All language subtitles for Solarmax IMAX 2000 1080p BluRay EN Sub

We're at the edge of a spiral galaxy,

far from the galactic core.

This small planet is our Earth,

its pole crowned with a circle
of "Northern Lights".

The whole planet glowing
in the infrared warmth

of a star we rarely think about,
a star we call "Sun".

It is almost midwinter in Ireland.

Soon the sun will begin its
journey back from the south.

Waiting for the Sun
is a Stone Age building,

older than the Pyramids of Egypt.

Above the entrance is a mysterious
skylight built by people

who understood very well
the ways of the Sun.

Sunrise on the shortest day
of the year: The winter solstice.

On that day, the first rays of the
sunrise spear through the skylight

and down a perfectly aligned
passageway to penetrate to the room

at the core of the structure,
to mark almost magically,

but with great precision,
the beginning of a new year.

This is the oldest room on Earth,
its careful alignment perhaps

the oldest evidence
of scientific thought ever found.

Our Sun is a star, one of billions.

It has shone
for five billion years

and will shine
for five billion more.

For us, it is the great engine
of life.

If you're near the pole,
the summer days never end.

The sun shines through midnight

and new days are born
out of days that never ended.

There, you can almost feel the Earth
rolling around beneath the sky.

Most ancient civilizations
recognised the Sun

as the source of all life
and called it God.

They observed it with care,

sometimes setting up stone markers
to send that knowledge through time.

The one sure prediction
in an unpredictable world:

The Sun sets,
but the Sun also rises.

Any break in that pattern once
caused terror and foreboding.

The Sun is 400 times bigger
than the Moon.

But the Moon is 400 times closer.

So on those rare occasions

when the Moon passes exactly
between us and the Sun,

the disk of the Moon exactly
covers the disk of the Sun.

Masked by the Moon, the Sun
reveals its mysterious corona.

The eerie streamers of light
heightened the mystery

and increased the power of those who
could predict these awesome events.

We have the eclipse records

kept by the astronomer priests
of ancient Babylon.

They are so accurate that
scientists today use them

to correct computer programs.

The Sun Gate
at Tihuanaco in Bolivia:

A fragment of a sun cult dating
back more than 1,000 years.

Nearby, high in the Andes,
is lake Titicaca,

and in the center of
the lake, The Island of the Sun.

On the island, this rocky hill
was once plated in Inca gold.

Here the sun god
anointed the first Inca

and send him north
through the Andes,

to create an empire that grew
to be as big as Europe,

with many dazzling cities,

among them, the lost city
of Machu Pitchu.

Like the people
of ancient Ireland,

the farmers of the Inca Empire
needed an accurate calendar.

If they planted their terraces
too soon,

the corn would freeze
in the groundl

too late,
and it would never ripen.

There is one building at Machu
Picchu that is like no other:

The Torreon.

Its curved wall is pierced
by an opening that is so aligned

that it will project the first
rays of the midwinter sunrise

precisely to the edge
of a carved rock,

and so mark
the first day of the Inca year.

The highest outcrop
at Machu Pitchu

is called
"The Hitching Post of the Sun".

From it, the Incas imagined
a great leash

stretching out
to hold onto the Sun

as it paced the horizon
like a restless Lama.

The ancient Greeks
imagined the sun as a god

who drove his chariot
across the sky,

but they abandoned their myths
for a more rational cosmos

nearly two and a half
thousand years ago.

Aristotle taught
that the world was round

and theorised
that the sun and planets

must be carried through space,
embedded in crystal spheres

that were nested around
the Earth, like Russian dolls.

He assumed that the Earth was
at the center of the universe,

misleading astronomers
for centuries.

By then,
the all-powerful church

had placed God in Aristotle's
seventh heaven.

The cathedral of Frombork
on the shore of the Baltic Sea.

At about the time
Columbus sailed for America,

a young astronomer
struggled here

with the contradictions
of Aristotle

as he observed the tracks
of planets across the sky.

To Nicholas Copernicus,
it made no sense,

until he made one of the great
intellectual leaps of all time.

The sun was the center
of a system,

the Earth,
merely one of its planets.

It was a cosmos
awesome enough

for one of humanity's
great minds: Galileo Galilei.

Galileo was the first person to
point a telescope at the stars.

He saw that
Copernicus was right.

Galileo found
that the Sun

was not the flawless orb
required by dogma.

It was as spotty
as a teenager.

The sun was
at the center.

But the church had no intention
of vacating center stage.

Galileo was put on trial
before the Inquisition,

a court that had the power to
burn him at the stake,

to inflict
any torture.

They showed him
their instruments,

and the threat
was enough.

The most respected scientist
of his day

signed a confession
that he knew was nonsense.

Dogma had triumphed.

The cathedrals of the new age
were the cathedrals of science.

And new instruments were built,
not for torture,

but to find
new galaxies,

to peer into the heart
of the Sun.

At first researchers could see
only the bland white face

that is revealed
by visible light,

and sometimes the procession
of mysterious dark spots

that some took
to be clouds.

The Earth's atmosphere clouded
and distorted the image.

But in time,
the great solar telescopes,

like Big Bear
in California,

blew away the notion
of a placid unchanging Sun.

People wondered
what the Sun was made of,

but never expected
to know.

It's 93 million miles away!

The answer was discovered in the
colors of the sunlight itself.

As each element burns,

it consumes
its own distinctive color,

writes its own signature in
dark lines across the spectrum.

Our sun is mostly made
of hydrogen and helium,

some carbon and iron
and other elements,

much the same elements
as we are made of,

but that's not so surprising, since
we were born of the same stars.

There had been a hundreds
of stories and theories

to explain the aurora.

But no one suspected
a connection with the sun.

An eccentric Norwegian
scientist, Kristian Birkeland,

built his own world
in a glass box,

electrified his model Earth
with its own magnetic field

and showed how electrons
from the Sun

could ignite
earthly auroras.

And he predicted that
they would be identical

and simultaneous
at both poles.

Birkeland was right,

but proof of his theories,
and so much else,

had to wait
until we could step into space.

Space has given us
new eyes.

Everything we glimpsed before
can be seen anew.

A stormy night as we fly towards
the coast of Australia:

We are heading south,
out over the Southern Ocean,

towards Antarctica.

This is SOHO.

Built in England and France
for the European Space Agency,

with instruments from Europe
and the U.S.A.

It was launched
by NASA

and parked a million miles
from Earth at a point

where the gravity
of the Earth exactly balances

the gravity of the Sun.

SOHO shows us the Sun
as we have never seen it before.

A wider lens.

The image is
30 million miles wide,

the Sun blanked out,

so we can see the corona
jetting out into space.

Here, the two images
are combined.

Billions of tons of particles
fired into space

at a million miles an hour,

sometimes, directly
at our Earth.

We are saved
by our magnetosphere,

an invisible magnetic shield
that protects us

from the lethal
particles that are spewed out

by our Sun
and other stars.

This solar storm pushed the edge
of our magnetosphere

twice as close
to Earth as usual,

disabling satellites, wiping out
radio communications worldwide,

and sending voltages
soaring dangerously

in everything from power
transformers to oil pipelines.

Repairs after
the last Solar Maximum

cost more than
$1 billion.

A century ago, space storms
could pass unnoticed.

But 2,000 satellites
have been launched

since the last
Solar Maximum.

Every aspect
of our civilization

depends on
their uninterrupted functioning.

Sun storms can kill
satellites.

They can
also kill astronauts.

For long space flights,
a dangerous storm

is a practical certainty,

and finding effective protection
a necessity.

But at present,
the best we can do

is try to avoid
Solar Maximum.

The Sun has north and south
magnetic poles,

just like the Earth.

But every 11 years,
those poles reverse

with unimaginable violence.

That peak of violence
is called Solarmax.

The 11-year cycles can change,
even vanish completely.

About 1,000 years ago,
the Sun was unusually active.

It was about the time
the Vikings settled

a grassy new land
they called "Greenland".

Thousands moved there,
but then the Sun grew quiet

and the solar cycles almost
stopped for a hundred years.

The average fall in temperature
was just two degrees,

but it was deadly enough.

The bays froze over,
the people starved.

No one survived.

Recently, scientists
have found that suns like ours

normally produce a superflare
about once every century.

A superflare would destroy
half of our ozone layer,

and the entire
satellite fleet.

We are fortunate
that our Sun

seems to be much more stable
than most other suns.

A tiny new spacecraft
called TRACE

brings us
a view of the Sun

that is still largely beyond
the scope of our understanding.

Magnetic field lines burst
through the surface,

to unleash in seconds
as much energy as the world uses

in a million years.

On the horizon is the mountain
that Native Americans call

"The Pivot of the Sky".

This is Kitt Peak
in Arizona,

site of
the National Solar Observatory.

The small telescopes
on the spacecraft

work in harness
with large telescopes on Earth.

The combination produces results
that are much more valuable

than any of them
could obtain alone.

This is what we call
the surface of the Sun,

the layer revealed
by visible light.

Embedded in it
are two sunspots,

each big enough to swallow
the Earth.

With filters and computers,
we can peel away the layers

as we'd turn the pages
of a book,

searching for
a better understanding

of the the forces that shape
our universe.

And more urgently, that shape
the climate of our world.

We urgently need
to know more.

So an International Solar
Terrestrial Program was devised,

linking satellites and a chain
of observatories

to create one
"Great Observatory".

A surprising discovery was
the singing of the Sun.

As the sun hums to itself,
a million pure tones change

as they resonate
through the plasma,

revealing to us
tides and currents far below.

In a Munich laboratory,
final testing of a satellite

that is destined to be flown
into the eye of a solar storm.

It is one
of four identical spacecraft

designed to fly together
in formation

to capture a unique 3-D picture
of the space environment.

The formation encloses
a pyramid of space

and monitors everything
that happens inside that space.

The tiny fleet will give us
an unprecedented view

of the interaction of the solar
wind with our magnetosphere,

from the bow wave
to the distant tail.

As the millennium
approached,

everything was in place
to make the Solarmax of 2001

a milestone in our search for
understanding of the Sun.

But a mistake was made
in a command sent to SOHO.

In a split second,

SOHO went from being the
flagship of the space fleet

to a useless piece
of frozen junk.

The SOHO team
refused to give up.

From all over Europe
and the U.S.A.,

they rushed
to the control center at NASA

to brainstorm ideas,
working to save their ship.

Months passed.

Dozens of schemes
were tried.

It was like trying to raise
a submarine with a fishing line.

But against
all the odds,

a signal hooked
into the control computer.

Delicately, painstakingly,
tiny surges of solar power

thawed out fuel
for the thrusters.

Incredibly, the whole array
of critical instruments

proved tough enough to survive
being frozen solid for 3 months.

SOHO came back
from the dead.

In a nation where land
is at a premium,

15,000 acres of virgin forest
preserve the shrine at Ise.

It is Japan's most
sacred shrine,

the Shrine
of the Sun Goddess,

and every year,
the Emperor pays his respects.

No one but the emperor and the
closest members of his family

can enter
the inner shrine.

It was the Sun Goddess herself

who appointed
the first emperor of Japan.

So even today,

one of the world's most advanced
nations still has a Sun King.

Every morning of the year,
people travel to sacred places

and rise in the darkness to
await the daily miracle.

Every sunrise brings hope.

For some, it's the hope
that we can learn to do

what the humblest plant
can do:

Make clean and abundant energy
directly from sunlight.

This aircraft
is on its way

to an altitude
of more than 80,000 feet,

twice as high
as a jumbo jet.

It is powered
only by sunlight.

It set a new world record

and poses
a new challenge.

The challenge of finding cheap
and practical ways

of using the Sun
and the sun-driven winds

to bring clean and inexhaustible
power to the machines of Earth,

machines that fit as
naturally as trees and flowers

into the web of life.

It is winter
in the high Andes,

just before sunrise
on Midwinter's Day:

The first day
of the Inca calendar,

and by some counts, the first
day of a new millenium.

It is time to prepare for
the festival of Inti Raymi,

time to celebrate
the Sun.