Universe

Subs by KalEl82

Our universe is an enigma,

an endless, inexhaustible paradox.

It's largely...

a dark, cold, and lifeless ocean.

But within this ocean,

there are islands...

blazing with light.

Galaxies, trillions of them,

each one, home to hundreds of billions of stars,

and around many of these stars,

there are planets,

alien worlds,

each incomprehensibly strange.

There are trillions of planets in our universe

and one of them

nurtured beings capable of contemplating this cosmic drama,

miraculously improbable,

brief candles flickering against the eternal night.

As darkness begins to fall,

if you know that all those points of light

that appear one by one in the darkening sky are distant suns,

then it's impossible not to be overwhelmed

at the sheer scale and majesty of it all.

The universe is infinite in all directions,

and terrifying in all directions.

But if you can overcome your fear, then questions arise.

And surely the most profound question of all is,

"How did all this come to be here?"

That's a question that's defined much of human history.

But it's only in the last century or so

that we've had the intellectual and technical tools

to interrogate nature directly in search of an answer.

And we've found that it looks, for all the world,

like there was a first moment in time,

a beginning to the universe 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang.

For all the world, but not quite,

because we've begun to suspect that there's more to it,

and we've embarked on a heroic quest to search for

and to explore the time before the dawn.

I can see everything quite clearly. The light...

It has a stark beauty all its own.

# See me when I float like a dove

# Skies above...

Magnificent desolation.

- Beautiful view. - Isn't that something?

# Take me away #

For all the people back on Earth,

the crew of Apollo 8

has a message that we would like to send to you.

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form and void,

and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And God said, "Let there be light",

and there was light.

And God saw the light that it was good.

Since we first became conscious of ourselves,

we've looked to the heavens, to those mysterious lights...

searching for answers.

What is the universe?

How did it come to be?

And what is our place in the cosmos?

We sometimes doubt

the creation stories that our ancestors told.

But those ancient myths conceal a profound truth.

The clues to the origins of everything can be found out there...

in light which ripples to us from beyond the stars.

If we're going to dare to know about the origin of the universe,

then we have to have some evidence.

And the connection we have with the deep past is light.

See, light travels very slowly on the universal scale,

only 186,000 miles a second.

It takes light eight minutes to journey from the sun to the earth.

It takes four years for light to journey from the next nearest star.

And that means we see that star as it was four years in the past.

So, the further out into the universe we look,

the further back in time we look.

And because we can look way out into the distant universe,

we can look back towards the beginning of time.

Go ahead, Charlie.

Okay, we have a go for release,

and we're gonna be a minute late.

Okay, Charlie.

In the quest to find the origin of the universe,

we need a time machine.

This is Discovery.

We concur, Charlie.

A telescope so powerful,

that can peer out so far into the universe,

that it can capture the most ancient light...

The telescope's released.

...and carry us back...

towards the dawn of time.

Okay, Charlie.

The Hubble Space Telescope

has taken us on an odyssey through the universe,

revealing its gods...

and monsters.

Our universe is a place of beauty...

and terror.

Hubble has shown us visions of sublime creation...

and images of awesome destruction,

illuminating our journey backwards in time...

towards the dawn.

The Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery,

clouds of gas nurturing newborn stars in the Milky Way.

An image brought to us by light that left the nebula 1 ,300 years ago.

The Pillars of Creation,

towering, delicate structures, light years tall,

7,000 years ago.

The Andromeda galaxy,

a glittering island of a trillion suns,

2.5 million years ago.

A cosmic rose, galaxies colliding in a celestial dance,

300 million years ago.

But Hubble's voyage has taken us even further out

into the uncharted ocean of space,

ever deeper into the darkness,

glimpsing countless ancient and faraway galaxies.

Wild, and primitive shoals of stars,

lighting the way to their primordial past,

until, finally, Hubble approached the farthest shore,

a galaxy near the dawn of time.

This is a galaxy called GN-z11 ,

and it is one of the most distant galaxies we've ever seen.

This is light from some of the first stars in the universe.

It began its journey only 400 million years after the Big Bang,

and it's taken 13.4 billion years to reach us.

When you think about that, this light journeyed through the universe,

and after nine billion years of its journey, the earth formed.

And then, during the whole history of our planet,

it completed the last third of its journey and entered our telescopes.

So, this is an image from the edge of time.

GN-z1 I was one of the very first galaxies,

formed at a time when the universe itself was taking shape,

shortly after the Big Bang.

GN-z1 I was a strange galaxy by today's standards.

Twenty-five times smaller than the Milky Way,

but filled with enormous, violent stars.

Lurking alongside these volatile giants,

there were other things,

delicate objects struggling in the maelstrom,

some of the first planets in the universe.

These were strange, primordial worlds,

and over the horizon of one of them, a sun rose,

marking a new chapter in the history of the universe,

the beginnings of a relationship between stars and planets...

that would, billions of years later,

on a faraway world,

lead to the origin of life.

Now, we don't know when or where the first dawn broke in the universe.

But what we do know is that the first dawn was not the first moment.

The stars and planets had to come from somewhere.

So, the first dawn was preceded by long, dark night.

Astronomers call this era the cosmic dark ages.

If we continue to journey back in time,

we'd see shadows fall across the universe.

The galaxies would disappear.

The first primitive stars would be extinguished...

one by one...

and darkness truly would be upon the face of the deep.

Here in the impenetrable gloom of the cosmic dark ages,

our quest to understand the origins of the universe...

would seem to end.

So, how can we peer into the cosmic dark ages

to explore the origin of the universe?

Well, perhaps counter-intuitively,

the light from the stars can still guide us

because that starlight has been travelling across the universe

for millions or even billions of years to reach us,

and information about the way the universe has changed and evolved

becomes imprinted in that starlight.

The stars have illuminated our voyage through time.

But their light can't guide us directly across the dark ages.

Instead, their light can be used to build maps of the universe

in space and time...

that allow us to navigate...

towards the moment of creation.

And the most valuable light of all

comes from very particular stars in the spectacular swansong of their lives.

Stars exist in a permanent state of conflict

because the force of gravity is relentless.

Left to its own devices, it will crush anything and everything without limit.

But fortunately, other forces come into play.

As a star collapses, its core heats up

and turns into a giant nuclear fusion reactor.

Hydrogen is converted into helium that releases energy

which creates a pressure which holds the star up.

But stars like our sun burn hundreds of millions

of tons of hydrogen into helium every second.

And although they are big, they're not infinite in size.

Stars, just like human beings, have a lifetime.

They are subject to the relentless march of time.

And for stars like our sun, the collapse continues

until it produces a new and exotic type of star

known as a white dwarf.

White dwarfs are strange beasts,

the fading remains of stars,

super dense, planetary-sized cores,

usually composed entirely of carbon and oxygen.