For decades some have suspected there might be others out there. Beings capable of communicating with us. Even visiting our world. Horizon: Strange Signals from Outer Space, BBC 2017
The Lorimer Burst: ‘This signal that was so bright and apparently so far away it was completely unlike anything they’d seen before.’ ibid. Duncan Lorimer
A deafening lack of any communication from extraterrestrials has become known as the Great Silence. ibid.
The Wow! Signal: the most famous cold case in the search for extraterrestrials. ibid.
This is the story of how the Big Bang evolved from a left-field proposition to an excepted explanation of how the universe began. Lost Horizons: The Big Bang, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, BBC 2013
At the centre of this debate were two opposing theories: the first is that the universe has always been around ... the brainchild of Fred Hoyle ... Professor Hoyle passionately disagreed with the second idea – that the universe somehow was created out of nothing in an almighty explosion. ibid.
In 1949 he [Hoyle] coined the term Big Bang. ibid.
But as soon as you delve deeper into the atom things get stranger. Hidden within the maze of mathematics were the descriptions of an array of sub-atomic particles no-one had ever seen before. ibid.
It has been estimated that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in all the world. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Everything & Nothing: Everything, BBC 2011
The universe they were seeing was revealing itself to be one of dynamic complexity. A universe of natural organic motion. A place of endless wonder. ibid.
Dotted around the sky Herschel and others had been observing strange cloud-like objects known as nebulae. Some of these nebulae seemed to have distinctive form and complex structure. Some astronomers began to suggest a radical idea. Perhaps the Milky Way wasn’t everything there was. ibid.
They had no way of measuring distances in outer space. ibid.
One of the great unsung heroes of science. She worked at the Harvard College Observatory. And her name was Henrietta Leavitt. Leavitt’s job was to count and catalogue the stars. ibid.
The talented, passionate and eccentric Hubble rapidly made a name for himself in the field of astronomy. ibid.
Andromeda was indeed an island universe ... We now estimate Andromeda contains over a trillion stars. And it’s just one of a vast multitude of galaxies. ibid.
What is Space? ... Does Space only exist when there is stuff in it? ibid.
The properties of Space were first described by the mathematician Euclid over two thousand years ago. ibid.
What is nothing? It is an extraordinarily difficult question to answer. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Everything & Nothing: Nothing
Emptiness makes up almost the entire universe. ibid.
It’s about Reality at the very furthest reaches of human perception. ibid.
To Aristotle the concept of nothingness was deeply disturbing. It seemed to present all sorts of problems and paradoxes. He came to believe Nature would for ever fight against the creation of true nothingness. As he put it, Nature abhors a vacuum. ibid.
A vacuum is Nature’s default state. ibid.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle ... The more I know about where something is, the less I know about how it is moving. In the Quantum world I cannot at the same time know both these quantities exactly. ibid.
Heisenberg showed in his mathematics that this is an inescapable feature of reality on this scale. ibid.
If particles can pop into existence, where do they go? ibid.
By 1928 Physics was struggling with a big problem. The two most important theories that describe how the universe worked didn’t agree with each other. ibid.
So it seems nothingness is a seething mass of virtual particles. ibid.
Nothing really has shaped everything. And what’s more, we now have a way to see this. ibid.
The teeming seething activity of the vacuum of nothing, and the quantum fluctuations with it were the seeds - seeds which grew into the universe we see today. ibid.
De Revolutionibus Orbium Coalestium Published in 1543 by the Polish Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus ... All the planets including the Earth go around the sun ... Copernicus’s book is full of clues that hint at other past sources. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Science & Islam, BBC 2009
What’s astonishing about the accuracy of Al-Battani’s measurements is that he had no telescope. ibid.
When we move to scales beyond our imagination, the universe behaves in extraordinary ways. Jim Al-Khalili, Secrets of Size: Atoms to Supergalaxies II: Going Big, BBC 2022
The distance between the Earth and Sun is actually a very significant figure in astronomy. ibid.
It’s thought that most if not all stars have heliospheres. ibid.
It’s fairly astounding that at the end of the twentieth century we actually don’t know what most of the universe is made of. Neil Spooner, Sheffield University
Astrophysicists believe that Space and Time began 15 billion years ago in one shattering moment: the Big Bang. They are now uncovering the entire life story of the universe from its cataclysmic birth to its final extraordinary death. Unfolding Universe, Discovery 2002
Edwin Hubble took the first steps toward forecasting the fate of our entire universe ... He made the astronomical discovery of the century: that the universe was expanding. Universe: Big Bang
Rather than slowing down the universe is speeding up. The galaxies are moving apart faster than ever before. ibid.
Venus and Mercury: two hostile planets that in the history of universe have suffered very different fates ... Both demonstrate the horrors of the planets that have gone horribly wrong. The Universe s1e1: Inner Planets, History 2007
It turns out Venus is less an exotic sister to Earth and more like an evil twin. ibid.
As a result of this retrograde rotation the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. ibid.
Venus is the hottest planet in the whole solar system. ibid.
Carbon Dioxide – CO2 – makes up 95% of the Venuvian atmosphere. ibid.
Venus has many more active volcanoes than we do. ibid.
The atmospheric pressure on Venus is 90 times greater than Earth. ibid.
Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. The planet has no known moons. Mercury has no atmosphere. And it’s known as a Naked Eye planet ... Mercury is the solar system’s tiniest planet. ibid.
The planet orbits the sun in eighty-eight Earth-days. ibid.
A year on Mercury is shorter than a day on the planet. And this sluggish rotation gives Mercury somewhat peculiar weather. ibid.
On Mercury you wouldn’t be able to hear the eruption. ibid.
In the distant corners of our Solar System are the violent ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Blanketed with smoky hazes these outer planets are turbulent and unpredictable. Neptune suffers the fastest winds in our solar system ... Uranus’s inner swarm of moons dash around the planet in less than a day. The Universe s1e11: The Outer Planets
In 1930 at the age of twenty-four Tombaugh captured an image of an object that seemed to validate Lowell’s predictions. The discovery was announced to the world. ibid.
Even though Pluto wasn’t Planet X could it still be classified as a planet? ibid.
At its closest, Pluto is 2.7 billion miles from Earth. ibid.
Would Eris officially become our tenth planet? Or would Pluto-sized objects be reclassified as a whole? ibid.
Our Solar System now officially consists of eight planets. ibid.
Scientific interest in Pluto hasn’t waned. Even as the vote was being taken in Prague a Nasa spacecraft called New Horizons was already on its way to exploring this far off world. ibid.
Five planetary rings: features that had only previously been seen on Saturn. ibid.
Neptune – a gleaming sapphire some three billion miles from the sun. ibid.
Neptune rotates much faster than Earth and this rapid spin helps to create violent winds. ibid.
Neptune had a great dark spot in its southern hemisphere. ibid.
Scientists were in for another surprise: the largest storm on the planet – the dark spot – simply vanished from the atmosphere. ibid.
Neptune has a complex system of moons - thirteen have been discovered so far. ibid.