First Stars • 2014 • episode "6" Cosmic Front

Category: Astronomy

Look up at the night sky, and you see countless shining stars. Our galaxy has 100 billion of them. Astronomers are now hunting for clues that will reveal "the first star" that transformed the ancient universe and led to the creation of everything that followed: galaxies, planets and life itself.

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Cosmic Front • 2014 • 18 episodes •

Terraforming Mars

Could human settlements on Mars become reality as early as 100 years from now? Artificial micro organisms created with the latest techniques in synthetic biology could be used to produce resources such as iron, energy, and food directly on the planet itself. What would this new "Earth" look like?

2014 • Astronomy

The Grey Mars

Could Mars have ever harbored life? Thanks to NASA's latest Mars rover Curiosity, scientists are finding clues to this profound question. This program tracks the first year of Curiosity's adventure, and confirms that an ancient environment could have supported life on Mars.

2014 • Astronomy

Betelgeuse - Death of a Super Star

In the Orion constellation, Betelgeuse, a red star 1,000 times the size of the Sun, is an old star that scientists predict will soon come to a violent end. Will we see a supernova explosion 100 times brighter than a full moon in our lifetimes? Will the explosion release rays harming life on Earth?

2014 • Astronomy

Dark Matter

The story of how we discovered Dark Matter and what we do and don't know about this mysterious substance. Did Vera Rubin discover the glue holding galaxies together? What composes dark matter? What are Dark Stars and what is super symmetry, the potential answer to the questions around Dark Matter?

2014 • Astronomy

Extraterrestrial Life

Extraterrestrial life = Science Fiction. Not so fast! -- the Cassini probe has provided photos of Enceladus, where scientists have found geysers of water vapor. And then there is Gliese 581g, a planet with Earth-like conditions....what would life forms look like in these watery environments?

2014 • Astronomy

First Stars

Look up at the night sky, and you see countless shining stars. Our galaxy has 100 billion of them. Astronomers are now hunting for clues that will reveal "the first star" that transformed the ancient universe and led to the creation of everything that followed: galaxies, planets and life itself.

2014 • Astronomy

Illuminating the Magellanic Clouds

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, luminous in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere, are celestial bodies shrouded in mystery, but recent observations have revealed some startling facts about them. They are survivors of galaxies formed in the early stages of the Universe.

2014 • Astronomy

Impact - Looking Out for Asteroids

An asteroid colliding with the Earth is not a just Hollywood fantasy. NASA and the Space Guard Foundation develop deflection plans to save the Earth from a comet, meteor or asteroid with Earth in its trajectory. Take a look at how the world is working together to keep our skies safe.

2014 • Astronomy

Knowing without Seeing - The Science of Black Holes

Einstein, Oppenheimer, and other physicists and astronomers wrestled with the concept of Black Holes. With relentlessly powerful gravitational pull, black holes suck in anything that comes near them, but do they? As the study of black holes progresses, science finds more mysteries than solutions.

2014 • Astronomy

Monster Black Holes

There are Black Holes, and then there are Monster Black Holes -- containing several million to ten billion times the mass of our Sun! They've been discovered in the center of many galaxies. But they don't just absorb everything around them...in fact, they may be key to forming new galaxies.

2014 • Astronomy

Our Extraordinary Sun

Telescopes on six solar observation satellites are currently monitoring the sun. The satellites include Japan's Hinode and the SDO developed by the United States. Solar activity (flares, sunspots) is at its lowest since modern observation began - what implications does this have for our Earth?

2014 • Astronomy

Saturn's Moon Titan - Another Earth?

Even with a surface temperature of -180C, Saturn's moon, Titan, could be another Earth. There's evidence of dunes made of quantities of organic material that could contain the building blocks for DNA. Astrobiologists are conducting studies on the possibility that life could be present on Titan.

2014 • Astronomy

Signals from Outer Space?

Were "little green men" trying to contact us? Over 40 years ago, extremely constant pulses were detected reaching the Earth from outer space. It caused a great sensation. Using a radio telescope larger than a baseball field, scientists looked for the source of these signals and found - pulsars.

2014 • Astronomy

Space Shuttle

The Space Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011 after leading international missions for three decades. This is the dramatic story of the tragedies and triumphs of the Space Shuttle fleet, and how it broadened humankind's exploration of space.

2014 • Astronomy

The Lunar Rover

In summer 1969, Apollo 11 succeeded as the first manned mission to land on the moon. The next challenge was to design and build the first exploration vehicle. It had to allow astronauts to explore the moon's surface, but it had to fit in just a meter square space!

2014 • Astronomy

The Mystery of the Universe's Bubbles

Scientists using the Hubble Telescope study vivid images from 12 billion and more light years away and observe that many galaxies cluster together like -- soap bubbles! Analyzing factors like dark matter and gravitational lensing, how can astronomers confirm this amazing bubble structure?

2014 • Astronomy

The Nebra Sky Disc

3,000- years-old, the Nebra Sky Disk is the oldest sky map in the world, predating Babylonian and Egyptian sky maps. Found in Germany, the Nebra Sky Disk is an archaeological mystery. Who were the people who designed this beautiful and functional ancient artifact with exact proportions?

2014 • Astronomy

The Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula is a interstellar cloud situated in the Milky Way, south of Orion's Belt. In a 2-year effort, scientists create a mosaic of over 100 images at the tip of Orion's sword to discover four massive young stars. What do they tell us about how planetary systems are formed?

2014 • Astronomy

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The Black Hole That Kills Galaxies - Quasars

The universe isn't just a vast empty ocean sprinkled with galaxies – most of the atoms are actually drifting in between, in the intergalactic medium. If we look closely, we can see who is in charge here: Quasars, the single most powerful objects in existence. As small as a grain of sand compared to the amazon river, they reside in the centers of some galaxies, shining with the power of a trillion stars, blasting out huge jets of matter, completely reshaping the cosmos around them. They are so powerful that they can kill a galaxy. What are they, and how do they mold the structure of the universe at their whim?

In a Nutshell • 2023 • Astronomy

Place in Space and Time

Brian reveals how - as our exploration of the cosmos has deepened - we have even been able to piece together how the universe itself began.

S1E4Human Universe • 2014 • Astronomy

The Shake Up

Lukrum pushes its corporate interest too far and jeopardizes the colonies. In the present day on Earth, human activity has destabilized the natural world.

S2E6MARS • 2018 • Astronomy

Mars's Deepest Mysteries

We examine what lies beneath Mars’s surface and uncover answers to some of the mysteries that have stumped scientists for decades

S1E4Mars: The Secret Science Series 1 • 2014 • Astronomy

Super Telescope: Mission to the Edge of the Universe

As Nasa releases the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, this film tells the inside story of the telescope's construction and the astronomers taking its first picture of distant stars and galaxies. Will it be the deepest image of our universe ever taken? The successor to Hubble, and 100 times more powerful, the James Webb is the most technically advanced telescope ever built. It will look further back in time than Hubble to an era around 200 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies appeared. Webb's primary mission is to capture the faint light from these objects on the edge of our visible universe so that scientists can learn how they formed, but its instruments are so sensitive it could also be the first telescope to detect signs of life on a distant planet. The James Webb Telescope is an ?8 billion gamble on the skills of its engineering team. It’s the first telescope designed to unfold in space – a complicated two-week operation in which 178 release devices must all work - 107 of them on the telescope's sun shield alone. If just one fails, the expensive telescope could become a giant piece of space junk. From its conception in the late 1980s, the construction of Webb has posed a huge technical challenge. The team must build a mirror six times larger than Hubble’s and construct a vast sun shield the size of a tennis court, fold them up so they fit into an Ariane 5 rocket, then find a way to unfold them in space. This film tells the inside story of the James Webb Space Telescope in the words of the engineers who built it and the astronomers who will use it.

2022 • Astronomy

Different Worlds

We reveal the planetary enigmas on our doorstep and embark on the New Horizons voyage to photograph Pluto. Will our encounter with this tiny ball of ice and rock and the trillions of icy objects beyond it paint a clearer picture of how the planets came to be?

S1E1The Planets • 2004 • Astronomy