3 Hours Of Mind-Blowing Space Facts To Fall Asleep To

the night sky is full of stars galaxies planets and asteroids asteroid actually means star-like even in the very best telescopes they look like nothing more than just points of light in the in the sky they Cosmic Boulders and there are trillions of them from the size of a car to Giants hundreds of miles across together they tell the story of how we came to be the Earth was made by asteroids 4 and A2 billion years ago the solar system is a vast Cosmic Whirlpool dust sticks together to create asteroids in our own solar system and

in every solar system the first objects to form the first large rocks before planets form are essentially asteroids there are no planets yet instead trillions of rocks and stones swirl around the newly born Sun it would have been a very strange place kind of like a merry of all these objects orbiting around the Sun and there are millions of these asteroids that are just in different sizes and different shap shapes these ancient asteroids will shape the solar system and build the planet we live on asteroids are so much more than just rocks in space they're

the building blocks of our very own Planet billions of small asteroids must Clump together to make a planet but asteroids move at thousands of miles per hour getting them to stick is hard we're here at the stock car RAC see what the early solar system may have looked like high-speed car collisions cause damage Parts smash off asteroid collisions are the same to join together somehow they must Collide and stick stock cars show how this happens they move fast but all in the same direction just like the asteroids in the early solar system when collisions happen

they're relatively gentle instead of Smashing apart they join together these are planets in the making they're going around almost at the same speed and they begin to stick together and that's how planets begin to form asteroids gather into rock piles like two cars locked together as more asteroids Collide the rock piles grow building whole planets this way would take billions of years yet the planets formed in just a few million years how when the rock piles reach Mountain size gravity speeds up the process gravity started to become important when they were about the size of

one of the Rocky Mountains like Pike's Peak behind me it was when they were several miles across that they had enough mass that their gravity could start to draw material in now if the Earth weren't here and it were just Pikes Peak over there a few miles away I would very slowly start to drift toward it faster and faster accelerating the whole way until I actually impacted it the gravity would draw me in it would pull on me until I actually hit the mountain itself large asteroids are mountains in Space the early solar system is

full of them their gravity pulls other asteroids toward them the larger an asteroid becomes the more rocks it pulls in and the faster it grows at that point the events happen very quickly it would actually draw that stuff in and grow very rapidly one of these early space mountains keeps on growing until there are no rocks left to pull in it's no longer an asteroid it's a young Planet the Earth all of the planets even the Earth they owe their existence to the fact that there were asteroids back then this is how all rocky planets

form asteroids join together until there are no more left Mercury Venus Earth and Mars are all overgrown [Music] asteroids but beyond Mars something went wrong no rocky planets instead billions of rocks and boulders that never join together the asteroid belt out here construction came to a halt before a rocky planet could form because of Jupiter the gas giant had already formed nearby Jupiter is humongous it's the 800 pound gorilla it dominates everything gravitationally 4 and a half billion years ago Jupiter's gravity causes Havoc it flings asteroids in every direction giant Boulders scatter from their regular

orbits onto extreme chaotic paths the stock car race ends and the demolition derby begins once Jupiter got the solar system began to look like a demolition derby things colliding with each other going in all sorts of different directions a cosmic pile up rocks smash into each other from every direction violent chaotic collisions these rocks don't Clump together they shatter and create the at asteroid belt violent collisions Still Rock the asteroid belt today in 2010 the Hubble Space Telescope captured this the aftermath of a hyper velocity Collision asteroids can both create and Destroy if many of

them come together gently you get planets too much violence and you get the asteroid [Music] belt billions of rocks and boulders a graveyard for a planet that never [Music] formed the asteroid belt is a mysterious realm full of danger and full of Promise a new frontier just waiting to be [Music] explored asteroids are as diverse as planets or moons some are metallic some rocky some Icy some even have their own moons they come in all all shapes and sizes from Boulders all the way to miniature worlds and they're everywhere distant solar systems have their own

asteroid belts the star Epsilon aradani is just 10 light years away it has not one but two asteroid belts another star has a belt 25 times larger than our own if you're actually living on a planet in that solar system the asteroid belt would look like a much brighter than the Milky Way a big streak across the night sky asteroid belts are the scraps left over after planets have formed so they tell us a lot about their solar system our asteroid belt is full of variety millions of strange asteroids each with a story to tell

yet we have barely explored it at [Music] all that's about to change the first mission to the asteroid belt is underway the dawn probe its goal to explore a mysterious distant realm we're going to learn more about the main belt asteroids from this one Mission than we will have since we've discovered the asteroid belt in the first place in July 2011 Dawn arrived at its first Target and sent back these pictures Vesta is the second largest asteroid in the belt it almost became a planet then Jupiter's massive gravity stunted its growth today it's a miniature

world one of the common misconceptions about the asteroid belt is that things are fairly small but some of the largest asteroids are really more correctly thought of as minor planets they're several hundred miles across Vesta Eva has a mountain three times higher than Everest Mark Sykes is co-investigator of the mission it's just a real excitement because you're seeing a new world for the first time and and and you know just enough to be dangerous in trying to explain what it is that you're seeing Festa is like a snapshot of the infant earth when it was

just as wide as Arizona we're seeing perhaps what an embryonic early terrestrial planet like Earth looked like in the in the first few million years of its history the dawn probe has already found that Vesta has an iron core like the Earth evidence that the Earth's core formed when the planet was still young this stunted world offers us a window on the Earth's distant past we're seeing things that we didn't necessarily expect but that's what makes it fun after Vesta the dawn Mission will head into the asteroid belt's outer reaches to explore an icy primeval

world four times bigger than Vesta there Dawn aims to settle another mystery about the Earth's past where did our oceans come [Music] from the asteroid belt is ancient violent and remote hundreds of millions of miles from Earth but not all asteroids stay in the asteroid belt they can roam all over the solar system the moon's surface records a violent past a massive Cosmic bombardment we see evidence every night when the moon comes out what do we see a pockmark Barren World evidence that there was an intense rain of asteroids and debris that came from outer

space completely disfiguring the surface of the Moon millions of craters cover the moon including the largest in the solar system 1,500 mil across itself scarred by thousands of smaller craters a storm of asteroids blasted the moon 4 billion years ago and if that happened to the Moon it must also have happened to earth the earth is a much bigger more massive Target in space for every one of those craters you see on the moon you've got to imagine 50 or 60 craters here on the planet Earth the impacts back then must have been horrendous every

few weeks a gigantic object hurling from out of space gouging out a huge chunk of the planet Earth we call it the late heavy bombardment for 200 million years Fireballs rain from the sky the impacts trigger earthquakes bigger than any in recorded history 10,000 mph hurricanes rip through Earth's primitive atmosphere but asteroids also bring a new substance to Earth some asteroids contain ice frozen water that melts on impact each asteroid brings a little more but could asteroids really bring enough water to cover 2/3 of our planet one of the questions we have is how did

water get to the Earth because the original Earth we think was very hot and very dry NASA's Dawn probe aims to find out the asteroid belt still contains I see asteroids to this day in the coldest most distant part in 2015 Dawn will arrive at the Solar System's largest asteroid series series is 1/3 the mass of the entire asteroid belt and four times as large as any other known asteroid a lot of it looks like pure ice Series has a rocky interior and icer mantle it's far enough away from the sun it's cold enough that

that it's stable series is just 600 mil wide yet there may be more frozen water here than all the fresh water on Earth the dawn Mission will find out for sure if series really does hold so much ice it could help explain why the Earth has so much water when asteroids bombarded the Earth 4 billion years ago massive icy bodies like series could have brought vast amounts of water water itself in the form of ice came down from the Heavens to create the Lush oceans of the earth and not just the oceans clouds Rivers glaciers

may all have come from space the dawn mission may uncover something even more significant on series it may find an ocean underneath the ice an inner mantle of liquid water melted by heat from the dwarf planet's core Life as we know it depends on water wherever we find water we may find the spark of life if there is a liquid water ocean underneath the surface to day that begs the question whether there could be life there extraterrestrial life could have started in the asteroid [Music] belt series could be home to basic life forms flourishing in

a subsurface [Music] ocean if asteroids like series can support life that could reveal how life started on Earth 4 billion years ago asteroids bombarded the young Earth they brought water and they may have brought life from the asteroid belt to Earth's new oceans primitive organisms that thrived and ultimately evolved into to all the Earth's creatures a planet that brims with life our earliest ancestors may have arrived from the asteroid belt perhaps these little worlds could be incubators of Life uh throughout our solar system maybe even in other solar systems around their Stars asteroids may bring

life to Worlds throughout the Universe they may also bring death asteroids are crucial to life in the universe but once life gets started asteroids can also end it asteroids really have two sides to them they're sort of creation and destruction all wrapped up together planet Earth is right in the firing line we've come to realize in recent years that we live in this kind of a cosmic Shooting Gallery astronauts witness this firsthand when I flew on Apollo 9 and I went outside to spacecraft it's very likely that I was hit by you know very very

small asteroid and you know it will make a hole in a space suit most objects in the earth's vicinity are tiny but they move at thousands of miles per hour so the suits are very very well built the result of which is they very heavy but you know we've never had one penetrated yet the Earth too has built in protection from small asteroids the atmosphere when asteroids hit the atmosphere they burn I can remember one night when we were looking down at the dark Earth and I kept thinking I saw an occasional flash of light

but I wasn't sure and then suddenly we're realizing of course you know we're looking at shooting stars most people don't realize that on a given night if you lie in the grass and look up at the night sky you'll see shooting stars many of them each hour most shooting stars are the size of grains of sand these burn up but larger space rocks can punch right through to the ground here's the proof meteor crater in Arizona gouged out by an asteroid just 150 ft across you can see the h force that excavated this and you

can also see the layers of material that were that were turned over uh uh as as the crater was excavated and so uh some of these rocks around here are kind of upside down from where they started there have been millions of impacts like this in Earth's past there will be more imagine a city where meteor crater is now theyd see a fireball coming through the sky very quickly you know this thing is moving at 8 m a second and so it wouldn't take very long for it to move across the sky and strike the

ground heat from the Fireball scorches the surface but most damage comes after the impact once the strikes the ground this takes a few seconds to create so very short time very large amount of energy and uh very devastating effects the asteroid is obliterated a mighty shock wave generates winds six times more powerful than a hurricane you have the blast that comes out probably for several miles and large debris that would crush buildings and and homes if it hit today the asteroid from a meteor crater would be a city killer but the meteor crater asteroid was

small it was likely a fragment from a much larger asteroid whatever it is that hit in meteor crater wasn't very big it was probably 50 yards across so not even as big as a football field there are millions of much larger asteroids these would cause even more Carnage country killers and worse asteroids over a half mile wide could end our civilization worldwide Killers we know because it happened [Music] already there are traces everywhere there's evidence of giant impacts all over the world and it's right underneath your feet and in fact in some places it's pretty

easy to spot like here in Southern [Music] Colorado so this layer of light colored Rock that's the KT boundary it's called a boundary because it marks the boundary between two different time periods everything that was put down here underneath the KT boundary had dinosaurs in it everything above it no dinosaurs so it really marks that point in time when the dinosaurs went away the lair is rich in an element called idium it's rare on the Earth's surface but common in asteroids so if a giant asteroid came in smacked into the Earth blew out dust everywhere

the idium inside the asteroid would have settled down into a layer all over the Earth and that's exactly what we see right [Music] here the clear fingerprint of an asteroid there must have been some perfect morning before the asteroid impact when the land of the dinosaurs was still very much as it had been for millions of years then there would be something sighted up in the sky something very bright bright very hot the asteroid is 6 M long big enough to devastate the planet the asteroid that came in and formed this layer here was very

massive and was moving very fast and so when it impacted the Earth that energy was turned into boom very very big boom it has the force of 5 billion hero of bombs large pieces of Earth blow out into space then rain back down a storm of fireballs wildfires rage across the [Music] globe in the KT boundary lay is a layer of soot and that's an indication that there were Global fires that everything on Earth was basically on fire after this happened the Earth plunges into darkness an impact winter mass extinction basically you can think of

this as every environmental catastrophe all happening at the same time it was an incredibly bad day for planet Earth a chilling reminder of the threat from space asteroids this big will hit us again we will go the way the dinosaurs we will be survived most likely by the bugs the Cockroaches they will be the ones who will inherit this Earth but hopefully that's going to be a long time from now is mankind doomed or can we Dodge fate asteroids built our world they brought water they killed the dinosaurs and made room for new species but

asteroids are also a [Music] threat we know absolutely for certain that there will be large impact in the future so it's not a question of if it's only a question of when large meteor impacts happen once every 60 to 100 million years we're due for one soon perhaps if we want to survive we need to prepare we must find the asteroids determine if they're heading for earth then stop them that's not easy but it's it may be possible happily there's a difference between us and dinosaurs we have telescopes and we can get advanced notice of

an impact asteroids are much smaller than stars and planets it's hard to see them coming to track asteroids you need a giant telescope like the a Rebo observatory in Puerto Rico right now I'm on top of the largest telescope in the world and this place may actually be our best defense against getting hit by one of these NE Earth asteroids the vast bowl is 1,000 ft across and it's not only the world's biggest telescope it's also the world's biggest radar dish when you think about using radar to keep track of all the airplanes that are

up in the sky well this one is so powerful it can actually track near Earth objects millions of miles away unlike a telescope radar can directly measure an object's distance and reveal exactly where it is that's perfect for tracking asteroids in 2004 astronomers spot a stadium sized asteroid heading toward Earth its name apus after the Egyptian God of destruction the day it might hit us April 13th 2029 Friday the 13th apus was the first neear object of the modern era that had astronomers honestly scared there seemed to be a 1 in30 chance something catastrophic happening

arbo Springs into action against the biggest threat from space ever detected apus could devastate entire countries but the asteroids path is still uncertain it might hit or it might just miss only aasbo can tell us for sure the arbu telescope was able to reduce the uncertainty of apus by 98% it told us that there was no chance this thing would hit us in [Music] 2029 it will be close apus will pass closer to the Earth than the Moon closer even than some Communications satellites [Music] we have powerful tools to detect asteroids someday we'll find one

that will hit the Earth how can we protect ourselves the obvious strategy is to destroy the asteroid before it destroys us but that could be risky you don't want to blow it up because you may end up breaking it into two three or five pieces which then end up hitting all around the earth and wiping out many many people exploding an asteroid could cause more harm than good better to make it Miss completely when an asteroid is headed for Earth their future paths cross and they'll both reach that point at the same time imagine the

Earth is a freight train and the asteroid is a car both heading for a railroad crossing if they reach that Crossing at the same time they will collide the best way to avoid the impact is not to Swerve away from the train it's to hit the gas or the brakes if you can cross the tracks before the train gets there or wait for the train to pass and then cross them that's what we want to do with asteroids just to make sure that the asteroid and the Earth aren't at the same place at the same

[Applause] [Music] time by simply slowing down the car we're going to miss that's the way to avert a [Music] collision but asteroids don't come with brakes we need another way to change their speed one approach is to use the asteroids gravity for a small enough asteroid all you need to do is Park a large spacecraft next to the asteroid a spaceship would hover above the asteroids surface you can thrust with your spacecraft to keep it from falling onto the surface of the astero and so it's like a little gravity tractor using gravity as the toe

line to move the asteroid out of the way over time the gravity between them would slow down the asteroid just enough for it to miss the Earth asteroids could shape our future in another way we could turn them from a deadly threat into a precious resource [Music] asteroids are a creative Force they build planets they bring water but they're also destructive asteroids are both a boon and a threat early on they bring the materials for Life later on they can destroy life asteroid oids bring violence and death but life may not always be in danger

ultimately if life becomes intelligent enough it can send objects out to deflect or destroy the impending asteroids we now have the technology to divert asteroids that means we can treat them not as a threat but an opportunity we could mind them many of them are just ripe for the taking in these wonderful mineral resources and so the asteroids in some ways are are literally gold mines in the sky they're not just gold mines they're zinc mines aluminum mines Platinum mines just one average sized asteroid could contain minerals worth thousands of billions of dollars [Music] but

first we have to reach the asteroids on April 15th 2010 President Obama announced a new plan by 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long Journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crude missions beyond the moon into deep space we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history ironically the easiest asteroids to reach are the same ones that threaten the Earth as they pass by a spaceship could rendevu with the asteroid yet even when asteroids come so close asteroid mining Mak may be too good to be true the

reason why we're not mining the asteroid belt today and letting the Space Program pay for itself is because of cost it takes an enormous amount of Rocket Fuel and expertise to bring back an asteroid from out of space but perhaps we don't need to bring the minerals back to Earth we could use the resources of asteroids to build settlements out in space you don't have to build a space station it's already there you don't need shielding because you can simply drill right into the soil and use the rocky material as shielding against radiation and microm

meteorites so in some sense think of an asteroid as a readymade space station low gravity makes it easy to come and go there's plenty plenty of water and all the construction materials that colonizers could ever need so one day when we have colonies in the asteroid belt and we need to build cities there that's where we're going to find valuable deposits of metals in the asteroid belt itself a vast band of cities in space strung across a b billion miles and not just cities but factories to turn metal from the asteroids into spaceships perhaps asteroids

could actually provide the metal the real structure to build our spacecraft so somewhere up there between Mars and Jupiter there may be the makings of our future spaceships ultimately asteroids may be a stepping stone by which we can one day leave the entire solar system asteroids made the Earth perhaps they even brought life here and in the future asteroids could help humans escape the Earth and colonize the Galaxy so in a way asteroids are drawing us out into space whether to protect ourselves or to expand where we live look out at the cosmos billions of

galaxies trillions upon trillions of stars and one profound question is anyone else out there we want to find another Earth is there a pale blue dot orbiting some star out there in the [Music] galaxy the search is on for worlds that could Harbor life we're searching for our own vision of ourselves out there in space we're searching for our [Music] Heaven we've already discovered more than 700 planets beyond our solar [Music] system and yet these exoplanets look nothing like our own boy were we wrong all these solar systems that we're seeing in out of space

we find that they don't look like our solar system at all we are the Oddball we're the freaks these are nightmare worlds and the cosmos is full of them we're finding all different flavors of hell all these different ways that planets can go wrong so that's where we are right now searching for heaven finding hell [Music] these are worlds where life couldn't possibly [Music] survive could we really be alone a cosmic fluke in a universe hostile to life we may soon have the answer now we have discovered hundred hundreds of exoplanets in out of space

at the rate of over one exoplanet a week in a few years that will probably be thousands and in the end there could be millions or even billions of these things waiting for us to discover them how could all of them be planets from Hell The Quest For answers Starts Here 63 light years from Earth we've discovered a planet it's even larger than Jupiter and it has a serious [Music] problem its orbit is incredibly tight it's closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun and 3 times closer in than the earth the result

is a superheated [Music] hell but there's another reason why nothing could survive here and that's the Ferocious wind the surface is battered by a NeverEnding storm we can't see these winds with our telescopes but we know the super storm [Music] exists because of this NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope Spitzer can see things that we can't it doesn't use visible light instead it sees an infrared it's a part of the light spectrum we don't see with our eyes infrared is heat one advantage of studying the universe in the infrared is it gives us this opportunity to see

the light coming from planets around other stars when you try to look at the light of a planet next to the light of a star the star is hundreds of thousands of times brighter than that planet which renders the planet very very faint but if we push into the infrared part of the spectrum the internal heat of the planet just as my internal heat causes the planet to Glow now it's observable and measurable Spitzer gives us something completely new the very first weather map of a planet beyond our solar system this simple image is a

technological Triumph the colors represent temperature differences but the map also proves the planet has hellish winds that's because the hot spot isn't where it should be one side of the planet permanently faces the star so its Center should be the hottest point on the planet it isn't something pushes the planet's hot spot to the side and that takes incredible able [Music] Force only a Non-Stop 6,000 mph hurricane could be this powerful 20 times stronger than the strongest winds on Earth eight times the speed of sound a small shift on a weather map evidence of SuperSonic

winds raging on an alien [Music] planet truly a planet from hell [Music] we're finding new planets at a staggering rate an average of one a week each one could be an earthlike heaven but the more we explore them the more hellish worlds we find and some are so nightmarishly hot that they're more than uninhabitable they didn't even exist this Jupiter sized gas planet is 256 light years from Earth in infrared it shines like a star thousands of times brighter than Venus the hottest planet in our solar system [Music] it's a blistering 3700 [Music] de it's

nearly impossible for a planet to get this [Music] hot its hellish temperature provides a clue to its appearance [Music] only an absolutely black object could absorb enough light from its star to reach such scorching temperatures if you were coming up on the night side away from the Star you would just see this blackness in front of you very little radiation very little light it would almost just look like the stars were avoiding a part of the sky [Music] just as black pavement absorbs sunlight and heats up on a sunny day the Black Planet roasts beside

its star we don't understand its atmospheric chemistry there's nothing on Earth that can absorb so much light the planet's only color comes from a scorching hot spot as you flew around to the day side things would begin to glow red hot there'd be a huge swirling storm all red and glowing what a hellish [Music] World deep inside clouds of titanium oxide swirl around a solid heart 100 times heavier than Earth Darkness visible another world from [Music] hell but some planets are even bigger seemingly impossible [Music] puzzles here's a mystery every astronomy textbook says that gigantic

jupiter-sized planets form way out in outter space where it's really cold so why is a Jupiter sized planet what's it doing inside the orbit of mercury Jupiter type planets can only form far from their parent stars out in the cold of space a gas giant orbiting this close means these monsters can move this is wasp 12b a scorching vision of hell it's so close to its star that its orbit lasts just one Earth day this world is so hot it's over 4,000 de fah this is just crazy hot was 12b is one of the hottest

planets in our galaxy we've never seen anything like this before this certainly is one of the most violent environments in the universe wasp 12b is only 2 million miles from its star searing heat puffs up its atmosphere giving it the density of Styrofoam in a big enough bathtub it would float we actually think it's so close to its star that the gravity the tidal effect of gravity warps it into almost an egg shape it's not even round it's it's ablong thousands of miles beneath the puffed up atmosphere lies a solid core it's rich in carbon

and the pressures are extreme there could be mountains of d and graphite and seas of liquit tar but wasp 12b won't last long it orbits so closely that its star is literally tearing it apart ripping away nearly 190 quadrillion tons of gas a year 10 million years from now wasp 12b will vanish the question is how did it get so close in the first place this is the birth of a solar system in the center a new [Music] star around it swirls a dis of microscopic dust grains these are plets in the making the dust

grains Collide and every time they collide they merge and so they get bigger and bigger and so they sort of grow like the dust bunnies under your bed and you have 100,000 years or a million years to make a very big Dust Bunny and they get bigger and bigger and [Music] bigger trillions of miles from the Star it's cold enough for ice to [Music] form ice picks up dust and gas G these gaseous clumps grow bigger and bigger over millions of years eventually they become gas giants in our solar system the gas giants Jupiter Saturn

Neptune and Uranus all form this way in the distant orbits we still see today so how did wasp 12b end up so searingly close to its star the answer gravity this planet is huge 40% more massive than Jupiter [Music] its immense gravity disturbs the dust disc it formed from creating [Music] turbulence and so the planet creates waves in the disk you know sort of density waves and you can sort of think of them as like waves on an ocean the gas giant becomes a galactic Surfer over hundreds of thousands of years the planet rides the

waves inward toward the star as the planet gets closer and closer to the star it starts to feel the radiation from the Star more and more and so it heats up surfing millions of miles from the cold outer reaches of the star system into the tight scorching orbit we see today an ice cold world becomes a planet from Hell nobody had any real clue that you could form a planet a billion miles out from a star it somehow moved in that is incredible but that's really the only explanation of how these planets got so close

to their stars in the first place wasp 12b is bizarre but it isn't alone we've found many of these super hot super close Giants we call them hot Jupiters battered by supersonic winds blacker than night hotter than [Music] hell but these hot Jupiters all have one thing in common there's no life here so these planets are just about as different from the earth as you can possibly imagine in fact we've now found over a hundred of these things rendering them so common that the question really emerges which ones are the weirdo them or us this

planetary roller coaster has consequences as they spiral inward hot Jupiter cause chaos they create a whole new class of planets from Hell orphan worlds flung away from their star into the emptiness of interstellar space planets orbit Stars between the stars is a vast Sea Of Darkness we've always thought of space as being empty that would be considered its defining characteristic that's why we call it space but when Planet Hunters switched from gazing at stars to staring deep into space they made an amazing discovery [Music] out of the darkness between the stars planets began to appear

first one dark gas [Music] giant then several more eventually 10 Dark Star planets emerged from the shadows of space I often wonder what it would be like to be on one of these rogue planets in between Stars the night sky would be perfectly black it'd be festooned with stars it' be [Music] beautiful but if you were at one of these planets you would be in a world of Perpetual night there would be no Sunrise or sunset there would be no warmth of the sun these planets formed around a star but now they roam the darkness

of interstellar space their Journey here was violent each one forced from its home orbit by the gravity of a hot Jupiter a jupiter-sized planet is an 800lb gorilla where does it sit anywhere it wants to hot Jupiters are killers as they surf in toward their star their immense gravity disrupts the system hurling plant from their orbital paths it flings into outer space any small planet so any Planet unfortunate enough to be orbiting close to the mother star would be flung into outer space with a passing Jupiter these planets will never again feel the heat or

see the light of a star all the rogue planets we've found so far are gas giants but perhaps there are smaller Rocky worlds too worlds that were once like Earth the large jupiter-like planets are just easier to see but there's no reason to assume there also aren't smaller orphan planets maybe as a Jupiter planet moves in toward the star and plays pingpong with the planets even something like Earth could have gotten kicked out then you would have this this cold Frozen little world just streaking between the Stars dark and lonely these planets are victims of

a violent gravitational battle Frozen orphaned Earth twins there may be hundreds of billions with a be of these planets roaming the Galaxy now there are only a couple of hundred billion stars in the galaxy so that means these rogue planets may actually outnumber [Music] Stars right now we find an average of at least one new exoplanet a week as our technology improves we'll see smaller and smaller planets orbiting Stars Worlds with a solid surface surface like our own but the first rocky planets we found are nothing like Earth these planets have been to Hell in

back we have found hundreds of alien worlds and now for the first time we're finding small planets made of rocks just like [Music] Earth planets this size are potential homes for life but instead we find more planets from Hell weird nightmarish and uninhabitable [Music] [Music] this is cororo [Music] 7B a world of violent extremes two Hells in one [Music] it's so close in that its star looms 360 times larger in the sky than our sun on cororo 7B the first Hell is unimaginably Hot the surface is a furnace roasting at 4700 [Music] de lava boils

turning the atmosphere into vaporized Rock when a cooler front moves in small Pebbles condense and rocks rain from the sky if that's not a classic vision of hell I don't know what is but that's only half the story The Hot Side of the planet is locked permanently facing the star Beyond is the Twilight Zone it's temperate here cool enough to turn the lava oceans into Solid [Music] Rock but this Pleasant zone is narrow travel further and you descend into a second hell this is the dark side the half of the planet that never sees the

sun Eternal darkness and Savage [Music] cold the temperature is hundreds of deg below zero so one side is hot another side is cold you either have you know fire or ice in the extreme the coldest places in the universe and the hottest places in the universe you couldn't think of a worst place to end [Music] up the planet was not always this way turn back the clock 1.5 billion years Coro 7B is [Music] forming but it isn't rocking it's a gas giant a 100 times bigger than [Music] Earth it migrates in toward its Star as

it closes in the star blowtorches gas from the planet its gaseous shell blasts off into space to reveal a rocky core Coro 7B is the skeletal remains of a hot Jupiter its parent star has reduced this once massive gas giant to a rocky Cinder it's hard to imagine planets more extreme than cororo [Music] 7B yet they do exist Rocky worlds machine gun by deadly cosmic rays this is a pulsar 7,000 trillion miles away from [Music] Earth it's a kind of cosmic Lighthouse this unbelievably tiny world just 10 m across fires an intense beam of radiation

through space as regularly as an atomic clock a single cubic centimeter the size of a keyboard key actually has about as much mass as Mount Everest smash a Mount Everest into a cubic centimeter the whole star which is only about 10 mil across is like that it's one of the most hostile environments in the universe anything nearby gets hammered by intense gravity and magnetism no one expected to find a Planet here but this Pulsar has [Music] three small rocky near Earth sized they were the first exoplanets ever discovered and the last place you would ever

find life it's got a tremendous magnetic field it's blasting out x-rays so these poor planets are just getting cooked by radiation the word earthlike I don't think could be applied to these guys at all the X-ray beam strafes the planets over and over firing radiation a million times more deadly than medical x-rays slowly stripping their surfaces away these are sterile worlds every body admits there's no chance for life at least as we know it on the planets that orbit the Pulsar radiation Cooks puls our planets to death the opposite hell is no better Frozen worlds

too cold for life in the constellation Scorpius 20,000 light years away is a red dwarf star red dwarfs are tiny and relatively cool and this planet is too far away to fill what little heat there is it's so distant its orbit lasts 10 Earth years it's the coldest planet we have found in the universe its surface is a frigid 370° below zero this is a world made entirely of ice methane ammonia and nitrogen are gases on Earth here they form a frozen toxic Frost glaciers and canyons and Cliffs of ice are the only terrain here

hell really has frozen over [Music] our search for Earth's elusive twin reaches another dead end perhaps we are truly alone or will our first tantalizing glimpses of an alien world potentially perfect for life change everything [Music] Earth the only habitable World in our solar [Music] system but in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars can we really be [Music] alone it's a question that Planet Hunters are trying to answer the whole purpose in my opinion of the discovery of exoplanets is to establish our true place in the universe who are we where do we

belong in the cosmic scheme things are there other planets that can have life just like ours that's where NASA's Kepler space telescope comes in Kepler lets us calculate how far a planet is from its star that's critical in figuring out what whether it could sustain life life on Earth is only possible because we're the perfect distance from the Sun not too hot and not too [Music] cold just right for liquid water oceans rivers lakes rain and life you know journalists say follow money astronomers say follow the water because water is the universal solvent that dissolves

most chemicals and that's where DNA got off the ground and where there's liquid water there could be life we're looking for planets that are not too close to their parent star where all the water would boil away and not too far away from their parent star where all the water would be tied up in a in a frozen form we're looking for that goldilock Zone where the temperatures are just right for liquid water to pool on the surface once Kepler has identified a new planet astronomers check whether it lies in the habitable zone of its

parent star so far Kepler hasn't found a single confirmed Earth [Music] twin but it has identified more than 2,000 th planetary possibilities and it's this sheer abundance of planets that gives scientists hope the important thing to remember is that even though we're finding all of these these terrible planets that are just completely unlivable is that we're finding lots of them we're finding hundreds and thousands of these planets and what that's telling us is that planets are easy to make and that means that even rare things are probably out there in large numbers even if the

Earth is a rare precious Jewel in our galaxy there may be dozens or hundreds of them out [Music] there Kepler has opened our eyes to a universe full of planets we can now guess at how many there might be in our own Galaxy 50 billion [Music] 50 billion worlds just waiting to be discovered and we think 1% could be in the Goldilocks zone of their star that's 500 million planets each with a Chance of harboring life right here on our own doorstep [Music] we haven't found one yet but we're getting [Music] closer this is glea

581 a red dwarf star 20 light years from Earth glea 581 is a tiny little star if the sun were the brightness of about 100 watt light bulb then glea 581 would be like a little Christmas tree light a tiny little fairy light very very small this shifts the Life Zone in because now if you want to be warm enough you need to snuggle up right next to the star the star has four planets three are too close and hot for liquid water but the fourth is different different it's a rocky World twice the size

of Earth and it's right on the edge of the goldilock [Music] Zone in theory if the planet has a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere it could trap enough heat to have clouds rain and oceans it would be a strange place to live twice Earth's gravity bathed in permanent red [Music] Twilight but right now this weird world is the closest we have to a planet like [Music] ours it's a promising start when we actually know for a fact that up there around that star is a planet like Earth that's going to just fundamentally change how people look

at the sky and how people perceive their place in the universe so that's going to be a profound moment not just for me but I think for Humanity in general our goal is to find another Earth but along that path we are going to find more things than we could have ever Poss possibly imagine and that's the part I love about this the most we don't know what craziness is going to be around the next Corner when we're looking for more planets I can't even [Music] imagine our universe the galaxies the solar system our home

planet Earth land sea air life where did they all come from look up into to space from our planet and what you see is a vast Cosmos teeming with billions of stars and galaxies turned back the clock over 13 billion years and our universe was a very different place back then it was so small that it could fit inside the palm of your hand from this infant universe everything would be created Stars galaxies and the building blocks of life itself the calcium in our bones the iron in our blood the atoms for the air we

breathe the water we drink the raw materials for our cities and machines naked science takes a journey through space and time to discover How the Universe was born and how it created everything in our world and how it eventually it will [Music] [Music] die everything we see around us is made of matter atoms and molecules take this car it's a 195 6 Ford Fairlane convertible it's constructed from many different materials like steel Rubber and glass go deeper and these materials are made up from combinations of elements like iron silicon chromium and carbon each and every

atom that makes up this car were created by our growing Universe physicist Lawrence Krauss studies how the atoms we see on our planet have come to be here we really are part Stardust and part Big Bang dust most of the atoms in our body are from the cores of stars but some of them have been around since the earliest moments of the Big Bang so we really are truly Cosmic individuals each and every atom was created over billions of years as our universe evolved so when we look at this car of course all the atoms

in this car came from Stellar explosions from Supernova processes and from Stellar Evolution but they were created at different times during the evolution of the universe to understand how the universe made all the raw material we see here on Earth we need to take an incredible journey and travel back through space and time to the moment our universe was born in the beginning there was nothing no space no time and then there was light suddenly a tiny Speck of light appears it was infinitely hot inside this tiny Fireball was all of space this was literally

the beginning of [Music] time the cosmic clock was ticking time could flow and space expand at the earliest moments of the Big Bang if you take it back to T equals 0 everything in our universe everything we can see all the matter and all the energy in all of the galaxies was once contained in a region smaller than the size of a single atom today the idea that our universe was once tiny originated from the brilliant work of American astronomer Edwin Hubble back in the 1920s most astronomers believed that everything visible in the night sky

were stars and they were part of our galaxy The Milky Way But Hubble wasn't convinced he studied a swirling cloud of light called the Andromeda nebula and showed that it was a Star City another galaxy far outside of our own Galaxy he showed that these other galaxies were speeding away from ours and the further away they were the faster they seemed to be moving the universe was expanding and if the universe was expanding then at some point in the past it must have been smaller much smaller and that it must have had a beginning the

idea of the Big Bang was born theoretical physicist David spurgle is a Big Bang expert The Big Bang Theory is not really a theory of how the universe began it's really a theory of how the universe evolved no one knows exactly what happened during the Big Bang but scientists do know that a fraction of a second after the universe was born this tiny super hot Fireball was already starting to expand we don't know how the universe began so we start our story when the universe was a billion of a billionth of a billionth of a

billionth of a minute old pretty young the universe was the size of a marble less than a trillion trillionth of a second after the big bang the marbleized universe was very unstable and underwent an enormous growth spurt during this period of incredibly rapid expansion space itself was expanding faster than the speed of light in the same way that this hot glass ball inflates so did the baby universe expanding in all directions at once and as it expanded it cooled a trillion trillionth of a second after the big bang the universe was small enough to fit

inside the palm of your hand a tiny fraction of a second later it was the size of Mars another fraction of a second and the baby Universe had grown to 80 times the size of the Earth a trillionth of a second after the big bang and our newborn Universe was still expanding but it didn't contain matter it was Pure Energy Einstein's famous equation eal mc² showed that mass and energy are interchangeable it gave us the knowledge to build weapons of mass destruction it also revealed how the universe created the first matter when a nuclear bomb

explodes a tiny amount of matter is annihilated and converted into energy in the baby Universe the exact opposite happened it converted pure energy into particles of mass matter but there was a problem the universe created both matter and its arch rival antimatter and when these two met they obliterated each other the infant Universe was a war zone a battle to the death between matter and antimatter if they mutually annihilated each other the universe would remain full of energy with no galaxies stars planets or life fortunately for us there was an imbalance for every 100 million

anti- particles formed there were 100 million1 particles of matter but there was that one extra particle of matter left over in each volume and that was enough to be account for everything we see in the universe today this tiny imbalance led to all matter we see in the universe galaxies stars planets even convertibles and ourselves astrophysicist Carlos Frank from Durham university in England explains we are a little bit of Dey left over from the annihilation of matter and antimatter We're The Leftovers of that process if the universe had not developed this slight asymmetry between matter

and antimatter the universe would have been completely boring they would be no structure there would be no galaxies there would be no planets quite what this newborn Universe was like has challenged cosmologists since the Big Bang was first put forward now in one of the biggest laboratories on Earth they are able to recreate conditions that almost certainly existed an instant after the big bang it's called The relativistic Heavy ion Collider Rick for short and it's located at the Brook Haven National Laboratory on Long Island it's like a time machine taking us back to 10 millionth

of a second after the big bang here scientists like Todd satata accelerate subatomic particles close to the speed of light and then smash them into each other the particles race around this 2 and 1/2 Mile surface circular tunnel in opposite directions 78,000 times a second and then Collide inside this giant detector bigger than a three-story house when they smash into each other they generate incredible heat just like the real infant Universe we believe the early Universe was extremely hot billions of times hotter than the center of the Sun what you're doing when these smashing these

nuclei together is melting matter creating matter hot enough to give us a glimpse of what the very early Universe was like when the particles Collide they break open and throw out a shower of even smaller particles it's a bit like discovering what cars are made of by watching them smash into each other you can race two cars together and smash them into each other head on and when you do that multiple times you start to see different patterns coming out a tire comes out here a radiator comes out there and before long you can start

to conclude that a race car is made up of the certain pieces what the scientists at Brook Haven have discovered is that within these superheated collisions a completely new form of matter appears and this matter contradicts the previous theories on the nature of the early Universe because it's not a gas it's a liquid it was super hot 100 million times hotter than the surface of the Sun there was so much energy inside the Young universe that the particles vibrated so fast that it had no stickiness there was no friction and it flowed perfectly this liquid

is perfect it has no viscosity in some sense it would be the perfect motor oil except it's a trillion degre hot inside the collider this amazing liquid Universe exists for only a tiny fraction of a second the Brook Haven scientists have succeeded in recreating conditions that existed over 13 billion years ago despite the universe being a perfect liquid it was in turmoil it was full of subatomic particles smashing into each other releasing more and more energy there was so much energy that unless the particles slowed down they would never Bond and create atoms the building

blocks of matter and the universe would never create the galaxies and stars or even us the universe is now 1 millionth of a second old and has expanded from smaller than the size of an atom to eight times the size of the solar system after the incredible turmoil of the first millionth of a second the universe was now relatively calm over the next 3 minutes the expanding Cosmos cooled sufficiently for protons and neutrons to bind together and form the first atomic nuclei hydrogen and helium these were not yet proper atoms they were missing a vital

ingredient the electron in the hot baby Universe there were plenty of electrons around but there was still so much heat energy the electrons were moving too fast to form bonds and it would stay that way for over 300,000 years 380,000 years after the big bang the universe had expanded to the size of the Milky Way it had cooled from billions of degrees fahren to a few thousand as it cooled the electron slowed down the universe was now ready to make its first true elements one of the scientists who discovered this critical moment in the story

of the universe was Arnold penus 1963 30-year-old penus and his 27-year-old colleague Robert Wilson began work on a new antenna in New Jersey initially they were only studying Cosmic radio waves but they would stumble on one of the greatest discoveries of all time as they started to test their equipment they detected an unexpected background noise it was additional signal and it appeared to be coming from the sky we eliminated uh very carefully the ground even the solar system because we did this winter to summer seasonal variation of man-made uh sources of uh equipment all these

things were eliminated in desperate ation The two scientists began to wonder whether the strange signal might have another more Earthly origin they found there were pigeons roosting in the antenna and it was covered with droppings they wondered if the pigeons were the source of the strange signal there was only one solution the droppings and the pigeons would have to go we finally got around to removing the pigeon uh droppings we also had to remove the pigeons that was a difficult problem because they turned out to want to come back and we mailed them off to

another site but even with the Troublesome pigeons gone the mysterious signal would not disappear and so uh we were left with the in escap almost inescapable conclusion that uh this radiation was coming from the sky I could not account for it the strange signal detected by penus and Wilson would turn out to be one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time but the explanation for their mystery background noise starts not with sound but with the birth of light we usually take light for granted but in the early Universe 13 billion years ago we

would see nothing at all light was trapped the universe was foggy imagine a flashlight beam in a fog of smoke the light bounces back and forth between the smoke particles and is trapped in the hot baby Universe a dense fog of electrons block the light from escaping but as the universe continued to expand and cool the electrons slowed down protons then grabbed these calmer electrons to form complete atoms of first hydrogen and then helium the UN was suddenly much less crowded with electrons the fog lifted and light was no longer trapped it hurdled out Across

the Universe creating a blinding burst of light had we been there we would have suddenly seen this opaque Universe become transparent suddenly the fog would lift and we would see a flash of light coming from everywhere around us it must have been a spectacular moment over time this burst of light dimmed and cooled and became microwave radiation it was this faint 13 billion year old microwave signal that penus and Wilson picked up on their antenna what they heard was the quiet echo of the moment the universe formed the first atoms it's really the light from

the origin of the universe if you have an old FM receiver if you tune between channels turn the knob and it doesn't capture and pop to a station go to a par with none you hear a that's what we call noise if you have a good radio set one half of 1% of that is actually the sound of the big bang and we can also see the moment when the first elements were created if our television is not tuned to a station a tiny fraction of the noise is radiation from 13 billion years ago but

this radiation is not the only reminder of the birth of the universe even the water we drink is a momento and it's kind of amazing to think that every time we take a drink of a glass of water we're drinking in atoms that have been around since the Big Bang the hydrogen atoms over the next millions of years the young universe continued to expand cool and get dark again so far the universe had only made hydrogen and helium atoms but the world we live in is made from more than a 100 different kinds of elements

without them the universe would remain a very boring Place made up of only gas a place where complex matter like planets cars and people could never develop the universe needed to get hydrogen and helium atoms to fuse and to do that it needed to make stars the universe was now 200 million years old and billions of light years across its temperature had dropped so far that it was colder than liquid nitrogen minus 367 de f it was also dark it would have remained a very gloomy place full of gas but without galaxies stars or planets

if it hadn't been for one thing the baby Universe wasn't born perfect Carlos Frank has created an amazing 3D simulation of how the early Universe evolved it shows that when the universe emerged from The Big Bang it was uneven little cracks appeared which were very very very tiny very very small and it was this rush in the face of the baby universe that later developed into the patterns that we see in the galaxies today without these cracks the universe would have been a very dull place the first Clues as to how these cracks developed into

galaxies and stars came when other scientists started to examine the Big Bang radiation first discovered by penus and Wilson so what penus and Wilson saw was this radiation was as far as they can tell uniform what cosmologist then did for the next 25 years was work very hard to try to find tiny variations and find them they did using W map a space probe designed to detect and analyze in detail variations in the background microwave radiation launched in 2001 the 15 50 million probe was fitted with some of the most sensitive instruments ever carried into

space our eyes detect only visible Starlight but W map can tune into the invisible microwave radiation once in orbit around the sun it picked up the faint radiation that has been Rippling around the universe since the dawn of time so when we look at the cosmic background radiation we're looking at this radiation that's been streaming towards us since half a million years after the Big B initially the microwave Universe looked very dull and seemed to be the same everywhere but when w map turned up contrast the results were spectacular the baby Universe wasn't smooth and

boring at all it was full of fluctuations these tiny fluctuations tell us what the variations in density how much stuff there is and and how it varies from place to place these denser regions are going to collapse to form uh clusters of galaxies and superclusters and galaxies themselves these low density regions these will grow and become the empty regions between galaxies so this picture really is our connection between the universe when it was a baby half a million years old to the universe today 13.7 billion years old these tiny imperfections in the fledgling Universe would

become galaxies and stars Mars and this one of the most amazing propositions in physics the idea that galaxies like a Milky Way that contain 100 million stars once began Life as a tiny little crack in the fabric of the universe the material in these cracks was filled with swirling clouds of hydrogen atoms the voids between the clouds grew bigger and bigger the gas clouds got denser and hotter gravity pulled the gas clouds together on filaments like beads on threads of a web Cosmic web where the giant filaments formed large Globs stars and galaxies would grow

as the universe evolved gases were able to condense into clouds which collapse to form Stars the Stars settle into a root ating disc that was later to become a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way over millions of years the hydrogen atoms clumped together and heated up the atoms began fusing and releasing energy and the gas clouds started to burn brightly eventually a star was born all over the universe millions of stars ignited for the first time the appearance of the first Stars would have been a truly SP spacular event had we been there we would

have really seen fireworks individual enormous flashes of light generated as the Stars Are Born and bur themselves out the universe has expanded many trillions of times its original size it was full of newborn stars made of hydrogen and helium these young stars were nothing like our own son they were very unstable but it was their instability that would make the universe a more interesting place because deep inside each new star something amazing was happening they were creating new elements the idea that stars build atoms came from the British astrophysicist sir Fred Hy one of the

greatest astronomers of the 20th Cent Hil didn't believe that the Universe began in a single explosion in fact he coined the name Big Bang as a term of derision hoil wanted to know where the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium came from he figured out that stars acted like nuclear reactors working a bit like a hydrogen bomb in slow motion [Music] but many billion times more powerful and their nuclear waste was new elements but it would take years before scientists were able to confirm his theory by analyzing the light from Stars each element emits a

light at a particular frequency when heated up imagine a sodium Street Lamp it emits light of a yellow color specific to sodium it's the same with stars take our sun if you break the light down into a spectrum you can see lines like a barcode corresponding to the elements each element has specific colors helping scientists identify elements like hydrogen which emits mainly red light we are go for Main in 1990 NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope to unravel some of the mysteries of our early Universe LIF off of the Space Shuttle Discovery with the Hubble

Space Telescope our window on the universe Hubble promised scientists unprecedented views of the young universe it would be able to look back through space and time and examine early stars to discover if they were making new elements but the dream soon turned into the worst nightmare after it was launched they discovered that Hubble's mirror was distorted it saw everything out of focus it needed corrective lenses and the only way to fix it was to send up another space [Music] shuttle one of the repairmen was astronaut Jeff Hoffman we were working with a 2 billion doll

telescope and the last thing we wanted was to break something and leave it worse off than when we got up there first the crew of the rescue mission had to capture the crippled telescope then execute a repair Mission unprecedented in the history of space flight first they had to open the access doors on the side of the telescope the one thing about working on Hubble that is very different from working on a car is you look over your shoulder and there you are in space and the Earth is going by below you the the stars

above you the astronauts had to carry out fine detailed work in the most difficult conditions when you're working in a space suit your hands are encumbered by thick stiff gloves it's sort of like working in ski mittens and it was quite a challenge all went well until Hoffman attempted to close the huge access doors I just had to close up the doors and when I went to close them they wouldn't close properly the doors were somewhat warped and it took a while for it to sink in this was very serious if you can't get the

doors closed you lose the telescope using improvised tools Jeff and a colleague were finally able to close the doors it took the team 5 days to repair the stricken telescope cosmologists around the world held their Collective breath they waited to see if the most expensive telescope ever built would deliver what its designers originally promised I well remember New Year's Eve 1993 December 31 when my phone rang and it was an old friend who worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Bal more he said Jeff do you have any champagne left over from your party

I said yeah we still have a half bottle in the refrigerator he said well crack it open again and drink a glass because we got the first picture back and Hubble works this is what Hubble saw the images were Beyond anyone's Wildest Dreams Hubble captured the final moments of a star's life when it explodes and blows off gas and dust it also captured Interstellar nurseries of newborn stars exploding into life billions of years ago and dark pillars of cosmic dust millions and millions of miles long ready to spawn a new generation of stars and planets

I guess it's hard to surpass the famous Pillars of Creation the Eagle Nebula where you actually see the birth of stars I mean it it's almost biblical let there be light a and I still kind of get goosebumps when I look at it but Hubble's true moment of Glory was still to come over a 10day period in 1995 the mission controllers pointed the telescope at a distant empty patch of space What emerged was the Deep Field image a tapestry of distant galaxies Hubble was looking back in time to some of the first galaxies and stars

created it revealed thousands of galaxies that had been seen before so the the universe became to our Consciousness far richer after the Hubble Deep Field it showed for the first time faint images of galaxies formed just a billion years after the big bang scientists then examined the spectrum of light from these distant stars and showed that these early galaxies had already created elements heavier than hydrogen and helium sir Fred Hoy may have been wrong about the birth of the universe but he was absolutely right about the Stars the early Stars acted like giant thermonuclear reactors

creating new elements you can think of the creation of all the elements in this room in some sense like a a car assembly line because in a car assembly line each part is sequentially added to the vehicle until it's complete Fusion reactions inside these young Stars released enormous amounts of energy and heat which forced atoms to fuse to form new heavier elements one after the other three helium nuclei combin to form carbon two carbon nuclei fuse to form magnesium magnesium to form neon and so on over a period of hundreds of thousands of years until

silicon fused to form iron iron is a very special atom the protons and neutrons inside its nucleus are very tightly bound together so that even the extreme temperatures inside the Stars couldn't get it to fuse into heavier elements it resolutely stays iron it was the end of the road the production line of element building shut down but our universe was still not complete there were all the ingredients to make a glass of water and some of the elements to build much of our convertible there were also quite a few of the ingredients to make a

human being the oxygen we breathe the calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood but there still weren't any of the vital ingredients like chromium for our Car fender and some metals like zinc that our bodies can't survive without the universe was about to enter a super creative phase where it produces all the elements heavier than iron to make the missing pieces in our birth of the universe jigsaw would take some of the most powerful explosions the universe has ever seen our universe has already celebrated its 500 millionth birthday there are still another

13 billion more to go before humans appear on the face of the Earth giant new stars have made many of the elements in the world we see around us but some vital elements are still missing heavy metals like chromium and zinc and expensive ones like gold and platinum to finish the job the universe conjures up the most amazing phenomena since the Big Bang massive exploding Stars called supernovas when the giant stars that made the lighter elements ran out of fuel they colle CED in on themselves creating incredible amounts of energy and enormous explosions these explosions

were so powerful they could fuse elements even heavier than iron and restart the element production line Tony metac Kappa from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee believes that without exploding Stars life itself would not exist Life as We Know It certainly would not exist were it not for core collapse Supernova events uh they are uh very clearly one of the key links in our chain of origin from The Big Bang to the present day one of the most recent and biggest supernovas closest to our galaxy was seen in the southern hemisphere in 1987 when a

supernova like 1987a explodes it emits light containing the signatures of the elements with in it by examining this spectrum of light scientists can calculate what elements are being forged inside the exploding star Michael Smith from the experimental astrophysics group at Oakridge then recreates these events inside his own star laboratory in this 100t Tower he accelerates and smashes individual particles into each other just like inside a supernova these sub Atomic nuclei are the ones that are absolutely crucial in the formation of the heaviest elements so the idea is to measure exactly how fast these nuclei will

fuse together in a laboratory and then translate that information into how fast they'll fuse inside exploding Stars when the particles Collide inside the accelerator they generate enormous energy in these extreme conditions the particles fuse and then you can bring other particles in and they will fuse and we believe that an exploding stars are just right to form elements much heavier than iron going all the way up to the top of the periodic table using the data from these experiments Tony metapa has created a model of how these massive exploding stars turn into heavy element factories

massive stars they evolve to an onionlike configuration at the end of their lives they have an iron core and outside of the iron core are layers of successively lighter elements inside the iron core the temperature rises to 8 billion de nearly 300 times hotter than the center of the sun it is so hot that the iron atoms that have sunk to the Stars core are torn apart the core destabilizes the cores then collapse on themselves in a fra action of a second the collapse proceeds to very very high densities the core collapses at speeds of

more than 43,000 m/s a volume the size of the Earth crunches down nearly six times the size of Manhattan in an instant the core becomes super dense if one were to take 1 cubic cm of that matter uh that would be the size of a sugar cube that sugar cube would be so dense that it would weigh as much as the entire human race the core rebounds like a compressed rubber ball and launches a massive shock wave the shock wave hurdles out smashing through the different skins of the Star as it punches through the outer

layers of the star the energy generated restarts the element production line atoms are smashed together to make brand new heavier elements all heavier than iron then the star explodes and the shock wave pushes the shrap likee debris outward further and further into space in in a very real sense uh Our Lives depend on the stars in the universe without their lives and deaths we would uh not be here today these astonishing images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show the aftermath of these giant explosions nebuli giant clouds of debris thrown off by exploding Stars swirling

inside are big new atoms gold silver zinc and Lead without supernovas our world would be a very dull place and possibly lifeless so I'm sure that that Paris Hilton doesn't wake up every day thinking about this fact but really really if it weren't for exploding Stars those 200 million stars that exploded so we could be here today she wouldn't have anything to wear so if it weren't for those Supernova explosions there wouldn't be any bling 9 billion years after the big bang and all the ingredients are in place for Life as We Know It the

universe has grown up into a vast complex Place made up of billions of galaxies and uncountable stars in a quiet corner of the Milky Way a mass of dust and gas begins to accumulate it's full of the rich debris left over from one of the massive supernovas and when it reaches a critical mass it begins to burn brightly A Star is Born our own star the sun what's left over forms a disc of swirling debris in orbit around the new Star the gas and dust that make up this ring come lied pulled together by gravity

the clumps of dust and gas become bigger and bigger planets form one of these planets is our Earth over the next 500 million years our planet slowly generates a protective canopy of gas the atmosphere the first life appears just single cells at first but as the eons pass those tiny single cells evolve into plants and animals and eventually humans we tend to disassociate ourselves from the universe but that of course is completely wrong we are a vital part of the cosmos and so when we talk about the origin and evolution of the universe we're actually

talking about the origin and evolution of ourselves everything we can see on our planet was either made in the Big Bang or inside a star scientists like Krauss believe they now know the Genesis of every atom that has created the world we live in these atams have been around since the dawn of time and um when I was young my mother used to tell me don't touch that you don't know where it's been and she would have been amazed but this is not the final chapter in the story after almost 14 billion years the universe

has really only just gotten started now we take a journey into the future to see how it all ends the universe we live in is nearly 14 billion years old it has created the raw materials for everything we see around us the Stars the planets trees cities automobiles even us our world is complete but the universe is still evolving scientists have come up with many theories on how it will end we know our un Universe began in a big bang what we don't know yet is what the future of our universe is going to be

our universe may end with a bang or whimper or something even more exotic one Theory suggests that our universe will run out of steam and stop expanding every Star Galaxy and Planet every atom will start to collapse ending in a single superdense pinpoint known as the Big Crunch to find out if the universe really is going to crash back in on itself scientists first need to discover if it's still expanding or if it's slowing down astrophysicist Saul pearlmutter studies the death of the universe by finding beacons in space exploding Stars called type 1A supernovas if

you have enough of these exploding Stars these the Supernova um that you've measured their their brightness though the ones that look fainter and fainter and must be further and further and further away and so you have some Supernova that are a little bit brighter they're they're more nearby some that are a little bit fainter so they're a little bit further and some that are very faint so they're very far away type 1A supernovas are similar to The supernovas that created the heavy elements they differ in one important fashion they always explode with the same exact

brightness this is because they are created in the same way two stars Circle each other held together by their gravitational attraction one is shriveled and super dense glowing with white heat a white dwarf the other star has bloated to an enormous size it's a red giant that is burning the last of its fuel as the two stars orbit each other the white dwarf sucks gas from its companion and begins to grow year after year when it is precisely 1.44 t times the mass of our sun the white dwarf crumbles collapses then explodes releasing a blinding

burst of energy every type 1A Supernova explodes at the same Tipping Point and so are equally bright and visible across the vast distances of the Universe Pearl mutter needs to find hundreds of type 1A supernovas and then measure how fast they are moving away from us he links up the most powerful telescope on Earth with the most powerful in space using Advanced cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope and a giant telescope officially known as the very large telescope or VLT for short he hunts for supernovas once Hubble has detected a particular light source colleague Chris

lidman at the VT analyzes the object to see what it's made of and makes sure it's a type 1A Supernova this object is is a distant Galaxy and next to it is what we believe is a distant Supernova the next crucial step is to understand what type of supernova this is the VT breaks down the light from the object into its Spectrum you want to be able to break up its light into a spectrum and look for the very characteristic fingerprint that you would see um if it really were a a type 1A supernova the

light emitted from this particular Supernova reveals that it's a type 1A lman can now calculate how far away this Supernova is the Supernova exploded about 7 billion years ago by comparing the positions and dates of all these supernovas stretched over space and time Pearl mutter can calculate whether the universe is slowing down his results are a shock the expansion of the universe isn't slowing down at all when we began the project of course the goal was to find out how much the universe was slowing down now when we actually started looking at the data it

looked like the universe wasn't slowing enough to come to a Hal um and in fact it wasn't slowing very much at all and in fact when we finished the analysis it looked like it wasn't uh slowing period it was actually speeding up in its expansion Pearl mutter's astounding Discovery means that the universe will not not grind to a halt then crunch back down into a pin head of super dense matter quite the opposite it will continue to expand faster and faster our universe is literally flying apart the expansion of the universe will accelerate at ever

faster and faster rates until literally everything will get ripped apart not just galaxies but eventually matter the Earth all the objects Stars the Earth planets people atoms in a finite time would get ripped [Music] apart long after our sun has burned out a 100 billion years in the future galaxies will pull apart the universe will be made up of isolated Stars which are running out of energy some will become white or brown dwarfs others will collapse into neutron stars or black holes then thousands of trillions of years after the big bang even the black holes

will evaporate and all matter will Decay to its basic ingredients atoms will fall apart and even protons the building blocks of atoms will Decay most likely future is perhaps the most dismal one where uh the universe becomes cold and dark and empty as the UN Universe continues to expand and the galaxies speed apart from each other space will become empty and dead our own cluster of galaxies will be moving away from us faster than the speed of light and will disappear from the night skies eventually everything will just sort of wind down and and that's

the end of things finally the universe will die and all that will be left is a cold dark and lifeless space [Music] the earth a giant mass of rock and water flying through space it's unlike any other planet we know because it supports life it's not just our home it's the only Safe Haven we have in the universe but how did it get here what strange forces of nature created this living breathing planet we depend on it's a mystery scientists are only now beginning to [Music] solve naked science brings together the latest research to discover

just what it took to create an earth on which people could [Music] live in this vast Cosmos there is only one place we know where humans can survive it seems as if the Earth was made for us it supplies us with water to drink food to eat and air to breathe it's the only home we have and we rely on it entirely but 5 billion years ago it did not [Music] exist where the earth now sits in the outer reaches of the Milky Way galaxy there was just a large cloud of gas and dust this

is the astonishing story of what transformed that cloud of dust into the planet we know [Music] today one person who understands what it takes to build a planet is astronomer Tom Fleming using telescopes like these at kit peak in Southern Arizona astronomers have pieced together how the Earth Earth was born it all begins with a big cloud of gas and dust little particles of dirty stuff grains of sand grains of silicon scientists call these regions of dust and gas molecular clouds but they're not like any clouds we see on Earth molecular clouds are vast they

cover hundreds of light years in size it was from clouds like these photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope that the Earth formed the clouds are made up from the debris of hundreds of dead stars when stars from the early years of the universe burned up their fuel they exploded and showered the surrounding space with their ashes when the first generation of stars died either gent or explosively in in an event we call a supernova the heavier elements the irons the silicons aluminum nickel that was created in the star is blown out back into the Galaxy

this cocktail of elements creates a molecular cloud from this new Stars Are Born and planets the force that drives their creation is Gravity the same force that attracts apples to Earth will attract two objects in space toward each [Music] other it draws the dust particles of the molecular cloud together over the next 10 million years the molecular Cloud slowly contracts under the force of its own [Music] gravity as our gas cloud collapses under the force of gravity to become a star something very interesting happens and I'm going to try and demonstrate what happens with these

two lead balls in this Carousel now I'll step up here on top of the carousel I've now increased my mass by the mass of two lead balls and I'm holding them straight out so now the mass in my body is distributed at a distance far from the center Fleming is impersonating a molecular cloud the weights represent its mass which to start with is spread over a huge area now I'm going to ask Lucy to give me a hand here and give me a little bit of angular momentum as I start spinning I'm going to move

the balls closer to the center of my mass and notice how faster I'm spinning and when I bring them out I slow down again and as you can see this is exactly what happens to the interstellar Cloud the large molecular cloud had a small rotation when it shrank this rotation speeded up as the cloud contracted the energy of the material flying in from space caused its Center to heat up this spinning ball became our sun the rest of the cloud was spinning so fast that it spread out into a vast disc of dust and gas

this was the Cradle of Life the material that would form the Earth and all the other [Music] planets until recently what turned this dust into a planet was a [Music] mystery then in March 2003 a light-hearted experiment on board the International Space Station led to a significant Discovery astronaut Don pedit was curious to see the effects of weightlessness on different substances in a series of simple experiments he filmed bubbles indigestion tablets swirls of colored water then filled the plastic bag with salt [Music] this last experiment turned out to be a scientific Revelation but at the

time pit didn't realize its significance the person who worked out what it meant was fellow astronaut Stanley love Don likes to mess with things and one of the things he messed with was putting things in plastic bags uh granular solids like sugar salt instant coffee he put him in a bag inflated the bag and shook him up just to see what would happen and and what happened was the little particles formed up into clumps like dust bunnies instantly when he saw a video of the experiment love realized that he was witnessing a significant Discovery and

Don shot this video down he said this is cool isn't this neat and showed all his little videos and his different substances and the different bags and uh I said Don yeah that is neat uh actually you've uh solved a very old problem in Planet formation in zero gravity the crystals be behaved completely differently to the way they behave on Earth love recognized what was making them stick together well anytime two different materials rub together you can have a few electrons get traded off from one material to another um this happens when you rub a

rubber balloon on your hair and stick it to the wall as it turns out once you get dust or basically anything uh in zero gravity and Shake It Up let it bump into each other we think it gets some sort of electrostatic charge on it which makes it Clump up together together just immediately you can break up the clumps by shaking the bag up and then they reform as soon as you stop shaking it in the first few seconds of its life our Earth may have looked something like this scientists think that this moment occurred

4 and2 billion years ago to follow the evolution of our planet naked science is going to represent the time from then to the present as 12 hours on the face of a clock at noon the clock started ticking the Earth's journey toward becoming a planet that can support life has begun the first step didn't take long once clumps of these particles had grown into objects about half a mile in diameter their Mass was great enough for their gravitational pull to attract material from the surrounding disc like giant vacuum cleaners they circled the sun sucking in

material from the disc until there was nothing left to consume in the inner solar system these clumps grew into around 20 planets this process took about 3 million years less than 30 seconds on our clock the next stage of the Earth's evolution was incredibly violent as these 20 planets orbited the sun their gravity affected each other and they began to collide with each Collision two planets combined over time these collisions reduced the inner solar system to just a few planets including Venus Mercury Mars and Earth astronomers believe that the Earth grew to this stage in

around 30 million years we are now just 5 minutes into our story but what was early Earth like what would happen if a human had landed here the energy from the collisions with other planets made the Earth incredibly hot at around 82,000 de F its temperature is more than five times that inside a cremation furnace a human would almost instantly disappear in a puff of steam and Ash but even as our planet cools down another danger threatens a storm of charged particles is approaching the young Earth it so intense that it could end all chance

of Life 4 and A2 billion years ago a giant cloud of dust collapsed to form our solar system the sun planets and Earth but as the newly formed Earth began to cool it faced one of the biggest threats to its existence a hurricane of deadly particles from the [Music] Sun Boulder Colorado at the space environment Center meteorologists monitor the storms on the sun it's the most extreme weather you're likely to see a light Breeze out there is 200 m per second and a low temperature is 8,000 de F around the-clock surveillance is necessary because storms

on the Sun affect us here on Earth space scientist Rodney theck knows just how deadly the sun can be the sun is a is a large explosion and from that explosion energetic particles are released these particles make up the solar wind and they travel toward Earth at speeds of up to 1 1 million M an hour if the solar wind becomes too strong it can kill we watch the Sun and when we see something that may produce energetic particle events here at Earth we try and warn astronauts even Airlines about these types of events the

charged particles in the solar wind are a form of radiation that can cause lethal damage to living cells an intense solar storm could kill an astronaut caught in space but the solar wind can also have a devastating effect on planets the Earth is surrounded by an atmosphere a thin layer of gases that protects it from the extreme temperatures of outer space but when the charged particles in the solar wind hit a planet's atmosphere they can strip it away you can see how destructive the wind can be by looking at Mars over millions of years the

solar wind has blown away most of its atmosphere now there is no liquid water on the surface too little air to breathe this could have been the fate of the earth so why wasn't it the answer lies in the moment of the Earth's creation as the early Earth was forming the energy released as material hit the Planet produced heat the heat became so intense that even Rock melted the lightest elements in the molten Earth Rose to the surface while the heaviest elements including iron sank down toward the center here they formed a molten core it's

this iron core that protects us from the deadly effects of the Sun's [Music] Rays exactly how the Earth's core protects us is a mystery that drives the research of Dan [Music] Le in his laboratory at the University of Maryland he spins scale models of the core to study how it behaves the Earth's core has Dynamo action that makes a magnetic field and that's a process where currents in the liquid iron cause magnetic fields lap has found that the spinning motion of the core creates a magnetic Shield that surrounds the Earth you see it's mostly actually

symmetric but you're getting small details that are rotating around with the inner sphere to show how how it does this lrip has rigged up a simple High School experiment we can see how the currents produce magnetic fields with this simple demo just take some iron filings and sprinkle them down around this coil of wire this coil of wire represents the core of the Earth the iron filings will reveal the shape of any magnetic field and then hook the coil up to a power Supply you can see the iron filings line up with the magnetic field

lines and the magnetic field lines are passing through the center of the coil looping around the ends the electricity in the coil produces a magnetic field the same thing happens on a larger scale with the Earth's core its magnetic field gives our planet its North and South Poles it also extends far out into space it's called the magnetosphere and this is what protects us from the solar wind as particles from the Sun fly toward the Earth the magnetosphere blocks their path those that get through are deflected toward the poles here as they enter the Earth's

atmosphere they react with molecules in the air to create the [Music] Aurora the northern and southern [Music] lights today the solar wind still erodes our atmosphere but thanks to the magnetosphere the loss is not life-threatening it's been estimated that between 5 and 10 pounds a second of our atmosphere are dragged out into the solar wind fortunately for us even at that rate the amount of time it would take to deplete our atmosphere would be many times the life of the [Music] Sun the magnetic field produced by the iron in the center of the earth played

a vital role in our planet's Evolution without it we wouldn't have any air to breathe on our clock in which 12 hours represents the whole history of the earth just 6 minutes have passed the Earth still doesn't look like the planet we know but could a human now survive on its surface it's Poss possible that the Earth may have cooled enough for a human to survive in a heat resistant suit and thanks to its iron core our planet is now protected from the solar wind but there is still no oxygen or water on Earth we

wouldn't last a minute worse still if a human could survive they would be in for a shock an astonishing event is about to take place the Earth is on a collision course with another planet and about to experience the biggest bang in its history so far we have seen how a giant cloud of gas and dust collapsed to form our solar system and how the Earth's molten iron core created a magnetic field that protected the planet from the deadly effects of the solar wind the Earth's formation was a violent and dramatic process but an even

more astonishing event was about to take place a collision so large that it would melt the whole planet and the only reason we know this event happened is thanks to a large object circling over our heads the Moon is the Earth's constant companion for centuries humans wondered where it came from there were many theories some thought that it was formed by the early Earth spinning so fast that it threw off material into space others proposed that the moon was a passing Planet captured by the Earth's gravity but no one really knew in 1963 the United

States launched the Apollo program one of the mission's aims was to discover how the moon was formed you sweet 16 has arriv okay R you're go for landing okay down at three stand by for contact contact [Music] wow Fant in the late 1960s and early '70s American astronauts made six visits to the [Music] Moon they played golf tested their skills at off-road driving and collected 840 lb of moonrock for scientists back home to study how about rolling that one over no [Music] way the pieces they brought back to Earth revealed something strange when scientists examined

them they found that they were very dry as if they had been heated [Music] this was baffling any theory of the moon's creation needed to explain this mystery in the 1990s planetary scientist Robin canop decided to put a new Theory to the test using a supercomputer simulation she modeled what would happen if the Earth collided with another planet the results were a revelation this is a a simulation of a single impact by a roughly Mars siiz planet shown here on the upper right colliding with the young Proto orth represented by this object here so the

impactors come in and hit the Earth at a very oblique angle at about 45° and you can see this long arm of material right here that's actually the impactor it's been stretched out and distored Ed by the impact event itself there's an inner clump of material you can see it right here that will re-impact with the Earth after a little more time this outer clump of impactor material it makes a very close pass by the Earth as a result of the Earth's gravity this initial Clump is sheared out into a long arm of material which

then finally breaks up to form a disc and it's from this disc of material orbiting the Earth that we believe the moon then later accumulates from this simulation canop has figured out exactly what happened during the impact there would have been this unbelievably large impacting Planet racing towards the Earth at a speed of 7 m per second this would have been an enormous object a planet that was half the size of the Earth itself and so would have completely filled the sky just before impact the impact itself was an incredibly energetic event with enough energy

to completely melt the whole of the earth and vaporize a significant portion of the Rock in the Earth when the planet hit the earth the glancing blow smashed material into space much of this debris stayed in orbit as a vast disc of rock and dust a clump of this circling material then became large enough for its gravity to suck in other matter from the disc and this became our moon it's now 50 million years since the Earth began to form on our clock in which 12 hours represents the whole of Earth history still only 8

minutes have passed at this stage in its life the Earth appeared very different to the planet we know the ground remained molten from the impact for thousands of years and the moon was 15 times closer than it is today you can imagine imagine what is now a stunning sight on a full moon night would have been breathtaking at that time with the moon 15 times larger than we currently see it the collision with the planet and the formation of the moon were key events in creating an earth Fit for Life the Collision could have tilted

the Earth on its axis this tilt gives us the [Music] seasons thanks to this tilt the earth's climate changes gently through the year it gives us the annual cycle of [Music] life it may have been possible for life to evolve on Earth without these Seasons but it would have been a very different planet from the one we know today the creation of the Moon also gave us the tides when the moon was close these were much stronger but they have weakened as the moon has slowly drifted away nowadays we take the oceans for granted but

4 and2 billion years ago they didn't exist and without water there could be no life where all our water came from and how it got here is one of the most amazing stories in science naked science is investigating the birth of the Earth how did nature build a planet on which humans could live so far we've seen that the Earth formed from a giant cloud of gas and dust its iron core created a magnetic field that protected from the deadly particles of the solar wind and it survived a big hit from another planet but for

the earth to have life it had to have water where that came from is one of the great mysteries of science there are currently around 326 million trillion gallons of water on the planet that that's 394 trillion Olympic swimming pools but many astronomers think that if the early Earth contained water at all it had very little at the time the Earth was forming the inner solar system was too hot for liquid water to exist the region from the Sun to the asteroid belt was almost bone dry the nearest water reserves to the Earth were now

160 million mil away in the outer asteroid belt out here far from the sun's heat water froze and was incorporated into the forming planets and other objects but how the water could have traveled from here to the Earth is a mystery scientists are only just beginning to solve one clue came with the blastoff in January 2005 of an unusual NASA spacecraft named deep impact its mission was to fly 270 million miles to a comet named temple one and launch an 800lb copper impactor into its surface [Music] the mission was the latest attempt to understand some

of the most mysterious objects in our solar system for centuries people had argued that comets had brought water to earth when they looked at the Moon it was clear from the craters that its surface had been bombarded by large objects similar objects must also have hit the earth Although our planet's much more Dynamic geological activity has since erased all trace of them scientists also felt certain that comets contained water in the form of ice but the Deep Impact mission was the first first time anyone had probed inside one on the morning of July 4th 2005

NASA scientists waited anxiously as the impactor approached the comet at a speed of 23,000 mph it scored a direct hit the explosion was captured by telescopes around the world analysis of the debris confirmed that comets contain significant amounts of water but could they have brought that water to Earth using radio telescopes astronomers have studied the type of water in the vapor trails of comets they wanted to know if it matched the water on Earth so far scientists have only analyzed three comets but the results are not encouraging for the comet Theory the water in all

these comets was not the same as the water in our oceans the comet Theory isn't yet dead but it's fizzling out of steam in its place scientists have evolved an exciting New Idea a vital clue arrived on January 18th 2000 that evening the sky above western Canada lit up with a bright light dozens of witnesses saw a meteorite enter the Earth's atmosphere seconds after the event local photographers took these pictures of the trail it left in the sky as it fell to Earth the meteor broke up into dozens of pieces and landed on tagish lake

in British Columbia within days scientists were on the scene extracting the Frozen Remains the pieces they pulled from the ice were the best preserved meteorites ever recovered still intact a piece was shipped to NASA's Laboratories at the Johnson Space Center in Houston here space scientist Michael zalinsky examined [Music] it the meteorite was remarkably undamaged despite heating up through friction as it entered the Earth's atmosphere the meteorites they're cold soaked in space for millions of years so they're very very cold and the air the atmosphere high velocity and they do in fact get very hot on

the outside but they're only heated for a few seconds and that's not long enough for the heat to get all the way in past a few millimeters actually this means that when meteorites hit the ground they cool very quickly you hear of of reports of meteorites causing fires on the ground things like that that's always wrong they're actually quite quite cold to the touch after a few seconds but when a meteorite is fragile like the one at tagish Lake where it lands makes all the difference very lucky it fell in a frozen lake if it

had fallen anywhere else it would have easily Fallen apart to dust in a few days and so it's quite possible this kind of meteorite Falls to Earth very very commonly it's just usually destroyed because the inside of the meteorite remained Frozen zalinsky was able to analyze what it was made of this is a sample of tagish Lake meteorite the black material here is mostly clay minerals the kind of you'd find in your yard and these clay minerals contain water molecules trapped inside and so about 20% of this meteorite by weight is water that's a huge

amount from the location and angle at which the meteorite fell astronomers traced its orbit back into space they discovered that it came from the outer reaches of the asteroid belt if you you do telescopic observations of asteroids what you find is as you move farther and farther from the Sun the asteroids have more and more water now astronomers suspect ECT that asteroids from this outer part of the belt brought water to Earth if they're right our oceans came from space in a torrential shower of meteorites but one question remains what could have caused so many

asteroids to swing out of their orbit and come crashing to Earth the culprit appears to be the biggest planet in the solar system Jupiter lies just beyond the asteroid belt and its mass is so great that its gravity disrupts the path of any object it comes near in the distant past it pulled thousands of asteroids out of their normal circular orbits into elliptical orbits that cross the path of the earth when that happened collisions were inevitable the Earth was bombarded as the asteroids crashed to Earth they smashed apart water inside them escaped explosion by explosion

they created the ocean we see today scientists used to think it took hundreds of millions of years for the earth to acquire its water but recent evidence suggests it arrived remarkably quickly the evidence comes from research carried out by geologist Steven Moises in his laboratory in Boulder Colorado Moises took some of the oldest rocks in the world world and ground them down from inside them he extracted tiny crystals called ziron a ziron is a common mineral it's generally small it's it's hard to destroy using an ion micro probe moish then analyzed the zircons and measured

the composition of the oxygen inside them he found that the crystals had formed from a particular type of rock one that could only have existed if there was water on Earth what was startling exciting fun was that these ziron showed not only that things on the Earth's surface had stabilized to within normal conditions but that water was present and water was present everywhere moish estimated the time the Earth acquired its water from the age of the zircons the zircons in some of the Rocks there are very close to 4.4 billion years old this evidence suggests

that the Earth's water arrived in less than 150 million years on our clock which 12 hours represents the whole history of the earth that's just 25 minutes after the planet began to form at this time our Earth would certainly have looked very different the sea was full of iron much of it brought up from below by hydrothermal vents and the atmosphere was a lot thicker than it is today an ocean rich in iron would have appeared green [Music] a denser atmosphere would have given a reddish tinge to the sky conditions for human existence are looking

better the land has now cooled to a tolerable temperature and there is water to sustain life but there is still one horrendous this problem the gases in the atmosphere are mainly nitrogen carbon dioxide and methane there's not a lung full of oxygen in sight without oxygen to breathe there's no way a human could survive in the early years of its life the Earth experienced a violent and tempestuous Onslaught in time the activity slowed until half a billion years after it began to form the Earth had cooled and was covered in oceans but there was still

no oxygen in the atmosphere without that animals and humans could not exist one scientist who has investigated how the Earth acquired its oxygen is geologist Martin Van cran andong his research has brought him to Shark Bay on the West Coast of Australia it's a world heritage site home to vast Meadows of seagrass dugongs and tamame dolphins but van crondon has come to visit much older living things this is one of only two places in the world where these strange living structures called stratales are known to exist these drates have been growing here since the end

of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago and at that time the sea level was a little bit higher and so these structures grew up to the present height that you see [Music] them stromatal ltes are primitive structures here they come in two forms short pillars of living bacteria and silt and flat bacterial mats the living part of the stromatal is made up of blue green bacteria that grow using photosynthesis they take energy from the Sun and convert carbon dioxide into oxygen it's really the the result of this process of giving off oxygen that

we have planet Earth as we know it today and habitats that people like us humans and all the other animals and plants are able to live on planet [Music] Earth what makes van cran andon believe that stromatolites created the Earth's oxygen is a remarkable Discovery 1,000 mil away in a remote region of North Australia this is the pilura one of the oldest landscapes in the world if you want to find out what happened early in the Earth's history this is the place to come you was really like you're transported back into a time machine of

early Earth that just sort of gave me goosebumps and shivers to walk over this ancient environment where you could still see the processes that happened 3 and a half billion years ago here at a location kept secret to preserve them lie the oldest fossils ever discovered the ancestors of the stratales in Shark Bay what's remarkable about this outcrop in the pilver is that it contains the oldest evidence for life on Earth we're looking at here in front of me our great great great great great great great grandfathers and grandmothers no one knows how life on

Earth began but these amazing fossils suggest that it emerged very soon after the planet formed these fossil stratales are 15 times older than the dinosaurs the bacteria that made them were living here just 1 billion years after the birth of the Earth on our 12-hour clock the time is now 20 minutes to three these would have been the first organisms that would have started the process of change of Earth's atmosphere to an oxygen rich atmosphere which has allowed us mankind and all the rest of life that we know today to evolve on planet Earth if

stratales existed on the earth 3 and 1/2 billion years ago they should have started to increase the amount of oxygen in the air but it appears that they didn't for the next billion years the oxygen level in the atmosphere hardly changed what happened to all the oxygen the stratales produced can be seen 300 mil away in this gorge in Australia's K geni National Park hidden in these rocks lies the key to the mystery of the missing oxygen geologists call these rocks banded iron formations and they believe that they owe their existence to stratales well these

banded iron formations are the product of a remarkable set of circumstances in Earth history they formed about 2.5 billion years ago when the Earth was very young and are the product we think now of microbial action in the ancient oceans the Earth's early oceans were full of iron as the bacteria and stromatolites bubbled out oxygen it reacted with the iron in the water you can see what happened in this simple experiment this flask of water contains iron it's the same color as the early oceans on Earth this pump does the work of a stromatolite pumping

out oxygen as the oxygen bubbles through the water it reacts with the iron to form iron oxide and it precipitates out as rust there was so much iron in the oceans that for over a billion years it absorbed nearly all the oxygen that the stratales produced as the rust precipitated out it fell to the bottom of the ocean and and was turned into rock it has been estimated that around the world these rocks have locked inside them more than 20 times the amount of oxygen that is in the atmosphere today and they took an incredibly

long time to form on our clock in which the whole history of the earth is represented as 12 hours we can see that the planet forms in the first 8 minutes after 25 minutes it has cooled and collected water on its surface but it takes another 4 and 1/2 hours to remove most of the iron from the oceans and deposit it in these rocks only then does the oxygen level in the atmosphere start to increase this happened approximately 2 and 1/2 billion years ago and for the next 2 billion years the level r R until

just 500 million years ago it reached the level at which animals could survive so is our planet finally fit for human life by this time it has certainly cooled there is water to drink and air to breathe if we could travel back to this time we could certainly survive in our story 11 hours have now passed but the Earth still has a long way to go before the first humans will walk on its surface at 37 Minutes to Midnight dinosaurs will emerge at 10 minutes to midnight they will be wiped out by a catastrophe finally

at 19 seconds to midnight the first humans will appear it has taken over 4 B billion years but out of a vast region of freezing dust and gas the forces of nature have created the only Safe Haven we have in the universe our home the Earth [Music]