Original subtitles

Brian Cox: 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 incomprehensibl y 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.

Neil Armstrong: [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...

B uzz a ld ri n: Magnificent desolation.

- Beautiful view. - Armstro n g: Isn't that something?

♪ Take me away ♪

William an ders: For all the people back on earth,

the crew oprollo 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'j

and there was light.

And god saw the light that it was good.

Cox: 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?

Cox: 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 786, 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.

Man 1: Go ahead, Charlie.

Man 2: Okay, we have a go for release,

and we 're gonna be a minute late.

0ka y, Charlie.

Cox: In the quest to find the origin of the universe,

we need a time machine.

Man 2: This is discovery.

Man 1: We concur, Charlie.

Cox: 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.

Cox: And carry us back...

Towards the dawn of time.

Man 1: Okay, Charlie.

Cox: 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 7,300 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—z7 7,

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 itsjourney 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 itsjourney, the earth formed.

And then, during the whole history of our planet,

it completed the last third of itsjourney and entered our telescopes.

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

Gn—z7 7 was one of the very first galaxies,

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

shortly after the big bang.

Gn—z7 7 was a strange galaxy by today's standards.

T wenty-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 yea rs 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.

Cox: 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.

Stars that were once a million times the size of our planet,

crushed to the size of the earth,

subjecting the carbon to extreme pressures,

and making white dwarfs, in effect, stellar diamonds.

These diamond stars are critically balanced,

able to resist the relentless inwards pull of gra vity.

But only just.

And that can make them ticking time bombs.

In 2078, hubble was in orbit.

The telescope focused on a galaxy far, far away,

Hunting for a distant white dwarf

that we knew was coming to the end of its extraordinary life.

For millions of years, the white dwarf had remained hidden,

Locked in orbit around a much biggest star,

a red giant.

As they circled each other,

the white dwarf's gravity drew in gas and plasma from the red giant.

The mass of the white dwarf increased...

Until it approached a critical limit...

Known as the chandrasekhar mass...

And surpassed it...

Triggering a colossal thermonuclear reaction.

The white dwarf detonated...

In a gigantic explosion called a supernova

That millions of light years away,

was detected by hubble.

That white dwarf star,

or to be more precise, the supernova that it became, has a name.

It's called sn 2078gv.

And even though it is 70 million light years away,

it is so bright that we could make a movie on it.

I mean, imagine now, this is a star the size of a planet

ending its life with a flash of light

that's as bright as five billion suns.

Now, although supernova like these only shine for a few days,

they cast a profound light out across the universe.

We've given a name to the sorts of superno va hubble saw.

They're called type 7a supernovae

and they're common enough to allow us to map the evolution of the universe.

Type 1A supernovae really are nature's gift to us

because they all explode in the same way.

That means that they all shine with the same brightness.

And that means that if we see one that's dimmer, it must be farther away.

And that allows us to measure

the distance to the galaxy that contains the supernova.

And because they shine so bright,

we can see them tens of billions of light years away.

That means that we can measure the distance to galaxies

all the way out towards the edge of the observable universe.

But there's other information encoded in the light.

When we look at the light from distant supernova explosions,

we see something very interesting, and very surprising,

because the light from every single supernova

that's not in our neighbourhood is redder that it should be.

The further away the supernova, the redder the light.

It's called a redshift.

Now, light has a wavelength,

and the longer the wavelength, the redder the light.

So, the explanation is that,

during the time the light has been travelling from the supernova to us,

space itself has been stretching, and that stretched the light.

And that means that the universe is expanding.

In our quest to find the origin of the universe, this is a vital clue.

Because if the universe is expanding today,

then, tomorrow, everything will be farther apart.

And it follows that, yesterday, everything was closer together.

So, if we want to understand how it all began,

we have to wind back time

through billions of yesterdays.

We have to go back to a time before the earth and the sun,

To a time before the galaxies,

And all the while, the universe is shrinking,

getting ever smaller, denser, and hotter,

until we arrive at the most famous moment in the history of the universe.

Our universe is a place of infinite variety.

There are galaxies of exquisite beauty,

stars of stupendous power,

and planets... Countless brave new worlds.

Galaxies, stars, and planets

are the things that make our universe remarkable.

They are the things that make it more than a barren expanse.

How did a universe of light and life

emerge from the cataclysm of the big bang?

Unfortunately, we don't know.

We don't even know if the universe had a beginning.

But we do know a great deal about how the universe evolved

from a very different state a long time in the past.

We know that 13.8 billion years ago,

this space that I'm standing in now and the space you're standing in now

and all the space out to the edge of the observable universe

containing two trillion galaxies was very hot and very dense,

and has been expanding ever since.

Now, that implies that way back, everything was closer together,

everything was contained in a very small speck.

But how small was that speck?

How did it come to be?

Well, we used to think that the universe emerged in that state,

very hot and very dense at the beginning of time,

and we used to call that the big bang.

But now, we strongly suspect that the universe existed before that.

And in that sense, it is possible to speak of a time before the big bang.

So, what was the universe like before the big bang?

The first thing to say is that it was very strange.

There was no matter.

All that existed was spacetime

and energy, an ocean of energy,

almost still, but gently rippling.

Before the big bang,

the universe was a cold, alien, featureless place.

Picture it as a near still ocean of energy filling the void.

Although it contained no structures,

that energy did have an effect on space. It caused it to stretch.

Not the gentle expansion we see today,

but unimaginably violent expansion.

That expansion is known as inflation.

Think of a speck, a tiny, insignificant patch of space,

Insignificant, except that many billions of years later,

this speck would have grown to become our entire observable universe.

The speck expanded at a phenomenal rate,

an exponential expansion...

That lasted...

Just a few billion, billion, billion, billionths of a second.

Now, the speck continued to expand

until it was about the size of this cave.

And then, inflation drew rapidly to a close,

and all the energy in that ocean that was driving the expansion

was dumped into space and formed the ingredients

of everything in our observable universe.

I mean, imagine that. A space about this size

filled with enough energy to form two trillion galaxies.

That's what we call the big bang.

So the big bang was not,

as we commonly imagine, some kind of explosion.

It was actually a transformation of energy into matter.

And the fossilised remains of these momentous events,

the memory of the rippling ocean of energy that drove inflation

became imprinted into our universe.

In fact, these fossilised ripples shaped our universe,

influencing where each galaxy and star emerged,

each planet and moon.

But how do we know all this?

How do we know that there was a big bang?

How do we know there were

ripples in an ocean of energy before the big bang?

The answer is...

Cox: That we've seen them.

Cox: Planck scanned the entire cosmos

looking for light.

Not light from galaxies or stars,

but light from the beginning of time.

This is a photograph of the distant past.

It's the most ancient light in the universe.

This is light that's travelled for almost 13.8 billion years to reach us.

It's a photograph of the entire sky,

a celestial sphere, if you like, every direction that we can look,

and it's been laid flat so we can see it all.

It's called the cosmic microwave background radiation,

and it's an almost featureless glow.

There were no stars and no galaxies in this universe.

Now, you might ask the question,

"well, if there were no stars and there were no galaxies,

"then, where's the light coming from?"

The answer is, the light is coming from the universe itself.

Because this is only a few hundred thousand years after the big bang,

so, the universe was hot.

So, what you're seeing here is the afterglow of the big bang.

The most revealing thing about this picture is the detail,

The variation.

This pattern is one of

the most important discoveries in all of human history

because it represents one of the necessary steps

in the story of how we came to be here.

See, that still ocean of energy that drove the rapid expansion

of space during inflation could not be entirely still.

There had to be ripples in the ocean.

It's a consequence of the laws of nature, as we understand them.

And those ripples in the ocean were imprinted into our universe

through the big bang that emerged as those areas

of slightly different density in the young universe.

And then, as the universe continued to expand and cool,

the regions that were slightly denser collapsed

to form the first stars and galaxies.

50, without those ripples, we would not exist.

But there's one more extraordinary thing about these ripples.

And that's the fact that we predicted them

before we knew they existed.

And then, we ventured into space to test our theory.

Planck's observation of the afterglow of the big bang is strong evidence

for our outlandish creation saga,

the story of the speck, the ripples, and inflation.

These ripples, then, are the seeds of our creation,

and we dared to guess that they exist

from our vantage point here, on a small planet

13.8 billion years after the moment of creation.

And then, because we're scientists, we decided to launch a spacecraft

out into space, and capture the oldest light in the universe.

And we saw that our guess was correct.

We dared to imagine a time before the dawn,

and we proved that our creation story is not a myth.

So, here is the creation story as told by science.

In the beginning, there was an ocean of energy

that drove a rapid expansion of space known as inflation.

There were ripples in the ocean.

As inflation ended, the ocean of energy was converted into matter,

then the big bang.

And the pattern of the ripples was imprinted into our universe...

As regions of slightly different density

in the hydrogen and helium gas that formed shortly after the big bang.

The denser regions of gas collapsed...

To form the first stars...

And the first galaxies.

And nine billion years later,

a new star formed in the milky way...

The sun.

The star was joined by eight planets...

Including earth.

And nearly 73.8 billion years after it all began,

we emerged...

Blinking into the light.

Man: "To see the earth as it truly is,

”small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats,

”is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together,

”brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold,

”brothers who know now they are truly brothers. ”

Cox: We all have moments of wonder.

We all dream.

Our thoughts float free, soaring across the earth

and out into a canopy of stars.

In our most reflective moments, I think we all understand that

small, though we are, we are connected to the universe.

We are collections of simple atoms,

but atoms arranged remarkably,

with the urge to explore the universe, and to comprehend it,

And celebrate our own place in this great cosmic saga.

And if we follow that saga back, it takes us on a pilgrimage...

To a time before the dawn,

And to strange ripples that existed in a universe before our own.

I think we all must wonder about the meaning of it all.

What does it mean to be human? Why do we exist?

Why does anything exist at all?

These do not sound like scientific questions.

They sound like questions for philosophy or theology, even.

But I think they are scientific questions

because they're questions about nature, they're questions about the universe

and the way to understand the universe is to observe it.

And we've seen ripples in the most ancient light in the universe,

laid down by events that happened before the big bang.

We've seen billions of galaxies written across the sky in a giant cosmic web.

And we've seen thousands of planets orbiting around distant stars,

worlds beyond imagination.

Now, the lesson to me is clear.

We won't answer the deepest questions by being introverted, by looking inwards.

We will answer them by lifting our gaze above the horizon

and looking outwards into the universe beyond the stars.

We used to look to the sky and see only questions.

Now, we're beginning to see answers.

Kimberly arcan d: Hubble is a very special telescope.

It's kind of like the celebrity telescope

and for a really good reason.

It was the first time that we were able to launch such a powerful,

large optical telescope into space.

Mason: The earth's atmosphere kind of blurs out lots of our images.

And so, by putting the telescope in space,

we get these precise, crystal clear images of our universe.

Man: Three, two, one, and lift-off

of space shuttle discovery with the hubble space telescope,

our window on the universe.

Carole haswell: The feeling that you get when the space shuttle takes off,

there's just a sort of... The sound and the vibrations,

it's just incredibly awe-inspiring.

Man: All rocket boosters have done their job.

Man 1: Go ahead Charlie.

Man 2: Okay, we have a go for release,

and we 're gonna be a minute late.

Haswell: We were all sort of sitting on the edge of our seats,

waiting for the very first images

where hubble is showing us what it can see in the universe,

and that turned into an unexpectedly long wait.

Newsreader: Engineers have discovered

that the giant telescope has a warped mirror,

which means the images sent back to NASA are distorted.

Haswell: We had this very, very precisely engineered mirror,

but it had been very precisely engineered to the wrong shape.

For the first three years in the life of the hubble, it wasn't producing

the wonderful images that everyone had expected.

Haswe ll: The solution was the same solution

to the fact that, as a kid, I couldn't read the blackboard.

The solution was basically to fit the telescope

with corrective optics, or something analogous to spectacles.

Man: And we have a go for main engine start.

Five, four, three, two, one,

and we have lift off lift off of the space shuttle endeavou r

on an ambitious mission to service the hubble space telescope.

Jeff Hoffman: It's kind ofamazing that we have to be able

to position this optical equipment to an accuracy of better than a millimetre,

something that we 'd have trouble doing even on the ground, in your bare hands.

Man: Firm handshake with mr hubble's telescope.

Woman: We copy that...

The vice president and I wanted to call you and congratulate you

on one of the most spectacular space missions in our history.

Arcand: And when hubble opened its eyes after they were corrected,

the views that we were able to get from that telescope changed forever

the way we understood and visualised the universe that we live in.

The pictures are remarkable. The trouble with hubble is over.

David kaiser: It's really hard to remember what it was like

before we had the hubble space telescope.

We've gotten so used to these extraordinary photographs

of the near, of the far, of the very, very far.

Mason: I think, any time I look at a hubble image,

my mind gets blown a little bit.

I was the kid that had, like, printouts of hubble images in their locker.

Anybody, whether they have the heart of an astronomer or soul of a poet,

they're going to find things in the images from hubble

that just appeal to them from the point of pure wonder.

Haswell: Hubble has not only done the things

that people expected and hoped it would,

but it's actually done a lot of things

that nobody would have dared to dream of.

Kaiser: One of the biggest discoveries

that came from using the hubble space telescope

is that, not only is our universe getting bigger,

it's not just expanding and stretching, it's actually getting bigger faster.

We can well imagine that the universe is going to continue to expand

and get so big that, eventually, the galaxies will just disappear.

They'll be so far away from us and moving so rapidly that we have no hope

of seeing any light from them, and that's a real possibility

for what could happen in the future.

Kaiser: We still have these mysteries of

what's really driving this new phase of accelerated expansion,

and we're building new tools to try to refine those questions.

Larry gladney: The hubble telescope which was a marvel for its time

is really far behind what we would design today.

It will be completely outclassed by the next generation telescope,

the James webb space telescope, which will see even deeper than hubble.

Haswell: And that will give us unprecedented detailed views.

We can use it to see through some of the very dense,

murky dust clouds and actually see stars in the process of forming.

We also can use it to look further and further back in time.

That's going to be a very, very exciting story which is going to unfold,

I think, within the next three or four years.

Hubble is still king because it's still a big observatory

in comparison to what we've had in space before.

Hubble is a unique instrument for making discoveries that

no other telescope could possibly ha ve made.

I think, when you think about an image of space,

when you think about space, you think of a hubble image.