Why Is Our Universe Growing Rapidly? | Beyond Earth | Spark

[Music] as the 20th century came to a close two independent teams of astronomers employed telescopes around the earth and observatories in space to study supern noi in distant galaxies each team sought to measure how gravity was slowing the expansion of the universe they made a shocking Revelation the expansion was speeding up and an unknown force was behind it the 20th century birthed the physics Revolution we've worked for a century to test it Einstein's relativity is holding up scientists are unraveling the Big Bang it's an explosion of space itself and asking new questions of our Cosmos we're still not entirely sure how super massive black holes form but we've been able to detect that they exist in pretty much every Galaxy new instruments are confirming old theories it has taken about 50 years for us to build an instrument that's capable of registering gravitational waves and shedding light on the ultimate fate of the universe we may be sailing off on an infinite journey of expansion with each piece of the puzzle the Mysteries deepen we have defined the boundaries of our ignorance and that's a very exciting place to be as a [Music] scientist [Music] humankind has forever sought to understand the forces that govern the heavens and the world around us generation after generation ideas were proposed tested revised the shoulders of giant grew tall building a vantage point with which to see [Music] reality in the 17th century an English polymath assigned mathematical Theory to his observations Newtonian physics was a revelation it changed the separation between humanity and the cosmos and revealed not just that we were connected but that we could understand it Isaac Newton published the first volume of his principia Mathematica in July 1687 within its Pages he detailed an equation for gravitational attraction everything in the universe pulls on everything else particles of matter attract each other with a force directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them we were able to predict accurately where planets were going to be in the future where they in the past we were able to find planets through the pertubations of that planet on another one after William herel discovered Uranus in 1781 astronomers noted its curious path across the sky employing Newton's version of gravity the planet's motion seemed to be influenced by a distant body European astronomers and mathematicians got together and they calculated that if there was an existing planet outside of Uranus then this would explain these funny movements two astronomers working independently each calculated the hypothetical planet's location in the night sky a third trained his telescope toward that position collectively they discovered [Music] Neptune but there was one planet which refused to play by Newton's rules Mercury tracing Mercury's orbits its closest point to the sun its perhelion moves ever so slightly every single year the phenomenon is known as precession Mercury orbit never quite fit correctly with the classical model it could not possibly be explained with new's law of gravity after we had observed it and seen the parhelion advance there's a way to make an entrance my destiny it was now a conspiracy of witches download V today one hypothesis there had to be another planet even closer to the Sun p ing Mercury's orbit the mystery planet was christened Vulcan after the Roman god of the forge while some hunted for Vulcan others sought a new mathematical Theory to explain Mercury's strange behavior in 1915 a German physicist presented a new take on gravity Einstein's relativity absolutely transformed the way we think about the universe to step out of this classical world of gravitation and be able to just turn that completely upside down and be able to come up with a mathemtical formula which is actually quite simple general relativity treats space as deformable Mass from a grain of sand to the entire Earth bends space and all natural bodies moving through the universe will follow those curves the sun doesn't pull on the Earth the Sun sits at the bottom of a gravitational well and the earth falls around it traveling just fast enough that it doesn't spiral inward in relativity we saw a sweeping away of the old and ushering in of a new paradigm applying the novel equation of general relativity Mercury's quizzical orbit was finally explained and its procession accounted for Vulcan was no longer necessary however Einstein's theory would need a further demonstration to supplant Newton's work which had reigned Supreme for over 2 years Einstein had predicted the presence of a massive would bend the way light passed through space an upcoming solar eclipse was set to darken the southern Atlantic on May 29th 1919 a team of astronomers led by Arthur Edington seized the opportunity to test Einstein's theory the Edington mission in 1919 was to measure the deflection of a star light as it passed close to the Sun if Einstein was correct a group of stars would appear in a slightly different part of the sky their light perturbed by the Sun's gravity as it passed in front the 1919 the eclipse was special because this eclipse happened projected against the background of the so-called highes star cluster a small concentration of stars that were the best studied stars to [Music] date a first base of observation was established in Brazil and Edington positioned himself on an island off the coast of West [Music] Africa the moon's Shadow charged across the Atlantic each station only had minutes to capture the eclipse on photographic plates returning to England both teams announced their findings Einstein was right this experiment was incredibly successful and the deviations in the positions absolutely confirmed Einstein's [Music] PRS scientists have continued putting general relativity to the test it keeps passing for several centuries we've worked with Newton's gravity then came along Einstein with relativity and showed that in certain extreme situations Newton's gravity doesn't really work well Einstein was able to explain all of everything we saw even to this day we've still not been able to go against his theories of gravity now is Einstein's relativity The Final Answer we've worked for a century to test it Einstein's relativity is holding up precisely I find that astonishing it all came back to a simple desire to understand and have a more complete picture of our universe while we can still use Newtonian mechanics in our day-to-day lives Einstein's revolutionary notion of gravity is required to to understand the universe we need to look out to places where we have extreme densities temperatures and things are very Dynamic that's where we will really be able to refine our ultimate theory of [Music] gravity to study the heavens astronomers capture light in telescopes that light is composed of a spectrum of colors we can understand the fundamental makeup and dynamics of something by taking its light and splitting it up into its component colors unique to each object this combination of colors represents the chemical Fingerprints of astronomical phenomena but to understand how a star or a planet could have such a fingerprint scientists needed to surpass the classical understanding of the universe they needed to reconceptualize the very concept of matter the ancient Greeks envisioned the atom as indivisible the most fundamental building block of substance in the 19th century scientists discovered it it was far more complex as our ways to study materials advanced in the past 200 years the structure of the atom is no longer just one homogeneous thing which is the smallest thing in the world the atom was instead demonstrated to be comprised of several components a nucleus where most of the mass was contained with an electron that would orbit around but according to classical Newtonian physics the electrons in a planetary model would spiral down toward the nucleus destroying every atom in existence in 1913 the Danish physicist Neil bour introduced his model of the atom the model relied on a new explanation of reality that had recently been developed Quant quantum physics quantum physics is the idea that nature is divided into discreet but very much differentiated bits it's trying to explain the very smallest scales of the universe the tiny bits of atoms and how they behave the weirdness and behavior of chemicals and basically every tiny tiny thing in our universe in this re-envisioned universe electrons are forced to orbit around their nucleus at precise distances like rungs on an unevenly spaced ladder the size of those rungs dictates the exact colors of light an atom can absorb or emit each element has its own arrangement we have a very outstanding challenge in trying to visualize and explain what the quantum World actually is for decades astronomers had been cataloging Stars based on the missing colors in their rainbow of light what they called Spectra and matching the missing colors to certain elements if we look at a spectrum and we see certain wavelengths missing we can tell which element in the star was responsible for absorbing that light scientists could utilize Spectra to identify chemical compounds throughout the cosmos the ghosts of unimaginably distant objects like quazars and pulsars can be made to tell their stories by manipulating the light that they emit in the 1920s quantum physics evolved the particles within an atom were revealed to also act like waves the electron is not in a position around the atom it is rather spread out there is a cloud of possible locations the universe became uncertain and that uncertainty helped solve a long-standing mystery of how our sun was able to shine under classical physics hydrogen nuclei in our Sun's core can't get close enough for long enough to undergo fusion it simply isn't hot enough but under quantum physics hydrogen clouds can the chance of fusion is astronomically tiny but it's enough combined the theories of Relativity and quantum physics have allowed us to explain the intricacies of the universe but employed in tandem they failed to provide any answers these are two theories of the way things behave which are mutually exclusive they don't sit together and yet they both work very very well when we try and describe big things with quantum mechanics it makes no sense when we try and describe small things with general relativity that doesn't work either gravity as we currently understand it cannot operate within a Quantum Realm there must be a theory out there that we haven't grasped yet maybe it's a new law of physics maybe it's tweaks these laws and maybe it's something else without a unified theory we'll never be able to truly comprehend the beginnings of our universe 13.8 billion years ago reality as we know it was born all of the material that form forms our universe at a single point that's the big bang an infinitesimal spark became an infinite Cosmos it's not so much an explosion into space it's an explosion of space itself as the universe grew to an unfathomable size Stars began to shine and galaxies coalesced [Music] modern technology allows us to observe many of these moments but not the earliest points of our universe's history as we turn back the clock a cosmic barrier arises 380,000 years after the big bang before that moment in the first few hundred thousand years our universe was so hot and dense atoms were ionized and they were a plasma any radiation a particle emitted would immediately be absorbed by another and it acted like a fog there was no way for the light to travel it wasn't until the universe expanded and cooled sufficiently that that radiation could start flowing freely the atoms recombine the fog clears and the light travels to us and has traveled towards us essentially unimpeded since that moment the oldest light is known as the cosmic microwave background it wasn't discovered with our eyes but rather our [Music] ears in 1964 two astronomers at Bell Laboratories were testing their radio equipment but something was interfering with the signal maybe it was was caused by something in the Earth's atmosphere and they spent a long time trying to remove it from their data they went to all sorts of lengths to account for and remove the effects of this static they thought it was actually bird poop they were looking at and had to clean it out because pigeons nested in their telescope they didn't call it Bird poo in the paper that they published they called it a white dialectric material they had no idea what was causing it wasn't clearly coming from anything that we knew and it was actually called Little Green Men for quite a while because you know what else could it be they were able to talk to a physicist H Peter who had some understanding of what might be going on and they were able ultimately to conclude that the static that they were hearing was actually the cosmic microwave background The Relic radiation from The Big Bang over the decades space-based observatories have mapped this signal which exists everywhere in the sky with Eerie [Music] uniformity one of the very earliest measurements was made by a satellite Observatory called Kobe the cosmic background Explorer it made an incredibly famous measurement of the temperature of the microwave background it is one of the most precise most pristine measurements in all of astronomy maybe in in all of science The Remnant heat of the Big Bang was predicted to be a few degrees above the coldest possible temperature roughly - 270° c the Kobe mission conf confirmed that prediction our universe had a beginning and had been expanding ever since the cosmic microwave background it's actually pretty constant all over the universe it implies that it was all produced in the same place and this is what enabled the cosmic micro background experiments to confirm the Big Bang Theory following Kobe further missions exposed hidden structures of an infant universe where gravity could act to form Stars galaxies and the Earth itself however all that we've learned from the cosmic microwave background only takes us so far back the 380,000 year barrier any earlier and we have to rely on scientific theories and models we can use Einstein's relativity to work our way back in time quantum physics also comes in to describe how the particles would interact in this universe which becomes amazingly small and amazingly concentrated but at the earliest moments when all cosmic energy was contained in a nearly infantes smal Point Theory fails us a tiny fraction of a microsecond away from The Big Bang our equations actually break down we don't have a theory that works all the way into this extreme regime beyond our beginnings there are other places throughout the Universe where physics appears to be [Music] broken the most extreme objects in our universe are invisible a black hole is a region of SpaceTime time which is so dense and has such strong curvature that nothing including light can escape from it fundamentally it's what happens at the end of the lifetime of a very very massive star for the largest Stars life ultimately ends with a gravitational implosion a supernova the mass that's left behind won't have any fuel to sustain it it all crumples together into an infinitesimal point a black hole there is no surface only an edge past which you could never Retreat trapped for eternity the idea of a hole is very apt you would look up and the universe that you had just left would be an Ever narrowing well of light above you the notion emerged from Einstein's equations however black holes spent decades as mere mathematical Oddities not real world [Music] phenomena in 1971 astronomers identified an intense x-ray Source dub signal X1 it lined up almost perfectly with a known star but the star was incapable of generating those x-rays by 1973 a consensus had been reached the star was orbiting a black hole the very next year a source of intense radio waves was identified in the heart of the Milky Way the phenomenon Sagittarius AAR was best explained by the presence of a black hole it is not the black hole itself that emits the radio waves but matter in a dis surrounding it spiraling downward as it gets ever closer to the black hole its orbital speed increases and eventually becomes close to the speed of light in doing so it's constantly bumping jostling against its neighbors it is a tremendous amount of of warmth of heat of light while Sagittarius AAR itself could not be resolved by our telescopes astronomers could spy on its Stellar neighbors we've been able to measure its presence and we've been able to measure its mass not because we can see it directly but because we can measure its gravitational influence on the stars that orbit very close to it the black hole at the center of our galaxy has a mass roughly 4 million times that of our son there is a particular breed of black hole that we call the super massive black holes most galaxies if not all galaxies contain at their very centers a super massive black hole so some of the biggest Galaxies have black holes in them with 20 or 30 billion times the mass of the sun which is [Music] astonishing with still not entirely sure how super massive black holes form but we've been able to detect that they exist in pretty much every Galaxy while indirect data suggested black holes were a part of our reality capturing Visual Evidence seemed nearly impossible because radio wavelengths are the longest amongst all types of light they require much larger telescopes to capture to image a super massive black hole in another galaxy would require a radio telescope as big as our planet we'd love to build a telescope the size of the Earth but we can't do that nevertheless Humanity accepted the challenge an international collaboration of organizations and observatories combined their efforts to birth The Event Horizon telescope we use several telescopes cited around the world and we use them as a team to make a really good picture you have large radio telescopes that are situated in varying places on the planet you can combine those signals and you can simulate a radio dish which is the physical size of those separations beginning with three observatories in 2009 and expanding to 8 by 2017 The Event Horizon telescope set its sights on the center of messia 87 a Galaxy 55 million light years from Earth the data collected by each telescope was fed into a supercomputer each individual telescope it story is combined with the others in this computer to create one incredible clear revealing picture when the images were finally processed they did not expose the black hole itself but rather its shadow measuring 100 billion km in diameter nestled within a super massive black hole 6 and A2 billion times more massive than our sun we see at a region where time stops this is very different part of the universe that we're seeing for the very first time while scientists cannot explain the intricacies of black holes until we find a theory that unites physics they have developed new methods to study them waves of light are not the only ripples that Traverse the cosmos according to general relativity space itself can also Ripple gravitational waves are caused by mass accelerating through space Einstein first predicted gravitational waves in 1916 but the size of these waves was going to be so small that he never thought they would be detected only the most extreme events in the universe create measurable gravitational waves when it got to the point that black holes were no longer ridiculed the physicists started saying maybe we can really seriously think now about building a detector we would need a laboratory capable of isolating distortions of space smaller than an atom it has taken about 50 years for us to build an instrument that's capable of registering gravitational waves the shaking of space itself in 2002 the laser interferometer gravitational wave Observatory better known as ligo began its search for evidence to support Einstein's proposition we detect gravitational waves using instruments called interferometers they're shaped like an L we shine a laser from the center of the L down the two arms after traveling 4 km down on either arm the laser light strikes a mirror and Returns the principle is that if a gravitational wave is coming from out in space and passes into the detector then it will alternately stretch one arm and then the other arm and we'll see this in the interference pattern of the laser beams when they're recombined to ensure a signal is genuine ligo built two detectors on opposite sides of the United States both stations were silent for years but following an extensive refit a signal was detected when two black holes orbit around each other they lose energy by the emission of gravitational waves they enter a death spiral orbiting fast until they Collide ladies and gentlemen we have detected gravitational waves we did it Einstein's theory dictated the event and both ligo signals matched it we detected the merger of two black holes a collision 1.3 billion years sold once we had the first one it became obvious that we were going to get more and more of them as we increased the sensitivity of the detectors ligo witnessed another type of collision 2 years later the second really major detection for ligo was a binary Neutron Star Collision when they Collide they give off all kinds of signals unlike a black hole merger a Neutron Star Collision could be witnessed not just with a gravitational wave detector but optical telescopes as well we were fortunate to be able to localize the area in the sky for that signal to a very small patch we sent it out to the astronomers and this created an unprecedented Avalanche of telescope satellites around the world redirecting their programs of observing that had a flow on effect everybody could image it in radio X-ray and so on and this gave us an enormous amount of physics that we didn't previously have Humanity entered an era of multimessenger astronomy studying the same object using a combination of information sources and employing multiple phenomena to confirm enhance or contradict our previous Notions of the universe whether it's radio waves light you can see with your eyes x-rays it requires a light particle that travels through space if we are wrong about our view of light everything in our universe is essentially wrong so gravitational waves offer an independent way of measuring the universe that gives you a holistic picture of what is actually going on out there the more Messengers you can use the better informed you are about how the universe works Messengers that come from traditional ways of viewing the sky come from particles using all of the available information that is how astronomy is progressing and big collaborations are being formed between specialists in the different disciplines it's a bright future for astronomy more powerful gravitational wave detectors could reveal the earliest moments in the cosmos while the oldest light takes us no further than 380,000 years after the big bang the oldest gravitational waves would reveal our history up until a tiny fraction of a second after the universe's creation I look forward to that with great interest because it may turn out that we've got it all wrong and when we look at the gravitational waves perhaps they'll tell us a different story from what we're expecting in the 1920s Humanity realized that our Milky Way galaxy was just one of many millions and even billions of light years away other galaxies nested together in clusters slowly rotating around one another a decade later Swiss astronomer Fritz swii had a mystery on his hands he had been observing the coma cluster a group of over a thousand galaxies stretching 10 million light years across given their Collective mass and gravitational influence some of the galaxies were moving so fast that they should have broken free the Gravity from the galaxies that we see is not enough there must be more gravity to allow the cluster to hold together otherwise the galaxies would have actually whizzed off into space and we wouldn't have clusters anymore several decades later studies of individual galaxies posed the same problem just as all the bodies in our solar system orbit a central point all the Stellar systems gas and dust in a galaxy rotates around the galactic core in the 1960s ver Rubin and Kent Ford began charting these rotation rates measuring how far material within a Galaxy spun relative to its distance from the center spinning matter in our universe operates under a principle known as conservation of angular momentum the total amount of mass and the distribution of that mass dictates how quickly an object will rotate you can do this right now you can spin around in your desure and test it that as you move your arms out you slow down and as you move your arms in you speed up planets in our solar system are rotating exactly based on gravity based on the Sun's mass and the mass of the planets but instead of slowing down at the outer edge of a galaxy ruin noticed that these stars move just as fast as those much closer in Vera ribben showed that the stars in a galaxy are not rotating like the planets in our solar system they're rotating as if there's much more matter than we can see in the galaxy and so either e our laws of physics are wrong but they kind of work in every other case or there's another type of mass that we've never discovered zi called this invisible matter dun Materia we know it today as dark matter we call it dark matter because it doesn't emit light and it doesn't absorb light at all so the only way it interacts with other material is via gravity Dark Matter forms huge structures Across the Universe existing as gravitational scaffolding we see its effects in photographs looking at Galaxy clusters the dark matter will distort the images of any galaxies behind it this effect is known as gravitational lensing the gravitational lensing is a really awesome effect in the universe where if you have a massive object the light will get bent around just like a magnifying glass or like a refracting telescope that magnifies the light of the background Galaxy and distorts it after accounting for the lensing caused by regular matter astronomers can map the distribution and concentration of dark matter at current measurements it appears to be five times more abundant than all visible matter there is a lot of mass out there in the universe that we just cannot see with our eyes that doesn't emit light but interacts in every other way we it scientists continue to hunt for an explanation of Dark Matter Dark Matter could be made of particles that we haven't yet discovered and we're looking in places like the large hron collider smashing particles together with high energy to try and spew out these amazing particles that perhaps we haven't discovered one hypothetical type of Dark Matter could be detected by studying neutrinos the smallest and least interactive particles known to physics so neutrinos are the kind of the the the awkward cousin in the family if dark matter is another type of particle that we haven't seen as dark matter collides with itself it should give off neutrinos that can travel through space that we can see here on Earth that we can measure and collect in a lab neutrinos are in the same family of subatomic particles as electrons but they have no charge they're Cosmic ghosts interacting with matter so irregularly that trillions of them are streaming through your body this very moment there are some intriguing suggestions that come actually from deep underground experiments where you build particle physics detectors which are seeing things that can easily pass through the Earth we go to the bottom of mines or underneath mountains to use the rock above as a shield so that we can have a better chance of seeing this rare collision with our detector the internationally funded Ice Cube experiment at the South Pole is the largest neutrino detector in the world a cubic kilometer in size buried over 2 km below the Antarctic Ice turning 1 billion tons of naturally frozen water into its own personal neutrino capture across 2 years Ice Cube indirectly detected 28 neutrinos however none were attributed to dark matter experiments of that kind have given some weird hints that just maybe we might be getting close to finding whatever particle it is that makes up Dark Matter meanwhile NASA's firmy Space Telescope hunts for the signatures of dark matter from low earth orbit we think that a type of Dark Matter forms antimatter and matter and it can form and then collide together and annihilate itself such an Annihilation would create gamma radiation which fery is designed to detect so far hasn't detected them but it's getting very close now until scientists find solid evidence the lack of detections constrain the possibilities of what Dark Matter could be we're narrowing the search field another possibility is that dark matter could not exist it could be that we've just got the math wrong and that's perhaps even more intriguing and even more worrying however another search for the invisible leads to an even larger mystery it was astronomer Edwin Hubble who revealed to the world that our galaxy was just one of billions in 1924 less than a decade later he announced another Revelation the universe was not constant in size it was expanding over the decades astronomers settled upon the Big Bang Theory and that the expansion set forth that our Origins would slow under the power of gravity the expansion of the universe originated in the Big Bang but everybody thought that because the universe is full of matter galaxies would by their Mutual gravitational pull slow down the expansion eventually the universe would begin to collapse the race was on to calculate when people were trying to set out how fast the universe was slowing down when was the universe going to stop and collapse back on itself in the 1990s two International Teams began measuring the expansion utilizing some of the brightest phenomena in the known universe type 1A supern noi the teams compared the age of particular supern noi with how quickly they were moving away from Earth by 19 1997 the teams had collected a wealth of data stretching back to half the age of the cosmos the next year they went public with their conclusions with a result that defied the known laws of physics the universe is not slowing down in its expansion it is accelerating and it seemed for a while that this must be a fluke of the measurements something wrong with the observations imagine the the exact opposite answer that you're told to go and find that is a big test of your scientific process and two independent teams found the exact same thing we now know that the observations are absolutely secure you can look at the universe in many different ways and you see the same phenomenon in June 1998 the phenomenon was given a name dark energy at the turn of the Millennium a supernova hiding in hub Space Telescope data added to the complexities of the universe 10 billion light years from Earth it was the oldest found up to that point it revealed that billions of years ago the universe's expansion was as physics had originally predicted Dark Energy was weaker than it is today but before our sun and all its planets were born Dark Energy began winning a cosmic tug of war pushing galaxies apart with more strength than gravity was pulling them in the mystery of dark energy tantalizes cosmologists I think the most exciting breakthrough in cosmology is the discovery that the universe is accelerating so what's causing it particle physics says that there is an energy of the vacuum itself in fact if that had been the dark energy the universe would have ripped itself apart probably within the first second of its existence it's often been described as the worst prediction or mismatch in [Music] history the European space agency's plank telescope hunted for pieces of the Dark Energy puzzle Imaging the cosmic microwave background the oldest obtainable light this data in hand astronomers calculated the exact composition of the universe Dark Energy comprises roughly 68% of all there is dark matter makes up another 27 only 5% of the cosmos is matter we can touch or light we can see but it's even worse than that most of the atoms in the universe will never even fall into a Galaxy and reveal themselves bits that have made it into galaxies that's basically 1% of all of the universe but so far as we're aware we're the only bit of the universe that has looked at and wondered about what a small bit of this universe we are to understand dark energy is to know the ultimate fate of the universe our current understanding from dark energy is that we may be sailing off on an infinite journey of expansion and the universe would last forever according to Einstein's relativity that would be a runaway process where the expansion accelerates forever more and more and more every Star will at some point disappear be infinitely far away from every other star every particle will Decay eventually it looks like the universe will come to an end as a cold Dark Lonely place so far better to be alive now than maybe in 40 billion years time missions to probe the mysteries of dark dark energy are already in motion there's different ways of measuring Dark Energy we can see exploding Stars we can use clusters of galaxies we can use how light bends around some galaxies at the ver Ruben observatory in Chile astronomers are embarking on a decade long venture to map the sky deeper than ever before capturing 20 terab of data each night and cataloging 37 billion stars and galaxies and we use those results as independent cross checks of the other probes and we're trying to pinpoint that insection of what Dark Energy could be now which tells us what Dark Energy actually is reality's greatest mystery is a test of patience for something that didn't exist in 1997 to 20 years later having hundreds of people around the world trying to discover it just shows how big of a question it is to understanding the nature of our universe the beginning of our universe I and the future of our universe we have defined the boundaries of our ignorance and that's a very exciting place to be as a [Music] scientist Humanity's perception of reality is ever evolving our view of the universe is dramatically different 30 years ago 50 years ago and 70 and 100 years ago and it's amazing to think what our view of the universe will be in 10 years how much more we discovered that we didn't know the vast unknown reaches of the cosmos are begging to be explored 95% of the universe is made up of completely mysterious dark matter and dark energy we don't know what makes this up we don't know if our picture of the universe is simply wrong it's a NeverEnding series of Amazing Discoveries about what is possible it challenges our Notions of who we we are where we come from where we'll go to how precious our own planet is the study of the universe to me it impacts Humanity on practically every level and that's why I find it endlessly inspirational our Quest For answers is an essential part of what makes us human the universe created planets created life and created people who can ask all of these questions that's just marvelous we hope to one day understand our place we are just a vanishingly small fraction of the universe but so far as we're aware we're the only bit of the universe that has looked out and wondered about what a small bit of this universe we [Music] are [Music] I am approaching so please don't forget about your Eng as the Cold War was still burned two spacecraft from opposing ideologies came together the American Apollo crew emerged into the Soviet Sawyers and the two commanders exchanged the first International handshake in space while the mission was a technical achievement it also heralded a new age in space exploration tensions fueling the Space Race were subsiding a new age of collaboration was born the goal of outer space began as an arms race it really was about superiority between the USSR and the USA after placing the first satellite into orbit Humanity sent one of its own it was an extraordinary Act of Bravery that Yuri gagaran undertook humans could go into space and survive possibly even Thrive we developed new technology and built shuttles to the Stars human beings need to travel we need to Journey we need to explore that's why we gone out into space building stations in orbit we established a permanent presence in space it took a decade to actually create the full International Space Station once the first components have g into space you could put a crew on board you could start to do the [Music] science [Music] oh as the second world war came to a close the United States and Soviet Union rushed to salvage Germany's scientific minds and the technology they had developed the Space Race really began I guess you could say out of World War II and the development of the V2 Rockets the world's first longrange guided ballistic missile Germany's V2 could cross the threshold of space everybody knows there's this missile that can travel between continents and it's been very successfully deployed in the UK and in Europe and everyone knows there's a whole bunch of people with expertise US forces secretly evacuated thousands of German scientists and technicians out of Europe far from the grasp of their communist former Ally the campaign was codenamed Operation [Music] Paperclip a cold war between the two ideologically opposed Nations mounted each stockpiled weapons and the technical capability to deliver them from America's perspective the Soviets were too technologically backwards to develop a rocket capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to the United States in 1957 the Soviet Union announced the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear payload 8,000 km the R7 however its enormous size proved impractical for Warfare the Soviet leader allowed his scientists to modify the missile to carry a satellite [Music] within weeks of the r7's first successful test the Soviets ushered in the Space [Music] Age bearing the Russian word for traveler Sputnik climbed over 900 km to the heavens the world was in anticipation that an artificial satellite would be launched but everybody thought it would have the American flag on it a polished aluminium sphere measuring 58 cm in width spotnik's sole scientific instrument was a radio transmitter you're you are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the Earth circling satellite one of the great scientific Feats of the [Music] age Sputnik transmitted A continuing series of beeps which could be picked up by any person with the necessary equipment proof that the Soviet achievement was not fictional propaganda all over the world people are tuning into the bleep bleep of the satellite which carries aboard the highly complicated mechanism necessary to transmit secrets of the universe it's a very characteristic beep and I would love to know how much forethought went into that for some I'm sure it sounds inspiring for others it sounds kind of intimidating but to hear this artificial thing beeping and seeing it above I think put a real Panic into some people and there was almost sort of Hysteria but at the same time time there was a Fascination that Humanity in some way had put this small object into orbit around the Earth and thousands of people would go out each night to watch this tiny point of light travel across the sky it really triggered a huge interest in space that hadn't been appreciated in The Wider population the space race was essentially here it was not a a pipe dream it was reality the starting gun had been fired and America was already behind they quickly scrambled to place their first satellite into Earth's orbit in the universe we know there is this thing called gravity if you have something that's very massive there's going to be a gravitational force pulling you towards that in the late 1600s Isaac Newton conceptualized orbit using Stones thrown from a Mountaintop the faster a stone is projected the farther it will travel before gravity drags it to the ground but because the earth's surface is curved a stone projected with sufficient force would be pulled toward the Earth at the same rate the ground below is receding Trapped In Perpetual freefall the stone would be in orbit the United States Navy attempted to launch America's first satellite into orbit just two months after [Music] Sputnik disaster follows as this official film shows only too clearly following vanguard's failure America's goal of space was handed to the Army Veron Brawn the V2 engineer snatched up during operation paper clip would refine his Jupiter sea rocket to deliver the satellite we've been assigned the mission of launching a scientific Earth satellite and we will use the Jupiter C configuration as a carrier that we developed along with the jet propulsion laboratory I promised the secretary of the army that we would be ready in 90 days or less let's go Warner they had to get something up there fast to show that they were still a major superpower when it came to space exploration collaborating with the teams of William Pickering at the jet propulsion laboratory and James Van Allen the lead designer of Explorer 1's instruments Von Brawn was ready in just 84 days 2 1 by [Music] command Explorer one took a weapon of War essentially an intercontinental ballistic missile something to lob nukes at your enemy and this converted rocket launched a satellite for scientific discovery they wanted to go up there probably still use the propaganda but also to use it for science to really show the world that they were doing it for peaceful purposes among its scientific instruments Explorer 1 carried a Gea counter it confirmed the presence of a large band filled with high energy charged particles radiation that had been captured by Earth's magnetic field named for James Van Allen the radiation belts sit high above the atmosphere shielding Earth from the harmful solar winds there are experiments going on right now around the Sun to better understand how these radiation belts affect us because that directly influenced how the future were designed to send people past these belts onward to the moon on March 31st 1970 Explorer's Journey came to an end after 58,000 [Music] orbits the next goal for both the Americans and the Soviets was to deliver a human to the stars and return them safely no one knew knew what the vacuum of space the fact that there was no air and therefore no pressure was going to do no one understood the temperature ranges no one understood could have human survive would a human being's blood not just pull up as little balls in their veins or would they be unable to swallow we simply did not know forming in 1958 NASA initiated its human space flight program project Mercury the Mercury astronauts were selected from a very large number of flyers and ex fighter pilots from all of the active duty pilots in the Navy Marines and Air Force the service records of 473 test pilots were selected for review 110 met the basic qualifications you could not just select the average human to go up you needed someone who has a history of not only the physical effects but what happens when something goes wrong they wanted people that had the right stuff and out of the thousands of people applied who were tested went through medical tests and psychological tests eventually came down to seven men NASA revealed the Mercury 7 on April 9th 1959 following America's announcement the Soviet Academy of Sciences selected 20 cosmonauts among their Air Force [Music] pilots six received accelerated training and one was chosen to be the first man in space Yuri Gagarin Yuri is uh many things a brilliant mind a loyal Soviet you could not have asked for a more perfect representation of your nation because he is about to become the most famous man in history gagarin's VTO one was to take off from the same cosmodrome in Kazakhstan that launched Sputnik some Rockets accelerate extremely fast and if you Ed those for a human they wouldn't survive the launch they couldn't take the G loads so Rockets humans have to take off relatively slowly gradually pick up speed within 10 minutes Yuri Gagarin became the first human to cross the Carmen line the border between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space Yuri gagarin's flight BOS one was just incredible he had a very very risky Mission but the craft kept him safe and kept him alive and that was a real technological feat the VTO operated on autopilot allowing Gagarin to perform tests on the life support and radio I think the thing that inspires me most about gagarin's mission is when he finally got into Earth orb and he saw the Earth for the very first time and he spoke back to Mission Control saying I see the Earth it's so beautiful the v's single orbit lasted only 108 minutes however placing Gagarin in space was only half the challenge bringing him home would be just as perilous if if you're in your capsule returning to Earth you're going to be careening down through the Earth's atmosphere and at the speeds we're talking it's going to generate an enormous amount of heat the gas that's right at the nose of the re-entry module can be hotter than the sun the re-entry capsule failed to separate from the service module sending both into a life-threatening spin luckily the friction burned through the cables connecting the two 2 and 1 half km from the ground Gagarin [Music] ejected had he landed inside the VTO the force of the impact would have ended his life Yuri gagarin's safe return penned a new chapter for the world this Russian achievement of Landing an astronaut safely orbit in the earth is really one of the greatest events in the history of mankind the Russians have succeeded in Breaking the Barrier which binds men to Earth and the path is now open for them to explore the solar system it was an extraordinary Act of Bravery that Yuri gagaran undertook we knew that humans could go into space and not only live but survive and possibly even thrive a month behind gagarin's orbit NASA sent their first man to the Stars aboard Freedom 7 Alan Shephard was the first US astronaut to achieve insertion into space he was certainly in out of space but it wasn't really an orbital ride there was no intention for Freedom 7 to complete a full orbit oh right left off and the clock is joined reaching an altitude of 187 km Shepherd traveled 486 km from the launch site splashing down in the North Atlantic Ocean the entire flight was over in under 16 minutes as [Music] planned America wouldn't attempt their first Earth orbit until 1962 John Glenn's Mercury capsule bore the name friendship stations Gantry is in launch position start interrogation in 1 minute God speed John [Music] Glenn Roger ZJ and I feel fine capsule is turning around oh that view is tremendous John Glenn successfully traversed the globe three times this is mercury control the Friendship 7 spacecraft is now committed to its third orbit unlike gagarin's Journey which was shrouded in secrecy the flights of shepher and Glenn were broadcast around the globe never in all of history have so many people shared without censorship an adventure of such magnitude through all news media in all languages all the peoples of the world are witness to this exploration of [Applause] space across three years both the United States and Soviet Union completed six solo missions but America still lagged behind the Mercury astronauts spent less than 54 total hours in Space the vstar cosmonauts totaled 16 days the Soviets achieved the next first with the flight of VTO 6 in 1961 boso 6 was historic it saw the first female Cosmonaut Valentina terish terish kova spent nearly 3 days in orbit however the nature of space sickness wasn't fully understood at the time Ground Control was unsympathetic to her condition the stories that came back later was that she was groggy didn't respond quickly to commands and while she was very much celebrated as being the first woman in space she was also heavily criticized despite the complications terova paved an important Stone on Humanity's path to the stars with a dozen single occupant missions in the history books the Space Race competitors strove to increase the size of their Crews one person can only do so much and you're going to need support from other people whether that's for health reasons or different skill sets NASA approved the gem program 3 months before JN Glenn's orbital flight it would take years to develop a capsule for two it's not a linear problem it's not as easy as simply taking a small spacecraft and scaling it up the complexities of the aerodynamics becomes quite challenging in achieving the right design for stability and for protection against the thermal conditions to ensure they remained ahead of the US the Soviets re retrofitted their one seat Vos do capsule and placed an extra rocket on the exterior to create the Vos God the need to put more crew meant every single piece of weight had to be justified to the extent that the crews themselves were even going on diets the life-saving ejection seat was stripped and the vosot 1's crew would venture into space without protective suits no Second Chances no backup if the pressure of air for breathing was lost then that would have been [Music] it vosot 1 set a crude spacecraft altitude record of 336 km the crew returned safely but the mission initiated a trend toward unacceptable risks in the Soviet space program this is what the space race was about it wasn't about some high-minded desire to understand the solar system in the universe it was literally about getting something done before the Other Nation and if that meant cramming more people into a sardine can then that's what you [Music] did while the Americans prepared for their first Twan team in space aboard gmany 3 the Soviets sprinted ahead crewed by paval BV and Alexi leonov the second Vos God Mission hoped to achieve the first Space [Music] Walk [Music] voson 2 was equipped with an inflatable airlock facilitating Alexi leonov's transition into [Music] space once cosmin leonov exited the craft he beheld Humanity's first unincumbered view of the world you're in a capsule you have very limited amount of material between you and the absolute guaranteed death of space the thought of then leaving that and trusting to essentially fabric is appalling a 5 m tether was all that kept him from floating into the void Alexa Lov was from in the military so I'm sure he would have been very disciplined about what he was doing leonov later wrote that he felt like a seagull with its wings outstretched soaring high above the Earth he was the first person with an almost perfect view of our planet hanging there taking in this amazing view beneath him the Earth our home the fragile atmosphere that we have and him linked to a space craft by just a tether however leonov's historic spacewalk quickly turned into a disaster he noticed that his hands were slipping from their gloves and his boots no longer fit his suit was expanding in the pressureless vacuum of space leonov had only minutes to re-enter the VOD before he would be plunged Into Darkness as the craft entered the Earth's Shadow the Cosmonaut vented half his suits oxygen as the last ditch effort to reduce volume and regain Mobility it was a quick decision in the matter of literally minutes he didn't know if that was the right or wrong answer he just knew that was his only chance of [Music] survival the hatch was finally closed but the explosive bolts that separated ated the airlock sent the capsule into a spin the vosot would touch down 2,000 km beyond their emergency landing site when rescue teams finally discovered the crew they had spent two nights in a Siberian Forest enduring temperatures below -25° [Music] C so the Russians were willing to take more risk at front because they were going to get longer term reward that was the only way they were going to establish dominance over the us there would be no further vosot missions hinting at an end to Soviet space Supremacy Humanity's foothold in space however was not free of tragedy both the Americans and Soviets lost lives in January 19 19 67 three NASA astronauts perished when fire erupted inside the Apollo 1 capsule during a ground [Music] Test 2 months later cosmin Vladimir kov the commander of the VOD 1 Mission became the first of the Space Race To Die whilst in Flight returning to Earth the parachutes of his Sawyer one capsule failed to open Soviet lunar dreams were suspended for 18 months during which time Yuri Gagarin the first man in space died in a jet crash St off the L now the following year America reached the moon it's one small step for man one Le for having lost the Luna race the Soviets shifted their focus toward establishing a semi-permanent presence in orbit in June 1971 salot 1 the premier space station received its first crew via the Sawyers 11 there were seven salot space stations that they launched periodically from 1971 they really pioneered another first for the US this are they really pioneered how to live in space if you want to really learn the fundamentals in physical processes then you're going to have to do an experiment without the gravity and places like the numerous space stations that have been in orbit give you a convenient laboratory to do that in 1973 the United States launched its first space station Skylab Skylab was essentially the answer to the question what do you do with the Saturn 5 when you no longer can afford to go to the Moon you use its spare parts to build a space station but as soon as the uninhabited station was placed in orbit it required repairs after the launch of the Saturn 1B rocket the solar panel one of two actually ripped off and its sun shade which was to protect the spacecraft from the radiation of the sun while it was in orbit was also damaged the first team deployed to Skylab were tasked with restoring the station so the astronauts had to have an emergency repair Mission and that itself was a difficult maneuver the two astronauts outside in a ballet of trying to actually hold one astronauts by the legs while the other was using a long pole with some scissors on the end to cut that cable rotate the pole clockwise okay that's pretty good eventually of course just the Ingenuity the efforts of human beings being up there managed to get the station up and running the main operational section where Crews would work and live was C CED from a refitted Saturn rocket it had a galley a zero gravity shower and sleeping quarters we have three bedrooms that we can live in they're very small the beds are on the wall as opposed to on the floor but they're still ample in zero g every aspect of life had to be navigated in the novel environment of microgravity because there's that lack of gravity you get fluids that pull in the outer extremities of the human body in the face and the hands and the feet the heart muscle is decreasing in size it doesn't need to work against gravity to get blood from your feet to your head you get changes to the shape of the eye which can change your focus you also get the effects of decalcification in the bones your bones don't need to hold you up while you're in space astronauts exercise for several hours a day just to keep their bodies fit and their physiology ticking over so human beings aren't designed for microgravity that's for sure Skylab remained in orbit for less than a year while the three teams completed 270 different experiments the key experiment that was being undertaken was actually on the astronauts themselves can humans remain healthy can they remain sane in Space the third and final crew of the station was so exhausted they shut off Communications with mission control for a full orbit the commonly accepted story is that the three Skylab astronauts had just felt they were overworked so they turned off the conss and they said we're out for the day we're not doing anything we're not talking to you the 93 minutes of radio silence sparked negotiations the three astronauts received a more lenient schedule and ended up completing all their tasks on their own time NASA learned a valuable lesson their Crews had [Music] limits in January 1967 the United States and Soviet Union joined with the United Kingdom to sign an international agreement regarding future space Ventures the ID space Treaty of 1967 was designed to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons into orbit and Beyond it was to try to limit the claim staking of governments in other words the exploration and utilization of the celestial bodies the moon and Beyond should be for the peaceful purposes of mankind for the benefit of all for exploration while the governments of the USSR and US remained engaged in a stalemate backed by mutually assured destruction an attempt to deescalate tensions produced the first United American Soviet space mission the Apollo soyers test project would see the two separate spacecraft unite in orbit the Apollos and so scientists are sharing information so you have to unclassifed all of your deepest darkest secrets with the other people in order to make this work that's the beauty of it is that they were willing to think beyond the borders of their countries and their philosophical differences to think of a bigger picture a bigger purpose which is ultimately the benefit of space exploration in the midst of Terri terrible terrible times Well I recognize that almost any subject there are differences of opinion my feeling is that people who understand this Mission understand that it is a very fine thing to do for both countries and and for the entire world I think this is a first movement in a direction of joint operations in space in the future both countries launched 7 hours apart 3 2 engine sequence start 1 zero launch commit we have a liftoff all engines building up [Music] drust both control centers Moscow and Houston have given a go for docking part of the Apollo so mission was essentially to get the command and Luna modules from the Apollo missions and to add a sort of docking PL platform so that then the soy's capsule could dock with those existing platforms I got two messages for you mow is go for docking Houston is go for docking it's up to you guys have fun how do we dock these two together and what does that look like what's the interface who wants to be the plug and who wants to be the socket is there going to be an argument there I think so there was and so they had to completely redesign their approach just to how you attach two things together they ended up calling it The androgen peripheral attached system and it's still used to this day actually to dock two things together less than 5 m [Applause] distance 3 [Music] m [Music] contact capture tell Professor Bush it was a soft ducking when the hatch opened Apollo 10's Thomas Stafford and Alexi leonov joined hands in the first International handshake in space to you the moment when the two commanders actually greeted each other seemed to be heralding a new era it really signaled the end of the Space Race and a new era of international collaboration between nations that have previously kept their programs very secretive over 44 hours the two teams exchanged gifts dined together and conducted joint [Music] experiments after undocking Apollo eclipsed our sun so the crew of Sawyers could study its Corona the fact that these two former Arch rivals in the world of space could come together it seemed like like a pivotal moment in perhaps human cooperation as well as activities in [Music] space following the success of their salute stations Soviet plans for space habitation grew more ambitious they never will be launch capabilities sufficiently large and Powerful to lift an entire Space Station into orbit and so the only way you can get something of significant size up into orbit is to put a bit up there and then slowly add to it after the first section of miria was launched in 1986 six pressurized modules were added over the decade one of the things that interests me about Mia is that Cosmonaut Bard the space CFT actually straddled the end of the Soviet Union the end of that era Sergey klev was on his second tour aboard me when the Soviet Union fell he was a stateless person in orbit around the Earth not quite knowing where he belonged serving as the flight engineer klev agreed to stay and perform the same duties for the next crew flying to Mia as a Soviet citizen and returning to Earth as a Russian citizen falling around the earth at an average height of 360 km the name Mir translates to peace it was really filled with International projects and many other nations were invited to take part Mia was visited by astronauts from a variety of Nations across North America Europe and the Middle East as well as a television reporter from Japan and it's wonderful to see a project that was truly International in spirit going up into space and and creating that environment that later led to the wonderful International cooporation that we see [Music] today however towards the end of its life Mia was plagued with hygiene issues I think Mia was is a little bit like a cruise liner you know can be a little bit susceptible to people's infections Mia was surrounded by a cloud of little yellow Frozen urine drops Waste Management always a big issue when you're in space urine particles even damaged the station's solar panels by the end of the program in fact it had to be abandoned unfortunately but it was a pretty successful experiment all up there was a lot of scientific achievements by the late 1990s malfunctions and Hazards were mounting mold growth computer crashes even a fire the station was abandoned in 2001 left to burn up as its orbit naturally decayed the same year humans set foot upon the moon NASA hatched plans to reinvent space Transportation the shuttle encapsulated the science fiction that I'd read as a kid a vehicle that would go into space and would land like an aircraft it's called a reusable space shuttle an airplane likee spacecraft that can be hurled aoft by a rocket up to 100 times it is actually an aviation system it generates some lift with its wings and with the underside of its fuselage and it just made the concept of going to space so much more accessible the challenge there is literally in the reusability what's going to go wrong over time in doing this immensely difficult thing technically speaking again and again and to be confident that the next time you did do it everything would still be fine space shuttle Colombia was ready for the program's Maiden orbital flight on the 20th anniversary of gagarin's Journey to space all subsequent launches would follow the same routine two solid fuel rocket boosters flanked the shuttle for the first 2 minutes of [Music] launch they would later detach to be collected for subsequent flights a disposable external tank filled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen powered the shuttle to space it would burn up during [Music] re-entry in order to withstand multiple Journeys through the Earth's atmosphere NASA engineered a resilient thermal Shield the Shell's aluminium shell was encased in over 24,000 protective silica fiber tiles the black tiles on the belly nose and wings where the heat would be greatest could handle temperatures up to 1260° C NASA's Fleet of five shuttles performed 135 orbital missions over three decades in addition to hosting their own experiments the shuttles launched satellites and space telescopes as well as delivering astronauts to space stations during space shuttle Challengers mission in February 1984 astronaut Bruce mandas became the first human to float freely in orbit he performed an untethered Space Walk using a specialized maneuvering unit the first untethered Space Walk must have been a terrifying moment you are your own spacecraft you are more free than almost anyone could [Music] imagine may have been one small step for deal but it's a heck of a big leap for [Music] me while the shuttle program basked in numerous triumphs it remains mired in tragedy 2 years after mccandless's Space Walk disaster befell Challenger 73 seconds into launch liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower a rubber o-ring in one of the solid rocket boosters failed and that allowed hot gases to cut through a strut which was holding on the big external orange fuel tank Challenger go with throttle up the entire space shuttle and tank ended up [Music] self-destructing FL controllers here looking very carefully at the situation the shuttle program endured a second disaster 17 years later in 2003 during Colombia's launch a piece of foam insulation broke off from an external fuel tank and struck the orbitor left wing the heat shield was was compromised it didn't prevent the space shuttle from safely reaching orbit but it was a very very big problem for re-entering yeah you definitely don't want to be outside now as Colombia descended into the thicker atmosphere Hot Gas penetrated the craft causing the wing to tear from the shuttle Colombia disintegrated killing the seven crew space is hard we say in this industry and the astronauts paid the ultimate sacrifice the reverse of that of course is the fact that there so many missions came after we learned from those mistakes we continued to explore that mission went on and so I think that that's the best example of what we do as human beings while NASA persevered through both tragedies the shuttle program never fulfilled its initial promise it was it was a marvelous instrument it was a fantastic vehicle it just cost too much to keep reusing when first proposed the cost of a single launch was estimated to be as low as $22 million Us in the end the average cost was 450 million for all that the space shuttle could hold its own against any number of the other marvels of the space era space shuttle Atlantis completed the program's final flight in 2011 having fired the imagination of a generation a ship like no other its place in history secured the space shuttle pulls into port for the last time its Voyage at an end as the 20th century came to a close construction was underway to facilitate a new age of space cooperation 2344 871 629 astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor delivered and connected a station module called Unity to the Russian module Zaria this an Endeavor we have capture of zarya the International Space Station was born but it was far from complete it took a decade to actually create the full International Space Station but once the first two or three components have got into space the first solar panels the first modules the first Power Systems you could put a crew on board you could start to do the science an International Community would be invited in this would demonstrate that collaboration and cooperation was the way space was going to go in the future since November of 2000 Humanity has maintained a presence in low earth orbit bit aboard the world's greatest laboratory it really opened up space to the world in a way that had never been accomplished before it just made our Ambitions greater following the space shuttle's decommission the Russian Sawyers provided the primary access to the ISS the fact that soy has been the worker course of fing both astronauts and cosmonauts up to the International Space Station since the end of the space shuttle program in 200 11 speaks volumes for the effectiveness and how welld designed it was how well it fits the requirements for a space taxi and the hatches between the soyo spacecraft and the International Space Station opening could you imagine telling the very first people in NASA in 1950s in 50 years you're going to need need the Russians to get into space I I think that would be a mindboggling statement to tell someone at that time on May 30th 2020 astronauts once again launched from American Shores this time aboard a capsule and Rocket designed by a private company SpaceX and dragon Go Nas go space now we're moving into this new era the commercialization of space the space entrepreneurs and so all of these companies and industries are looking at new ways be able to use the facilities of the space station that commercialization of course will help to fund its future the International Space Station has become part of this modern-day movement or progression really to democratize space and what that means is it just gives a More Level Playing Field style of access to space for just about anyone the International Space Station is the only place where we can learn what will be required when Humanity chooses to venture beyond Earth's orbit if as a race we are to explore the universe we need to have the experience we need to have an understanding of how to handle those extreme environments so we're now using the International Space Station as that test ground to see what the effects long-term will be of humans in space not only the lack of gravity additional radiation how do you grow food along the way how do you survive in a closed environment that has to work perfectly for those future [Music] Journeys the story of the International Space Station will soon come to a close but it's place in the history books will endure as a testament to what a United Humanity can achieve from seeds of rivalry we have opened a gateway to the cosmos in space exploration we find our greatest challenges and we rise to that challenge as we ventured into the unknown humankind has grasped the impossible one of the huge benefits of scientific Endeavor is its capacity to bring people together in order to achieve something that has longlasting impact for the betterment of our society establishing a foothold in orbit we craft a better world it's a keystone for Humanity to come together and do something for the benefit of us as a [Music] whole 5 years after opening its eye to the cosmos the hubbles Space Telescope set its sights Upon A seemingly empty patch of Sky near the constellation Ursa [Music] Major staring into the void for 10 days the telescope captured 342 images in ultraviolet visible and infrared light the compilation revealed a sea of galaxies stretching across time back to their very Origins Humanity glimpsed the true scale of the cosmos the invention of the telescope revealed our universe and repositioned the Earth within it that Cosmic perspective shifted dramatically the universe suddenly became this vast Place populated by galaxies like our own Milky Way in the 20th century our telescopes escaped the limitations of Earth's atmosphere once we had sent the first satellites into Earth orbit we had the possibility of sending observatories out into space the electromagnetic spectrum unlocked a realm of invisible light every time we do a new survey at a new wavelength we always find major discoveries we're looking right through the dust and we can see see how the stars are being assembled how they are growing with Next Generation Optics we hope to Define our place within the cosmos every Discovery we have made has changed the way we see ourselves we should be Pride that we can have Cosmic [Music] humility [Music] for thousands of years Humanity looked to the night sky in Wonder but with only the human eye to observe it our perception of the heavens was flawed when the ancient people looked into the night sky they saw that the stars were arranged in a fixed pattern and it just rotated around the Observer Aristotle emerged as perhaps the most prominent voice of Greek philosophy and he coined that phrase of the immutable Heavens where nothing would ever ever change many of the Ancients picked Ed a geocentric Universe our Earth at the center and the celestial bodies in orbit but not all early thinkers in ancient Greece arist starus had suggested that perhaps the Earth might not be at the center of the universe and that maybe the sun might be at the center in the 2 Century CE helenistic astronomers devised a model to explain the complex movements of the planets the eye could observe occasionally but regularly each wanderous path would briefly appear to move backwards with Earth fixed as the center of reality these retrograde motions were explained by adding epicycles to the planet's orbits all of astronomy was fixated on the concept that the circle is a perfect geometric figure and in order to keep circles as the fundamental way that things moved in the universe they had to put little circles orbiting around bigger circles several astronomers would question the Paradigm over the centuries then in the 1500s a Polish Cannon founded the heliocentric Revolution Nicholas Copernicus realized that the Motions of the planets that we could see in the sky would be much more elegantly explained if they were all moving around the Sun instead of around the Earth cernus was able to simplify to's picture and remove many of the epicycles it turns out in the end his circular orbits weren't exactly the solution at the turn of the 17th century German astronomer Johannes Kepler did away with circular orbits and EP Cycles allowing each planet to orbit in an imperfect ellipse around the Sun you now had a very simple direct and clean model for how the solar system worked that mapped with [Music] reality just a few years later Humanity acquired clear scientific evidence that Earth was not the center of the universe thanks to pieces of precisely shaped glass astronomy is only as good as the instruments you have the invention of the telescope in 16008 revealed the heavens before the first telescopes were developed human beings could only see about 3,000 Stars when people first started looking at the sky through telescopes it was the first time a human sense had been extended it's a really simple invention really suddenly you could collect more light and still direct it into a human eye it uses a couple of lenses you put them together and you can magnify the objects that you're looking at you could suddenly stop building astronomy around just points of light in the sky which is what it had been all about before that Galileo galile was the first person on record to point his telescope Skyward he was able to make out the crated surface of the Moon and illustrate its phases in detail Galileo then trained his sights on Venus and discovered that it too went through phases he showed that the Milky Way was basically made up of stars rather than some sort of coagulated milk he showed that there were mountains on the moon and CES on the moon but perhaps his greatest discovery came as he observed the planet Jupiter he was looking through his telescope and he saw what he thought were four stars around Jupiter he kept watching the Stars over the course of a few days and he saw those Stars rotating and so he published this discovery as the Moon of Jupiter it changed the concept in the minds of astronomers that the Earth needed to be at the center of the universe telescopic sight had revealed a distant world with its own satellites however the telescope's ability to open up our universe had only just [Music] begun a clear night reveals that the stars are not randomly sprinkled across our Sky most collect in a long dense Trail sweeping through the heavens this Milky path that stretches across the sky which the Romans have called via laa the path of milk and we call it today the Milky Way it's an amazing sight but you can't distinguish all of the individual Stars the Milky Way is really a collection of many billion stars which are individually too small to be seen while Galileo's telescope revealed the individual Stars the Milky Way's significance would not become clear until the late 18th century the brother and sister team of William and Caroline hersel constructed some of the largest telescopes in the world there are different types of telescopes uh either you can use lenses which are made of glass and you pass the light through the glass these are called refractive telescopes there was a natural limit to how large you could make these telescopes based on lenses when you make a lens larger and larger it becomes pretty heavy that piece of glass bends under its own weight and it loses the perfect shape to which it has been manufactured in 1789 the Hershel completed the world's biggest telescope 12 m in length the great 40t telescope captured light not with glass but with polished metal mirrors you could make much larger without structural problems because you could put a piece of Steel underneath that would hold them in place and that was structurally much stiffer than a lens would ever be also they don't suffer from some of the problems or what we call in the business aberration that the glass lenses do in the 1780s hersel and his sister embarked on a project to map the Milky [Music] Way conceptually it's quite difficult these days to to think about just what an Endeavor this was these were two people looking out with a a very large telescope that they'd built themselves mapping a forest from being within the forest you don't really know what it looks like from outside they measured the distances to what they called nebul at the time and what they found was that these nebula were actually usually clusters of stars and hersel assumed that every Star would have the same sort of true brightness the same amount of light it emits so he figured if I just look into all directions in the sky and I count how many stars I see there I could work out the structure of the Milky Way that overall distribution of stars it wasn't a correct assumption but it wasn't a bad one either because scientists in the face of a lack of knowledge a lack of understanding have to start somewhere knowing the exact point at which their telescope was pointed and calculating a star's distance based on how dim it appeared the herel slowly mapped the structure of the Milky Way they discovered that the Milky Way is like a flattened dis shape and the stars were not distributed uniformly across the whole of the sky in spite of their hard work the Hershel incorrectly concluded that our solar system was near the center of the Milky Way their sample of stars was too limited the Milky Way consists of much more than just stars there are heaps of dust clouds and they are so dense that they obscure the light from the stars the Hershel were limited by the most nearby dust clouds surrounding us and that's how far they could see it would take over a century to reposition our [Music] home as the 20th century dawned the next record setting telescope was completed 22 tons of moving Parts supported by a pool of liquid mercury to turn a gigantic mirror toward its targets [Music] the power of the 60in telescope in Southern California allowed astronomer Haro shapley to embark on his study of globular clusters bound collections of stars that evolved from the same gas cloud you might think about it like a a gigantic ball containing tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of stars crucially they are not in the plain of the Milky Way But A sphere all around the center you can see these clusters above the plane of the Milky Way below the plane of the Milky Way where there is no dust in the way that blocks your few shapley employed a certain breed of star Within These clusters to determine their distance from Earth it's really hard to measure distance in space because we can't just get a ruler and place it between the the stars but it's a really important part of what we do one of the best ways to discover how far away things are is to look at a type of star called a seid variable like Cosmic Clockwork seids vary their brightness over time and it's a stable pulsation where each pulsation might last for a week or up to a month shapley knew that he could time those pulsations and derive the distance so you can take the safid Bal star put it far away and the light gets dimmer but we know what the brightness is because we know how it's pulsating the dimness tells us the distance calculating the distance of seed variables sharly revealed that just as our Earth is not the center of our solar system our solar system is not at the center of the Milky Way We Now know in fact that the Earth and solar system uh closer to the edge of our galaxy than to the center about 25,000 light years from the center of the [Music] Galaxy in 1917 the 60-in telescope at Mount Wilson was surpassed by a new device at the same [Music] site weighing over 4 tons the 100in hooker telescope's mirror was forged from wine bottle glass coated in reflective silver American astronomer Edwin Hubble was offered a staff position at the observatory and soon set to work studying spiral nebula there was a big debate about the nature of the nebuli one part he said they are just glowing gas clouds and the other side said hm we think that some of them might behold Milky Ways or whole island universes to settle the debate Hubble measured their distances from Earth he thought they were outside the Galaxy but other astronomers thought they were within the Galaxy in October 1923 while comparing separate photographs of the Andromeda nebula Hubble identified a sepid variable star his calculations showed that it was 900,000 light years away far beyond where shapley placed the edge of the Milky Way it meant that Andromeda couldn't possibly be part of our own noi Way galaxy it had to be a separate Galaxy a separate Island Universe this was the moment when the Andromeda nebula became the Andromeda Galaxy we were no longer the center of everything the universe suddenly became this vast Place populated by galaxies like our own Milky Way Hubble's follow-up discoveries swiftly convinced the great majority of astronomers that the Universe contained a myriad of galaxies perhaps as many as 100 billion the universe was Far bigger than we could possibly have imagined every Discovery we have made has changed the way we see ourselves as relation to this universe we become a smaller part of it we become a less privileged part of it we're on a tiny Rock that's orbiting a very average star and that star is one of 200 billion or so orbiting a pretty ordinary spiral galaxy and that's in a group of about 50 galaxies within a super cluster of probably millions in a universe that is unimaginably big and possibly completely infinite but to truly explore the universe we had to see the invisible before the 19th century Humanity's view of the world was restricted to the visible spectrum then in 1800 William Hershel the same man who attempted to position our son within the cosmos exposed sunlight's secret Hershel knew that Newton had split the light of the sun into the rainbow of colors he then wondered what would happen beyond that rainbow of colors he was interested in what temperatures the different colors of the rainbow might have but then out of Interest he moved one of his thermometers beyond the red edge of the spectrum and discovered that the temperature there was higher even than the hot red end of the spectrum and that told him that there was some form of radiation which may have been similar to the radiation of light but it carried with it heat and that was actually the discovery of infrared radiation he went on to be able to show that these infrared rays were the same kinds of rays as the visible light they were reflected and refracted these rays of energy Traverse and disperse across the vacuum of space but they are merely two sections of a continuous Spectrum from radio waves at the lowest energy to gamma ray at the greatest and that really set the stage for a detailed understanding of the broader electromagnetic spectrum astronomers were slow to adopt technology cap capable of detecting these rays but following technological developments spurred on by the second world war the field of infrared astronomy blossomed infrared light uh we can't see it with our eyes but our detectors or cameras at the telescopes can actually capture that light infid astronomy was a massive breakthrough because it allowed us to see through dust the star forming regions where young stars are just forming engulfed in dust when we use infrared light we're looking right through the dust which is transparent to infrared and we can see how the stars are being assembled how they are growing we've never been able to watch true infant Stars before the Advent of infrared Imaging the entire electromagnetic spectrum eventually became except accessible with each band revealing different secrets of the universe our eyes are evolved to detect visible light but that's really only a fraction of the whole electromagnetic spectrum when we're looking at the UV we're actually looking at the stars and the hot gas when we're looking at the radio we're looking at the cold gas in the universe each band of electromagnetic radiation is uniquely challenging to study even visible light as our ground telescopes are hindered by the very air Humanity needs to [Music] survive on Earth We're very very fortunate to have an atmosphere for astronomers that's not so good as light comes from a star it's traveling in a straight line but then it gets perturbed through our atmosphere this is why stars twinkle if you take an image of that it just comes out blurred in order to limit the volume of atmosphere that we need to peer through the largest optical telescopes in the world tend to be built on the tallest mountains today astronomers and Engineers combat atmospheric Distortion with technology known as Adaptive Optics Adaptive Optics is a technique that was proposed back in 1953 at that time the technology wasn't there to actually implement this idea but in the late 70s early ' 80s people started thinking about how they could do that to counteract Distortion astronomers shoot powerful lasers into the sky we use a technique called laser guy Stars what you do is you propagate a laser beam into the night sky and you create a artificial star with it the laser hits sodium atoms on the edge of the atmosphere causing them to Glow the light travels down through the turbulent air and a telescope receives its point of reference computers analyze the distorted artificial star and create an inverse pattern that pattern is sent to a deformable mirror which uses magnets to bend it into shape and we push and pull on the surface with a little actuators in the back it's like a bed of nails and they're like fingers which can move and distort it in a way which compensates for the errors introduced by the atmosphere because particles in the atmosphere are constantly shifting these adaptive mirrors have to adjust in real time up to 1,000 movements per second the Distortion is canceled out out revealing how the heavens appear before entering Earth's air and sometimes you can't even tell the difference between images that have been captured on Earth with Adaptive Optics and those that have been captured in space above the atmosphere entirely in 1995 the technology enabled the discovery of the very first brown dwarf the missing link between the largest planets and the smallest stars by resolving individual stars and tracking their motions at the heart of the Milky Way Adaptive Optics was also employed to identify the presence of a super massive black hole but to truly unlock the heavens we would have to journey to them our atmosphere not only distorts images it also prevents some light from ever reaching our eyes we do some amazing observations of the Universe from the ground where we can but really the Earth's atmosphere blocks critical wavelengths very high energy gamma rays infrared ultraviolet the whole range the view from Earth's surface is insufficient if we truly hope to understand the universe it's kind of like if a doctor was trying to diagnose you and he only looked at one part of your body instead of your whole Health the solution would be difficult but necessary we needed to deliver a telescope to space the more than 2 ton oao spacecraft is this country's heaviest unmanned satellite it will carry nine telescopes once we had sent the first satellites into Earth orbit we had the possibility of escaping that atmosphere and sending observatories and instruments out into space to gather data without having to go through the Earth's atmosphere on December 7th 1968 just 3 weeks before the first crude flight around the Moon an atlas centur rocket carried the first successful space telescope into [Music] orbit orbiting astronomical Observatory number two earn the Monica Stargazer it was put up by NASA and it was a UV telescope what Stargazer did was it looked at many many many stars and it actually told us the stars are hotter than the models had been saying they were astronomers have long believed that new stars are formed by the condensation of interstellar gas and dust with the oao we may be able to better understand process of star [Music] formation The Observatory also confirmed that comets are surrounded by vast clouds of hydrogen but most importantly Stargazer proved the viability of an observatory in orbit with each subsequent decade new telescopes were carried to the heavens opening up the electromagnet gentic Spectrum everything on Earth emits infrared radiation our bodies do the Earth does the atmosphere does because it's all being heated by the sun's rays and so we often have to get our infrared telescopes out into space the infrared astronomical satellite a joint project between the US UK and the Netherlands launched in 1983 there is a new window into as astronomical observations and opportunity to learn new things about the [Music] Stars every time we do a new survey at a new wavelength we always find major discoveries and those discoveries are almost never what we intended to find in the first place IRAs mapped 96% of the sky over its 10-month Mission it pierced the D of stars that had just erupted and revealed the melanic clouds satellite galaxies of the Milky Way located about 190,000 light years away but Humanity's longest serving infrared Space Telescope is NASA's [Music] Spitzer launched in August 2003 Spitzer entered Service as the year came to a [Music] close Spitzer was the first telescope placed in an earth trailing orbit circling the Sun at the same distance as Earth slowly drifting away from the planet over time this allows it to stay much colder because it doesn't have to deal with the glow emanating from Earth itself and by keeping the instrument colder you really reduce the background noise and you can see much fainter signals peering through dust Spitzer revealed Saturn's outermost ring Phoebe which starts about 6 million kilm beyond the planet hidden Cradles of newborn stars and some of the most distant black holes in the universe even when its liquid helium coolant ran out in 2009 its Mission continued the Spitzer team turned around and said no we can still operate at some other the wavelengths it's okay we don't need the coolant for that and some of the most amazing stuff that Spitzer has done in those latter years were never predicted in the beginning of its Mission it was so productive right up until the very end Spitzer was officially decommissioned in January 2020 16 years after it first opened its infrared eye however the Juggernaut of space public relations Outreach and Monument to Humanity's exploration continues to operate the Hubble Space Telescope Hubble really capitalized on some of the earlier developments with the Space Telescope we'll be able to look to much greater distances and therefore much further back into time much closer to the creation of the universe itself on April 24th 1990 the Space Shuttle Discovery carried Hubble to its home in Earth orbit and lift off of the Space Shuttle Discovery with a Hubble Space Telescope our window on the universe one month later Hubble was ready to begin its [Music] Mission and can you verify can you take the St to the 180 but when the first images were downloaded something was [Music] wrong everyone was really surprised and shocked the image quality wasn't what they were expecting they were fuzzed out and blurred in a way that really had not been anticipated somewhere during the telescope's construction an error had been introduced when you build a telescope whether it's with mirrors or lenses you first have to take close attention to the shape the surface has to be polished exquisitely well Hubble's mirror had been polished a little too flat the curvature was off by 150th the width of a human hair in 1993 after extensive testing and simulations of the repair the shutle Endeavor was sent to modify the telescope as astronauts performed five space walks over 10 days just not even pulling it I'm just toting it with my fingertips are you ready for me to let go yes okay I'm going to un it was too difficult to replace the mirror but because they knew how exactly wrong it was they were able to counteract that the analogy I like is put a pair of eyeglasses on all the instruments to compensate for the error on January 13th 1994 NASA announced that the new Optics were working get it once the a Space Telescope was fixed and it started to deliver amazing science the images that hle started returning were just striking we were able to see detail in these distant galaxies that had never before been possible layers of atmosphere that stars had expelled maybe 10,000 years ago and that now formed very intricate shapes Hubble also showed us visions of objects in our own solar system that had only been possible previously with space probes like the voyagers we were able to see For the First Time The Changing effect of seasons on Mars the way that the polar ice caps grew and shrank just seeing these scenes made the universe to me more earthlike it became like landscape photography over its lifetime Hubble produced some of our most spectacular and iconic images of the cosmos from The Pillars of Creation to the sharpest ever view of the Andromeda galaxy and perhaps the most important photograph in astronomical history on December 18th 1995 the Space Telescope began a 10-day Mission known as the Hubble Deep Field staring at an apparent void near Ursa Major it was taking the most powerful telescope of the time and allowing it to stare at what was otherwise an apparently empty patch of sky for as long as we possibly could whereas most astronomical surveys were concerned with capturing the full breadth of the sky Hubble focused on a single location that would not be obstructed as the telescope circled the Earth the Hubble Deep Field is about the size of a coin so if you hold up a coin to the sky that's about the size of the Hubble Deep Field and what was there was astounding the resulting image revealed almost three 3,000 galaxies sharp images of galaxies you could only dream to have seen on a photograph and it revealed just a plethora of different sizes shapes colors ages we do see other Spar galaxies like our Milky Way but we also see these giant red elliptical galaxies we also see galaxies that are in the middle of colliding it's not just a pretty picture it reveals things that astronomers just didn't know about the nature of the universe each galaxy in the Hubble Deep Field resides at a different point in time when we observe galaxies at further and further distances from us what we're seeing is light that left those galaxies millions or indeed billions of years ago the most distant are shown as they were over 12 billion years in the past Hubble provided us a time capsule in a single compiled image we turned Hubble from a potential failure to what is today the most incredible instrument that Humanity has known to this time the hubo Space Telescope had a few instruments initially that did a really good job but then as the technology evolved we were able to retrofit the telescope with even better instruments Hubble embarked on further Deep Field missions peering even farther into the cosmos with updated cameras providing surveys in both ultraviolet and infrared light with an almost infinite sea of galaxies scientists hope that somewhere lies a world like our [Music] own in the 16th century an Italian frier named giodo Bruno expanded the capern notion of the cosmos jordano thought that stars were really far away solar systems of their own stars like the sun that would be orbited by their own planets on which there might possibly be life Bruno was deemed a heretic and burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition but the notion of exoplanets and life upon them did not die with him one of the most important question to answer of course is whether we are alone in the universe and that's why astronomers are actively looking for exoplanets in 1992 astronomers used the arbo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to observe a pulsar over 2,000 light years from Earth a pulsar is a really weird type of a star it's really the remnants of an old star that's gone Supernova and its core has collapsed down into a very very small very Dense Star and it's spinning around very very rapidly sometimes more than a thousand times a second and beaming out kind of a lighthouse of radiation but their particular Cosmic Lighthouse had some mysterious irregularities some object was close enough to regularly exert a gravitational effect on its timing it turned out it wasn't just one planet but as many as three planets that were orbiting the pulsar and their orbital periods were able to be inferred from those timing measurements the first worlds beyond our solar system had been found in 1995 a pair of Swiss astronomers were watching not the core of a death star but a star very similar to our own 51 pegasi located just over 50 light years from Earth its light was periodically getting redder then Bluer it was also wobbling in Space the movement caused by a smaller body in orbit while we might not be able to detect the presence of the planet directly we can detect their gravitational influence on their parent star the planet was about half the mass of Jupiter but orbited so close to its star that its year lasted less than five Earth days many of the solar systems we find have got these hot Jupiters large planets which orbit very close to their parent Stars they the easiest ones to find they have the biggest effect on their parents St until they tend to be the ones you find first as the New Millennium dawned a Fresh Field in astronomy flourished there have been some amazing discoveries of extrasolar planets including huge solar systems and a lot of the planets that we're finding are very big and very close to the Stars so these are are enormous sort of Jupiter plus planets but within the orbit of mercury they come in all different shapes and sizes the planets don't bear any resemblance to the distribution of our own solar system necessarily we're finding exoplanets around binary star systems and we're also finding different sizes of planets around Stars we've even discovered orphan planets planets that do not have a star to orbit where did these come from are they things that have been shot out of a solar system by gravity or are they things that formed in space some we've even seen directly through infrared telescopes picking up their heat sources as they dance around their star but despite all these observations the Earth remains special it's easy to say we're unique you know we're the Blue Planet we've got all this water we have the most complex life that we're aware of so far but we don't really know our sample of the other planets is actually pretty tiny the universe is a largely inhospitable place the holy grail for many Planet Hunters is the discovery of another world with the potential to support Life as We Know It astronomers are really excited about the idea of finding other Earths in the universe we believe they exist habitable zones are distances from a given star where liquid water a key ingredient to Life as we know it can exist upon the surface of an earthlike World joining the quest in 2009 NASA's Kepler space telescope led the charge to discover earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable Zone around their [Music] Stars if we are to find life anywhere else in the universe apart from the earth having liquid water is probably a good place to start looking but the habitable zone is not the same for every Star the more massive the star the brighter and hotter it burns so the planet must orbit farther away in order to retain [Music] water Kepler's sole scientific instrument was a photometer that continually monitored the brightness of approximately 150,000 main sequence [Music] Stars incredibly Tiny But periodic drops in brightness indicate that a planet is momentarily blocking a small portion of the Stars light Kepler 186f was the first earth-sized planet found within the habitable zone over 500 light years from Earth in the constellation signus the rocky World orbits a red dwarf star if we're looking for planets that might Harbor life we really want them to be be around a stable star like our sun a lot of the planets that have been found are around red dwarf stars now they're very unstable they're very faint most of the time but then they have huge eruptions of radiation which would probably kill any life forms on the [Music] surface as of 2020 there are over 4,000 confirmed exoplanets over half of those were discovered in Kepler's data we have discovered thousands upon thousands of planets around stars in the region around our sun but this is only a drop in the cosmic ocean but there's no rule that says planets have to be orbiting in the same plane that we are if Kepler is able to by chance detect thousands of exoplanets which just happen to be passing in front of a star we can then step back and go wow there are likely to be tens if not hundreds of trillions of planets just in the milkyway galaxy and then if you think of all the trillions of other galaxies in the universe there would just been an unimaginable number of planets out there with an incredible array of possibilities Kepler ended its mission in November 2018 but the Baton has passed to other observatories both around the world and in space so I think as we discover more about the cosmos we become smaller and less significant but our significance remains for an important reason and that is because we are still the only life forms known in the universe right here on planet [Music] Earth Humanity's Suite of telescopes from the ground to in orbit have opened up the cosmic history books Hubble brought us close to our universe's Inception but to go ever further back Humanity continues to advance our telescope technology Hubble's successor is the most complex and largest Space Telescope to date named after the man who headed NASA in the 1960s James Webb it's the biggest telescope we've ever put into space and it has an unprecedented capability to look into the early universe and look with great resolution at what the galaxies look like in the early Universe its 18 goldplated mirrors combine to stretch 6 and 1/2 M across it's a significant increase in collecting aperture and it's going to be able to look much deeper and further in the universe at the height of Hubble's power it could look back to a tenth of the universe's total age but not far enough to witness the births of the very first galaxies James web aims to look at the very first galaxies in the universe we don't know what they're going to look like we don't know what type of gas they're forming from unlike Hubble which originally studied visible light James web performed mostly infrared observations it will also see how massive black holes in the universe accre matter and grow we know that we have black holes 1 billion years after the big bang which already have the mass of 20 or 30 billion Suns we don't know how to make them in such a short time the James web space tele telescope operates outside of Earth's orbit 1.5 million km from the planet four times the distance of the Moon there are some very interesting points in space called lrange points lrange points are balance between the gravitational forces of multiple space objects web orbits the Sun but remains in a fixed spot in relation to the Earth and it's possible to locate spacecraft there so that they are always sitting at the same location relative to the Earth and the Sun it's never going to see Earth it's never going to see the sun directly it's always going to be looking out it's going to be scanning different areas of the sky it's looking exactly where we want to uh away from the stuff we know and and out into the universe there it's five layer Solar Shield the size of a tennis court blocks the light from the sun earth and moon as well as heat from from the spacecraft itself enabling web to obtain the deepest observations to date looking forward we should prepare for more surprises in 10 years we'll have a completely different take on how big the universe is and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger out there manipulating light we have revealed the heavens the invention of the telescope and then its subsequent Improvement absolutely turned our understanding of the natural world on its head Humanity continues the search for our exact place in the cosmos 20 years ago we only knew of one solar system that had planets now we know of thousands it's amazing centuries of Discovery have challenged our preconception the wonderful thing about science and particularly studying the cosmos is that our perception is continually changing our new generation of telescopes will reveal even more it's important that we keep pushing the boundaries so that we never become complacent that we never stagnate we are constantly challenged by the things we discover and the things we attempt [Music]

Channel: Spark

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Keywords: Spark, Science, Technology, Engineering, Learning, How To, education, documentary, factual, mind blown, construction, building, full documentary, space documentary, bbc documentary, Science documentary

Id: 7gSEZyGzdOY

Length: 155min 25sec (9325 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2023