Original subtitles

This is NASA's premier control center

for satellites navigating outer space.

From this very room, commands go out

to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Hubble has been illuminating

one mystery of the universe after another.

With no atmospheric distortions,

a space-based telescope can observe

celestial bodies in great detail.

Omega Centauri is a star cluster

containing 100,000 stars.

One can make out the blue or red colors of individual stars.

This is the Cat's Eye Nebula.

Those veils enshrouding it are gases released

by the star that shines in its center,

many gaseous layers distinctly revealed.

This huge galaxy contains 100 billion stars

burning in space like our own sun.

Even at the speed of light,

its image takes 69 million years to reach us.

This is one far-out celestial body.

Hubble beautifully captures an image

of this entire galaxy,

showing even individual stars.

Hubble is now shedding light

on one of the greatest mysteries of the age,

the distribution of galaxies in space.

There are over 100 billion galaxies in our universe

spread out in a fantastic pattern.

And that pattern is

bubbles,

entire galaxies clinging to each other in a pattern

resembling astonishingly that of soap bubbles.

But in the bubbles themselves, there are no galaxies.

How is it that the universe is structured like this?

The Hubble Space Telescope takes on the challenge

of the universe's bubbles.

Three, two, one,

and liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery

with the Hubble Space Telescope,

our window on the universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched

into Earth orbit aboard the Space Shuttle

in April of 1990.

It's the largest ever space-based telescope,

13 meters long, as big as a bus.

It photographs the cosmos while traveling

at 28,000 kilometers an hour

at an altitude of 600 kilometers above Earth.

The Space Shuttle has been used to service the telescope.

In 2009, state of the art observation equipment

was installed, upgrading its capabilities.

Let's check out just how powerful the Hubble is.

The Orion Nebula,

gases in vivid reds and blues.

Let's go in for a closer look.

Amidst these cosmic clouds,

a strange celestial body appears.

This heavenly eyeball is a protostar.

It's the beginnings of what will eventually

be a star shining brightly like our own sun.

Only the Hubble Space Telescope,

with its amazing powers of resolution,

could penetrate the very nucleus

of this incipient star system.

This one is like a budding flower.

Hubble photographed it at intervals for half a year.

Its unfolding petals of gas or cosmic dust

are rendered in exquisite detail.

This remarkable spherical structure floating in space

is the remnant of a supernova that exploded

some 400 years ago.

Hubble was able to capture the faint color

of its nearly transparent shell of gases.

Even without atmospheric interference,

it's quite a trick to capture the light

of such far-off sources.

The light is collected and focused by a giant

2.4-meter diameter mirror

developed especially for use in space.

Light rays are directed to cameras situated

behind the mirror, and various data

are then beamed back to Earth.

Moving through space at incredible speed,

it takes Hubble just 90 minutes to orbit the Earth.

All the while, it can maintain focus

on a fixed point in space,

collecting optical and spectrographic data.

This is the Hubble Command Center.

Let's check out the very heart of mission operations here,

the control room.

A staff of 10 or so working in shifts

command the Hubble 24 hours a day.

This is the Mission Operations Room

of the Hubble Space Telescope

at Goddard Space Flight Center.

We have a number of consoles in here.

Each has a specialized function and position.

This map is currently,

this is where the Hubble is overground.

We're over North Africa right now.

This is the planning and control system

and optical telescope assembly

as well as the science instruments.

Rosalie is monitoring the performance

of the on-board attitude control systems.

The staff send out a stream of vital commands

specifying minutely how the angle of the telescope

should be adjusted

and how long a given observation will last.

This is the first place on Earth to receive the images

shot by the Hubble Space Telescope.

And in orbit, something this would be-

And this is where the staff decide

where to focus Hubble's observations to begin with.

In fact, they're deliberating right now.

Now you have a list of specific proposals?

Yeah, and- Provided a proposal

is formally submitted and approved,

Hubble can be used by anyone in the world.

Every year, the institute receives

a thousand such proposals.

Of those, it will adopt about 200,

with 800 falling by the wayside.

Secondary set of chance

The institute's director is Matt Mountain.

He says that as director, he greatly enjoys evaluating

the many splendid proposals for use of the Hubble.

His toughest task is dealing with complaints

from those whose applications were denied.

Sometimes I get a lot of very angry calls

from some very experienced astronomers complaining,

"Why haven't I won telescope time?"

"After all, I'm a famous astronomer."

And I have to tell them, "I'm afraid this year,"

"your idea was not as good as the idea of,"

"in fact, some younger people."

Hubble is a world telescope.

It's everybody's telescope.

It's the people's telescope,

and I think that we should all be very proud

that as a people, we're able to do this.

If a proposal is approved,

actual observations are initiated.

Some observations take several hours,

some take dozens of hours.

But the raw images that reach Earth are not,

at first sight, breathtakingly beautiful.

They must undergo several steps of processing first.

The first step is to delete extraneous optical artifacts.

Yeah, so this first image here is

what you might call a raw image.

It comes down from the telescope,

and we spend a lot of time here

calibrating our camera so that we understand

the artifacts that you'll see in the images,

and of course, we want to remove those artifacts

from the image to get a nice clean image.

These raw images that first arrive on Earth

are marred by cosmic rays and other factors.

By superimposing multiple images

and removing visual noise,

a clean image can be obtained.

Next, represent the object in color

based on the observational data.

The Hubble Space Telescope does this

by recording image data using more than one color filter

and then combining the results.

Hubble's data can also yield three-dimensional images.

In the contours of a Hubble image,

gases and stars are clearly differentiated.

Distributing them according to their measured distances

results in 3-D images,

exciting images borne of the desire of scientists

to convey the wonders of the cosmos.

The freshness and immediacy of Hubble's images

enhance our understanding of the universe.

The Carina Nebula comprises vast gaseous clouds.

It measures 50 light years across.

Just like people, stars in outer space

are born and later die.

They originate, it is believed,

from clouds of gas and dust.

The dark portions of this image

are dense concentrations of accumulated gases.

It is within these dense gases that stars are born.

This is a location within the Carina Nebula.

We see towering masses of gas.

With this image, Hubble has captured

the very moment of a star's birth.

Stars are born amidst violent eruptions.

Here, we see a jet erupting at the tip of a tower of gas.

Stars do not live forever,

and within these same Hubble image of the Carina Nebula,

we can find a spectacular view of a star that is dying.

Amidst gases expanding like two balloons fused together,

a giant star is entering its final phase.

Superannuated, it marks the end

with fierce exhalations of gas and dust.

A grand explosion is the last hurrah of the giant star.

The Crab Nebula is comprised of the remnants of a star

that exploded a millennium ago.

The power of that explosion was tremendous.

Even now, its gases are expanding

at a rate of 1,300 kilometers per second.

Eventually, these gases will coalesce again

as the raw materials for new stars.

The Hubble Space Telescope has succeeded in capturing

detailed images of the life and death of these stars.

Hubble's precise images also help us understand

how the Cosmos is composed.

The universe, we find, is structured

into clusters of galaxies, collections of stars.

This is our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

It's 100,000 light years across.

That means that traversing it would take 100,000 years

at the speed of light.

Planet Earth is located here

between two thick swirling arms of the galaxy.

And beyond the Milky Way,

vast numbers of other galaxies can be found,

out to the farthest reaches of the universe.

One by one, Hubble has been capturing detailed images

of many of the uniquely shaped galaxies in our universe.

This is the Whirlpool Galaxy

located 21 million light years from Earth.

One can clearly make out the red nebulae

on its giant spiraling arms.

It's about the same size as our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Galaxy Messier 104 has been nicknamed

The Sombrero Galaxy.

You can see why from this profile.

The bulging center and the broad thin disc

are two striking features of this spiral galaxy.

Galaxy Messier 82 shoots forth clouds

of interstellar matter.

These red plumes bursting out from the center

are made of hydrogen gas.

Here is a pair of galaxies

a hundred million light years from Earth.

The two galaxies are beginning to collide.

Ultimately, they will merge,

forming one giant galaxy.

Such collisions tend to occur in areas

where galaxies are found in high concentration.

But why are there such clusterings of galaxies?

To solve that mystery, a large project

initiated by one scientist

has set a record for observation time

using the Hubble Space Telescope.

The suburbs of Los Angeles.

Astronomer Nick Scoville has been observing

far-off galaxies for four decades.

His chief goal, to solve the mystery of galactic clustering.

So Doctor, what are you working on?

This is a table which I made recently,

a couple months ago, which I'm now tightening up.

It's a suspended table,

no legs, no compression members,

just wires to hold it up.

If you think about it, the table is a little bit

like a spiral galaxy in the sense

that it's suspended in space,

but it's an amazing thing when you look at galaxies,

that they're actually suspended in space,

nothing holding them up except gravity

of very distant galaxies.

We still don't understand the real origin of it,

and so even though astronomers have gained

an incredible knowledge and understanding

of the present universe,

there's a lot that's left out,

and that's one of the real pleasures

of doing astrophysical science.

A major discovery relating to galactic distribution

provided Scoville with the hint he needed

to solve one of his puzzles.

In 1986, articles in American newspapers

trumpeted the view that the cosmos was structured

like a conglomeration of bubbles.

This news, which ran completely counter

to conventional wisdom,

was a great shock to cosmologists.

The co-discoverer of this bubble structure

was the astronomer Margaret Geller.

She remembers how scientists at the time

generally discounted galactic clusters,

seeing primarily a loose scattering of galaxies.

They were just randomly distributed in the universe

and then there were some clusters of galaxies,

people know about those,

and they thought they were just...

There were some lumps around in the universe

and they were random.

With planet Earth as a reference point,

Geller mapped the locations of a thousand galaxies.

That led to the discovery of strange patterns

in galactic distribution.

And you can see that there is a pattern.

It looks sort of like a person,

and you could see there are regions that are really empty

where there are no galaxies, like this one,

very big and very beautiful patterns,

and it was a very exciting heady experience to find those.

I like to think of it as a kind of bubble-like pattern,

but these bubbles aren't the tiny bubbles you see

in your kitchen sink.

These bubbles are 200 million light years across,

so it takes, traveling at the speed of light,

it would take 200 million years to cross one.

There are vast regions in space

where there are almost no galaxies

and other regions where they are stacked up like a wall.

It's as if the galaxies were clustered

in the interstices between giant bubbles.

The galaxies are indeed distributed

according to a general principle.

Geller calls it the universe's bubble structure.

However, some objected that Geller's scope

was too narrow and that the bubble-like distribution

she observed was merely accidental.

The state of New Mexico in the Western United States.

At the Apache Point Observatory

perched atop a mountain range,

scientists from America, Japan, and Germany

have mapped out the bubble structure

of a large section of the cosmos.

The project is called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

or SDSS.

A dedicated 2.5-meter aperture telescope

was specially fabricated for this project.

The initial target area for observation

was 100 times larger than Geller's,

about half of the nighttime sky.

Galaxies within that scope were cataloged

and their distances from Earth measured.

The tiny holes in this metal plate

help measure galaxies' distance from Earth.

First, the two-dimensional location of each galaxy

is marked with a hole.

From the spectroscopic data gathered

through dedicated optical fibers attached to each hole,

the corresponding galaxy's distance from Earth

can be calculated.

The survey utilized 2,000 of these metal plates.

In the first eight years, half of the sky was surveyed.

This is a partial map of the universe

based on galactic distances

as determined by the SDSS Project.

Each of these spots is a galaxy.

There are a million of them.

In some places, galaxies are densely congregated.

In others, they are sparse.

Such bubble structures extend indefinitely

in all directions.

The universe is just full of bubbles.

Nick Scoville of Caltech is the prime mover

behind the COSMOS Project,

designed to observe extremely distant bubble structures.

Using the Hubble Telescope, it should be possible

to peer beyond the SDSS Project's

three billion light year range

to as far as 10 billion light years from earth.

By looking that far away,

Scoville hopes to observe the past shape

of the bubble structure.

This galaxy is located 320 million light years from Earth.

In other words, its light takes

320 million years to reach us.

So the light we're observing is

from 320 million years in the past.

The farther out one looks,

the farther into the past one sees.

Scoville believes that the bubble structure's past

can help us unravel such mysteries

as why the galaxies cluster the way they do

and why vast reaches of space

have emerged with almost no galaxies.

The prime goal of the COSMOS Project

which separates it from other deep surveys done with Hubble

is that it covers a large area, and the prime goal is,

as it was originally designed,

is to map the structure of galaxies

and understand their evolution

with respect to the large-scale cosmic environment.

The new proposal, however,

had a serious constraint.

A huge amount of time was required for these observations.

Consider the full moon.

Mapping its area requires 80 separate images.

But observing the bubble structure of the universe

required mapping at least one enormous bubble

plus some margin.

That would take as much sky area as nine full moons.

The hundreds of images necessary meant securing

huge amounts of telescope time with the Hubble.

To succeed in such a large-scale survey,

project leader Nick Scoville assembled a team

of more than 100 scientists from around the world.

It is a remarkable international undertaking,

one that has been conducted successfully for many years.

In 2002, the COSMOS Project submitted its initial proposal

for use of the Hubble Space Telescope.

But it requested so much telescope time

that the Hubble's project review panels

could not come to a decision.

The Hubble director at that time was Steven Beckwith.

I think it was something like

1,200 orbits of telescope time,

which no project had ever had before.

We only give out 3,000 orbits in an entire year,

and so this would have been more than a third

of an entire year's worth of data.

And even though the committees thought the science was good,

I think they couldn't quite bring themselves

to give out that much time.

The policy had been to give

as many scientists as possible access to Hubble.

But Beckwith wrestled with the issue.

He was reluctant to veto the project.

Some large-scale programs were just too worthy to pass up.

Even if you normalized per orbit of telescope time,

the impact of those programs per orbit was greater

than the sum of all the small programs per orbit.

And then as director,

I took a fraction of the telescope time

and I set it aside, and I said that will only go

for a very large program.

Under this new regime, the COSMOS Project qualified

as a large-scale Hubble program.

One of the project's team members

was Yoshiaki Taniguchi of Ehime University in Japan.

They didn't get as much telescope time

as they'd requested, but it was a record amount anyway,

666 Hubble orbits, or a thousand hours.

Scoville also figured out how,

in the reduced time available,

they could adjust their imaging methods

to cover an area as large as nine full moons.

In 2003, Hubble began observations dedicated

to resolving the mystery of the universe's bubble structure.

The target field measuring nine full moons across the sky

but extending deep into space

focused on a corner of the Sextans constellation.

Let's take a look at some of the 600 images

taken during this project's record-breaking number

of Hubble orbits.

What at first glance looked like stars

are in fact mostly galaxies.

Let's look closer.

Galactic forms come into view.

Smaller-looking objects may simply be farther away.

Some of these galaxies are more than

10 billion light years away.

In that nine-full-moon field of observation,

over a million galaxies were detected.

It took three years just to analyze these images.

This image represents the distribution of galaxies

as recorded by the COSMOS Project.

The red portions indicate the presence of galaxies.

The brighter the area, the denser the galactic cluster.

So within this particular structure here,

there are about a thousand galaxies.

There are filaments leading into the structure,

a thousand galaxies occurring within it,

large structure down in here,

filaments coming across the field.

That nine-full-moon field of observation

did in fact yield proof of the universe's bubble structure.

And the COSMOS Project captured images of galaxies

from a whole range of time periods.

The galaxies are differentiated by distance from Earth,

so one can trace the shapes

of bubble structures into the past.

The basic principle,

the farther out in space one looks,

the farther back in time one sees.

This is outer space 2.5 billion years ago.

One can readily make out large bubble structures.

Let's go even farther back in time.

3.5 billion years ago,

the bubble structures are a little smaller.

Six billion years ago,

the bubble structures are much smaller.

Farther away and longer ago,

they were smaller still.

Using the Hubble Space telescope,

they found that the farther back in time they went,

the smaller the bubble structures were.

A million galaxies from 10 billion years ago

to the present day all photographed,

thanks to unprecedented access

to the Hubble Space Telescope.

This reveals in part the evolution

of the universe's bubble structure.

And somewhere in these million galaxies

is hidden the key to the origin of that bubble structure.

Just a- So I gather you have some new-

The COSMOS Project has analyzed

every one of those million galaxies.

You wanna show something?

Sure.

So we now have over 25,000-

Let's see what light it has shed

on the mystery of cosmic bubble structures.

Of six, which is 500 million years after the Big Bang.

So yes, it's actually really interesting

because there are some low- Alexie Leauthaud

conducts image analysis for the COSMOS Project.

Multilingual, she was interviewed

for this program in Japanese.

This is using Tully-Fisher.

So the dark matter distorts light

in what's called gravitational lensing.

This dark matter cannot be seen,

but altogether, its mass is more than five times the mass

of all the stars and galaxies.

That makes it a source of powerful gravitational forces.

Because there is dark matter between the Hubble

and far-off galaxies, the light from those galaxies

is bent by gravitational lensing.

In this image from the Hubble Space Telescope,

we can see typical gravitational lensing.

The pole of the invisible dark matter

makes far-off galaxies appear curved like bows.

By analyzing how light is transformed

by gravitational lensing,

we can get a sense of the distribution of dark matter.

That has meant studying

an enormous number of galaxies

and considering a whole range

of gravitational lensing effects.

The analysis took two years.

Finally, the distribution of dark matter

over a wide area was made manifest.

This is the distribution of dark matter

as revealed by the analysis of gravitational lensing.

As with the galaxies, there are areas of clustering

and there are empty areas.

In fact, the dark matter also demonstrates

a bubble structure.

On the left, we see how certain galaxies are distributed

Let's map onto it the dark matter for the same area.

It's an exact fit.

Dark matter is distributed

in the same places as the galaxies.

Where there is no dark matter,

there are no galaxies.

The bubble structure itself is determined by dark matter.

Dark matter, within its powerful gravitational fields

stars and galaxies have congregated.

Using Japan's Subaru Telescope,

Taniguchi checked the distances

of those one million galaxies identified by Hubble.

Confirming the distances

of a million galaxies took three years.

That data enabled the construction

of a three-dimensional view of the dark matter.

This is the first 3-D map of dark matter

ever seen by human eyes.

Inside the regions of dark matter,

cosmic gases and dust collect,

giving rise to stars and galaxies.

Research into the distribution of dark matter

is now one of the hottest topics on the cosmic front.

Yes.

Seeking to elucidate

the bubble structure of galactic distribution,

scientists in the COSMOS Project took on

some of the toughest problems in astrophysics.

The Hubble Space Telescope's catalog of so many galaxies

constitutes a treasure trove of information,

and Nick Scoville expects that

with further conceptual advances,

it will continue to yield discoveries.

I think the most critical thing that a good astrophysicist

should have is the curiosity to, one,

discover problems which people have

either misunderstood or haven't solved,

but then secondly, to persist in trying to understand

what they're seeing.

Like this table concept which I wanted to build

for a very long time but didn't have the time

or didn't have the design,

it's a lot of fun to keep a problem

in the back of your mind and let it percolate

and then eventually would come back and work on it,

and you accumulate new knowledge over time

which then you apply to that problem.

It looks like it's still holding.

Applying the same curiosity and persistence,

Scoville plans to continue his pursuit of knowledge

on the cosmic front.

What was the universe like

when its bubble structure first formed?

Let's meet a scientist dedicated

to this new issue on the cosmic front.

Mauna Kea, Hawaii,

ranging over the summit of this 4,200-meter volcano

are the astronomical observatories of 11 nations.

This is Japan's Subaru Telescope.

Its 8.5-meter primary mirror

is among the largest in the world.

It can take in 10 times as much light

as the Hubble Space Telescope.

That means it can capture

even fainter objects than Hubble can.

A celestial object spotted by the Subaru Telescope in 2007

was like nothing that had ever been seen before.

The discoverer was a young astronomer

named Masami Ouchi.

Ouchi was observing distant galaxies

with the aid of the Subaru Telescope.

In the course of that, he accidentally

came across a curious object.

What he saw was in this image.

Of course, many galaxies are shown.

It's this red object that was so problematic.

Distance from Earth, 12.9 billion light years.

That dates it to near the very birth of the universe.

Detailed analysis established an astonishing fact.

The object itself spanned 50,000 light years.

This was on a scale unthinkable in conventional cosmology.

Galaxies are the largest objects in the universe,

but when the Hubble images are lined up,

one sees that the farther back in time one goes,

the smaller the galaxy.

Previous measurements put ancient galaxies

at about 10,000 light years across.

If the object spotted by Ouchi was a galaxy,

its size was unprecedented for that slice of outer space.

All ready to go.

Oh, okay.

It was so unbelievably large,

Ouchi initially removed it from the study,

thinking it a measurement error.

I mean the pointing is fine or-

But somehow, it bothered him,

so he took additional distance measurements

at the Keck Observatory.

The result was the same, 12.9 billion light years.

The distance measured with the Subaru Telescope

had not been a mistake.

Ouchi named the object

Himiko, after an ancient Japanese queen.

Five times larger than any other galaxy that old,

Himiko was a mystery.

Exactly what was it?

If Himiko's shape could be more accurately determined,

that would point to an answer.

And the best tool to help with that

was the Hubble Space Telescope.

In September, Hubble set its sights on Himiko.

What would Hubble reveal about Himiko's shape?

This is it, download time.

This will be Ouchi's very first Hubble's eye view of Himiko.

This is an image of Himiko as seen by Hubble.

It's just a raw image, with the noise not yet eliminated,

but Ouchi can see at a glance

that this stick-like object is far longer and thinner

than he'd imagined.

The size again measures the same with Hubble

as with the Subaru Telescope.

At 50,000 light years across, it is indeed gigantic.

Himiko, the largest known distant celestial object.

Hubble has taken us one step closer

to unraveling its mysteries.

The next steps will be to eliminate

the noise in the Hubble photograph

and then to superimpose various color filters.

When a fully refined picture of Himiko has emerged,

it may solve one of the riddles of the frontiers of space.

The Hubble Space Telescope,

product and symbol of our questing spirit,

our longing to fathom the mysteries of the universe.

Hubble has already shown us that the universe

is comprised of a seemingly endless patchwork

of giant bubbles.

But there remain mysteries that go

beyond our wildest imaginings,

mysteries that are waiting for us to discover them.

Humankind has only just begun

to challenge the cosmic front.