Alien Worlds: Stranger Than Fiction • 2017 • episode "S1E7" • The Planets (US)

58:52

Professor Brian Cox journeys into a supermassive black hole - a monster that can destroy worlds and stop time, and which is forcing us to reassess our understanding of reality.

S1E4 • Universe BBC • 2021 • Astronomy

57:47

On a bright, cold morning on 15th February 2013, a meteorite ripped across the skies above the Ural mountains in Russia, distintegrating into three pieces and exploding with the force of 20 Hiroshimas. It was a stark reminder that the Earth's journey through space is fraught with danger. A day later, another much larger 143,000 tonne asteroid passed within just 17,000 miles of the Earth. Presented by Professor Iain Stewart, this film explores what meteorites and asteroids are, where they come from, the danger they pose and the role they have played in Earth's history.

Astronomy

43:01

An exploration of the dramatic fate of our future descendants, the technology they'll need to survive the end of this world billions of years from now and our options for colonizing and starting again on a new planet somewhere far from Earth.

S1E3 • Space's Deepest Secrets • 2016 • Astronomy

42:29

Nebulas are the strange structures of cosmic gas and dust where stars are born and die, and new discoveries reveal the secrets of these mysterious places.

S7E5 • How the Universe Works • 2019 • Astronomy

59:37

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

10:33

Lunar days are about 14 Earth days long, and when night comes, temperatures plummet. But there are other issues to deal with as well. For instance, how can we overcome the moon's lack of atmosphere; difficult terrain with abrasive particles, and the effects of cosmic background radiation?

S1E4 • Destination: Moon • 2016 • Astronomy