All language subtitles for Universe (1960) Roman Kroitor, Colin Low

The ground beneath our feet is the
surface of a planet whirling at

miles an hour around a distant sun.

Our life is possible only because of the
light and warmth of that sun, a star.

Yet the sun which shines on us is only
one out of billions of such stars in the

universe.

This is one of the world's major
observatories, the David Dunlap

miles north of Toronto.

Dr. Donald McRae is a professor of
astronomy at the University of Toronto.

Observatory. At any moment scattered
throughout the world, there are hundreds

men and women observing the heavens with
optical and radio telescopes, gathering

data for the solution of many questions
about the universe.

routine work for the most part.

McRae's job tonight, if the sky remains
clear, will be to take photographs of

six stars with the telescope.

A mirror over six feet in diameter, with
its surface shape to within one

millionth of an inch, will catch the
light from a star.

This light will be reflected from the
large mirror onto a smaller one, which

turn will focus it back into a camera at
the base of the telescope.

Out of the study of hundreds of
thousands of observations, astronomers

pieced together an accurate picture of
the universe.

Beyond the appearance of starshine and
moonbeam, what will the first men to

leave the earth find?

Enough is now known that we can, in
imagination, journey into these spaces.

250 ,000 miles away, the moon.

This is the moon that men have
worshipped as a goddess, that countless

have sighed over and sworn by.

It will take immense courage to journey
to this place, for on this pitted and

pocked ball of pumice and stone there is
no atmosphere.

No air to breathe, no sound to hear.

By day, the sun's heat would boil water,
if there were water.

At night, 240 degrees below zero.

Unshielded, a man couldn't live here for
two minutes.

But if he were to die, his body would
lie unchanged through thousands of

for nothing grows and nothing decays.

If you were to hover in space beyond the
moon, speeding up in imagination its

movement, you would see a majestic
procession in the sky.

As the moon circles the earth, so the
earth itself circles the sun.

The sun is the center of a system of
nine heavenly bodies, called planets,

wheel around it in vast orbits trapped
by its gravitational pull.

closest to it, the tiny planet, Mercury.

On the surface of Mercury, the
temperature is hot enough to melt lead,

face of it is turned perpetually to the
sun, only 36 million miles away.

If we looked outward from Mercury, we
would see the second closest planet,

Venus, shining brighter than the much
more distant stars.

Venus, in orbit 31 million miles further
out from the Sun, is a mystery, for its

face is veiled by dust storms, or
perhaps dense cloud.

Looking outward from Venus,

The most brilliant and beautiful object
in the sky would be a planet in orbit 25

million miles still further out.

Earth.

Beyond Earth, shining redly in the
night, Mars.

Colder than Earth and smaller, this is
the planet men have looked on and

wondered whether they are alone in the
heavens.

It is reasonably certain that the
markings on its surface, bluish green in

Martian summer turning rusty brown in
the autumn, indicate vegetation.

Here, however, the atmosphere has almost
no oxygen, and no creatures like men

could live here, 140 million miles from
the sun.

In the place past Mars, where there
should theoretically be a planet, There

only the asteroids, small bodies ranging
from boulders to chunks 300 miles

across, hundreds of them swinging in
orbit about the sun.

500 million miles out from the Sun, the
giant planet Jupiter, ruling 12 moons.

Jupiter, seen here from one of its
moons, is larger than all the other

put together.

Its atmosphere is a thousand miles deep,
a poisonous mixture of methane gas,

ammonia and hydrogen.

which at the bottom must have the
density of water.

Here, under the enormous pressure of the
atmosphere, a human being would be

crushed beyond recognition.

These are the rings of Saturn.

Bands 10 ,000 miles wide, composed of
almost an infinity of meteoric particles

of gravel and ice circling the sixth
planet.

Saturn, with its nine moons, is so far
from the sun that it takes 30 Earth

to circle it.

And here the temperature never rises
above 240 degrees below zero.

And if we were to plunge still further
out, hundreds of millions of miles, past

the planet Uranus, beyond Neptune, we
would finally come to the last of the

known planets, to the dwarf Pluto, named
for the god of the underworld.

Its surface moves in perpetual darkness
and unimaginable cold.

For the sun is four billion miles away,
only a starry speck in the sky.

Sometimes a strange apparition appears
in the sky, a comet.

Like a planet, a comet orbits the sun,
but it is only a loose conglomeration of

ice and dust, invisible, until its head
comes close enough to the sun, whose

rays then excite it into fluorescence,
and push away from the head a vaporous

tail, which may become a million miles
long.

For a few weeks, a comet blossoms, and
then, passing the sun, it will fade and

coast again, unseen, billions of miles
into the darkness, perhaps not to return

for a century to the blazing star, which
is its master.

The sun is an unimaginable inferno, a
thermonuclear furnace churning with the

storms we see as sunspots, heaving from
its surface columns of gas that arch 300

,000 miles into space, pulled and
twisted by enormous electrical and

fields.

The sun produces the energy of a million
hydrogen bombs exploding every second.

So it has raged for five billion years,
and so it will rage for perhaps another

five billion years, flooding its planets
with radiant energy.

Too near or too far from this furnace,
instant death for men.

Between 91 and 93 million miles from
this star, filtered through a blanket of

atmosphere, its energies sustain human
life.

Hey,

what's the matter? You're a striker.

When a particular star is to be
photographed, it is located by its

on a star chart.

On such a chart, every black speck is a
star.

146 .7 plus 1349.

Forty -five tons of steel and glass must
be aimed precisely.

at a spot perhaps 200 million billion
miles away.

Many of the stars astronomers study are
invisible to the naked eye.

Even the nearest ones, apart from our
sun, are so far away that their light is

very dim.

The mirror in the base of the telescope
gathers and focuses hundreds of

thousands of times the amount of light
seen by the naked eye.

Almost nothing of a star can be known
directly.

It is a photograph that is studied.

Not a portrait of a star, but a
photograph of its light, split into a

in which each band has its meaning.

The presence in that distant star of
elements like iron, calcium, carbon.

From a spectroscopic photograph,
astronomers can tell whether a star is

towards us or away.

By exposing on the same plate the
spectrum of the star, and the spectrum

iron arc, and measuring the displacement
between the two.

To photograph the spectrum of the arc
takes ten seconds.

To catch enough of the light from the
star may take up to two hours.

During the exposure, machinery in the
base of the telescope automatically

compensates for the rotation of the
Earth, keeping the star centered.

If we looked more deeply into space,

leaving behind us the Earth and the
whole of our solar system, and traveled

the speed of light, it would take four
years before we came to even the closest

of the billions of suns scattered
through stellar space.

Although the stars are suns, many of
them are unlike our sun.

Some, like Beta in the constellation
Lyra, instead of planets, have a second

swinging around them.

There are multiple suns, like Castor in
the constellation Gemini.

There are giant suns 5 ,000 times as
large as ours, and dwarfs, in which one

cubic inch of matter weighs 40 ton.

Suns rotating so rapidly that pinwheels
of gas are thrown off, weighing more

than our whole system of planets.

Suns that over a period of days or hours
pulse as their internal nuclear

processes change.

Rare suns in which the temperature
reaches 5 billion degrees, where nuclear

fusion makes elements as heavy as iron
and results in the enormous explosion of

a nova or supernova.

The brilliant light from such explosions
floods through the gaseous clouds of

space for billions on billions of miles.

And the remains of a supernova recorded
ten centuries ago can still be seen as

the Crab Nebula in the constellation
Taurus.

As well as stars, in stellar space there
is gas and dust.

sometimes glowing in starlight,
sometimes dark, obscuring what is behind

Stars, gas, dust, all moving in apparent
chaos.

Until a generation ago, it seemed
indecipherable.

The only suggestion of form was their
grouping in the band we know as the

Way.

Now years of patient work have revealed
a pattern in the universe.

A pattern beyond anything we could have
imagined looking at the heavens with the

naked eye.

With data sifted from countless
painstaking observations, astronomers

filling in the details of a pattern so
vast that everyday ideas of distance and

time cannot encompass it.

If we could move with the freedom of a
god, so that a million years pass in a

second, and if we went far enough, past
the nearest suns, beyond the star

clouds and nebulae, in time they would
end, and as if moving out from behind a

curtain, we would come to an endless sea
of night.

In that sea are islands, continents of
stars, that we have named the galaxies.

The largest known forms in the universe,
hundreds of billions of suns bound

together by gravity, rotating around
their common center once in 200 million

years.

Our sun.

with its planets, is near the edge of
one such galaxy, the rim of which we see

dimly as the Milky Way.

The galaxies are the birthplace and
graveyard of the stars.

Here, gas contracts into knots, becomes
hot, and flares into the life of a sun,

sometimes forming with it planets.

sometimes planets which must be suitable
for life.

And here, too, the stars finally consume
themselves and collapse into cold, dark

dwarfs.

A hundred billion suns, yet formed so
enormous, that they have been observed

slipping through one another like
phantoms, their stars light years apart,

continuing undisturbed in their courses.

At the very limit of our most powerful
instruments, galaxies still are flung

across space, themselves as numerous as
stars in the night sky.

But when we look this deeply into space,
we are looking at a ghostly image of

the distant past, for the light by which
we see these regions started traveling

towards us long before the dawn of life
on earth.

In all of time,

on all the planets of all the galaxies
in space, what civilizations have risen,

looked into the night, seen what we see,

asked the questions that we ask?