WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE (2011)

Wonders of the Universe (2011)
By Brian Cox

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonders_of_the_Universe
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1854226/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/wonders-of-the-universe/


Episode.1 - DESTINY [Time]

Excerpts:
"Today it's filled with over 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars."


"(universe) is woven into the very fabric of the cosmos. Time."


"This film is about the greatest expanses of time
The deep time that shapes the universe."


"the fate of the universe is determined by the passage of time."


"our entire solar system is traveling on an unimaginably vast orbit,
spinning around the center of our galaxy.
It takes 250 million years to make just one circuit of the Milky Way."


Arrow of Time
"We are compelled to travel into the future.
And that's because the arrow of time dictates that as each moment passes,
things change.
And once these changes have happened, they are never undone."


"when we look up into the sky... we're looking back in time
because the light takes time (to reach us)."


"In fact, this is the oldest single object that we've ever seen"
GRB 090423 (Wolf-Rayet star) situated in the constellation of Leo.
"and the light from that red dot has been traveling to us
 for almost the entire history of the universe. ... 13 billion years ago.
600 million years after the Big Bang."


"Our sun is just one of 200 billion stars in our galaxy."
"Our galaxy is one of 100 billion in the observable Universe."
high entropy = more ways to rearrange
low entropy = less ways to rearrange


'In six billion years our sun will explode.'summarize:Proxima Centuary (closest star to Sun, 4.2 light years), type stars will die in end. And when they die the universe will be 100 trillion years old. And there will be nothing any 'bright' thing in the sky, only black holes.


"after nearly 14 billion years, we believe there are currently no black dwarfs in the universe."


"after the 'unimaginable period of time', even the black holes will have evaporated."
... when i say 'unimaginable period of time,' i really mean it.
It's 10,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years."


"As a fraction of the lifespan of the universe,
as measured from its beginning to the evaporation of the last black hole,
life, as we know it, is only possible for
one thousandth of a billion billion billionth billion billion billionth billion billion billionth of a per cent."

_______________________________

Episode.2 - STARDUST [Temperature]

Excerpts:

"This is Himalayan limestone,
the rock out of which much of this magnificent mountain range is made.
... limestone is made primarily out of the bodies, the shells, of dead sea creatures - coral and polyps - and when they die,
they are put uner immense pressures and squashed
and eventually form limestone.

So the Himalayas were once living creatures."



"Every atom in my body was once part of something else,
so an ancient tree or a dinosaur or a rock, in fact,
definitely, a rock.
And the reason that the rocks of the Earth
can become living things and then living things will return
to the rocks of the Earth is because everything
is made of the same basic ingredients.
These ingredients are chemical elements,
the building blocks of everything on Earth."
nearset star - Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years from Earth.
nearest galaxy - Andromeda, 2.5 million years from Earth.


"Polaris is 430 light years away."


"It's in stars like our sun that the elements are assembled."
They're the only places in the universe hot enough and dense enough to fuse atoms together.
Even then, only a fraction of the star reaches the extreme temp. necessary.

The sun is 6000 Celsius at its surface, not nearly hot enough to power fusion.
But deep below where temp. reaches 15m degrees,
the sun fuses H and He at a furious rate."


"Betelgeuse, a red giant star in our galaxy.
"Its only about 600 light years away, but it's the size that's astonishing."
Betelgeuse

Orion Belt.
Betelgeuse is extemely unstable,
because its dimmed by about 15% in the last 10 years.
Now astronomers think this star could go supernova at any moment
that could mean anytime in next million years,
but equally it could explode tomorrow.
And Betelgeuse is only 600 light years away.
And when it goest the Betelgeuse will be incredibly bright
it'll be by far the brightest star in the sky.
It may shine as brightly as full moon.
It'll be almsot the second Sun in the daylight.

In the single instance,
Betelgeuse will release more energy that our Sun will produce in its entire life time.


The Orion Nebula is the one of the wonders of the universe

"Every C atom in my hand, every atom of carbon in every living thing on the planet
was produced in the heart of a dying star."


"All the gold mined from the earth in all of human history
would only just fill three Olympic-size swimming pools."


"Ant it's that scarcity that makes gold valuable, but gold is just one of many rare elements.


"There are over 60 elements heavier than iron in the universe.
and some are valuable, like gold, silver, platinum. some are vital for life, like copper and zinc, and some are just useful, like uranium, tin and lead.
But across the universe, tere are vanishingly small amounts of those heavy elements.
The reason for that scarcity is that creating substantial amounts of the heaviest amounts of the heaviest elements requires some of the rarest conditions in the universe.
In a galaxy of 100 billion stars, these conditions wille exist
on average for less than a minute in every century."



"Although on average there's one big supernova in each galaxy every century,
there hasn't been one in the Milky Way since the birth of modern science.
The last was in 1604, so we're long overdue.
Astronomers are now searching the skies for the star that is most likely to go supernova.
And amongst the leading candidates there's a familiar name.
This is the constellation of Orion and this is Betelgeuse,
and we know it's extremely unstable because it's dimmed by about 15% in the last ten years.
Now, astronomers think that this star could go supernova at any moment.
That could mean any time in the nexy million years but equally it could explode tomorrow,
and Betelgeuse is only 600 light years away.
When it goes, Betelgeuse will be incredibly bright.
it'll be by far the brightest star in the sky.
it may shine as brightly as a full moon.
It will be almost a second sun in the daylight."


"When we look out into space, we are looking into our own origins."

"Because we are truly children of the stars."

___________________________

Episode.3 - FALLING [Gravity]

Excerpts:

"So the time it takes the moon to spin once
is almost the same as the time it takes to orbit the Earth."


"This is Andromeda, a spiral galaxy roughly the same size and mass as the Milky Way.
This island of over a trillion stars sits over 2.5 million light years away,
but every hour that gap shrinks by half a million kilometers."
"Whilst most galaxies have been rushing away from each other
ever since they formed just after the Big Bang,
some galaxies formed so close together that they are locked
in gravitational embrace and the Milky Way and Andromeda are two such galaxies.
and Computer simulations suggest that they will collide together
in around three billion years time."


"The body with the strongest gravity in our solar system is the sun.
... it has a gravitational pull at its surface 28 times that of the Earth."


"On 4th July 1054 AD, a bright new star appeared,
and it outshone every other star in the night sky for over three weeks.
it was so bright that it was visible in the daytime."
"We now know that that new star was in fact the explosive death
of an old star, a supernova explosion..(of "Crab Nebula that the Chacoans saw in these skies a thousand years ago")"TWO FORCES
"Throughout a star's life, there is a constant battle between energy
pushing out and gravity pushing in.
As long as the star burns, the tow forces balance each other out. "Atom and Empty Space
"And whilst almost all the mass is contained in the nucleus, it is incredibly tiny compared to the size of an atom. if this (pebble) is the atom the elecoron is something like a kilometer away.
So that means that matter is almsot entirely empty space.
I'm full of empty space. The Earth is full of empty space.
Everything you can see in the universe is pretty much just empty space.
So if everything in the universe is made up of atoms, and atoms are 99.9999% empty space, then most of the universe is empty."


"Gravity is NOT a force pulling us towards the center of the Earth like a giant magnet.
In a sense, gravity isn't really a force at all."


"The moon is falling into the valley created by the mass of the Earth.
The Earth is falling into the valley created by the mass of the Sun.
And the solar system is falling into the valley in space-time created by our galaxy.
And our galaxy is falling towards other galaxies in the universe."


"Our sun takes around 200 million years to make its way around the Milky Way.
One of these S stars takes only 15 years to go around the center of the galaxy."


"gravity will eventually crush matter out of existence."

________________________________

Episode.4 - MESSENGERS [Light]

Excerpts:


LIGHT
"light is a messenger from long-forgotten era,
and contained in the light from these faraway places
is the story of our universe's origin and evolution."


"Through light we can stare back
across the entire history of the universe
and discover how it all began,
and ultimately
see how light
breathed life
into us."



""Solstice" is Latin for "sun stands still""
because as the Earth orbits around the sun and the year passes,



"On Earth, on a night like this,
there are about 2,500 stars
are visible to the naked eye."


"Every star we see in the night sky
is a sun that sits within our own galaxy, the Milky Way."


"The Milky Way is home to 200 billion stars."


"On Earth, the speed of sound, depending on altitude
is around 1200 km per hour known as Mach I."


"Danish astronomer Ole Romer, realised that it takes time for light to travel from Jupiter to Earth...
So Romer had discovered that light doesn't travel instantaneously.
It moves through space with a finte speed."


"We now know that the light travels at precisely 299,792,458 meteres (or 300,000 km / 186,000 miles) per second.
That means in the time that it takes for me to click my fingers, light has travelled around the Earth 7 times, or that it travesl ten million million kilometeres in one year,
and that's the yardstick that we use to measure the universe,
as 10 m m km is aprox. one light year."
Andromeda      =     2.5 million light years
Centaurus A     =     10 million light years
?                        =    14 million light years
NGC 520          =    100 million light years



"There is vast amount of information and detail contained withing every beam of light.
And that information is written in COLOR."
Interpretation of BIG BANG THEORY
"The image is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field."
..picture taken by the Hubble space Telescope over a period of eleven days.. constellation of Orion.. the most distant galaxies in that image are over 13 billion years away.. it saw galaxies glow in all different colours. But when it peered to the very edge of the visible universe.. and saw that every galaxy glowed RED.
...
When light is emitted by a distan star or galaxy, its wavelength deoesn't have to stay fixed,
it can be squashed or stretched,
and when light's stretched, its wavelength increases and it moves to the red end of the spectrum.
So the interpretation of th fact that the most distant galaxies appear red
is that the space in between them and us has stretched
during the time it's taken the light to journey over that vas distance.
That means that our entire universe is EXPANDING.
.. what an expanding universe implies,.. if the galaxies are all rushing away from each other,
that means that if you rewind time, then they must have been closer toghether in the past, and actually, if you just keep rewinding then you find that at some point in the past,
all the galaxies we can see in the sky were quite literllay on top of each other.
That implies that the universe may have had a beginning,
and that is the Big Bang Theory."


"Visible lights of the universe are just a tiny fraction of all light in the universe.
Beyond the visible spectrum, our world is illuminated by invisible light."


"Well, heat is nothing more than a form of light, although we don't normally call it light.
it's actually infrared light, and the only difference between infrared and visible light is the wavelength. Infrared has a longer wavelength than visible light."


________________________________