The death star.

Out in deepest space lurks a force of almost unimaginable power. Explosions of extraordinary violence, are blasting through the Universe every day. If one ever struck our Solar System it would destroy our Sun and all the planets.

For years no one could work out what was causing these awesome explosions. Now scientists think they have identified the culprit. It's the most extreme object ever found in the Universe; they have christened it a 'hypernova'.

The death star.

Alien planet.

This CGI or computer animated documentary takes place on Darwin IV, a planet 6.5 light years from earth, with 2 suns and 60% of Earth's gravity. Having identified Darwin as a world that could support life, Earth sends a pilot mission consisting of the Mothership Von Braun and three probes: Balboa, Da Vinci, and Newton. This robotic fleet is responsible for finding and assessing any life forms on Darwin IV.

Initially, the expectation is to find microscopic life, but the probes soon find themselves in the middle of a developed ecosystem teeming with diversity of life of all sizes.

The drama on Darwin IV is motivated by real science missions, such as the NASA Origins Program and the NASA / JPL Planet-Finder Mission, as well as the European Space Agency's Darwin Project.

"Alien Planet " is a cosmic expedition along side Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Jack Horner, Craig Venter, and George Lucas, and NASA's Chief Scientist Jim Garvin. No longer just the domain of science fiction, "Alien Planet" dramatizes an exciting and possible answer to what alien life really looks like and when we'll find it.

Alien planet.

Titan, a place like home?

BBC Documentary about the Huygens mission to Titan, which landed there in January 2005.

Titan, a place like home?

The nature of existence.

This is an "ex nihilo" derivation of existence as the geometric embodiment of a simple integer count. Possible mechanisms are given for the nuclear, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational interactions as well as cosmological observations.

The nature of existence.

The Hawking Paradox.

A documentary about the universe and Stephen Hawkings role in understanding it. But behind the public face lies an argument that has been raging for almost 30 years.

In 1976 he published a paper in Physical Review D called, "The breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse". In this paper, Hawking argued that it wasn't just the black hole that disappeared.

He said that all the information about everything that had ever been inside the black hole disappeared, too. In everyday life, we're used to losing information - but according to physics this isn't supposed to happen; according to physics, information is never really lost, it just gets harder to find.

The reason physicists cling on to the idea that information can't be lost is that it's their link with either the past or the future. If information is lost then science can never know the past or predict the future. There are limits to what science can know.

Since then the "information paradox" has come to be seen as one of the most fundamental and most difficult problems in physics.

The Hawking Paradox.

Most of our universe is missing.

Most of our Universe is missing.


Dark matter and dark energy are two of the most vexing problems in science today. Together they dominate the universe, comprising some 96 percent of all mass and energy. But nobody knows what either is.

Dark matter was invoked decades ago to explain why galaxies hold together. Given regular matter alone, galaxies might never have formed, and today they would fly apart. So there must be some unknown stuff that forms invisible clumps to act as gravitational glue.

Dark energy hit the scene in the late 1990s when astronomers discovered the universe is not just expanding, but racing out at an ever-faster pace. Some hidden force, a sort of anti-gravity, must be pushing galaxies apart from one another in this accelerated expansion.

Richard Muller - the big bang, dark matter, dark energy.

Cosmological origins: the universe, galaxies, and stars.

The March 13, 2007 Volunteer Enrichment Committee lecture at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science by Curator of Space Science Dr. Ka Chun Yu.

This lecture covers the 13.7 billion year history of the Universe, including topics on cosmology (relativity, the expansion of the universe, the aftermath of the Big Bang, inflation, the cosmic microwave background radiation, formation of the elements), and the evolution of the universe's contents afterwards (large structure formation, the evolution of galaxies, the roles of dark matter and dark energy). The talk ends with star formation covering molecular clouds.

Cosmological origins: the universe, galaxies, and stars.

The big question...

In this 20 min program narated by Stephen Hawking, we take look at the origin of the universe as is understood by modern science and largely thanks to Hawking's contribution to this field of research.

The big question - How did the universe begin?

Doppler effect & The Big Bang.

This lecture is part of a serie of 36 video lectures on Electricity and Magnetism, by Professor Walter Lewin, they were recorded on the MIT campus during the Spring of 2002. Prof. Lewin is well-known at MIT and beyond for his dynamic and engaging lecture style.

The Big Bang is a cosmological model of the universe that has become well supported by several independent observations. After Edwin Hubble discovered that galactic distances were generally proportional to their redshifts in 1929, this observation was taken to indicate that the universe is expanding.

Ironically, the term 'Big Bang' was first coined by Fred Hoyle in a derisory statement seeking to belittle the credibility of the theory that he did not believe to be true. However, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background in 1964 was taken as almost undeniable support for the Big Bang.

Analysis of the spectrum of light from distant galaxies reveals a shift towards longer wavelengths (Doppler effect) proportional to each galaxy's distance in a relationship described by Hubble's law, which is taken to indicate that the universe is undergoing a continuous expansion.

Lecture 35: Doppler effect & The Big Bang.

Super massive black holes.

A super massive black hole is a black hole with a mass in the range of hundreds of thousands to tens of billions of solar masses. It is currently thought that most, if not all galaxies, including the Milky Way, contain a super massive black hole at their galactic center.

Super massive black holes.