All language subtitles for Universe (1960)

The ground beneath our feet is the surface of a planet

whirling at thousands of miles an hour around a distant sun.

Our life is possible only because of the light

and warmth of that sun. A star. Yet the Sun which shines on us

is only one out of billions of such stars in the universe

This is one of the world's major observatories, the David Dunlap

Observatory, 15 miles north of Toronto

Doctor Donald MacRae is a professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto

"Observatory." ---At any moment scattered throughout the world there are hundreds

of men and women observing the heavens with optical and radio telescopes

gathering data for the solution of many questions about the universe

routine work for the most part. MacRae's job tonight if the sky remains clear

will be to take photographs of six stars with the telescope

A mirror over six feet in diameter, with its surface shaped to within 1 million

of an inch

will catch the light from a star

This light will be reflected from the large mirror onto a smaller one

which in turn will focus it back into a camera

at the base of the telescope

Out of the study of hundreds of thousands of observations

astronomers have pieced together an accurate picture of the universe.

Beyond the appearance of

starshine and moonbeam what will the first men to

leave the Earth find?

Enough is now known that we can, in imagination, journey into these spaces.

250,000 miles away---the Moon. This is the moon that men have worshipped

as a goddess and countless lovers have sighed over and sworn by.

It will take immense courage to journey to this place for

on this pitted and pocked ball of pumice and stone

there is no atmosphere

no air to breathe, no sound to hear.

By day the sun's heat would boil water, if there where water

At night, 240 degrees below zero

Unshielded a man couldn't live here for two minutes.

But if he were to die, his body would lie unchanged

through thousands of years for nothing grows

and nothing decays.

If you were to hover in space beyond the moon, speeding up in imagination its movement

you would see a majestic procession in the sky. As the moon circles the Earth

so the Earth itself circles the Sun

The Sun is the center of a system of nine

heavenly bodies called planets which wheel around it in vast orbits

trapped by its gravitational pull. Closest to it is the tiny planet

Mercury

On the surface of Mercury the temperature is hot enough to melt lead

While one face of it is turned perpetually to the Sun

only 36 million miles away

If we look outward from Mercury

we would see the second closest planet, Venus

shining brighter than the much more distant stars

Venus, in orbit 31 million miles

further out from the Sun is a mystery for its face

is veiled by dust storms or perhaps dense cloud

looking outward from Venus the most brilliant and beautiful object

in the sky would be a planet in orbit

25 million miles still further out---Earth

Beyond Earth, shining redly in the night---Mars

Colder than Earth and smaller

this is the planet men have looked on and wondered

whether they are alone in the heavens.

It is reasonably certain that the markings on its surface

bluish-green in the Martian summer turning rusty-brown in the Autumn

indicate vegetation

Here, however, the atmosphere has almost no oxygen

and no creatures like men could live here

140 million miles from the Sun

in the place past Mars where there should should theoretically be a

planet, there are only the asteroids, small bodies ranging from boulders

to chunks 300 miles across, hundreds of them, swinging in orbit

about the Sun

500 million miles out from the Sun

the giant planet Jupiter, ruling twelve moons

Jupiter, seen here from one of its moons

is larger than all the other planets put together. Its atmosphere is a thousand

miles deep

a poisonous mixture of methane gas

ammonia and hydrogen which at the bottom must have the density of water

Here under the enormous pressure of the atmosphere

a human being would be crushed beyond recognition

These are the rings of Saturn

bands 10,000 miles wide

composed of almost an infinity of meteoric

particles of gravel and ice, circling the

sixth planet

Saturn with its nine moons

is so far from the Sun that it takes 30 Earth years to circle it

And here the temperature never rises above

240 degrees below zero

And if we were to plunge still further out

hundreds of millions of miles past the planet Uranus

beyond Neptune, we would finally come to the last of the known planets

to the dwarf Pluto, named for the god of the Underworld

Its surface moves in perpetual darkness

and unimaginable cold for the Sun is 4 billion miles away

only a starry speck in the sky

Sometimes a strange apparition appears in the sky

a comet

Like a planet, a comet orbits the Sun but it is only a loose conglomeration of

ice and dust, invisible until its head comes close enough to the Sun

whose rays then excite it into fluorescence and

push away from the head a vaporous tail

which may become a million miles long.

For a few weeks a comet blossoms

and then, passing the Sun

it will fade and coast again unseen billions of miles

into the darkness, perhaps not to return for a century

to the blazing star

which is its master.

The Sun is an unimaginable inferno, a thermonuclear furnace

churning with the storms we see as sun spots, heaving from its surface

columns of gas that arch 300,000 miles into space

Pulled and twisted by enormous electrical and magnetic fields

the Sun produces the energy of a million hydrogen bombs

exploding every second

So it has raged for five billion years and so it will rage for perhaps

another five billion years

flooding its planets with radient energy

Too near or too far from this furnace---

instant death for men. Between 91 and 93 million miles from this star

filtered through a blanket of atmosphere, its

energies sustain human life

When a particular star is to be photographed,

it is located by its coordinates

on a star chart. On such a chart every black speck

is a star.--- "14 6 point 7 plus 13 49"

45 tons of steel and glass must be aimed precisely

at a spot perhaps 200 million billion miles away

Many of the stars astronomers study are invisible to the naked eye

Even the nearest ones---apart from our Sun---are so far away that

their light is very dim

The mirror in the base of the telescope gathers and focuses hundreds of

thousands of times the amount of light seen by the naked eye

Almost nothing of a star can be known directly

It is a photograph that is studied. Not a portrait of a star but a

photograph of its light

split into a spectrum in which each band has its meaning

The presence in that distant star of elements like iron

calcium, carbon. From a spectroscopic photograph, astronomers can tell

whether a star is moving towards us or away

by exposing on the same plate the spectrum of the star

and the spectrum of an iron arc and measuring the

displacement between the two

To photograph the spectrum of the arc

takes 10 seconds. To catch enough of the light from the star

may take up to two hours

During the exposure, machinery in the base of the telescope

automatically compensates for the rotation of the Earth

keeping the star centered

If we looked more deeply into space, leaving behind us the Earth

and the whole of our solar system and traveled at the speed of light

it would take four years before we came to even the

closest of the billions of suns

scattered through stellar space

Although the stars are suns

many of them are unlike our sun

Some, like Beta in the constellation Lyra

instead of planets have a second sun swinging around them

There are multiple suns like Castor in the constellation Gemini

There are giant suns five thousand times as large as ours

and dwarfs in which one cubic inch of matter weighs forty tons

Suns rotating so rapidly that pinwheels of gas

are thrown off weighing more than our whole system of planets

Suns that over a period of days or hours

pulse as their internal nuclear processes change

Rare suns in which the temperature reaches 5 billion degrees

where nuclear fusion makes elements as heavy as iron

and results in the enormous explosion of a nova

or supernova

the brilliant light from such explosions

floods through the gaseous clouds of space for billions on billions of miles

and the remains of a supernova recorded ten centuries ago

can still be seen as the Crab Nebula

in the constellation Taurus

As well as stars, in stellar space

there is gas and dust, sometimes glowing in starlight

sometimes dark, obscuring what is behind them

Stars. Gas. Dust. All moving in apparent chaos.

Until a generation ago it seemed indecipherable

The only suggestion of form was their grouping in the band we know as the Milky Way.

"Doctor MacRae?"

Now, years of patient work have revealed a pattern in the universe.

A pattern beyond anything we could have imagined

looking at the heavens with the naked eye.

With data sifted from countless painstaking observations

astronomers are now filling in the details of a pattern so vast

that everyday ideas of distance and time

cannot encompass it

If we could move with the freedom of a god, so that a million years pass in a second

and if we went far enough, past the nearest suns

beyond the star clouds and nebulae

in time they would end. And as if

moving out from behind a curtain, we would come to an

endless sea of night.

In that sea are islands, continents of stars

that we have named the galaxies

the largest known forms in the universe

Hundreds of billions of suns bound together by gravity

rotating around their common center once in

200 million years

Our sun with its planets is near the edge of one such galaxy

the rim of which we see dimly as the Milky Way

The galaxies

are the birthplace and graveyard of the stars.

Here, gas contracts into knots, becomes hot

and flares into the life of a sun, sometimes forming with it

planets. Sometimes planets which must be suitable for life.

And here, too, the stars finally consume themselves

and collapse into cold dark dwarfs

A hundred billion suns yet forms so enormous

that they have been observed slipping through one another like

phantoms, their stars light years apart

continuing undisturbed in their courses

At the very limit of our most powerful instruments

galaxies still are flung across space

themselves as numerous as stars in the night sky.

But when we look this deeply into space we are looking at a ghostly

image of the distant past for the light by which we see these

regions started traveling towards us long before

the dawn of life on Earth

In all of time on all the planets of all the galaxies in space

what civilizations have arisen

looked into the night, seen what we see

asked the questions that we ask?