system such as our universe energy is conserved it may be converted concentrated or dissipated but it's never lost James Prescott Jewell built an apparatus that demonstrated this principle [Music] it had a weight that descended into water and caused a paddle to rotate he showed that the gravitational energy lost by the weight is equivalent to heat gained by the water from friction with the paddle that led to one of several basic energy yardsticks called a jewel it's the amount needed to lift an apple weighing 100 grams one meter against the pull of Earth's gravity in case you were wondering it takes about 100 joules to send a tweet so tweeted attack from Twitter the metabolism of an average sized person going about their day generates about 100 joules a second or 100 Watts the equivalent of a 100 watt light bulb in vigorous exercise the power output of the body goes up by a factor of 10. one order of magnitude to around a thousand joules per second or a thousand Watts in a series of leaps by additional factors of 10 we can explore the full energy spectrum of the universe so far the coldest place observed in nature is the boomerang nebula here a dying star ejected its outer layers into space at 600 000 kilometers per hour as the expanding clouds of gas became more diffuse they cooled so dramatically that their molecules fell to just one degree above absolute zero the total absence of heat [Music] that's around a billion trillionths of a joule that makes the signal sent by the Galileo spacecraft as it flew around Jupiter seemed positively hot by the time it reached Earth its radio signal was down to 10 billion billionths of a watt [Music] now jump all the way to 150 billionths of a while that's the amount of power entering the human eye from a pair of 50 watt car headlamps a kilometer away [Music] moving up a full seven powers of ten Moonlight striking a human face adds up to three hundred thousandths of a watt that's roughly equivalent to a cricket's chirp from there it's a mirror five powers of ten to the low wattage world of everyday human Technologies 10 100 watt bulbs together at one thousand joules per second 1000 Watts that roughly equals the energy of sunlight striking a square meter of Earth's surface at noon on a clear day gathered 200 bulbs 20 000 watts is the energy output of an automobile a diesel locomotive five million Watts advanced jet fighter 75 million Watts an aircraft carrier almost 200 million Watts the most powerful human Technologies today function in the range of a billion to 10 billion Watts including large hydroelectric or nuclear power plants [Music] at the upper end of human Technologies was the awesome first stage of a Saturn V rocket in five separate engines it consumed 15 Tons of fuel per second to generate 190 billion watts of power how much power can Humanity Marshall and how much do we need long before the launch of the Space Age Visionaries began to imagine what it would take to advance into the community of Galactic Civilizations in the 1960s the Soviet scientist Nikolai kardashev speculated that a level one civilization would acquire the technology needed to harness all the power available on a planet like Earth according to one calculation we are 0.16 percent of the way there this is based on British petroleum's estimate of total World oil consumption some 11 billion tons in 2007. today generate about two and a half trillion watts of electrical power how does that stack up to the power generated by planet Earth deep inside our planet the radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium generates 44 trillion watts of power as this heat rises to the surface it drives the movement of Earth's crustal plates and Powers volcanoes remarkably that's just a fraction of the energy released by a large hurricane in the form of rain at the storm's Peak it can rise to 600 trillion Watts a hurricane draws upon solar heat collected in tropical oceans in the summer you have to jump another power of 10 to reach the estimated total heat flowing through Earth's atmosphere and oceans from the equator to the poles [Music] and another two to get the power received by the Earth from the Sun at 174 quadrillion Watts believe it or not there's one human technology that has exceeded this level [Music] the an602 hydrogen bar was detonated by the Soviet Union on October 30th 1961. [Music] it Unleashed some 1400 times the combined power of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs with a blast yield of up to 57 million tons of TNT it generated 5.3 trillion trillion Watts if only for a tiny fraction of a second that's 5.3 yato Watts a term that will come in handy as we now begin to ascend with the power scale tribute to the dedication hard work to Nikolai Kardashian a level two civilization would achieve a constant energy output 80 times higher than the Russian superbomb [Music] that's equivalent to the total Luminosity of our sun a medium-sized star that emits 375 yata watts however in the grand scheme of things our sun is but a cold spark in a hot universe look up into Southern skies and you'll see the large magellanic cloud a satellite Galaxy of our Milky Way deep within is the brightest star yet discovered r136a1 is 10 million times brighter than the sun now if that star happened to go supernova at its peak it would blast out photons with a Luminosity of around 500 billion yotta Watts to advance to a level 3 civilization you have to Marshal the power of an entire galaxy the Milky Way with about 200 billion stars has an estimated total Luminosity of 3 trillion yachtowatts a three followed by 36 zeros [Music] Isaac Asimov imagined a galaxy-scale civilization in his foundation series Galaxia he called it is a super organism that surpasses time and space to draw upon all the matter and energy in a galaxy but who's to say that's the upper limit for civilizations to boldly go beyond level three a civilization would need to Marshal the power of a quasar [Music] the Quasar is about a thousand times brighter than our galaxy here is where cosmic power production enters a whole new realm based on the physics of extreme gravity it was Isaac Newton who first defined gravity as the force that pulls the Apple down and holds the Earth in orbit around the sun Albert Einstein redefined it in his famous general theory of relativity [Music] isn't simply the attraction of objects like stars and planets he said but a distortion of space and time what he called space-time we're totally dark object can do this has been narrowed by Decades of observations in theory if a black hole spins it can turn into a violent Cosmic tornado gas and stars begin to flow in along a rapidly rotating disc the spinning motion of this so-called accretion disk generates magnetic fields that twist up and around these fields can Channel some of the inflowing matter out into a pair of high-energy beams or jets gas and dust nearby catch the brunt of this energy growing hot and bright enough to be seen billions of light years away amazingly the power of a black hole can rise to even greater extremes at the moment of its birth [Music] as a giant star ages heavy elements like iron gradually build up in its core as its gravity grows more intense the star begins to shrink until it reaches a critical threshold its core literally collapses in on itself that causes the star to explode in a supernova and now in death the star can unleash gravity's true Fury in the violence of the star's death gravity can cause its massive core to collapse to a point forming a black hole in some rare cases the newborn monster Powers a jet that accelerates to within a tiny fraction of the speed of light for a few minutes these so-called gamma-ray bursts are known to be the brightest events since the Big Bang three orders of magnitude above a quasar at a billion billion Yates a 10 with 42 zeros remarkably they are still not the most powerful events known Albert Einstein's equations contained an astonishing prediction that when massive bodies accelerate or whip around each other they can stir up the normally smooth fabric of space-time they produce a series of waves that move outward like ripples on a pond scientists are now hoping to detect these gravitational waves and verify Einstein's prediction using Precision lasers and some of the most perfect large-scale vacuums ever created [Music] at the laser interferometry gravitational wave Observatory known as ligo they are hoping to record the Collision of ultra dense remnants of dead stars known as neutron stars and of black holes according to computer simulations as two black holes spiral into a fateful embrace the energy carried by each gravity wave Rises five orders of magnitude above a gamma ray burst to a hundred billion trillion times the power of our sun does the Collision of black holes Define the known power limits of our universe perhaps not as turbulent as the environment of a black hole might be its true power May well lie deep in its core a black hole's mass is enshrouded within a dark sphere called The Event Horizon since the 1920s scientists have described the mathematics of the Event Horizon as the equivalent of a waterfall it's the point of no return Beyond which water falls freely into the Gorge at the Event Horizon of a black hole space itself Falls freely in at the speed of light if the black hole is spinning then the flow spirals down and around an inner Horizon that envelops the singularity that's the central region where space-time becomes infinitely warped any matter if it rides this River of space whips around the inner Horizon so fast that centrifugal force tends to fling it back out [Music] as that happens it collides with matter that's streaming in whipping up a ferocious Cosmic storm the energy of the colliding stream feeds upon itself rising to what may well be a limit imposed by Nature it dissipates only as it falls into the singularity and disappears fortunately for us gravity walls off such energy extremes behind the Event Horizon where they cannot affect the rest of the universe [Music] and so here we sit our world is nestled within a vast stream of cosmic energy somewhere between the spin of an electron and the Maelstrom of a black hole there's no telling whether a future Earth civilization will be able to harness enough energy to advance into the cosmos for now as we tap into the tiny morsels of power at our disposal we venture a closer look at a universe blazing with activity [Music] we are its product [Music] and its Starstruck admirer [Music] foreign [Music] brilliant powerful Giver of Life the story of how the sun will one day become our enemy if we are to survive we'll have to leave the Earth we'll need to seek out new homes in amazing new places and change other worlds to recreate the Earth we left behind in the far future our sun will become a monster it will burn all life from our planet to destroy entire worlds finally our son will even destroy itself going to happen one day our son will die and when it does we'll go with it it's time to think about the future [Music] foreign [Music] for 5 billion years the sun has nourished the Earth Sun that provides the energy for plants to grow it is the Sun that makes life on Earth possible but that will change [Music] slowly unstoppably our sun is getting hotter and hotter [Music] once it gave life to us all but what it gave it can also take away if human beings are to have a long-term future we must leave our planet behind and search for new places to live one day our homes will be out there some are in space [Music] in the distant future this could be our home out here in space we'll have to seek refuge on new worlds where we could settle and live [Music] and the reason is we have to escape from our son [Music] some new worlds may be difficult to adapt to others may be very like our own foreign but what is it that makes our planet so special [Music] and why is it so dependent on the Sun [Music] here is the Sun as it is today [Music] center of our solar system the earth goes round at about there are the other planets [Music] the reason why our planet is the one with life on it is that it is just the right distance from the Sun closer in and we boil further out and we'd freeze we live in a kind of safe Zone that's perfect for life the trouble is that zone is moving the sun is getting hotter as it does the region where life can exist shifts further and further out ultimately the safe Zone will leave Earth behind when it does we'll be in serious trouble our planet will die [Music] this is how it will happen [Music] as the sun burns up its nuclear energy it will come hotter and hotter by the time it's five percent hotter plant life everywhere will be dying [Music] ten percent hotter and animals too will begin to die 15 hotter rivers and oceans would evaporate creating huge Cloud Banks trapping more and more heat in the far future life on Earth will become impossible and there's nothing we can do about it what will happen to us then [Music] astronautical engineer Robert superin believes he has the answer he wants to find us a new place to live the only real choice that we have is to uh grow expand become a space-faring civilization or to become extinct Not only would we become extinct but unless we become space-faring civilization and bring Earth life out with us into the universe all life on Earth will become extinct Robert subin's goal is to make us a home on Mars today Mars is cold and lifeless temperatures regularly drop to 100 below freezing and its atmosphere is 200 times thinner than our own a person standing unprotected on the surface of Mars would be dead in seconds [Music] if some scientists believe we could still learn to call this home [Music] Mars is the only other planet in our solar system that has on it all the resources needed to support life has water it's frozen to the surface as ice and permafrost but it's there it's got carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it's got nitrogen in the atmosphere and if humans go to Mars and develop the craft of how to use these resources then we can make Mars a place where human beings can sustain themselves we can make a new world for our posterity foreign no species can expect to last long if it stays in the same place in a very real sense humans are not native to the Earth We're Not native to North America we're not even native to Europe we're native to Kenya that's why we're tropical animals with long thin arms no fur but humans were able to leave there and colonize the Earth by becoming creative man the inventor that's how we coped with Ice Age Europe and that's how we're going to cope with Mars and the planets Beyond [Music] researchers have already been preparing for life as Pioneers on Mars [Music] living in the space Park did prove difficult but they culped zubrin is optimistic [Music] they're ready to take this on and frankly if we shrink from this challenge what it would really mean is that we'd have become much less than the kind of people we want once were we are much better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were to send people to the Moon in 1961 when John F Kennedy started the Apollo program I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal of Landing a man in the the moon and returning him safely to the Earth we were there eight years later there is nothing in this that is beyond our technology it's just a question of showing a little bit of moxie for zubrin it's not the technology that's lacking it's the will that technology and willpower alone may not may not just look at what we'd leave behind this is our life support system the plants that create oxygen countless species of animal how will we fare without them [Music] our survival depends on the living thing s we share our planet with the air we breathe the food we eat all this is created by other forms of life if Mars is to be our harm it'll have to be harmed to all of this as well [Music] 15 years ago we thought we knew the answer this is Biosphere 2 a huge glass Dome covering three acres of Arizona desert completely sealed off from the rest of the planet the theory was that people could survive in it because the whole environment was self-sustaining trees would provide oxygen artificial clouds and oceans would regulate the climate but the experiment failed food rapidly ran short extra air had to be pumped in on Mars that failure would have killed them all [Music] if we're ever going to call the red planet our harm clearly something's going to have to change the easiest thing to change maybe Mars itself [Music] it's an idea called tariff terrifying the aim is to transform a whole planet from a place where we couldn't survive to one way we could [Music] NASA scientist Chris McKay believes we could turn Mars into something surprisingly like Earth when we think about going into space we tend to focus on humans but in fact it turns out that it's easier for plants and microorganisms to go to Mars first they're going to be the first Martians in Death Valley in California Chris McKay is seeking Earth's most hearty creatures creatures that might be able to survive on Mars that's our guides these green smears are algae microscopic organisms that can Thrive even in the harsh and variable climate of Death Valley and they could thrive on Mars too sucking in its thin and unbreathable atmosphere of carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen in its place except at the moment even the algae would find Mars deadly the first step to make Mars habitable habitable even for the toughest little algae is to warm it up a bit right now it's too cold and too dry for any type of life from Earth well warming up a planet is something we know how to do we're doing it on Earth the pollution on Earth would be the medicine on Mars strange twist way to make miles a place we could live maybe to pollute it [Music] is hot would work thank you first a spacecraft has to drop off the pollution creating machines [Applause] The Machine's job is to suck up a mixture of Martian dust and atmosphere and process it into new chemicals it then belters out these greenhouse gases to warm the planet darks up to soak up heat from the Sun [Music] you present enough machines over time Mars will warm up enough to allow these algae to survive [Music] and the algae will begin to give Mars an atmosphere of oxygen but to speed the process up we would need more efficient oxygen makers and the best that we know are plants and trees [Music] the real goal to making Mars breathable is to get trees growing there those trees those will be the ones that make the habitable world and then things will really start happening as the oxygen level built up insects maybe small animals and eventually large animals and maybe even humans could then survive naturally foreign [Music] we could change Mars [Music] if I were to lay out a time scale I would say 50 years humans go to Mars and soon thereafter the algae and the bacteria go to Mars and then maybe 30 years later the trees go to Mars and then the humans come back but this time in a natural setting that's biologically suitable for them and then we've learned how to become a life form that lives on two planets not just humans but all of life [Music] it's a bold and astonishing plan works we could turn Mars into a planet very much like Earth [Music] but even Mars will not last forever even there we could never escape the power of the Sun foreign as the Sun keeps getting hotter safe zone for life moves further and further out this is Mars now Earth's dead this is our home thanks to our terraforming it looks a lot like Earth and thanks to the hottest sun it's now in the safe Zone the only trouble is the sun is still getting hotter actually the safe Zone will leave Mars behind as well and with Mars dead wolves David Brin is a science fiction writer he imagines future worlds for a living well it's a big universe out there and the Earth is a very specialized environment but we're not going to find many Earths out there if we want to spread out into the Galaxy then we're going to have to adapt to the universe uh it's not very easy for human beings to get accustomed to that idea because we're used to making the environment adapt to us [Music] as the sun becomes hotter new worlds will warm into life this is Europa one of Jupiter's huge moons we know today as a frozen planet airless with a crust of iron-heart ice but in the future it will be something else entirely the ice will have melted Europa will have become an ocean world after Mars perhaps we'll come here and make this our new home [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] we could live in cities at the bottom of an alien sea but David Brin thinks that in the end a life behind glass may not be the solution [Music] first will arrive in spacesuits live in domes bringing Earthly environment with us but eventually people will want to get out of those domes and part of that will involve changing ourselves to fit into new environments our ancestors evolved for life on Earth but bring things our descendants May redesign themselves for a future on other worlds human beings have been wonderfully invented in the last 20 million years and yet other species have not been idle Birds develop lungs which the air flows through from one side to the other so all of the lungs are used we only use about half of our lung capacity if we were to just genetically engineer ourselves so that our lungs flowed through like those of birds think of the thin atmospheres that we could live in wouldn't it be great to be able to hibernate like a bear we'd be able to travel to far planets possibly even for Our Stars [Music] and if they live and work in zero gravity eventually they're going to get sick and tired of pulling around a third of their weight in these useless legs which are only good occasionally for pushing it against walls why have legs if you're in zero gravity when you could have two additional arms wouldn't it be more functional jumping all over the place like Gibbons can genetic engineering achieve any of these things who knows we're just at the beginning of this Grand Adventure but it's an extravagant version of tomorrow that we should be thinking about wouldn't it be a desirable if they're happy if they're creative if they're productive if they're part of a great civilization Viva La difference you can only guess at the future what will our descendants be like we'll have to wait and see and where will they live because the only certainty is it cannot possibly be here it's not just that the sun will have seared all life from planet Earth is that the planet itself will no longer exist everything we know will have disappeared because in the far future our sun will turn into a monster it's going to conceal the solar system its first victim is the closest planet Mercury foreign [Music] ultimately boiled away [Music] still the sun grows it's 160 times its original size 2000 times hotter and its next victim is the Earth [Music] [Music] long sincere Baron by the Sun the place we once called home now melts and is engulfed [Music] seven billion years from now the Earth will be gone [Music] for us today one question remains the future of our planet also our future can we really survive the death of planet Earth look at where we stand today look at how far we've come compared to the world of a hundred years ago we're living in a science fiction Universe with skyscrapers 100 stories tall who can believe looking at that that looking forward to the next hundred years there will not be a new branch of human civilization on Mars and look back a thousand years now the world lit only by fire who can say that a thousand years from now there will not be hundreds of new branches of human civilization filling out worlds on orbiting hundreds of stars in the snake of the Galaxy some people think that we're living at the end of history but I couldn't disagree more I think we're living at the beginning of time we're present at the creation it's a glorious time to live [Music] for all we know we might be the only life form in the galaxy in the universe if that's true I think that really deepens the importance of the role of humans in spreading life beyond the Earth if we're the only spark of life then we certainly don't want that spark to go out [Music] scientists today are already imagining strange and far off tomorrows for our kind and if we do survive perhaps we will be there to witness the moment when our Sun's Transformations finally end it was first The Giver of Life then the destroyer of worlds now it too is doomed this is the Sun at the end of its life layer after Lair it is blowing itself apart clouds of star stuff drift out into space it's a slow process takes minutes of years and what follows is inevitable the death of our son it casts off one final layer is extinguished forever [Music] so the sun will one day go out will that be a significant event to our descendants billions of years hence I don't think so they will have observed similar phenomenon on innumerable other stars long before that time but if they did think about it they would note with gratitude that their ancestors did not stay on that one little world and await their Doom but rather spread forth into the universe and made their life possible [Music] but our son's future is certain there will come a time when we must leave our Earth behind our planet will be gone we humans have come a long way traveling our world in search of new lands spreading to every corner of the globe the time has come to look to new destinations to go once more into the unknown this is the story of our journey in space [Music] we will fly to the Stars on a ship that sails on sunlight [Music] we'll explore the most distant edges of the cosmos by taking a roller coaster ride through the very fabric of our universe [Music] and we'll discover the machine that has charted the heavens as never before it's the voyage of a lifetime a voyage to our future in space [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] we've always had the urge to explore our ancestors journeyed into the unknown to discover new lands and now it's time to do it again but this time it's not avoids between continents this time it's a Voyage to the Stars [Music] as our telescopes get ever more powerful they have shown us a universe of unimaginable Beauty and Power vast clouds where new stars are born strange galaxies even tantalizing hints of new worlds they've also shown dangers disaster is so huge they could destroy the Earth in seconds [Music] space is full of Terrors and wonders but will we ever see them for ourselves it's less than 50 years since we took our first steps out into space since then thousands of rockets carrying hundreds of people have made the 10-minute flight into orbit North Story Musgrave is one of a new breed of space adventurers when you see a lot from the outside it's a rather glorious magnificent thing inside is the absolute opposite of that it's 137 decibels it's shaking everything is shaking you have a solid rocket boosters that are really pounding the vehicle and all and then you'll have the turbulence in the atmosphere that adds another Shake Rattle and Roll and so you're basically in a small closet here with belts and straps and helmets and gloves and parachutes survival gear and you got all of this it is all over you and at the same time you're being shook I can't help but you just want the whole stack to hold together you're along for the ride and you want to survive that [Music] so it's not a joyride for me it's what I need to go through to get into the incredible Serenity and the celestial dance of zero gravity [Music] hello you've been we are inspired we are ready we are becoming a race of space fairs strange and unfamiliar world but for the privileged few who go there it is an experience they can never forget spacewalking is much more like a dance than anything else you choreograph every move you choreograph every finger every toe every body position and how you're going to do all of that it's just as precise as a ballet going into space it's open tonight at the ballet [Music] foreign [Music] you see your boots going 18 000 miles an hour 25 000 feet per second you see your boots going down the road [Music] if you ever want to play Superman that's where to do it we stand on the edge of space our most ambitious project is Testament to what we have achieved the International Space Station freedom but it's surprisingly close to home it's floating less than 400 kilometers above our heads [Music] furthest we've traveled into space is this in 1969 we set foot on the Moon that's one small step for man one diabetes [Applause] for the first time ever we looked back at our home from the surface of another world [Music] it's amazing to think that people have actually walked up there Voyager left Earth in 1976 in past Jupiter then Saturn and now it has left all the planets far behind after decades in space it's 14 billion kilometers from Earth [Music] it's an impressive Journey until you consider this on this scale the nearest star to our solar system is way over there [Music] in fact it's over 100 kilometers away to reach it would take Voyager another 25 000 years thank you and Voyager speed even reaching the nearest star is an impossible Journey but perhaps There's Hope it's easy to forget that in a single person's lifetime we've gone from this to this and in our quest to reach the Stars some scientists believe the answer could be to go from this to this deep space one its secret is a new kind of engine the iron Drive and it's the passion of NASA scientist Mark Raymond the idea for Ryan propulsion has been around since long before I was born but the first time I ever heard of it was in a Star Trek episode they're using ion propulsion and Spock says configuration unidentified ion propulsion High Velocity unique technology and I thought well this is really amazing but I'm never going to see anything like that in my lifetime but in 1998 mock Raymond's dream became reality deep space one but what is it that makes the iron drive so different compare it with the conventional rocket foreign the rocket fuel Burns was tremendous force and as it thrusts down it pushes the rocket up [Music] in the laboratory Mark Raymond watches a prototype iron Drive in action instead of tons of Rocket Fuel the engine uses a few grams of a gas it gives the gas an electric charge and spits it out atom by atom at incredible speeds creating a seemingly gentle blue haze [Music] the iron Drive doesn't have the raw power of a rocket it has something better staying power it's a bit like the hair and the Tortoise [Music] [Music] conventional rocket engines create huge thrust and awesome acceleration [Music] they burn through their entire fuel supply in just a few minutes after that it's all over the iron Drive is nowhere near as powerful in fact it would take deep space while four days to get from naught to 60. but the reason Deep Space 1 is the fastest spacecraft ever is because it's been accelerating for almost two years when we communicate with that spacecraft out so far in the solar system to think that our baby is out there this little spacecraft that we built I just I think it's really amazing iron Drive spacecraft will be fast enough to stand comets or travel around the planets of our solar system in just a few months but even iron drives don't last forever eventually they too run out of fuel to travel further to reach the Stars we'll need something new and it may be based on one of the oldest Technologies we know the sale long ago the Limitless power of the wind carried our ancestors to new worlds in the future we may use the same idea to travel to the Stars on sales that catch nothing more than sunlight solar cell using only the light from our sun [Music] many scientists assure that this is the future of space travel [Music] one of them is Les Johnson the son puts out photons light standing here on a sailboat the photons that are falling on us are pushing on us but the push is so slight that we don't feel it all the other forces around us are so much higher in magnitude that it's not noticeable but in the vacuum of space if you have a large enough light enough material the the pressure that's exerted from these solar photons can cause that to move to see if sunlight could provide enough Force to drive a sail through space Johnson and his team built this a man-made Sun in front of me we have a simulated Sun about three times brighter than what the sun is at the Earth and that's the reason I'm wearing these UV protecting sunglasses and that it could damage your eyes if I were to accidentally look right into the beam [Music] they're testing the ultra thin Ultra lightweight material they would need to make a real solar Sail it's mounted on a rod in the full glare of their artificial sun [Music] as you look in there you can see it slowly rocking back and forth what's causing that is a sunlight pressure of the photon pressure as is pushing on the sail incredibly it works worth this piece of sail material is being moved by nothing more than light [Music] work is being performed around the country solar sail technology is getting to the point where very soon we'll be flying it in space to reach the immense speeds needed to travel from star to star the solar sail must start its Voyage with as big a push as possible [Music] it must fly as close as it can to the source of its power the Sun foreign [Music] it's a dangerous maneuver it works the craft will whip around the Sun and hurtle out into space at almost three quarters of a million kilometers an hour [Music] a solar sail could reach the nearest stars in just decades it's a truly impressive start but is it enough [Music] foreign [Music] place to get from one side to the other even using a super fast solar cell traveling at incredible speeds would still take two and a half million years and our galaxy is only one of billions that make up our universe foreign is the final front here if we ever want to be true Star Travelers they'd have to take a completely different approach we're going to have to learn how to manipulate very fabric on Space itself some scientists believe there may be a quicker way to get around the universe one of them is cosmologist Peter Coles when early man first began to explore his environment he would run it a fundamental barriers whenever he came across mountains the mountains are not easy to cross when you're faced with a wall like these mountains around us you've got no choice either but to go around them or over the top [Music] now these days it's exactly the same thing with space travel if we're going to explore and colonize our galaxy and the distances we have to travel are truly immense [Music] so when it comes to space travel we're really still very much in the Stone Age foreign could be to take a shortcut don't go around the obstacle go through it you travel through space you're fundamentally limited by the speed of light but it's just possible that the laws of physics might have a kind of loophole in them which allows us to travel slower than the speed of light but still travel huge distances in a very short time and the way you can accomplish that is through a wormhole is basically a tunnel that takes a shortcut through space-time so here to the nearest star could be connected by a very short tunnel wormholes may sound like science but creating one may just be possible foreign first we'd have to harness the incredible forces of an exploding star and use them to punch a hole through space [Music] we'd need exotic forms of energy to keep the tunnel open but the science is sound at least in theory it is possible to create a tunnel that reaches clear Across the Universe [Music] experiments have already begun to try and build the first tiny wormholes foreign [Music] wormhulls were taken from one side of the universe to the other literally no time at all instant travel [Music] anywhere the Wormhole could just as easily have taken me halfway across our galaxy but with the University of Feats how do you decide where to go for that you're going to need a map space as we've discovered is very big but Professor Brian Boyle and a team of Australian astronomers may have the beginnings of an answer they're creating the biggest map imaginable a map of our universe traditionally astronomers have looked at the universe as a as a flat on the plane of the night sky you can think of it like a map of the Earth for a hiker a fly map it's no use at all a flat map wouldn't tell you if there was a mountain in the way or a huge ravine [Music] in the same way the hikers of the future will need a three-dimensional map to guide them around to create a three-dimensional map Boyle and his team had to develop a unique piece of equipment 10 years in the making and weighing over three tons the device uses over 600 fiber optic cameras the whole apparatus is delicately maneuvered into position high up on one of the biggest telescopes in the world everything's connected up we're ready to go fibers in position what we're going to do now is to take the telescope back up to the top and wait for the stars to come out foreign [Music] every night the telescope looks at a new patch of the night sky [Music] and for each point of light it sees a robot places a single fiber optic camera the light from the object is measured and its distance from the earth accurately calculated so far the tireless robot has looked at and logged the positions of tens of thousands of stars and galaxies [Music] bit by bit it has pieced together an unequal picture of the universe [Music] and this is the result for the first time ever we can see what our universe looks like in three dimensions [Music] when the map was first created I was really filled with a sense of that mixture of awe and excitement you know here I could see almost developing in front of my own eyes was the structure of the universe giant archipelagos of galaxies stretching hundreds of millions of light years across Intergalactic space [Music] the day before I'm going to launch them out here I go to the beach right over there I go to the ocean falline ocean and I look at the satellites Crossing overhead but I look at those satellites just whizzing along and I think tomorrow that's me [Music] so I think on that kind of thing where you don't know if you're coming back and you don't know the final outcome and you may not really know where you're going to end up you focus on a journey and that's what carries you forward [Music] there's a lot out there to explore and one day Humanity may be lucky enough to do it our children or our children's children will reach for the stars so the next time you look at the night sky remember that space is stranger and more beautiful than we can begin to imagine and above all remember this out there in space is our future [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] we go about our lives unaware that in the depths of space lurk invisible monsters [Music] destroyers powerful enough to tear apart our son and leave our Earth a shatter burned out ruin you are about to enter the world of the universe's ultimate killer you will be there when the monster is created in the heart of a Dying star we will search for its telltale signs in the darkness of deep space this is the story of the power that may one day destroy us all the black hole [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign what goes up must come down thing is it's not always true you throw something hard enough it might never come down [Music] if something goes up fast enough it can escape the Earth altogether faster still and it can escape the immense pull of our sun the force that holds the planets in place [Music] in fact travel fast enough and you can even escape the pull of the billions of stars that make up our galaxy the Milky Way [Music] but there is one object out there whose pull is so powerful you can never Escape no matter how fast you go not even if you travel at the speed of light Meet the monster this is a black hole in action it tearing apart a star that is straight too close anything that comes near is destroyed it's hard to believe anything could be powerful enough to destroy something as big as a planet or a star but it's true let's take a closer look put a black hole near something and immediately it starts ripping it apart foreign on this scale our Earth would be no bigger than a pebble we wouldn't stand a chance shocking thing is how small the black hole is black hole itself is right at the center of the disk it's tiny it's a million times smaller than the star let's look what it can do [Music] it's so powerful [Music] the answer is gravity it's the force that keeps us all stuck to the surface of our planet if something's heavy enough it pulls you towards it and planet Earth is heavy so heavy in fact that to get off it you have to do this all of this just to escape from our tiny globe foreign Ty seems strong imagine the pull of the Sun our sun is a million kilometers across this is the real heavyweight of the solar system but if you think our sun is Big think again there are stars out there that are vast their gravity is mind-boggling [Music] but compared to a black hole even this star is a weakling a black hole weighs as much as a massive star but it's crammed into an area smaller than a pea a black hole is gravity gone mad nothing can ever escape what could create such a monster something so heavy and yet unimaginably small foreign powerful enough to create a black hole should be clearly visible right across the universe and recently we might actually have witnessed one as it happened it was a team in Australia headed by Professor Brian Boyle that spotted it the first clue that led to his Discovery came in the form of radiation gamma rays that are invisible to the human eye a nice guy that we can see with our own eyes is only part of the picture light comes to us in many different forms from low energy radio waves to the most highest energy form of light the gamma rays the form of light that packs the biggest punts every night in the gamma-ray sky is fireworks night we've been detecting violent bursts of gamma rays for decades but we've never actually seen what causes them it has to be a violent event but what kind problem is gamma-ray bursts only last a few seconds to make things harder the best way to detect them is from space [Music] during a routine observation The gamma-ray Observatory detected an enormous blast of energy going off in deep space what had triggered it Brian Boyle's team Guided by the space Observatory turned their ground-based optical telescopes onto the plast in the hope of seeing it before it had time to fade [Music] the information was relayed down to the ground and the optical telescope sprang into action to try to localize where this burst of energy had come from [Music] foreign was something we didn't expect that this light was actually coming from a supernova what they'd seen with their telescopes was an exploding star but the explosion was Far larger than anyone had ever witnessed before foreign and in the heart that cataclysmic explosion the researchers realized that something astonishing and terrifying had happened as the massive star died a monster had been born what we'd witnessed was the birth of a black hole what Boyle's team had seen was the death of a star so heavy that when it exploded its entire Mass collapsed inwards instead of blasting outwards into space foreign it's a hundred times bigger than our sound thousands of times brighter but it doesn't just explode as its surface layers blast upwards its core is smashed inwards the center of the star collapses in on itself billions upon billions of tons of star stuff crushed smaller and smaller until a whole star is squeezed to a single microscopic point and from the remains of the dying star black hole is born foreign [Music] massive star explodes and creates a new black hole every Thousand Years which may not sound like a lot until you remember that the galaxy has been here a very long time speeding up its history you can see that stars will be going off like firecrackers and when a black hole is born it never dies every black hole that was ever created is still out there so there should be around 10 million of them somewhere the question is where until recently black holes remained unseen in the depths of space but something as deadly as a black hole can't remain hidden forever like most Predators they leave a trail of Destruction [Music] and scientists are now beginning to recognize these telltale signs one black hole Hunter is John 11. even though black holes are dark and invisible it doesn't mean they have no effects or extremely strong vortices and they pull matter in these swirling winds around them a lot like a tornado oh and just like a tornado you might not see it until the debris begins to get sucked up like this tornado is now pulling the gases in and so suddenly you can see the the presence of this Vortex the strong swirling wind [Music] it isn't the wind of a tornado you see it's the Havoc it creates [Music] yeah [Music] that's how we detect black holes too by the damage they do [Music] even though tornadoes are incredibly powerful you don't see them until they suck stuff into them until you see them pulling up cattle and houses and cars and and gas and smoke and clouds and it's the same thing with black holes so you don't see them until they pull in the matter around them [Music] this is what astronomers look for not the black hole itself but Stars caught in the black hole's incredible gravitational pull this one is tearing apart a star that drifted too close a feeding black hole is anything but black foreign star is wrenched out of shape as the monster tugs of it gas from the Star whirls around the hall it forms a super hot disc of start every 100 000 kilometers across [Music] a deadly Embrace that will last millions of years Cole can't swallow it belches out huge Jets of uneaten star are spat out into space [Music] the most spectacular kinds of black holes we've seen are so powerful they're drawing in so much material and spinning so rapidly to create these huge jets these powerful funnels of material that are thin but incredibly incredibly long incredibly vast and the Jets themselves can cross as as much as an entire galaxy they're absolutely huge [Music] the damage of black hole inflicts on a star can be seen clear Across the Universe once astronomers knew what to look for they began to hunt for feeding black holes using powerful space telescopes we've tracked down more and more of them these are the actual images black holes tearing apart everything they meet [Music] most of them are remote they're in distant corners of the universe and we've only found them because they're feeding but what about the black holes that aren't feeding where are the millions of black holes that should be wandering through our galaxy they remain hidden against the dark background of space luckily there is a way of tracking even the blackest of black holes this is what gives them away light a black hole's gravity is enormously powerful it affects everything around it can even bend light so when a black hole passes in front of the distant star the light from that star is distorted and the black hole gives itself away the precise moment it's distorted by a black hole is a daunting task but that didn't stop one very very patient astronomer trying to see the invisible Tim Axelrod is dedicated many years of his life to the pursuit of the universe's hidden objects for the last eight years we've been looking at the same patch of Sky every night monitoring the brightness of 20 million stars the reason that we're doing this is we're looking for microlensing events these events are extremely rare but they occur when a massive object passes across our line of sight to a distant star Axelrod set about his search for what he calls gravitational microlensing when a star's light is distorted by a massive object like a black hole [Music] the ants were stacked against him at best his chance of finding the right star was one in a million that fact it just seemed impossibly large to people so most people thought that we would fail pretty dismally [Music] undaunted by the enormity of the task and the skepticism of his colleagues Axelrod said about looking for that one Telltale pinprick of light amongst 20 billion stars every night for eight and Thai years [Music] then one night he hit the jackpot here we have a view of the large magellanic clown the blue square shows a field of view of our telescope so now we've zoomed in a bit the star which we're interested in is a pretty inconspicuous fellow right in the center of the Crosshair how we zoom in yet again this is picking the needle out of the haystack and what we saw when we looked at it over a period of time was this we were naturally ecstatic everyone that saw it agreed immediately that this was gravitational microlensing so we were just over the moon far out in space he had seen the impossible a massively heavy object like a black hole sliding silently in front of a distant star [Music] next Axelrod turned to our own Galaxy what he saw was disturbing evidence not of one or two black holes at hundreds but is that anything for us here on Earth to worry about could our own fragile planet ever encounter one of these invisible monsters if we do ever meet a black hole it would tear our world to shreds but one thing is sure our skies seem to be full of them and our galaxy still has one last dark secret and it took the most powerful telescope in the world to unlock it the Keck in Hawaii one of the astronomers using it is Andrea guess cat telescope is a fabulous telescope to eat great because it's large better you get to collect a lot of photons so you can see very faint things and it allows you to see very fine detail the telescope's vast mirror allows Andrea guest to study the center of our galaxy with more accuracy than ever before [Music] and what astronomers have seen there is a black hole a million times more powerful than normal foreign of one of the images we got just last night we actually see that there are fainter Stars towards the center of our field of view and these stars are extremely important the motion of these stars that revealed the presence of the black hole [Music] [Music] there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy that is so incredibly powerful it spins whole Stars around itself at impossible speeds the fact they're going a thousand kilometers per second tells us there's two million times the mass of the Sun of matter there [Music] this is no ordinary black hole this black hole is a giant two million times as heavy as our sun [Music] and it's not in some far-flung region of the universe this black hole is sitting right at the center of our galaxy foreign [Music] ly the idea that the Earth might one day fall victim to a black hole doesn't seem quite so unlikely if we are ever unlucky enough to meet one what would it be like foreign s far out in space beyond the furthest planet unseen a rogue black hole plows into the cloud of comets that surrounds our solar system and flings them towards Earth with Incredible thoughts these impacts are the first warning of Our Fate [Music] as the black hole comes closer its next victim is Jupiter the giant of our solar system foreign even from so far away the black hole's gravity makes itself felt here on Earth a world is being shaken apart but the black hole hasn't finished yet it's heading straight for the heart of the solar system our sun foreign though tiny in comparison it tears the sun apart dragging the sun with it the black hole heads towards Earth [Music] the Earth is now unbearably close to the Sun whole life has long since cease to exist [Music] and our planet starts to melt [Music] quietly our battered world disintegrates and is consumed [Music] and all that is left is the black hole drifting through space [Music] Earth eaten by a black hole it sounds bizarre but we know that there are millions of these monsters out there what we don't know is [Music] [Music] Take a Walk on planet Earth it's a wonderful place but don't take it for granted because one day it might just vanish forever this is the story of the universe we live in and the dangers we face just by being here we'll fly with the comets and asteroids which threaten all life on our planet here on Earth will recreate our son's headlong plunge around the Galaxy and what's disasters unfold which could spell the end for us all [Music] our planet is under threat our mission foreign [Music] if you're a gambler then this is the planet to live on because just by being here we're all taking a risk and the odds are stacked against us do you feel lucky you should do may not realize it but we are all winners we human beings are incredibly lucky to be here because the universe keeps trying to wipe us out trying and failing we have survived every disaster the universe has ever thrown at us sunflower now run of luck won't last forever when it ends our planet and our entire species will cease to exist we can do something about it [Music] [Music] could our whole planet really be in danger what could threaten the globe 13 000 kilometers across or 6 billion people [Music] to understand the threat you have to see it firsthand I want to show you planet Earth as it was in its earliest days this is where it all begins we're lucky there's even a planet here for us to live on because it was very nearly blown apart before life had even begun this is planet Earth billions of years ago the very beginning of its life as you can see it is under attack these are asteroids rocks left over from the creation of the planets themselves some of them were vast and one of them was on a collision course with Earth this Collision nearly smashed our Earth to pieces we were hit by a ball of molten rock the size of Mars traveling at Colossal speed [Music] the impact ripped huge chunks out of our planet somehow it survived but what about the future smaller chunks of rock are still flying around our solar system today they could put an end to human civilization asteroids range in size from Pebbles to mountains or even bigger and they're dangerous they're flying around at incredible speeds to get an idea of the damage they can do just take a trip to the moon all his life on earth into the solar system there's really nothing to say about it what can you say about a site like that [Applause] [Music] in 1969 for the first time ever human beings walked on the surface of another world [Music] [Applause] the Moon and what a world it was airless Barren hostile [Music] foreign the disturbing evidence of a terrifying threat the Moon is scarred with craters the marks of countless asteroids that have slammed into it the Moon is under attack [Music] I'm traveling through space alongside the Moon another planet the one we call home so why aren't we taking the same pounding [Music] there's a simple answer to that [Music] we are [Applause] this crater was formed in a few seconds about 49 000 years ago it's almost 1.2 kilometers in diameter it's almost 200 meters deep the object that caused it was an asteroid about 40 meters in diameter came in with a velocity of about 25 kilometers per second and it exploded with a force of a 15 Megaton hydrogen bomb this is meteor crater in Arizona geologist Jeff Wynn thinks of what happened here could happen again soon [Music] local effects would have been devastating obviously anything within the circumference of the crater would have been obliterated if you were an animal grazing within a few kilometers you probably would have been killed by the impact blast if you were beyond that depending on where the wind was blowing the ejecta coming down would have killed you and this is just one rather blunt example of what could happen if one of these things did hit geologists are discovering more and more evidence of asteroid impacts here on Earth meteor crater would be hard to miss other impacts are more difficult to spot but we have seen them we photographed them from space these are the remains of Titanic collisions some of them fast 20 or 30 kilometers across the Earth is being pounded all the time Siberia 1908 an entire forest was flattened [Music] there was an impact in Saudi Arabia in 1933 this was caught on camera in Canada in 1972. and the m is it flew back out into space if it had crashed on Earth it would have exploded with more Force than an atom bomb [Music] amazingly in all these events no one at all was killed but even if an asteroid doesn't hit us it could do something even more dangerous it could hit the sea if a big asteroid smashes into the ocean it could create a huge deadly wave that could wipe out entire cities [Music] I think there's a realistic possibility that something like this could cause serious problems to human civilization sometime in the next Century or two it's not an appealing thought but the threat is real whole cities could be obliterated from space whether or not it's your city comes down to luck but before you feel too lucky think about this it may not matter which city you live in there are things out there which could wipe all life from the face of the planet space contains dangers that make asteroids seem utterly insignificant our telescopes have captured images of truly colossal disasters this Photograph shows a star a hundred times bigger than our sun blasting incandescent gas out into space and this is a black hole spewing out Jets of super hot matter at close to the speed of light if these have been near us there's almost no chance that we'd have survived [Music] it looks as their Fortune has been on our side at least it has so far [Music] but for how much longer [Music] Professor Mike rampino thinks the odds for long-term survival of life on Earth could be slim which is a very big role in the existence of life on the planet Earth you have to realize that the Galaxy's very violent place and if we get unlucky that could put an end a complex life on the planet here's the problem we don't notice it but planet Earth is on the move [Music] while we get on with our lives the world is hurtling around our galaxy at 230 kilometers a second and high speed means high risk Sami win Samuels [Music] we may not realize it that we're on the right of Our Lives think of the Earth's orbit this is a kind of cosmic roller coaster ride [Music] moving past Gas clouds we can come close to black holes [Applause] we can get close to Stars can come close to Supernova explosions cause catastrophes on the Earth sound incredible it's very real life on Earth has been all but eradicated on 20 separate occasions and to make matters worse it's going to happen again after all remember what happened to the dinosaurs foreign through space is a dangerous business it's not just that we're moving it's where we're going planet Earth regularly flies through some of the most dangerous areas of the Galaxy well if one could speed up time and watch the orbit of the earth through the Galaxy and around the Galaxy it would look like a very very fast carousel sun and the planets moving up and down [Music] and at the same time moving around the Galaxy very rapidly you go around the Galaxy about once every 250 million years but also we go through the densest part of the Galaxy every 30 million years that's the danger zone every 30 million years our planet Earth travels through a region heavily packed with stars foreign that it's every 30 million years or so that life on Earth comes close to being wiped out coincidence [Music] here is our galaxy a huge flat pancake of four hundred thousand million stars all whirling around the brightest areas are where the stars most tightly packed these are the danger zones and this star is our son at the moment it's just around there just another pinprick in the cloud of stars that makes up our galaxy but take a closer look and see how it's moving it doesn't just go round and round the Galaxy it also goes up and down and where the sun goes the earth goes so regular's Clockwork we plunged through the danger zone and every time we do so the odds are stacked against us here's how it works this is and each of those other dots is a star [Music] as our son Bobs up and down through the Galaxy we're passing them by the million and where the stars are densest the danger is greatest [Music] the reason those other stars are dangerous is the powerful effect of their gravity on our solar system fly upwards from the Sun away from the Earth and the other planets and eventually you encountered these chunks of ice trillions of them a vast cloud in space if another star comes too close its gravity disturbs the cloud ice chunks in more than 10 kilometers across traveling at 40 kilometers a second its million year Journey Into the Heart of our solar system we know these huge snowballs by another name foreign this is a comet [Music] plunges towards the sun it warms up and belches out a haze of gas and dust and immense Cloud Trails through space behind it the comet's tail but this Comet doesn't hit the sun it skims round it and out it doesn't bode well for the future of the existence of human beings on the Earth [Music] we last passed through the danger zone one million years ago but that doesn't mean we're safe yet because a million years is how long it takes for comets to make their way into our solar system [Music] and in July 1994 one smashed straight into Jupiter drawn in by its immense gravity [Music] these blurred photographs reveal a colossal explosion [Music] he covered an area bigger than our entire planet [Music] if Jupiter hadn't intercepted that Comet if it had hit the earth instead could have been the end of us [Music] I told you we were lucky and it's not just the Jupiter saved us six years ago it has saved us thousands of times it's been doing so since the dawn of our solar system without Jupiter life on Earth would never even have got started remember all those asteroids in the early solar system back then there were so many of them flying around that life couldn't even get started what changed that was Jupiter its powerful gravity sucks in anything that comes too close foreign you're watching it a million years per second Jupiter made life on Earth possible it drew the asteroids fire and shielded our planet it's still catching asteroids today but unfortunately for us the number of asteroids out there is all but Limitless foreign ER or later our luck will run out just as it did for the dinosaurs Jupiter can't catch them all and one is all it takes this one for example the question is what on Earth are we going to do about it [Music] foreign it seems we have a problem [Music] this asteroid is huge 50 kilometers across 100 billion tons of rocks surrounded by clouds of dust and debris it's traveling at 40 kilometers a second and it's heading straight towards Earth [Music] so what are we going to do about it the American Military are on alert the man who runs Earth's asteroid detection system is Sergeant Rob Medrano [Music] today comets and asteroids do represent the most significant threat that we have from space now they do impact the Earth routinely but mostly we're talking objects that are very small concerned about are those objects that actually penetrate the Earth's atmosphere in a large form and with that in mind on average we're discovering about four a month the asteroid passes Mars it is now only 45 days from the Earth already time is running out for us all detecting a threat is not enough the point is to do something about it [Music] there are several possibilities one is to send a rocket up with a nuclear device and blow it to Pieces another possibility is to put chemical rockets on the object and literally try to shove it out of the way this all requires that we have enough lead time to be able to mount some kind of a major project like this and do something about it foreign possibilities for human beings to survive far into the future one is some kind of planetary protection the other is insurance moving off of this planet under other planets if there are catastrophes on this individual Planet it wouldn't wipe out human beings entirely [Music] the potential still exists for an asteroid to impact the Earth that would essentially uh wipe out Life as We Know It in terms of Defending ourselves today predicting where the asteroid is going to actually impact that that that's really all that we have [Music] so far we have survived [Music] but what about the future to safeguard that we should be acting now one day our planet's luck will run out it's simply a matter of time we must develop the technology to defend ourselves because we're not prepared the odds are that one day shreds in a Flash collapse in on itself or will it slowly freeze to death scientists are Imagining the unimaginable and they're coming up with some wild ideas about how it's all going to end this is the end of the universe [Music] a battle is taking place in the farthest reaches of space no one can see it but scientists are certain that it's happening and that the outcome is grim foreign the universe is going to end it won't happen for billions of years but there is no way out figuring out how it will end is the challenge of astrophysicists around the world they're pointing high-tech equipment out toward the Heavens to unlock the secret of Our Fate the possibilities are frightening in one scenario gravity pulls the universe back into itself similar to air being let out of an inflated balloon the Universe goes back to its original size this is the Big Crunch the end of the universe and a big Fireball is all the matter collapses onto itself that'd be pretty dramatic then there's the Big Chill the universe expands until the nuclear furnaces that power all the stars burn out the universe grows cold and dies a second possibility is actually kind of sad the universe will continue to expand forever and it will just grow into an increasingly cold and lonely place as the expansion removes our nearest Neighbors from us and we just end up a single isolated community of stars and galaxies then again there could be a much more spectacular end in which everything is ripped to shreds down to the last atom think of it like a balloon that is filled with too much air it pops it's much more dramatic Than The Big Chill and just as fateful as the Big Crunch the universe continues to expand but at an Ever quickening pace and in fact the pace is so great that even the space-time fabric cannot hold the universe together [Applause] however the end comes it will be a dramatic conclusion to understand how it all could end scientists turn to how it began the mystery starts to be solved here at the Mount Wilson Observatory overlooking Pasadena California in 1929 while looking through what was then the world's largest telescope Edwin Hubble makes a strange discovery the universe is expanding Hubble's Discovery led to a whole new picture of the universe that it was a dynamic environment and that it evolved it changed in time and that's different from pictures that people had of cosmology previously thank you before Hubble scientists said that the Universe was static and unchanging Hubble's discovery that the universe is expanding and it had a starting point a beginning that brought the idea forward that hey what if we ran the film backwards in time and found the point at which that began the big bang that fraction of a second with the universe and everything in it exploded into existence foreign [Music] scientists theorize that at the moment of the Big Bang the first small particles of matter called quarks were produced they collided to form the building blocks of the universe [Music] [Music] gravity also created The Big Bang through the particles together eventually creating the first stars and lighting up the cosmos the theory of the Big Bang is a very solid Theory what happened at the moment of the Big Bang is still something we're working on we don't really understand if the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang scientists must consider that it will stop expanding at some point the question is how [Music] the most obvious answer involves gravity what goes up must come down stars and galaxies and everything else might reverse Direction the universe would collapse and what some scientists call a big crunch [Music] a model rocket offers Clues to how the Big Crunch would work the Rocket is like the universe expanding into space out of the Big Bang an initial bang allows the rocket to overcome the pull of gravity [Music] eventually when the fuel is exhausted the rocket coasts a few feet higher stops and is pulled back to Earth this is what would happen with a big crunch the entire universe is essentially pulled back to its launch pad there's a point where possibly the universe will stop that moving outward just like the rocket that we saw and have to fall back in upon itself and collapse again under the force of its own gravity in this scenario the universe could return to its original state just before the Big Bang setting the stage for a Perpetual seesaw of creation and destruction the Big Crunch Theory moved to a scientific back burner cosmologists figured out that there must be some form of energy that keeps the universe from collapsing the existence of such a force leads to new theories about what the universe is made of and how it might end and evidence about how this might play out is found in some of the most powerful and mysterious phenomena in the cosmos black holes [Music] predicting How the Universe will end involves some of the most advanced technology known to man on a remote volcano on the island of Hawaii astronomers are monitoring a battle in space that is shaping the fate of the universe at an elevation of nearly 14 000 feet the Keck telescopes bring astronomers from all over the world nearer to space for a clearer view of the cosmos they come here because the telescopes work best far away from City Lights And as high as possible above Earth's polluted air harsh conditions make it difficult to work here but for scientists in pursuit of the great Mysteries above its Paradise so this is a remarkable location but of course the air is very thin it's extremely hard to work here but these telescopes are amazingly powerful but we're ambitious astronomers we don't just stop looking at easy objects we try hard to look at the very famous objects so we can understand the extremities of the universe here astronomers Like Richard Ellis are working on a problem that has been all-consuming for cosmologists since Edwin Hubble they know the universe is expanding but what they don't know is how fast it will be difficult to predict exactly how the universe will end until they solve this mystery the answers lie in the past now what we were looking at what I did the focus on was a v equals 12. okay that's the dry stuff we have to get a better focus now that was worth doing an astronomer like myself who uses a ground-based telescope as a time machine we're looking back in times to study distant galaxies seen as they were a long long time ago one of the distant galaxies that astronomers found revealed a powerful source of x-rays from something that they could not see it was in the constellation cygnus and emitted no light but something was there whatever was emitting these x-rays had a mass about seven times that of Earth's sun there wasn't a name for it so they called it a black hole black holes offer scientists an analogy to how the Big Crunch Theory works has run out of fuel they collapse in on themselves into a smaller and far denser mass that attracts more and more matter just like the Big Crunch the gravitational pull is so powerful that anything that falls near a black hole will be forever trapped not even light can escape it's a mind-boggling concept that something invisible is detectable and offers A View to our ultimate fate this black top represents space and space is relatively flat but when you put a massive object into space it curves it this is a penny and notice how it comes into a really beautiful circular orbit basically the black hole trapped it into an orbit around itself and that orbit becomes very circular as it gets closer and now the penny will eventually disappear go inside the black hole Earth Sun warp space similarly to a black hole only it's a cosmic wimp by comparison the gravitational pull of our sun is much weaker Earth and all its nearby planets are trapped by the sun's pull but it's so mild that it just stays in orbit without being sucked into the sun the mass of a black hole can be a million times the mass of the Sun or more causing a huge warp in the space around it that consumes everything that comes near that black hole wraps space around itself and so if material falls near it it falls inside and gets trapped forever black holes exist in isolated areas throughout the cosmos a black hole's gravitational pull is a scaled down version of the force that could cause the universe to collapse that force is dark matter and dark matter is what scientists often call Cosmic glue let's do some cosmology here with dark matter attracts other objects via its gravitational attraction it's a positive force there's another force that opposes gravity and that is dark energy Dark Energy we don't really understand what it is but it's a negative repulsing effect that pushes galaxies away from each other the whirlpool in Richard Ellis's demonstration represents the gravitational force of dark matter the green dye coming out of the syringe shows how the stuff of the universe collapses under the force of dark matter the presence of Dark Matter acts as the focus for the gas in the universe bringing structure together this is how the Milky Way developed as the universe expanded little things merging into big things the positive constructive force of gravity now if this was the only force in the universe the universe would stop expanding at some point in the future and eventually the universe would start collapsing gravity would eventually halt the expansion bring it back together in a big crunch yet the universe continues to expand and isn't showing any signs of collapsing this suggests the opposing force of dark energy could be stronger than dark matter but it will take scientific detective work to find out they look to one of the most violent forces in the universe for Clues we're studying exploding stars to try to understand if they can tell us the rate at which the universe is expanding these are explosions at the end of the lives of stars not unlike our sun the fuel that these stars have in their centers is spent the star collapses the outer part expands and the star becomes something called a white door white dwarf stars sometimes have other stars orbiting nearby a companion star a massive explosion could happen if the companion star's debris Falls onto the white dwarf causing a spectacular fireworks display in the cosmos [Music] scientists consider exploding stars or supernovae like in these images captured by the Hubble telescope to be reliable telltales of how fast the universe expands their brief and bright explosions allow scientists to track the universe's expansion and give them a way to measure its speed essentially they are white dwarf stars that become nuclear bombs they explode with a certain brightness and a certain length of time it takes a certain amount of time for that brightness to dissipate they are essentially standard candles any one of these will look the same no matter where it is in the universe astronomers measure the distance and speed of these exploding Stars by measuring the amount of red light they emit the faster the star moves away from us the redder its light appears the expansion rate of galaxies containing stars like supernovae can then be used to interpret how the rest of the universe is moving outward we know this because we can compare the velocities of galaxies with their distances these are the clues that lead astronomers to answer just how soon the universe will reverse Direction and come back together in a big crunch or this information might lead to an entirely different conclusion Dr Ellis is looking at Clues at the Keck observatory in Hawaii while the telescope is on the top of a huge volcano he's in a viewing room on another part of the island hey Mission lines Johan in the red in at the same time Johann Richard is at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena California evaluating the light from a distant Galaxy that the Keck telescope captured in Hawaii he's looking to see if any of the known elements coming from the Galaxy are in the Red Spectrum and moving farther away we can interpret that as a velocity as how much the Galaxy is moving away from us we can really interpret how the entire universe is behaving is expanding interpreting redshift is the Cornerstone of the quest to pin down the fate of the universe foreign pictures of the universe that have only been possible in recent years have led cosmologists to conclude that the redshift of distant galaxies is greater than predicted this is startling not only is the universe expanding up nothing in the observable Cosmos could account for an accelerating universe and yet the data seem irrefutable this has to mean that an invisible force is working against gravity cosmologists have come up with a name dark energy so when the universe was young gravity was the most dominant force and so what we see here is galaxies as particles on the surface of the water are bound together by gravity and the point about seven billion years ago dark energy and gravity are pretty well in balance but the universe continues to expand the density goes down and so Dark Energy starts to take over and lo and behold the universe starts to accelerate so dark energy is now the dominant property of space so the universe started out with a certain amount of energy and we know we're trying to understand how much energy there is and we know the universe is expanding as it as it moves outward with time we also know now that the universe's expansion is accelerating and we don't know is that acceleration going to slow down or not we're still trying to understand that so in understanding what's going to happen to the fate of the universe we have to know how much energy is there how much matter is there the history of the universe is really a battle between dark matter and dark energy these two forces are in opposition and so both the history of the universe and its ultimate fate is really the competition between these two forces the Big Crunch theory was a result of scientists interpreting that dark matter is the dominant Force but astronomers now suspect that dark energy might be much stronger if so the end could be dramatic and final it pulls apart solar systems it pulls apart stars and eventually it grows so strong that it falls apart matter itself breaks bonds pulls apart atoms and reduces everything to fundamental particles and that's the end of the universe [Music] the battle between Dark Matter the force that holds the universe together and dark energy the force seeking to tear it apart has set the Universe on a path of destruction if dark matter is the Victor the universe might collapse if Dark Energy rules the cosmos it could rip to shreds the expansion grows so strong that tears up the entire universe it'll be a strange twist of fate dark energy the force that propelled matter to form a magnificent Universe continues to push it outward and drives it to its demise to find out if dark energy is in fact winning the battle scientists will first need to know how fast the universe is actually expanding the most remarkable feature of the universe is that it's expanding every Galaxy is moving away from every other Galaxy when you look out into the night sky you see distant Stars galaxies clusters of galaxies the observe with telescopes and they're all moving away from us we can illustrate that with this balloon as we expand it we see that every dot drawn on this Black Balloon like the night sky is moving away from every other Dot [Music] but there's something else that we know about the universe something else that we know about the expansion that is that the expansion is getting faster the universe is accelerating the size of the universe is getting bigger at a faster and faster rate and we don't know exactly how fast it's accelerating but if it's accelerating fast enough then something really dramatic can happen the universe could end up tearing itself apart in a big rip this is perfect this is great that you rig this up so this is this is a giant version of the demo that I do in clasp Dr Robert Caldwell attempts an Earthbound experiment to show how dark energy affects the acceleration of the universe he uses a paintball gun mounted on a truck yeah and basically I mean we could adjust the angle in any way that you want it what do you think about yeah I think down a little bit more is uh is the best that we can Mark outside the gun fires that'll be good all right let's try that he sends the truck coasting down an incline Earth's gravity pulls the vehicle downhill which is similar to how dark energy propels the universe outward causing it to expand gravity pulls the truck forward at an increasing speed the gun fires painted the ground at regular one second intervals Caldwell measures the distance between the paint dots to calculate just how fast the truck was accelerating he'll use the data from this experiment to see how gravity's Force compares to dark Energy's force in the cosmos we started thinking about the Big Rip when it was discovered that the expansion of the universe was accelerating the degree of acceleration is not known and it's the subject of a lot of effort by astronomers today to try and figure out exactly how fast the expansion is growing what is the past evolution of the universe in detail and if we can glean from that what is the future evolution of the universe it's not known exactly how fast it's accelerating there's some evidence that the acceleration is beyond a certain threshold and beyond that threshold there's a runaway effect that could take place and it would rip apart the universe fantastic I think we've got some good data excellent how do we measure this great give you that end all right I'll take this the point of the paintball experiment is to find parallels between the truck propelled by the invisible force of gravity and the accelerating universe I'm glad we got the long tape measured because it's really growing pretty fast the interval within a few measurements the distance between the paint spots increases by nearly seven times if the truck were in space at this rate it would travel faster than 100 miles per hour within a minute and over a thousand miles per hour within 10 minutes they're getting big now two and a half feet 42 all right 0.5 the question for Robert Caldwell is whether the same kind of expansion and acceleration are happening on a cosmic scale what's the uh the capsule made of is it plastic or something gelatin okay biodegradable you'd actually eat them if you wanted to this right here is the data that I took with Eric the cumulative distance traveled by the car as a function of time and that's beautiful it's this nice parabolic shape that's exactly what you expect for an accelerating body now over here I've got another calculation going on where I'm working out the acceleration of the universe Robert Caldwell's calculation shows that forces on Earth are similar to forces in space this demonstration then gives a sense of the dramatic rate of expansion that appears to be happening in the cosmos by I it might be difficult to appreciate how good a fit it is but I can tell you that the weight of the statistics indicates that an accelerating universe is a very good fit to this data if like the truck the universe is continually accelerating then billions of years from now the universe might tear itself apart thank you all the distant stars and galaxies will be pulled away from from each other they'll be pulled away from us but moreover we won't have time to grow cold and lonely it'll actually be pretty exciting and dramatic and finally stars are ripped apart planets are ripped apart and even atoms are are torn apart before the universe ends wouldn't happen for at least 50 billion years but still it's an interesting fate for the universe [Music] Adams ripping apart look like things like coffee cups are solid atoms joined together to create something that will hold a cappuccino without leaking a single drop zoom in through the cup like sailing through the cosmos past the molecules and into the atoms the solid cup is nothing more than a fabric of atomic particles that formed a bond to become matter if these particles were to move apart the bonds that hold this cup together stop working the atoms no longer support molecules the connections between the minuscule particles dissolve matter in the form of this cup ceases to exist it disintegrates gone from existence this is the dramatic end that Robert Caldwell foresees for the universe what you would see if you were standing on Earth or standing on some other planet that happened to still be around at that time you would see something that looks like a wall of Darkness approaching you and as the wall of Darkness approaches Stars would go out galaxies would go out and then eventually that wall of Darkness would surround the planet and then pretty soon atoms themselves are torn apart and that's it just the wall of Darkness shrinks down to a point and that's the end of the universe according to Robert Caldwell that moment is still billions of years off leaving plenty of time to refine the research in a way this is like a detective story we're trying to figure out what is the culprit or who is the culprit responsible for the cosmic acceleration we think we know its name we call it dark energy but we don't know the modus operandi we don't know exactly how it works what's needed is more information more information about the physics behind the dark energy we want to know exactly what it does and exactly what it's made out of and in answering those questions we'll be able to figure out exactly what is the fate of the universe the Big Rip is one Theory cruising just above Earth's atmosphere and peering deep into space the Hubble telescope provides scientists with Clues to a less violent but equally unavoidable end of the universe [Music] scientists now say the universe is expanding and that depending on how fast it is accelerating it might end in a big rip where everything tears apart it's also possible that it will continue to expand but at a slower rate the universe wouldn't rip apart but would become dark cold and lifeless if dark energy turns out to be constant a constant property of space and continues at the same rate that it is now the universe will keep expanding forever and it will be a very sad State I think in the end it just chills out everything cools down evidence for The Big Chill and all of the theories for the end of the universe in part come from the Hubble Space Telescope it has been orbiting Earth since 1990 and has an unobstructed view of the cosmos the extraordinary images it beams back to Earth are amazing in their Clarity and detail and because of Hubble scientists can make better predictions about how the universe will end so here is an example of a very deep field that was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope which literally you point the Space Telescope at a single region in space and if you looked at this from a typical round-based image before launched first of all it's a literally almost size of a postage stem and so suddenly the first Hubble Deep Field that was ever taken had 4 000 galaxies that look just like the galaxies here that were never visible before from the ground tremendous power each of these smudges in their own right is another galaxy each one of these galaxies contains about 100 million stars Hubble sees more than just stars and galaxies it just might be on to one of the key ingredients of space an invisible ingredient that could put the brakes on Energy's effect and cause a Big Chill that's Dark Matter scientists talk about dark matter as the substance that holds the universe together and could progress evidence that dark matter exists is seen in some of Hubble's images of nearby galaxies it sometimes appears as though other galaxies surround them the other galaxies are not really there at all rather they are reflections of more distant galaxies coming from behind astronomers suspect this optical illusion is dark matter causing a weird Distortion of light called gravitational lensing the light from the more distant galaxies is literally Bent by the curvature of space caused by stars and dark matter in its path the more Dark Matter there is between Earth and the distant Galaxy the more the light will be bent and the greater the force to cause a Big Chill rotational lensing is a tremendous tool for the astronomer because we can measure the Distortion in background use it to trace the distribution of Dark Matter on various scales we're looking at a distribution of idealized galaxies here on the sky and the light from these distant galaxies is passing through clumps of dark matter what you look at is not really what's happening it's a bit like wearing spectacles and not knowing that you're wearing them if you can tell how much that bending is occurring you can map the dark matter and you can also see well if there's Dark Matter there is the universe around that dark matter behaving the way it should given the gravity or not if it's slightly gravitating less then Dark Energy might be changing in those places identifying which energy force dominates dark matter or dark energy will give scientists more confidence about whether a big chill or a big rip Will Be Our Fate the best evidence shows dark energy as the driving force but by how much solving this mystery depends on astronomers finding ways to measure how fast the universe is moving [Music] on Earth it's simple to determine how fast something moves an airplane for example is relatively close we can look at it and calculate its speed by estimating the distance it travels and timing how long it takes to get from one point to another but a star's light can travel for millions or billions of years before it can be seen on Earth by the time its light gets here the star will be long gone and it's too far away to gauge its speed or distance traveled with any certainty the universe is expanding only scientists cannot give precise answers about how fast the mystery moves closer to being solved by Imaging the cosmos with greater precision [Music] clearer images from space make it easier to estimate the rate of expansion if the universe continues to expand with time then ultimately all of the energy sources the nuclear furnaces and stars would run out and die and the universe would actually get very cold and there'd be something called a Big Chill in The Big Chill scenario Earth could become a lonely cold Planet as the universe expands distances between Stars grow so vast that they nearly disappear from View over time they burn out and eventually the entire universe ends in a frozen state this fear demonstrates the principles behind a Big Chill the marbles coming out of the sphere are like stars that were formed following the Big Bang Dark Energy propels the Stars outward Dark Matter slows them down in a Big Chill the expansion would continue but the nuclear fuel that causes the Stars to burn will eventually run out foreign the first thing to go would be sunlight the sun dims as it exhausts its last bits of nuclear fuel Earth would freeze and become lifeless billions of years after humans are gone the cosmos expands out of view a few newer Stars might remain but most would have long moved away [Music] the furnace powering the universe burns out the darkened Universe continues to expand a Frozen and lifeless remnant of its once vibrant existence eventually if this keeps going if nothing changes in the in the composition of this energy density the universe will continue to expand forever it's going to get colder and colder and eventually even the gal our neighboring galaxies will be receding from us so fast that we won't be able to see them so the universe is going to get cold and dark and and it will be a very lonely place foreign ERS have much to learn about the influence of dark energy and dark matter and much of the newest information is coming from this probe in deep space it's sending back information that's helping scientists to interpret the history and the fate of the universe [Music] foreign [Music] by all appearance is a quiet and peaceful place but in reality there are forces that are driving it to an end science moves astronomers closer to deciphering the universe's great Mysteries including its ultimate fate the solution to the universe is riddle May well be hidden in this multi-colored image what's incredible is that it's a map of the early Universe from the moment it was conceived an even more fantastic it reveals a great story that helps cosmologists predict how it will end the machine that captured this is called wmap a NASA satellite that's working around the clock to chart the cosmos [Music] what we're looking at here is the edge of the visible Universe it's the light that wmat measured left that's the remnant heat from The Big Bang and this is literally the oldest light in the universe that we can see this fossil Relic from the early Universe tells us a great deal about what the composition of matter was like what the expansion rate was like and really what the conditions were at the birth of our universe wmap is one of the great astronomical breakthroughs of the 21st century nothing before could give us such a clear image of the energy left over from The Big Bang energy that scientists call The Cosmic microwave background wmap is measuring temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background which may finally make it possible to predict which force will dominate The Universe And how that force will bring the cosmos to its end the blue spots are regions in the microwave light that was produced by the big bang that are slightly colder than the average temperature and the red spots are regions that are slightly hotter than the average temperature difference is revealed by wmap tell scientists about the nature of the matter and energy that is contained within the universe they're able to analyze the light patterns and find Clues not only about the substance but also the fate of the universe we only capture a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum with our eyes and we have to go to much longer wavelengths same wavelengths are used to heat water in a microwave oven are what we're measuring here with W member wmap is so precise that it can detect differences in temperatures as small as one one thousandth of a degree this sensitivity helps scientists to calculate the ratio of dark matter to dark energy forces that will determine how the universe ends we assembled all those difference measurements and make a map of what the variations look like and by turning up the contrast we can we can basically subtract off this uniform glow from The Big Bang and look for a variation it doesn't look like much until Gary Henshaw adjusts the contrast then the wmap image comes to life looking at wmap imagery is in essence taking a journey back through space and time so that we might get some new ideas on the fate of the universe pulling away from the probe and following the path of the light it is collecting we pass Mars Jupiter and Saturn whose reflected light takes over an hour to reach Earth [Music] foreign then leaving the Milky Way We Pass Andromeda the next nearest galaxy whose light takes 2.3 million years to reach us which means we have traveled 2.3 million years back in time [Music] finally we arrived back 13 billion years ago at the beginning of visible light before that superheated hydrogen gas is everywhere wmap can see this far back in history it's confirming important facts about the universe and what's driving it to its demise the final act for the universe becomes more easily predicted thanks to wmap its information combined with the work of astronomers has led to some astounding discoveries concerning a rapidly expanding universe rapid expansion supports the dark energy Theory and the possibility of a big chill or big rip we now know from all the data we've had in the last 10 years of theirs by a factor of two to one more dark energy than dark matter so dark energy is the dominant constituent of the energy in the universe the evidence seems clear dark energy is taking over and is leading astronomers into new thoughts about the beginning and the end of the universe before the discovery of dark energy things were a lot simpler if we could determine the amount of matter in the universe then we could say something about its ultimate Destiny those simple days are gone but the proof is adding up and supports the idea that the universe will continue to expand but will it do so to Oblivion we've made huge strides over the last century and learning something about the evolution of the universe and its expansion but we've now raised more questions in some sense than we've been able to answer and so I think the next decade is going to be even more exciting astronomers have tons and tons of challenges that have been thrown our way by theorists and we are rapidly trying to figure out how to answer all of these questions and I think that's the exciting future because if you if you can go out and really observe something you're testing it and that's what science is all about the battle between dark matter and dark energy is expected to go on for billions of years and humans will be long gone from Earth when the final outcome occurs but no Pursuit has been more significant to science than understanding How the Universe arrived how it works and how it will end it's a never-ending Quest it's driving astronomy what are the answers to these profound questions the constituents of the universe the nature of dark matter and perhaps the biggest mystery of all what is the ultimate fate of the universe foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The Universe & Space

Views: 1,014,166

Keywords: knowledge, Science, The Universe, Space, Solar System, Astronomy, documentary, cosmos, planets, stars, planetary, how the universe works, Secrets of the Universe, Formation, Earth, Space Discovery Documentary, how the universe works formation and evolution

Id: paUPly9gAIo

Length: 239min 51sec (14391 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 09 2022