When viewed from Earth, Saturn’s rings appear solid, but they are actually made up of chunks of rock and ice. They look spectacular, but navigating around them – and the planet’s more than 60 moons – would be a nightmare for travelers.
Head into the ice zone to learn the secrets of two world’s which are impossible to fathom. Uranus, an icy gas giant with an atmosphere composed of a cosmic cocktail of hydrogen, helium and methane, is so distant from the sun that it takes 84 years to orbit the sun. Neptune, its vibrantly blue neighbor, takes nearly twice that long. Rocket to the far reaches of the solar system, where a trip to these remote worlds has long been a mystery tour.
Pluto is so far away from Earth that it is a mere pinprick of light in our powerful telescopes. Locked in a gravitational dance with its largest moon Charon, this frozen outpost is simply the first discovered body in an unseen swarm of icy worlds.
See what it would take for humans to journey to the uncharted limits of our solar neighborhood and what NASA scientists think we’ll find when we get there.
As of May 31st, 2010, astronomers have confirmed the detection of some 455 extrasolar planets, indicating that alien solar systems are ubiquitous in the Milky Way Galaxy and throughout the cosmos.
NOVA goes behind the scenes at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to offer a look at the construction and launch of the two Martian exploratory rovers, ‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’.
Exploring the mysteries of black holes and theories about the existence of other kinds of holes, such as ‘mini’ or microscopic black holes that exist at the atomic level; ‘white holes’ – the opposite of black holes where matter is ejected; and ‘wormholes’ – gateways in hyperspace that connect points in space and time and possibly lead to other dimensions.
From a distance, our galaxy would look like a flat spiral, some 100,000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxys center. Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of the galactic center. And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important, something strange is going on in there. Astronomers tracking stars in the center of the galaxy have found the best proof to date that black holes exist. Now, they are shooting for the first direct image of a black hole.
A presentation of the facts and theory surrounding the astronomical phenomenon of black holes, using the latest in computer-generated imagery. Theories regarding their origin are presented, along with speculation about what lies with and beyond them.
Without the moon, humans wouldn’t exist. Life, if it had started at all, would be in the earliest stages of evolution. Days would last four hours, winds would blow at hurricane force and there would be a dense and toxic atmosphere resembling that of Venus. Luckily, 50 million years after the formation of the solar system, our proto-planet was hit by a celestial body more than twice the size of Mars, which formed the moon.
In this one-hour special, we learn what Earth was like before the moon and what life would be like if the moon disappeared.
A look at nebulas – the “art gallery of the galaxy” – amazing regions of space, where old stars die and new ones are born. Astronomers reveal the techniques and technology used to capture the details and wonder of these distant objects, many of which are too far away to be seen by the naked eye.
We humans tend to believe that we occupy an extraordinarily unique and special place in the universe. Until a few hundred years ago, we believed that the entire universe revolved around Earth. When Copernicus argued instead that Earth orbits the Sun, we backed off, only to insist that it must be our Sun around which the universe revolves.
However, this view of a Sun-centered universe was also not supported by subsequent astronomical observations. In response, we believed that as a minimum, the Sun is the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. But that was also not borne out by observation. Indeed, we continue to discover that our solar system’s place in the universe is not unique at all.
