Episode 2 Stargazing Live

After last night's cloud cover, the sky is completely clear tonight.

The stars are out and Jupiter is shining. Last night we searched for

evidence of life on other worlds. Tonight we will try and explain how

everything came to be here in the first place by looking up at the

night sky. We have one hour to tell you the entire history of our

universe. Hold on to your hats. By the end of this programme Brian

will try to answer the question more of you have asked him than

anything else - what happened before the Big Bang? I'm Brian Cox.

He is Dara O Briain. And this is Welcome back to Jodrell Bank. We

were unlucky with the weather last night. This is the second night of

Stargazing. Thank you for your questions and photographs that you

have already sent us. We have been inundated. There are some

incredible images. Here is the first one. It is a beautiful image

This one, the Milky Way over Trusk Lough. Finally, this is the Flame

Nebula in Orion. Wow! The star in the belt is just below there. That

is the star that lights up this nebula. The dark patches are dust

lanes across the glowing gas. Fabulous stuff. We want to see more

of these. More questions. More photographs. We will cover them in

this show or in the later show, Back to Earth. E-mail them to us -

[email protected]. Send them on Twitter to @bbcstargazing or go to

the website - bbc.co.uk/stargazing. Ed Copeland is waiting to join in

with our live webchat as well. bet you say that in your sleep!

Anyway, tonight we will try and take you on a tour of the history

of everything. Take a look at this image. This was taken by the Hubble

Telescope. In this image there are some of the most distant galaxies

we have ever seen. The interesting one is this one. You can't see it

there. It has 11.9 next to it. That is 13.35 billion light years away

from Earth. That means that light has taken 13.35 billion years to

travel from that into the Hubble Space Telescope. The universe is

only 13.75 billion years old. That light has been travelling

throughout the history of the universe pretty much. You have seen

a galaxy there that formed only a few hundred million years or so

after the Big Bang. What we see is a snapshot of what that galaxy was

like at the moment its light left on the long journey to us. Mark is

in a field. It is great to be back here again

with the Liverpool Amateur Astronomical Society. ALL: Hello!

They are quite cheery. We have clear skies at the moment. Earlier,

we did manage to get some footage of the Pleiades star cluster,

otherwise known as the Severn Sisters. It is a billion million

miles away. It takes its light 4 40 million years to get to us. Most of

the stars are in the Milky Way. There are a couple of objects which

you can see which aren't in the Milky Way such as the Andromeda

Galaxy. We have a live image now of the galaxy. It is an object which

is 15 quintillion, which is a billion billion miles away. The

light has been travelling for 2.5 million years to get to us. The

image is just under three million years old. That means if anybody is

on a planet inside the Andromeda Galaxy looking back on us, they are

seeing us as our ancestors were starting to walk on two legs which

is crazy! Great objects to look at. Try and get a look at them if you

can. For now, back to you in the studio. Do you understand those?

Quintillion, I have never heard that. It's a million million

million million - I should have put the brakes on one million ago!

to the ten or something. Anyway, the deeper into space you can see,

the further back in time you are looking. A lot of our greatest

questions have been answered by sending incredibly complex

instruments into space. Many were built in the room where Liz Bonnin

is now. Welcome back to NASA's Jet

Propulsion Laboratory here in California. This is High Bay One

where they built Voyager and also the Mars Curiosity Rover that we

saw last night. Not only that, but this is the room where the wide

field planetary camera of the Hubble Telescope was built. The

camera that has given us the deepest view into our universe to

date. Tonight, I will find out how that camera has improved on that

image and I'm also going to show you Hubble's successor, the biggest

Space Telescope ever built. Come back to me soon.

The telescope is in space, it looks for light. The light we see is only

a tiny proportion of the light that exists in the universe. I will

expand on that idea in the old- fashioned way with a piece of chalk.

Visible light - light is an electromagnetic wave. It has a

wavelength. It is the distant from peak to peak. Visible light has a

wavelength of 500,000 millionths of a metre. That is visible. That is

what our eyes can see. If you go to longer wavelengths, first you move

to infrared light. We can't see that. We can feel it. You feel it

as heat. You go further to longer wavelengths, we go through

microwaves which have a wavelength of five centimetres. Then into the

radio part of the spectrum. Jodrell is detecting wavelengths of 20

centimetres. You can have radiowaves out to hundreds of

metres. Go to the other end, the wavelengths start getting shorter

and shorter. Beyond the visible there is ultraviolet. That is the

stuff you can't see but gives you a suntan. Shorter wavelengths we get

out to x-rays which pass through your skin which is why you can see

your bones. Finally, to the low- wave radiation. Different

telescopes have been designed to cover all parts of that spectrum.

We have images from them here for example. This is the Nova Cygni.

This is why you are seeing super- high-energy photons. The Chandra X-

Ray Total scone. Pillars of Creation. Visible light is one of

the few pieces that's affected by our atmosphere. -- Chandra X-Ray

Telescope. We have mike wave telescopes, this

is from the Planck. This is the Helix Nebula. That is very

beautiful. It is material coming off a dying star. In there, the

elements of life have been spread out into the universe. Collectively,

these have allowed us to piece together the grand story of our

universe. First, we need to try and give you a sense of timescale. When

did everything start? How long will The rhythms of the natural world

have an eternal quality to them. Perhaps that is why our earliest

theories of the universe picture it as unchanging and everlasting. Over

the last century, that picture has been transformed. Our current best

model of the universe is called the Big Bang Model. That says the

universe is 13.75 billion years old which means that it began 13.75

billion years ago. So if the universe had a beginning, does that

imply that it will also have an end? To answer that we need to

understand how the universe evolved with time. That is something that

was discovered in the 1920s when astronomers measured the movement

of distant galaxies relative to the Earth. If you look at galaxies

beyond the Milky Way, what you find is all the galaxies appear to be

rushing away from us. Imagine all the dots of the galaxies and I blow

up the balloon - as the balloon expands, every dot, every galaxy

moves away from every other galaxy. The interpretation of the

measurement that virtually every galaxy is rushing away from every

other is the same. They are doing that because the universe is

expanding and it's been doing that since the Big Bang. The cause of

this expansion is not fully understood. But in the billions of

years since the Big Bang, space has continued to expand. There are also

other forces at work on the galaxies in the universe. All those

galaxies out there across the universe have one thing in common

which is that they are massive, they have mass, they are made of

solid objects. Now, Isaac Newton told us there is a force that

exists between objects that have mass, the force of gravity. It acts

to pull things together. If I drop this shell, then due to the force

of gravity it meets the earth. Think about what that means for the

expansion of the universe. It is full of these galaxies, a great

deal of matter, a great deal of mass, all attracting itself

together, so the mass in the universe acts as a brake on the

expansion. The mass in the universe acts to slow the expansion of the

universe down. For much of the 20th Century, scientists believe that

the balance between these two effects, the initial expansion and

the breaking effect of gravity, would determine how the universe

might end. In this old theory, if gravity won the battle, then the

expansion might not just slow down, it might even stop and reverse so

the universe could one day begin to contract. That scenario is called

the Big Crunch. It means every galaxy in the sky will start

rushing towards every other galaxy and eventually the entire

observable universe would shrink back to the size of a single atom,

hot and dense. It would be an incredibly violent end to the

universe. Just over a decade ago, when astronomers measured how space

has been expanding over time, they discovered something unexpected

which completely changed how we think the universe might end. Five

billion years ago, the expansion of space actually began to speed up as

if something had given it fresh momentum. So what is this

mysterious thing that is stretching the very fabric of space itself?

Well, the best answer I can give you is that we don't know. It is

one of the great mysteries in physics. It does have a name. It is

called "dark energy" and that is all that everybody can agree upon.

There are theories about what this dark energy is and where it comes

from. But so far, nothing quite seems to fit. What we do know is

that its presence in every cubic metre of space, here and out beyond

the edge of the Solar System, beyond the Milky Way, and out to

the edge of the observable universe, space contains dark energy. The

universe, so far as we can tell, will continue to accelerate faster

and faster. The galaxies will get further and further away.

Ultimately, that dark energy will dominate and our best guess is that

the universe will continue to We have lots and lots of questions

coming in. Loads of the has asked - - have asked a version of this. How

do we know the universe is expanding? It is one of the most

important measurements in astronomy. If you look out to distant galaxies

and you can pick up stars in those galaxies, then what you see is that

they emit light but that light is stretched and what you find is that

the further away the object is that you look at, the more stretched the

light becomes. How do you measure distance? There are certain objects,

supernova explosions, where we know the brightness and we understand

the physics were enough to know how British should be and then it is

quite simple. You look at how bright it looks and you can look at

the distance. -- you know how bright it should be. This then

tells us the universe has been stretching. If you can imagine a

wave of light that has been travelling from some object for 1

billion years. The universe has been stretching for 1 billion years

and him when it is 2 billion light years it will be stretched to

billion years. And if you run the clock backwards, you start drawing

it in and it reduces down the universe. That is it. So you

reverse it mentally. The universe is contracting and contracting and

at some point you find something is on top of everything else and that

is what we call the Big Bang, and that is what we will be talking

about later. Lucy has asked on behalf of her class, how can space

never end? It is a very difficult concept. And that is if indeed it

never ends. It was born in the neck so I hope that is the answer.

we happy with batons are? Yeah! We of fine! We have an update on the

Mars sedge. We have pictures that have been picked out by you. We

have 60,000 people taking part already. 450,000 images of Mars

have been explored by you in 24 hours and we should make it well

over one million tonight. It is three-quarters the size of Wales,

the area. We have gone from Cyprus to three-quarters of Wales. Can we

make it all of Wales this evening?! This is an interesting feature

never before seen, picked out by a few were. These are geological

features. What is that? What are those bright bits? Is it the sun

catching it? It is fascinating. had some discussions last night

with folks like Brian May. What if aliens landed? We will give you a

patch of Mars that you can look at if you want to join in. The people

of Wales are locked on Mars! We are trying to find them! If you find

Elvis, we will give you a price! How did we begin to work call of

his out? I will show you this one image. If -- work all of this out?

This is the 20 ft telescope built by William her sure. You had to

stand on it to make observations. You could see the two moons of

Uranus and Oberon. And another moon that we think may be home for life.

We like a crazy project on this show and we decided to recreate and

rebuild her -- the Herschel Telescope.

To find out just how he made his 20 ft telescope, I have come to the

Royal astronomical Society in London where his observations have

been collected. I guess the important question to build this,

have you got any plans I can take with me? Not directly. We do not

have a lot of detail. Just the sketches. So I only have pictures

to work from? Fabulous! It is a brilliant structure. It has to go

up and down and a new track and let the sky rotate in front of you. He

wants to fathom what he calls the length, breadth, depth and

profundity of the universe. And so he built bigger and bigger

telescopes to see further out? Exactly. It looked quite cumbersome.

How did it work? The whole structure could rotate. You would

have needed some big strong beefy chaps down here. Lots of polls,

ropes and chains. A bit of ingenuity and we can probably

cricket! I hadn't quite appreciated how much effort he had gone into

building this. And there is a lot of stuff I have to think about. So

for me to get it working safely, it is going to take quite a bit of

planning. I will also need a lot of help so I have come to the

University of Derby, who have agreed to house the telescope, to

meet the crack team who are going to help make this happen. So

hopefully I can see what he saw. The university's staff and the

local astronomy Society are going to run and manage how it is built

and they have a but you'd have questions. Are we going to keep it

in wood? If you want to see a perfect image in the sky you want

tea the telescope to be sealed and not distorted. As you wind it up it

will become unstable. How will you stop it sagging in the middle?

how stable will it be in terms of higher winds? It looks like a have

a bit of thinking to the engineers have come up with a design that

looks a bit different to the original. Instead of wood, we are

going to build it out of scaffolding poles revolving around

a central pivot. The telescope will sit in a cradle to support it and

it can be winched up and down. Although remains dated, it remains

true to the principles. Now I am against the clock to get this ready

Surrey solid base of the telescope is first on my list. -- so a solid

base. We need to plot true North first so the local astronomical

Society is here to find it a proper way, with an astronomical clock and

the sun. At local noon, a shadow is thrown by a perpendicular stick

showing North. And with some nifty maths, they can workout East, West

and the degrees in between. He if you are South, give me a wave!

help it get marked out in style, the local primary school are here.

They are painted in bright colours. Who is looking forward to the

telescope? Me! We need clear skies, don't we? Yes. What planets have we

got here? Uranus and Sutton. you remember who discovered Uranus?

William Herschel. Now the base is down and looking beautiful, it is

time to put the construction plan into action. Now, this is no

ordinary scaffolding job. Inaudible the telescope to work, all

measurements have to be totally precise. -- in order for the

telescope. I am trusting you all. Shall we get started? Yes. To see

the whole night sky, William Herschel needed a panoramic view so

that team attaches 12 kneels to the base so it can rotate. -- wheels.

The original fellow over two or three times at first, I think, so

that won't happen to us, will it? No. We have taken on board all of

the issues and accommodated them. We have made sure it is safe to use

and we have no concerns. We Dicky layers of scaffolding and plays it

is time to add the specially crafted cradle for the 20 ft long

telescope tube which will hopefully stop its sagging in the middle.

Well, it fits! And as it is put in position, you start to get a feel

for William Herschel's ambition and the sheer scale of what he was

doing. There is just one thing missing - the actual telescope. I

have no idea whether the drawings are going to give me enough

information to actually see what he saw through it, so there is still a

lot to figure out. Mark, that didn't look too easy?

it was and! I still find it amazing the amount of effort William

Herschel went through. -- it was not! We understand as much as we do

about these amazing stars behind me offence to him. But the setting up

of the mound was a bit easier than I expected. The optics was a bit

more of a challenge but you will see a bit more about that tomorrow

and after the show I will be heading down to derby of the

weather is clear and I will be showing you what you can see

through the telescope. If this is important things up. The lesson

here is that there is an interaction between engineers and

inventing new instruments a more we can learn about the universe and

William Herschel discovered Sutton's Moon. You go for 100 years

and you get to Edwin Hubble and we have learned a lot about that, with

the Hubble telescope. I am going to show you something now. The Hubble

constant. I am going to use my Black Hawk! I am going to remind

back through the time of television backed Izzy 1970s! This is what he

measured. He used a bigger telescope. So what could he see

what that? He was the first to see stars in distant galaxies.

Initially in the Andromeda Galaxy, so he was the first to show it as

not some kind of nebula in the Milky Way but an external island of

stars. He went on in 1929 by making hundreds of measurements with high-

precision telescopes to work out this number, which is the Hubble

constant, named after him. It is 70 kilometres per second per

megaparsec. Now, this is a strange thing. It is a distance measure.

You will know what it is if you one astronomer. It is 3.2 something my

ears or so. So this number maps and encodes the expansion rate in it of

the universe and it says if you go about 3 million light years over

there and look at the galaxies and average out their motion, then on

average they are moving away from the Milky Way at 70 kilometres per

second, pretty slowly. A my favourite thing about this is a

little mathematical trick and we're going to do this at home for those

of you were so minded. If you have got them to be the same unit, they

kind of cancel each other out and you are left with a number which

has just in units of one over a second. Yes. Send us a tweet as

soon as you have done it. Turn megaparsec into kilometres and they

will cancel out. Invert that number and you will get an age of the

universe which is something in billion years. Send it in on

Twitter. The first one IC, I will buy you a pint! You flip the number

over and you get the age of the universe! What I love about it is

it is a measurement. A simple measurement. This is how we first

deduced or measured the age of the universe. It is a beautiful thing.

It is how they measure the first space Telegraph... Sorry!

Telescope! Let's go back to Liz by -- and she will tell us more.

you. We are at the Deep Space Network and it is from here that

they, and Nasser -- at NASA, do many of their measurements. One of

the most famous has to be Hubble's of the early stars and galaxies.

Thank you very much for joining us. This iconic Deep Field Image that

we know and love so well has recently been improved. Is that

right? Yes, it is the most recent image we have and we are looking

back 90% back to the Big Bang. The objects highlighted here are the

most distant images and galaxies known. The one on the left in red

is the most distant we have seen and it has been seen for 380

million years after the Big Bang. That is amazing! Can we now say

these are the earliest galaxies? That is it? No. We already know

from the colours of these stars that the stars have chemical

elements in them which have been enriched with and galaxies

themselves so there are even earlier galaxies be on the depth of

this image. Hubble has probably looked back as far as it can but we

now know there are earlier object so it has set the stage for further

exploration of even earlier object with more powerful facilities.

need a bigger telescope! Hmm! And will -- and to uncover all of those

stars and galaxies, NASA or were doing the work and I was lucky

enough to go and see the latest The plan is to solve the mystery of

how the very first stars were formed. They are believed to be 300

times the mass of our Sun. A telescope here is planning to

change all that. These are the plans for NASA's most

formidable Time Machine yet conceived. Called the James Webb

Telescope, its 6.5 metre diameter mirror will let us see objects far

fainter than Hubble can. It will be the biggest telescope ever sent

into space. They have been building it for a decade. The mirror is too

large to fly into space on any of today's rockets so it folds up into

three sections. Each of the 18- mirror segments are precision-made

and are coated in pure gold. Today, two more are just arriving.

Critical spaceflight hardware. Don't you just love it?! I would

not want to be the guy manoeuvring this right now. Far too nerve-

wracking. Just don't drop it! Like everything else, these mirrors have

been designed to be as light as possible, by Nobel Prize Winner Dr

John Mather. We have made it lightweight because that is the

only way to get it up into space. We need to go much higher so we are

going up on a European rocket and it can carry 6,000 kilos, which is

about half what the Hubble was. So it has to be much lighter.

Each mirror weighs 20 kilograms and they will be assembled in a clean

room so nothing can contaminate their 1.32 metre diameter surface.

It is not just its size that will give it the edge over Hubble, it is

the light that the Webb Telescope is designed to see that will make

all the difference. On its journey towards us, the light from the most

distant stars and galaxies has changed. It is still travelling at

the speed of light. Because the universe is expanding the

wavelength of that light has become longer, from visible to infrared

wavelengths. So to be able to detect that light you need a

telescope that is sensitive to infrared. The Webb Telescope can

pick up the radiation from a bumblebee the distance of the Moon.

By giving the telescope's sensitive infrared eyes we are on the brink

of viewing our deepest origins in the birth of the first stars.

Though for Dr Mather, the most exciting discoveries will be those

that we can't even begin to imagine. Every time you build a big

telescope, we get a surprise. Nature seems to be like that. Our

imagination, no matter how imaginative we are, there are

things out there that we will never guess.

Richard, you have been working on this area all your life. How

important is it that we find those very early stars? It is very

important. This moment when the universe was bathed in light for

the first time - we call that Cosmic Dawn - it is an important

landmark in the history of the universe. What are the implications

if Webb does find those stars? we know when this moment is, we can

start to come backwards to the present day and start to piece

together how stars enriched the galaxies with the chemical elements,

how they grew in size up to the majestic systems we have around us

today. How does your research follow on? There is lot more to do.

We have to understand the physics of what is going on. You are not

out of a job(!) No. Thank you. Join me later when I find out about some

other NASA missions that are helping us to understand star

evolution in much greater detail. See you in a bit.

Thanks, Liz. Until the James Webb is launched, the deepest image of

the galaxies we have is from the Hubble Space Telescope. We should

be able to see the same patch of sky outside with Mark now. Which

patch of sky is the Hubble looking at? It was in a position in the

constellation of Fornax. It is just below the trees, ten degrees above

the southern horizon. We have a video which shows what it would be

like if you were to take a journey in that direction. The final image

was a combination of 2,000 individual images. Stunning. It is.

We can see back to the formations of the first galaxies. We can't see

to the first moment of the Big Bang. It took light a while to get going?

Yes, imagine when every galaxy you can see in the night sky, the whole

universe was crammed into something the size of your head. That is

large enough! Very dense! Yes! universe has expanded and cooled

ever since. So it gets cooler and cooler, at a point around 400,000

years after the Big Bang, the universe had cooled down so much

that electrons were able to go into orbit around the nucleus to form

atoms. Light could travel through the universe and we can take an

image, we can see that light now travelling from that place all

those light years away. We have taken a picture of that image and

it is this. It is called the Cosmic Microwave Background. This is the

first light we are seeing there? That's right. In universe terms,

that is a baby. It is the earliest light we can see. It was taken by a

NASA probe which measured this faint glow of light that bathed us

in all directions. It's been travelling to us for 14 billion

years. What are we seeing here? There's a lot of features in this?

The colour tells you its temperature. The temperature is

almost the same everywhere. With probes like this, we have managed

to find, tease out the tiny variations across the sky. Where it

is red, it is ever so slightly hotter than average. Ever so

slightly? It is a millionth of a degree. The light we are measuring

is really cold. It is minus 270 degrees. We are measuring tiny

variations. The measurement is the temperature fluctuations. What do

they correspond to? You have these ripples in temperatures. They trace

out tiny lumps and bumps in space. The space was almost completely

smooth. There were these tiny lumps and bumps. They are origins of all

the stars in the galaxies that we see now. We think they grew over

millions of years until the lumps got big enough to form the very

first stars. This image is the entire sky? So every direction you

look? Unwrapped on to a flatscreen. We are looking at the seeds of the

galaxies. Without these fluctuations, we wouldn't exist?

That's right. There is another mission, the Planck Mission? That's

right. We have learnt a lot about what the universe is made of, but

the Planck Mission has been operating beautifully. It is

working at higher resolution. This is a map of it right now. This is

our Milky Way galaxy in the purple. You are getting in the way - this

is what we want to see at the edges? Exactly. We have to filter

out the Milky Way? Exactly. question is what is that going to

tell us? What is the origin of those fluctuations? Exactly. We

have this crazy idea about what happened in the first trillionth of

a second. The first one trillionth? Yes. The universe expanded

incredibly fast, faster than the speed of light, blowing up bits of

space that are smaller than the nucleus of an atom in a trillionth

of a second. That is what made our universe the way it is today. We

are not sure if that is what happened or not. I find that

remarkable that we make a measurement that you can link back

to events that may have happened a trillionth of a second after our

universe began. It is phenomenal. You can trace it through to 400,000

years where we see this light and all the way through to today and it

is making so much sense. We are finding out what the universe is

made of. It is really a wonderful thing. We will talk to you after

the show. Thank you very much. We will see you again. If you are

hoping to get out after the show, you will need some clear skies. So

over to Su San Powell in the BBC Weather Centre. -- Susan Powell in

If you are planning on casting your eyes skywards, you better get on

with it! Further north, you are up against some fog so the best places

might be North Wales and the North East of England. Better prospects

tonight than tomorrow night. Tomorrow, a lot of cloud across the

UK. An old weather front in the east, a fresh one to the west. The

clearest of the skies will be between those two weather fronts.

It will be limited so your best chances are this evening. Perhaps

tomorrow, not quite so great. I will be back tomorrow to give you

Thank you. If you do have clear skies, get out there and take a

look after the show. Even if all you are doing is gauging it with

the naked eye, there is a still a lot you can work out about the

history of the stars above us. Here is Mark to explain.

On a clear, dark night, thousands of stars can be seen twinkling

above our heads. To the untrained eye, it is easy to assume they are

all the same. Tiny white specs light years away. In fact, many

stars aren't white at all. Our nightly companions are many

different colours and those colours give us a clue to their life

stories. Most stars appear white to us on Earth because they are so far

away they are too faint to stimulate the part of the eye that

lets us see in colour. If we could see as well as a powerful telescope,

our view of the sky would turn technicolour. When you know what

you are looking for, picking out the colours of stars is fairly easy

to do. Many are bright enough to be seen with just the eye. Let's start

by looking at Orion. It rises nice and high so it is easy to spot. We

start by looking for its famous three-star belt which you can see

just over my left shoulder. Move upwards to find a star called

Betelgeuse. To the naked eye, it is one of the most colourful. You

can't see this with our special low-light black-and-white camera so

here is what it looks like through our telescope. As we go out of

focus, its stunning red colour becomes really prominent. If we go

back to the belt stars and start at the top star and drop a line down

towards the lower right-hand corner we spot another bright star called

Rigel. This is Rigel out of focus. You can see it is a vivid blue

colour. Both Rigel and Betelgeuse are known as super-giants. They are

amongst some of the brightest stars in the night sky. Why is one red

and the other blue? The colour of a star can tell us how hot its

surface temperature is. We think of hot things as red and cold things

as blue. The hotter a star is the bluer it looks. The cooler the star,

the redder it glows. So Betelgeuse is colder than blue Rigel. With a

simple chart like this, we can tell how hot the stars are. I would say

Rigel is more of a Bluestar than "a bluey"-white star which means its

temperature is 10,000 K which means it is a burning furnace with

phenomenal amounts of energy. At the other end of the scale is

Betelgeuse. It is less than 3,700 K. One of my favourite colour for

objects to observe is a map in Andromeda. To find and, --

Andromeda, we need to get to Pegasus. At this time of year, it

is directly above our heads. Stop around 13,000 Kelvin. If we move

upwards, we which another bright star. It is more orange. If we

continue higher, we reach the last. If we look at this through a

telescope it is transformed into one of the most stunning objects in

the night sky. It is a double star, made of a hot blue star orbiting

with a larger, cooler golden companion, and when you see them

together it makes their contrasting colours all the more striking.

Observing the colours of them can take a bit of practice but it is

well worth the effort. And the more you discover about the colour and

other characteristics, the more they will reveal their secrets to

I'm here with some of the younger members of the Liverpool astronomy

Society. Do you remember the first time you saw the colour in the

stars? Yes, it was a star low on the horizon flickering from red to

blue. That is what started me on the road to learning about them.

And it looked beautiful. Yes. do you remember? It was really cool

because I thought all stars were white and then I realised they were

different colours depending on their age and their temperature.

And that is the case, it is the temperature which affect it. Of

course there are other things. Have you seen any colour in the Planets?

I saw Jupiter. It has got orange, brown and white. It has got a white

dot and it is a volcano. Yes. A big storm on Jupiter. Thank you for

that, guys. We will let you get back to observing. Back to the

studio. A big debate going on here as to

what the colour means - does it mean temperature? First of all,

Mark, it is that a budget. She was correct. The reason why. -- it is

the temperature. This is part of a triple star system. This is red and

that is because it is cool on the surface. That is because it is very

small, around a tenth of the mass of the sun. The pay up is that it

will burn for many, many, many billions of years. But here's

another famous red star. Can you believe I have mess this up again?!

This picture you cannot see now and has become faded in! There it is.

This is Betelgeuse. This is red for a different reason. It is a very,

very, very large star indeed, many times larger than the sun. You

could fit most of the solar system in there and you can even see sun

spots on the surface. It has only been alive for less than 10 million

years. It is burning is feel so voraciously. The surface is cold

because it is very large so it is a long way away from the core.

things might get more dramatic for that star at any point? Yes, it is

already burning helium and it will run out of fuel building the

heavier elements to its core and then it will collapse. This is an

artist's impression of what that would look like in our skies. And

quite honestly, this could happen tomorrow. Betelgeuse is on borrowed

time now. That will look like a second sun in the sky. How long

will we have this in the sky? will go for about two weeks like

that and it will be the most spectacular sight. What you are

seeing is the distribution of the elements of life. Because we are

overdue a supernova in the Milky Way? Yes, because on average you

get one in each large galaxy per century. What was the fame has one

we had? This was the Crab Nebula. So this was seen by Chinese

astronomers. That Furnace was basically where the heavier

elements were built? Yes. It is a spectacular and beautiful thing in

the sky but what we are looking at... Well, we have an image we

took early on tonight. There it is. That is a small telescope. What

you're looking at it is the elements of not only carbon and

oxygen that were cooked in the heart of the star, but elements

like gold. Anything heavier than I am cannot be made in the centre of

a star. It is only made for a few minutes each century each galaxy

and that is why they are so expensive, those elements -

platinum, gold. Because they are only made out there. So you can see

what this teaches us about the origins of the stars and galaxies

and it tells us ultimately how we got here. Liz is with some of the

pioneering scientists leading this research. At thank you.

I am with Professor Fiona Harrison, principal investigator with the

NuSTAR telescope with NASA. Camped -- am I right in saying this is the

only telescope that could get us this image? You snack. It is making

images more than 10 times Chris Pratt and sensitive, by hundreds of

times, than anything we have seen previously. -- images are more than

10 times more precise. It was created in a foreign nuclear

explosion. In particular, 44Ti, which could end up in our bones.

And does this give us a better understanding of how stars explode?

Yes, the distribution is very sensitive to whether the explosion

was spherical or oxide did. And that tells us how stars explode.

Thank you very much. A telescope that has communicated with the Deep

Space Network is the Spitzer Mission telescope. Thank you for

joining us. It can peer through all of the dust and gas of newly-formed

stars so when the supernovae begin to form into stars, it can give us

images like this. Tell us what we are seeing here? We are seeing a

helium cauldron where dust and gas are being thrown back and forth by

young stars and massive stars are being formed. You can see a bubble

be -- being formed. So we are learning a lot more about how that

process comes about. What about planets coming into formation

around a star? Can it tell us about that? It can tell us about planets

because they are warmed by the star light. The team yesterday found a

second asteroid belt around the second brightest are in the North

sky. We have an inner and an outer belt sculpted by the planets.

Fascinating. Thank you so much, Neil. These are teaching us so much

more about the cycles of star death and birth and how all of that works

together, to understand how our universe is shaped. We will also

find out a lot more about how our own solar system came to be made

and how we came to be made of staff stuff. Tomorrow, we are leaving

this place, heading deep into the desert to this. This part of the

Goldstone at work. And I will be finding out how scientists are

tracking asteroids. Or we gave you is a bit of an

approximation. It should have come out at 15 billion. You opines to

Guy and Andrew Murray. -- you owe a drink too. We should probably leave

the last final bet to Ed. Yes, Professor Ed Copeland. The question

is, what is the fate of the universe? I don't know. OK, thanks

for coming along, Ed! The best you can do, because you need to look

into the future and for that you have to base it on whatever models

you have, and we have a series of models which are consistent with

the data so you can project thenceforward so we have three

scenarios I can come up with. You had a thing about Doc energy and if

you imagine that being constant. -- dark energy. It is a nightmare for

particle physicists. If it is driving the universe than the

universe is accelerating so distant galaxies are accelerating a part

and these galaxies will disappear before us over many billions of

years and gradually it would just look like an empty universe with

these things all spread out. you would see no stars in the

skies? Well, probably. And the other one is, imagined the dark

energy is increasing, so it is getting more and more dominant, and

then things are more dramatic. data doesn't suggest it should be

like that. If it is, acceleration is even more rapid and then not

only do the galaxies move apart but they split apart and then the

constituencies split apart and the atoms split apart and then you get

the fundamental parts thrown across the universe like an angry child

throwing their toys across the universe! Again, not wonderful!

There is a happy ending and that is in the case were the dark energy is

a transient feature and so it is driving the energy now but maybe it

is changing with time, and it actually decays. A bit like the

early inflation you describe but the beginning of the programme. And

what will happen there is the energy stored in the dark energy

goes to create particles and radiation and the universe read

Keats again. And now we are back to his scenario with a much lower

energy scale. -- it heats up again. Another curvature of the universe

becomes important in determining the ultimate fate of the universe.

So that is the most palatable? It is still not entirely palatable!

is the least likely. At the moment it looks like... We are going to

talk about a lot more of this next time. For now, let's go outside to

Mark for the last time. Everybody has gone indoors now but if you

have been inspired to look up at the sky, we have lots of resources

you can look up on the website. If you want to get hold of race

stargazing guide, then the details are on the screen. They are in

conjunction with the Open University and it is well worth

getting one of those. OK, that is the Star Guide. At the

beginning of the show a promise to answer the ultimate question, what

happened before the Big Bang? -- I promised. Well, the universe may

have existed for an infinite amount of time before the Big Bang or time

may have begun at the Big Bang, so the answer is either the universe

has been here forever or it hasn't. Fantastic, isn't it? That is why we