stars Archives - HDclump

Seven Ages of Starlight

Science / 2 minutes of reading / May 5, 2022 / By HDclump

Seven Ages of Starlight: This is the epic story of the stars, and how discovering their tale has transformed our own understanding of the universe. Once we thought the sun and stars were gods and giants. Now we know, in a way, our instincts were right. The stars do all have their own characters, histories and role in the cosmos. Not least, they played a vital part in creating us. There are old, bloated red giants, capable of gobbling up planets in their orbit, explosive deaths – supernovae – that forge the building blocks of life and […]

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Universe – The Big Bang: Before the Dawn episode 5

Science / 4 minutes of reading / November 7, 2021 / By HDclump

Universe – The Big Bang: Before the Dawn episode 5: It’s the ultimate question: why are we here? Cutting-edge space missions take us back 13.8 billion years to the very beginning – the origin of the Universe. Professor Brian Cox asks the ultimate question: how did the Universe come to be? The Universe is daunting in its scale. We live on one planet of eight that orbit just one of the four hundred billion stars in our galaxy. But our galaxy is just one of trillions in the universe. Yet it is amongst those galaxies that we have

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Universe – Black Holes: Heart of Darkness episode 4

Science / 4 minutes of reading / November 4, 2021 / By HDclump

Universe – Black Holes: Heart of Darkness episode 4: Prof Brian Cox journeys into a supermassive black hole – a monster that can destroy worlds, stop time, and is forcing us to reassess our understanding of reality. Professor Brian Cox continues his epic exploration of the universe with a journey into darkness. The centre of our galaxy is home to an invisible monster of unimaginable power – a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A*. Weighing 4 million times the mass of the Sun, it’s an object with such an immense gravitational field that nothing can escape – not

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Universe – The Milky Way: Island of Light episode 3

Science / 4 minutes of reading / November 2, 2021 / By HDclump

Universe – The Milky Way: Island of Light episode 3: Professor Brian Cox continues his epic exploration of the cosmos by exploring the faint band of light that sweeps across the night sky – our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The Sun is just one of almost 400 billion stars that form this vast, majestic disk of light, our own home in the universe. We’ve longed to understand our galaxy’s secrets since the time of the ancient Greeks, yet it’s only very recently, thanks to a cutting edge space telescope, that we’re finally able to reveal the Milky Way’s dramatic

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Universe – Alien Worlds: The Search for Second Earth episode 2

Science / 5 minutes of reading / November 1, 2021 / By HDclump

Universe – Alien Worlds: The Search for Second Earth episode 2: Humans have long gazed up at the night sky, wondering whether other lifeforms and intelligences could be thriving on worlds far beyond our own. Answering that question seemed fated to remain pure speculation. But over the last few decades, ultra-sensitive telescopes and dogged detective work have transformed alien planet-hunting from science fiction into hard fact. Gone are the days of speculation; the hunt for extraterrestrials has become a matter of serious scientific inquiry. As the hunt for alien worlds began, we expected to find worlds similar to

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Universe – The Sun: God Star episode 1

Science / 5 minutes of reading / October 28, 2021 / By HDclump

Universe – The Sun: God Star episode 1: Professor Brian Cox begins his epic exploration of the cosmos with a hymn to the great luminous bodies that bring light and warmth to the universe: the stars. It is estimated that there are two hundred trillion stars in the universe, each playing their part in an epic story of creation – a great saga that stretches from the dawn of time, with the arrival of the first star, through diverse generations until the arrival of our own star, the sun, and a civilisation that has grown up in its

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Stars

Science / 1 minute of reading / May 8, 2019 / By HDclump

For as long as humans have walked the Earth, the stars have fascinated us. But we have come a long way since the earliest days of astronomy when we had nothing but our eyes to observe the night sky. Since then we have designed an arsenal of ingenious machines to help us unlock the secrets of the stars – from how they work and move around the Universe to how they live and die. For more than 60 years, the Sky at Night has covered every major development in our understanding of the stars, and regular Sky at

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