Ice Worlds • 2024 • episode "S1E4" • Solar System

112:05

Covers 1964-1968, four heady, dangerous years in the history of the space race, focusing on the events surrounding the Apollo 1 and Apollo 8 missions. As Americans moved through the 60s and reflect on the challenges ahead, many begin to wonder: What exactly is it going to take to beat the Soviets to the moon?

S1E2 • Chasing the Moon • 2019 • Astronomy

11:20

How do astronomers make sense out of the vastness of space? How do they study things so far away? Today Phil talks about distances, going back to early astronomy. Ancient Greeks were able to find the size of the Earth, and from that the distance to and the sizes of the Moon and Sun. Once the Earth/Sun distance was found, parallax was used to find the distance to nearby stars, and that was bootstrapped using brightness to determine the distances to much farther stars.

25 • Crash Course Astronomy • 2015 • Astronomy

11:14

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

58:53

Documentary marking the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight into space. It was hailed by the Soviet Union as a triumph for socialist science over capitalism, but the true story is much stranger. George Carey's film shows how the Soviet space programme was kick-started by a mystic who taught that science would make us immortal, and carried forward by a scientist who believed that we should evolve into super-humans who could leave our overcrowded planet to colonise the universe. Stranger still, Carey shows how those ideas have survived Communism and adapted themselves to the science of the modern world.

2011 • Astronomy

59:05

A space mission discovers the dramatic history of the Milky Way. Professor Brian Cox reveals how our galaxy endured multiple collisions as rival galaxies fought for survival.

S1E3 • Universe BBC • 2021 • Astronomy

10:49

Venus is a gorgeous naked-eye planet, hanging like a diamond in the twilight -- but it’s beauty is best looked at from afar. Even though Mercury is closer to the sun, Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, due to a runaway greenhouse effect, and has the most volcanic activity in the solar system. Its north and south poles were flipped, causing it to rotate backwards and making for very strange days on this beautiful but inhospitable world.

14 • Crash Course Astronomy • Astronomy