The Sky at Night – Is Cosmology in Crisis ? episode 2 2019: ever since we discovered that distant galaxies are racing away from us, there has been a heated debate over just how fast the Universe is expanding. At the beginning of the 21st century, we thought we knew the answer. But now, two very different viewpoints have emerged. […]
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In Pluto and Beyond: the New Horizons spacecraft attempts to fly by a mysterious object known as Ultima Thule, believed to be a primordial building block of the solar system. Three years after taking the first spectacular photos of Pluto, New Horizons is four billion miles from Earth, trying to achieve the most distant flyby in NASA’s history. If successful,
The Sky at Night – Beyond Pluto: On 1st January 2019, Nasa’s New Horizons probe notched up another historic first: the first ever Kuiper belt fly-by. Its target was 2014 MU69, a chunk of ice and rock about four billion miles (approximately 6.4 billion kilometres) from Earth, dubbed Ultima Thule, a Latin phrase meaning a distant, unknown region. It is
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Neutron stars are strange and violent phenomena that defy the laws of physics, and new discoveries reveal that these bizarre nightmares are far more deadly than previously believed, with the power to destroy planets and even other stars. A neutron star is the collapsed core of a giant star which before collapse had a total of between 10
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A look at two missions attempting one of the most difficult feats of space exploration – to collect a rock from another world. This episode checks in on the US and Japanese attempts to bring a piece of an asteroid back to Earth. The missions have taken decades of planning, but the results will be worth it. 
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The Sky at Night – Return to the Moon ? –Â Nearly 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon and it seemed like the dawn of a new age. Soon we’d be flying to the moon as effortlessly as we fly to America, and a moon base would be filled with men and women building a better future
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Space-time is the secret structure that controls the universe, and this strange four-dimensional substance controls time, light, and energy. It will also determine how the universe will end. Space-time In physics, space-time is any mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. Space-time diagrams are
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Quasars are the brightest and most powerful objects in our universe, and though they have shaped the cosmos, they might ultimately destroy everything that exists. Quasar A quasar (also quasi-stellar object or QSO) is an active galactic nucleus of very high luminosity. A quasar consists of a super massive black hole surrounded by an orbiting accretion disk
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The Milky Way is dying, and experts are investigating what’s killing it. How is the universe put together? How is it built? And how does it actually work? Science’s hit space series will blow your mind by answering how the universe started and how it will end – and everything in between. Learn how nuclear fusion keeps them
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In October 2017, astronomers made a spectacular discovery – they spotted the first ever object to visit our solar system from outer space. They gave it a suitably exotic name… ‘Oumuamua. Its discovery set off a hurricane of press speculation and a major scientific investigation. To investigate this spectacular astronomical detective story, The Sky at Night goes to
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Planets that orbit two suns instead of one might be deadly hell worlds, but new discoveries reveal that sci-fi star systems with binary stars might be optimal places for alien life. How the Universe Works is a users guide to the cosmos from the big bang to galaxies, stars, planets and moons. Where did it all come from
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The Sky at Night – The Invisible Universe: reports on one of the most unnerving discoveries in space science – that most of the universe is missing. We live in a material world, so instinctively we know what normal matter is – the world around us, the planets, stars and interstellar dust. But scientists currently estimate that 95
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