Stephen Hawking's Favorite Places 3 • 2018

61:05

Sagan discusses comets and asteroids as planetary impactors, giving recent examples of the Tunguska event and a lunar impact described by Canterbury monks in 1178. It moves to a description of the environment of Venus, from the previous fantastic theories of people such as Immanuel Velikovsky to the information gained by the Venera landers and its implications for Earth's greenhouse effect. The Cosmos Update highlights the connection to global warming.

4/13 • Cosmos: A Personal Voyage • 1980 • Astronomy

49:07

For centuries the giant planets floated on the fringes of the solar system as distant objects in the eyepieces of astronomers. But in December 1973 mankind had its first close encounter with Jupiter. We chart the story of our discovery of these massive planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

S1E3 • The Planets • 2004 • Astronomy

9:00

How do these objects differ from one another, if at all? Nick Moskovitz, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory, compares these space solar system bodies.

2015 • Astronomy

49:58

This is the story of the James Webb Space Telescope, told by the people who have devoted their lives to it. It is the world’s largest, most advanced, and most expensive telescope, and building it has been fraught with challenges. But it will all be worth it if the December 2021 launch is successful.

Secrets of the Universe (Curiosity) • 2022 • Astronomy

46:04

The Ship of the Imagination travels back in time to reveal 11th century Europe and North Africa during the golden age of Islam, when brilliant physicist Ibn al-Haytham discovered the scientific method and first understood how we see, and how light travels. Later, William Herschel discovers the infrared and the signature hidden in the light of every star, eventually unlocking one of the keys to the cosmos.

S1E5 • Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey • 2014 • Astronomy

45:41

Ants, scorpions and fireflies provide clues for biologists to conjecture about life on exoplanet Janus, including highly adaptable pentapods.

S1E2 • Alien Worlds • 2020 • Astronomy