All language subtitles for Hidden Universe 3D

This is home.

Our very own corner of the universe.

But stand here on the surface of Earth and look up.

Hidden out here, in the limitless reaches of space,

is the story of our past, present, and future.

For centuries, astronomers from every corner of the world

have striven to unlock secrets of the universe.

This is Dr. Jonathan Whitmore,

and I suppose you could say

that he's always had stars in his eyes.

I have two great loves in life.

Music and astronomy.

As a kid I dreamt of playing piano at Carnegie Hall one day,

then flying to some distant mountaintop to stargaze the next.

But Carnegie Hall will have to wait,

because I got hooked on astronomy in a big way.

My very first glimpse through a telescope

showed that even our closest neighbors are stunning.

When I saw the moon,

I felt that I could almost reach out and touch it.

Saturn has her amazing rings that circle the planet.

The rings alone are 20 times wider than the Earth,

but in some places, are only 10 meters thick.

And there's Jupiter.

The stormy gas giant.

We have one moon.

At last count, she had more than 67.

But for me, the most beautiful object in the sky

is the thing we're all bound to.

The thing that gives us warmth and life itself.

The sun.

Our sun is a star,

just like all the other stars we see in the night sky.

When I found that out, my mind was made up.

Jonathan's decision to become an astronomer

led him halfway around the world,

to one of the highest and driest places on the planet.

Chile's Atacama Desert is his launch pad

for a trip to the edge of the universe.

When people find out that I'm an astronomer,

they always ask me to point out what I observe in the night sky.

And the truth is, I can't,

because the things I study are so far away,

you can't see them with human eyes.

That's what I love about science.

It challenges our boundaries and constantly pushes us forward.

Take Mars, for example.

Not long ago, we thought of it as just a pale, red dot in the night sky.

Now we can see it in extraordinary detail.

Starting in 1997,

the Mars Global Surveyor mapped

the entire surface of Mars so precisely,

that we could see detail down to a mile in size.

It revealed huge canyons,

10 times longer than the Grand Canyon,

and volcanoes three times taller than Mount Everest.

More recently, NASA sent the Mars rover, Curiosity.

It's a mobile lab that is scouring the landscape

for water and interesting samples.

And from orbit, we are mapping Mars with incredible precision.

We can now see rocks on the Martian surface that are barely a foot wide.

These images of the surface of Mars

aren't some special effect

created for the next Hollywood sci-fi epic.

This is the real thing.

These images were taken using HiRISE,

the largest telescope ever carried on a deep-space mission,

aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

If you've ever dreamt of living on Mars,

just come to the Atacama Desert,

and you'll be amazed by how similar it is to the Martian landscape.

In the middle of one of the world's most arid deserts,

the team at ESO have constructed a place that's full of life.

This is where we live.

In fact, if we ever colonize another planet,

this might be the kind of biosphere that we build there.

Sheltered from the extreme conditions outside,

you'll find an oasis, with all the comforts of home.

A swimming pool, a library, a restaurant,

and even a music room where I can practice piano.

Astronomers from all over the world are drawn to this place

by their passion for the stars.

And up the mountain is the telescope we have all come to use.

It's called the ”VLT."

The Very Large Telescope.

So we're not exactly that great at coming up with names,

but that's exactly what it is.

A very large telescope.

Make that four very large telescopes.

VLT operator and mountaineer, Lisa Tura,

is here to prepare the telescope.

On her days off,

you'll find Lisa scaling the highest peaks of the Andes.

So she is unfazed by the task of calibrating these gigantic,

and sometimes temperamental, machines.

When you operate the VLT,

you have to treat it with the utmost care.

One miscalculation can throw out

an entire night's observations.

Its instruments are so sensitive

that even your body's temperature can affect the readings.

So we need to be extremely thorough

every time we start it up.

The VLT is one of the biggest optical telescopes in the world.

It has a 27-foot mirror that acts like a giant light bucket,

capturing as much light as possible.

This main mirror

reflects and focuses the light up to a second mirror,

then down to a third mirror in the middle of a telescope.

And finally,

into instruments on the side of the VLT.

Once Lisa has finished her calibrations,

the VLT can see objects four billion times fainter

than those detectable by the human eye.

For me, music will always play a big part in my life.

But when I'm about to look up

and see distant objects that no one else has ever seen,

I know I've made the right choice.

Before the night's viewing begins,

everyone must leave the building.

The VLT demands total darkness.

As I said, temperamental.

Every speck of man-made light has to be shut out.

Even the tiniest bit could ruin the observation for that night.

As the Earth spins,

the Milky Way appears to pass over us,

while the telescopes twist and turn,

tracking distant objects in the sky.

Nowhere else in the world can you see the stars shine as brightly.

On the clearest of nights,

you can see your own shadow,

cast from the light of millions of distant stars.

And as we explore the heavens,

we have found the birthplace of stars.

This monstrous cloud of gas and dust is the Carina Nebula.

It's a star factory,

churning out thousands of stars,

some of which are the brightest in our Milky Way.

You could call it a stellar nursery.

Because in a nebula like this one,

stars are being formed.

And even though these stars are relatively young,

they're not exactly small.

And there are a huge range of star types.

In fact, our own sun would have been formed in a cloud of gas and dust just like this.

Sometimes, these nebula are named by the shapes that they seem to make.

Here's one with a great nickname.

The Snow Angel Nebula.

The blue wings of the snow angel are actually hot gas,

being illuminated by a huge star forming in the middle of this hourglass.

The astronomers who named the War and Peace Nebula

could see a dove dancing in the gas.

I don't see it myself,

and I'm more interested in the gigantic stars here.

They're shining hundreds of thousands of times

brighter than our sun.

But not every nebula is a stellar nursery.

A thousand years ago,

Arabian, Japanese and Chinese astronomers

all recorded a strange, lingering light in the sky,

as bright as the full moon.

They were witnesses to the death of a star.

A supernova explosion that scattered gas and dust particles

60 billion miles into the cosmos,

forming this.

The Crab Nebula.

Sometimes, astronomers look deep into the sky

and see the cosmos looking right back at them.

This magnificent eye in the sky

is just the remnants of a burned-out star

that has shed its outer layers back into the universe.

By studying formations like this,

we now know that stars come and go from the universe.

Just like life begins and ends here on Earth.

Beyond our Milky Way,

you'll find stars, gas and dust

clumped together in huge structures called galaxies.

Galaxies come in all shapes and sizes,

but what I love most about them

is that the light that I'm seeing was created way back in time.

Light from even the closest large galaxy

takes two and a half million years to reach us.

And the deeper I look into space,

the older the light I see.

This means that galaxies are like fossil records

of how the universe used to look and act.

So in a way,

my work is a little bit time travel

and a little bit cosmic archeology.

I'm trying to help decipher these distant records

so that we may one day

better understand the story of our universe.

Since these objects are so far away,

a new challenge faces optical astronomers.

Like the heat distortion you see on a road,

the atmosphere distorts and blurs light coming in from the universe.

It's what makes the stars appear to twinkle at night.

To counter this problem,

the VLT has a trick up its sleeve.

It fires a laser beam 60 miles up in to the night sky

to create a fixed point.

Almost like a fake star for the telescope to focus on.

On the ground, the VLT compensates

by warping the telescope's mirror hundreds of times per second,

allowing us to capture the sharpest of images.

If you want to see what I'm looking for,

don't look at the main part of these pictures.

Look further, deeper,

into the details of the image.

My work takes me beyond all these close celestial objects

and out into the vast universe that lies beyond.

Highlighted here are distant galaxies.

They're similar in size and structure to the closer ones,

but they are so far away that even with the VLT,

you can barely make them out.

These are the galaxies that I study.

Out here are the frontiers of our knowledge.

This image is as far back in time as we can see

with an optical telescope.

It is the edge of the visible universe.

I chose to become an astronomer

when I learned that our sun is a star.

You know, we have looked over 13 billion years into the cosmos,

and everywhere we look, we find stars like our sun

and galaxies like our Milky Way.

When you see all of these galaxies,

you can't help but feel a profound connection to the universe.

Here in our cities,

the digital world is producing a new breed of astronomer,

using telescopes and supercomputers to create detailed simulations.

They see the world differently.

Dr. Greg Poole is one of those astronomers.

He is a universe-builder.

But the glow of bright city lights of technology

drowns out our universe.

When we look for the heavens, we can't see them anymore.

That's why when Greg gathers his data for his cosmic simulations,

he too has had to pack his bags

and head for the Atacama Desert.

Greg has come to use the most powerful telescope ever built,

but his passion for photography

won't let him pass up an opportunity

to capture the Atacama's night sky.

I love this place.

It has a peacefulness that clears your mind.

The ancient Incas who lived here

organized their lives by the night sky.

The movement and position of the stars told them when to

plant and harvest their crops.

They must have felt a kind of kinship with the stars.

And when you see the night sky as they would have,

it's not hard to see why.

Greg isn't the only one that sees the world differently.

This mosquito is on the prowl for its next meal.

As it hunts,

it sees the world in a very different way than we do.

It doesn't just see visible light.

It also has an array of sensors

that detect infrared heat signatures.

That's how it can find you in the dark.

And it will.

Like the mosquito,

a new telescope called "ALMA"

is being built to detect signals outside of visible light.

ALMA is an extraordinary collaboration

between the European Southern Observatory,

North America and East Asia.

A decade of work is almost complete.

If you're thinking this looks more like a construction site

than a telescope,

you'd be right.

This is base camp.

ALMA has a completely different design from optical telescopes,

because it's looking for microwave signals.

And the best place for a microwave telescope

is high and dry at over 16,000 feet

on the top of a mountain.

But 16,000 feet is not a place you can work for very long.

The thin air and dryness make it hard to breathe

and altitude sickness can lead to unconsciousness

or even death.

So engineers here have come up with a creative solution.

They're building each individual antenna

at a low-altitude base camp.

And then each hundred-ton dish is driven up the mountain,

one giant piece at a time.

Normal vehicles aren't up to the task,

so engineers have built

the world's biggest remote-control truck.

An operator can guide each antenna into its place in the array

by using laser-guided steering and collision detectors.

These safely guide the dish onto a concrete pad,

where it will be ready to power up and get to work.

Every time I see ALMA,

I think of how far we've come.

This isn't just a big telescope.

It's an array of 66 dishes

that are connected by a giant supercomputer

to make these separate dishes act as one huge "eye in the sky.”

It makes ALMA the most powerful telescope ever built.

Bathed in its eerie, green light,

ALMA lets us peer into the farthest corners of the universe.

These are the Antennae galaxies when viewed by normal, optical light.

But ALMA sees so much more.

One of her first images was a revelation.

A huge, dense cloud of hydrogen gas

hidden within the galaxies.

Enough gas to form more than a billion stars.

Centaurus A was the first galaxy I ever studied.

Using telescopes like ALMA,

we can see a massive black hole at the center of this galaxy.

It's spewing out plasma at almost half the speed of light.

Every galaxy, nebula and star in the sky

has secrets hidden from us.

Take the Crab Nebula.

We know that it was once a star that blew up in a supernova explosion.

We know this because when we look with X-ray vision,

we can see the compact remains of that exploded star.

A pulsar.

But there is still more to the story.

Because infrared observations penetrate deep

into the dusty clouds of this nebula,

revealing elements like hydrogen, carbon, silicon and iron.

All of these observations reveal an incredible truth.

That stars are the factories of the universe,

continually creating the basic elements

necessary for everything to exist.

And as stars die,

they disperse these elements back into the universe.

We are made from the stars.

The collective knowledge of years of observations

has revealed our true connection to this cosmos

and has allowed me to create

one of the most detailed simulations of the universe ever constructed.

Each one of these points of light is a galaxy,

just like our own Milky Way.

Our universe contains billions and billions of galaxies,

and each galaxy has billions of stars.

The universe is unbelievably vast.

And even though we may be small in comparison,

we are not insignificant.

Everything we are,

every single piece of us,

everything that we see, feel, or taste,

was made possible by the stars.

It's no wonder we constantly set our sights higher

and aspire to know ever more about the universe.

NASA is building the successor to Hubble,

the James Webb Space Telescope.

It will help us see from our small perch in the Milky Way

to the very edges of the universe

and the beginning of time itself.

We live in the universe,

and the universe lives in us.

So when we look up into the night sky,

the story we see

is our own.