Find out what astronomers have been learning when they look deep into the core of giant galaxies. In nearly every one, they are turning up supermassive black holes that are tearing space to shreds, blasting away at their environments, and raging against the relentless force of gravity that created them in the first place.

We can build powerful rockets able to carry people and machines into orbit, or even vault them to the moon. But our fastest spacecraft don’t hold a candle to the distances that define Interstellar Flight. So what’s on the drawing boards? What futuristic designs and fuel options promise to one day transport us to the stars, and how practical are they?

Are the universe and its physical laws so fine-tuned that the rise of life is inevitable? Or is life a fluke, a lucky roll of cosmic dice? We look for the answer in the rise of two important components of life, dust and water. It turns out that the universe is laden with water, a byproduct of dust kicked out and spread around by supernovas and black holes.

In the far reaches of the Galapagos archipelago there is a remote island – Darwin Island. Here, a mysterious parade of giant whale sharks passes by. All of them are pregnant females, about to give birth. What has drawn them here? Where are they going?

Galapagos: Realm of Giant Sharks follows a group of researchers who have travelled out to Darwin Island to begin following these dinosaurs of the sea wherever they travel across the globe. But placing satellite tracking devices on giant sharks is not always easy. Steel spear tips bounce off, dangerous currents intervene, and the sharks can deliver bone-crushing swipes with their tails.

In an exciting blend of science and natural history filmmaking, Galapagos: Realm of Giant Sharks uses action-packed, high-resolution photography to draw audiences into the world of one of the ocean’s largest and least understood creatures.

Our latest episode of Cosmic Journeys. We ask the question: Are the universe and its physical laws so fine-tuned that the rise of life is inevitable? Or is life a fluke, a lucky roll of cosmic dice? The film investigates the rise of one important component of life, water. It turns out that the universe is laden with water, a byproduct of dust kicked out and spread around by supernovas and black holes.

A fascinating new simulation from NASA shows how astronomers might use black holes to look for signs of a theoretical dark matter particle called a WIMP. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. When they get whipped up by a black hole, annihilation rates would soar, and we’d be able to see them.

The episode of Cosmic Journeys explores the intersection of paleoclimate and current climate science. Through its turbulent history, Antarctica has played an important role in the evolution of planet Earth. This role will likely continue as a warming global climate begins to eat away at the ice sheets that cover the continent. The fate of the world as we know it is linked to the fate of Antarctica.

“The sun & the stars dear, they’ll shine on our highway. They’ll shine on our home here, by my highway of light.”

Images:
European Southern Observatory

Music:
“Moonlight Hall” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

They are eruptions so vast, so Earth-shattering, they have changed the history of our planet. Climate collapse. Toxic turmoil. Mass extinction. Worse than a killer asteroid, or nuclear war, they are Earth’s most destructive Supervolcanoes.

North America, the time was six hundred and forty thousand years ago, long before humans arrived on the continent. Amid one of nature’s great mountain building projects, the Rockies, vast columns of smoke began to rise high into the atmosphere. And soon a smokey haze wrapped the globe.

A thick blanket of ashe spread over the western United States. Geologists have traced this event to a depression in the land known as a caldera, in the heart of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Today, we venture to Yellowstone to admire its spectacles of steam and boiling mud.

Visitors to Yellowstone may never suspect they are atop one of the world’s largest active volcanoes.

The last time it blew, it sent an estimated 1000 cubic kilometers of dirt, rocks, ashe, dust, and soot into the atmosphere. But that’s small compared to Earth’s largest super volcanoes. Find out what made Toba, Siberian Traps, Deccan Traps and other super eruptions so powerful.

Revel in this spectacular commemorative image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, courtesy of HubbleCast.

Hubble was launched in orbit on 24 April 1990 as the first space telescope of its kind. For two and a half decades, it has beamed back data and images that have changed our understanding of the Universe and how it came to be.

This amazing image of the star cluster Westerlund 2 is a giant cluster of about 3000 stars. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina.

The stellar nursery is enshrouded by dust, but Hubble’s Camera peered through the dusty veil in near-infrared light, giving us a clear view of its inner workings. The image resolves the dense concentration of stars in the center, about 10 light-years across.

The cluster is only about two million years old, but contains some of the brightest, hottest and most massive stars ever discovered. Some of the heftiest stars are carving deep cavities in the surrounding material by unleashing torrents of ultraviolet light and high speed streams of charged particles, known as stellar winds. These are etching away the enveloping hydrogen gas cloud in which Continue reading Hubble Space Telescope Celebrates 25 Years in Space →