Original subtitles

A giant cloud in outer space, a nebula.

This one is called the Horsehead Nebula.

Nebulae, made mostly of gas and dust, do resemble clouds.

The Eagle Nebula features these three pillars of creation.

Just the tip of one of those horns

is big enough to accommodate our entire solar system.

The Carina Nebula.

Space is by no means an empty vacuum.

It's filled with interstellar gases and cosmic dust.

When the gases and dust clump together,

the result is a nebula.

Obtaining distinct images of these nebulae

has been one of the great contributions

of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble has devoted over 100 hours

to the observation of one nebula in particular.

Winter is the time when the constellation Orion

shines forth most beautifully in the northern hemisphere.

Connect the dots of the constellation's stars,

and you get the figure of Orion,

a hunter described in Greek myth.

Below the three stars of Orion's Belt,

you can spot the edge of his sword.

That's what Hubble focused on.

This Mosaic combines 100 plus images of that region,

pieced together over a two-year period.

What emerges is a detailed picture of the Orion Nebula.

It's enormous.

Just the vertical dimension, as shown here,

extends 12 light years.

At its center, four young stars,

each equivalent in mass to more than 15 of our suns,

form the main components of a cluster called the Trapezium.

The sheer brilliance of the Trapezium

lights up the Orion Nebula in a blaze of glory.

It is said that at one time or another,

every telescope in the world has been trained

on the Orion Nebula.

It's thought to hold the key to a riddle

everyone wants to solve:

How stars are born.

If one really could voyage into the depths

of the Orion Nebula,

what sort of cosmic scenery would unfold?

With Robert O'Dell as our expert guide,

let's go sight-seeing ourselves.

The Lick Observatory is located in the mountains

just east of San Jose, California.

A century ago, it boasted the first telescope in the world

to be erected on a mountain top.

And in 1963, it was here that Robert O'Dell,

then a newly-minted college professor,

made his first professional observation

of the Orion Nebula.

Hola.

These are two of O'Dell's former students

and research assistants.

Very pleased to see you.

Manuel Peimbert Sierra

became a university professor himself

and still conducts research on the Orion Nebula.

His wife, Sylvia Torres Peimbert,

also does nebula research at the university.

And Mount Hamilton's such a beautiful sight.

Right.

The most interesting thing is that

it is the star-forming region that is closest to us.

And therefore it has been studied very thoroughly.

We can know more details about it

than that we can learn from other gaseous nebula.

It's a Rosetta Stone or a cornerstone

for the study of the universe.

And in addition to that, it's very beautiful.

So if you see the images of Orion,

many of the amateur astronomers get in love with astronomy

by looking at the Orion Nebula.

The three astronomers used to come here

every winter to conduct their own observations.

The Orion Nebula appears at first to lie within

the Orion Constellation, but actually, it does not.

The nebula's farther away, 1,500 light years from Earth.

And since it's located in a different part of the night sky

from the star-rich Milky Way,

it's relatively easy to observe.

Wow.

The telescope looks the same,

but like us, maybe the joke's that it's a little older,

and it has been 50 years older and out in the cold.

It looks like a movie of the '40s.

Yes.

Then of course there's the clinician.

These yellowed pages.

Wow.

Odell still carefully preserves

his observation logs from his early days.

were made in October of '63.

Wow!

Really, that's astounding!

During these observations,

O'Dell realized something important.

It was the key to a major discovery later.

O'Dell made a study of the composition

of the gases in the Orion Nebula.

He noticed small amounts of cosmic dust

mixed in with the gases.

Differentiating gas and dust proved crucial.

A nebula is comprised mostly of hydrogen and helium gas.

The gases concentrate into light-emitting stars,

like our sun.

But there's dust too.

Matter such as silicon and nitrogen,

and all this dust turns out to be crucial

to the creation of planets such as Earth.

It just caused a fundamental change

in how people looked at these regions

where stars were formed.

If they didn't have dust in them,

then you'd probably only form a star

and might never actually form planets around them.

By observing the Orion Nebula,

O'Dell realized he ought to be able to witness

the birth of both stars and planets.

He's been doing just that for 50 years.

O'Dell was just 13 years old

when he first saw the Orion Nebula.

He says he saw it as just a hazy mist.

Neither of O'Dell's parents had much schooling.

They worked all their lives.

But O'Dell says they were determined

that their children would be well-educated.

The family's finances were precarious,

but they scraped together enough to buy this book

on how to make your own telescope.

Using cardboard boxes and other materials close to hand,

the young O'Dell managed to construct

a working telescope.

With it, he saw the Orion Nebula.

Looking at things yourself that were beyond the Earth

seemed fascinating.

The ability to essentially travel outside the Earth

for the price of building your telescope

just seemed wonderful.

O'Dell wanted to view

the Orion Nebula in greater detail,

and he began to take steps to make that dream a reality.

In 1969, the American Apollo Program

succeeded in landing men on the moon.

By the 1970s, NASA was vigorously pursuing

new objectives in space development.

A team was assembled to develop a new project.

The team included just one astronomer, Robert O'Dell.

Recruited into NASA from academia,

the ex-professor became one of the chief advocates

of an extraordinary plan,

to put a large optical telescope into Earth orbit.

O'Dell's friend at the time, Lyman Spitzer,

had already proposed the concept

of a space-based telescope.

The two of them often conferred on the subject.

In 1977, three decades after Spitzer's original proposal,

construction began on the Hubble Space Telescope.

The primary mirror was 2.4 meters across.

In addition to acting as project scientist,

O'Dell personally took charge of the design and development

of some of the instruments critical to observation,

the telescope's cameras.

This one, about the size and shape of a grand piano,

was Hubble's main camera.

In space, where there are no atmospheric fluctuations,

this camera could take images of unprecedented

clarity and detail.

Three, two, one, and liftoff!

In April 1990, a space shuttle

finally lifted off with the Hubble Space Telescope aboard.

O'Dell and two daughters witnessed the launch.

It's a very emotional experience,

because at that time I had been working on the Hubble,

first as an adviser for 19 years.

The Hubble Space Telescope was deployed

into a low Earth orbit of 600 kilometers.

A month after launch, Hubble sent back its first images.

But everyone's great expectations were dashed.

Hubble's fuzzy images proved no better

than those taken from Earth.

Pretty horrible.

Just the shock of knowing that something was wrong.

After the expense of vast sums of money

and 20 years of labor, the scientist's dreams

seemed lost in space.

O'Dell and his colleagues now searched desperately

for the cause of the aberration.

They found that the primary mirror

had been shaped too flat toward the outside.

The deviation measured 0.0003 millimeters.

At this point, there was no way to replace that huge mirror.

In December of 1993, a space shuttle was sent up

to service Hubble, an attempt to convert

despair back into hope.

One servicing objective was to swap out

that main camera array for a new one

that O'Dell helped design.

It included optics modified to help compensate

for the telescope's misshaped mirror.

20 days later, Hubble sent back new images.

This is how Hubble saw Galaxy M100 before servicing.

And this is after servicing.

A much clearer picture of a galaxy

more than 52 million light years from Earth.

Never before had a galaxy so far away

been observed so distinctly.

It was perfect.

It was better than the contract called for,

which we knew it should be

before this problem with the test device.

So it was great.

It is as good a telescope image-wise

as a telescope of that size can be.

With a new lease on life,

the Hubble Space Telescope opened one new window

after another onto the mysteries of our universe.

Hubble was now repaired, and even enhanced

with corrective optics, but O'Dell's own research plans

ran into a new snag.

Hubble Telescope time was strictly rationed.

Priority went to those who had contributed the most

to its development or who had already achieved

distinction in astronomy.

Despite his own early advocacy

and his role in Hubble's development and deployment,

O'Dell himself had been granted no telescope time at all.

O'Dell had devoted 20 years to this project

because he wanted a better view of the Orion Nebula.

Now others were getting first use

of the revolutionary telescope

he had worked so hard to deploy.

It was hard on him.

Around that time, a meeting was held by the astronomers

who had been granted telescope time on Hubble.

After the meeting was finished,

O'Dell was handed an oblong plate of metal.

This is one of my most prized possessions.

It's now a plaque decorating his office.

The inscription, signed by 50 scientists

who had been given time on the Hubble,

reads as follows:

"To Bob O'Dell, for outstanding service 1973-1983,"

"we award a guarantee of Space Telescope time."

Unknown to me, the 50-odd scientists

who did have guaranteed time, voluntarily each gave me

part of their time, and collectively,

they gave me the same level of this reward.

It was an absolute surprise to me,

just a wonderful surprise.

Collectively, O'Dell's colleagues

had given him some 40 hours of work time

on the Hubble Space Telescope.

But O'Dell himself had a generous plan

for 20 of those hours.

That one half I offered to Professor Lyman Spitzer,

who was a personal friend,

and who was the person who had originated the concept

of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Spitzer had similarly been left out

of the initial award of observation time

on the Hubble Telescope.

Now the two visionary men with 20 hours each

could realize their personal dreams

of using a space-based observatory.

After that first servicing mission,

Hubble still needed adjustments

before observations could begin formally.

The Orion Nebula, which is large and bright,

was chosen as a target for testing.

O'Dell knew about that and requested

a highly-specific imaging target.

It was a region he had become interested in

during his work at the Lick Observatory.

This is the test image O'Dell took

of the Orion Nebula.

There was something in the vivid image

that astonished him.

Of course we were very concerned

that this was some type of artifact

introduced by the computer program,

but once we became confident that the images we were getting

were good ones, then just like that it was clear

what we were seeing,

that we were seeing protoplanetary disk

around other stars.

It did look potentially like gaseous clouds

whose shape had altered by chance.

However, since this was the Orion Nebula,

where cosmic dust was present,

the image could be showing the birth of planets.

O'Dell became convinced that indeed this image

recorded the very moment of their creation.

In 1994 O'Dell was finally able to use the Hubble time

he had been given by his colleagues

to conduct whatever observations he wished

of the Orion Nebula.

This was his earlier test image.

Now O'Dell was able to examine a region ten times larger.

Four stars shine brightly near its center.

The heart of a star cluster called the Trapezium.

Let's take a closer look.

A cocoon-like form emerges,

the kernel of a star enveloped in gas and dust.

It's even more distinct than the image

obtained during the test.

And the new image can be processed

and refined further still.

There's something inside that cocoon,

but what exactly is it?

A star like our sun emerges as a concentration

of gases in space.

Eventually the central portion of the gas concentration

heats up and a protostar takes shape.

Swirling around it is a disk of gas and dust that can,

in time, become planets.

It's a dynamic situation, to say the least.

From the center of the disk

erupts a perpendicular jet of stellar material.

It is so powerful, it extends trillions

of kilometers into space.

The potentially planet-forming swirl of gas and dust

is called a protoplanetary disk, proplyd.

The dust surrounding the protostar combines

with other dust particles,

combining into larger bodies.

Gravitational forces assist this process

of repeated collision and amalgamation,

and eventually planets are born, like our own, Earth.

At the core of the protostar,

nuclear fusion sets in, producing tremendous

amounts of heat and light.

All that force blasts away the remaining nearby gases.

What's left is a new solitary star glowing in space.

Its stellar jet and a proplyd or protoplanetary disk,

carrying the raw materials of future planets,

all enveloped in a cocoon of gas and dust.

The proplyd thus occurs in the stage prior

to the birth of planets like those in our own solar system.

A number of proplyds have been discovered

in the Orion Nebula.

But their shapes and colors are quite varied.

Why should this be so?

This graphic provides a sideways look

at the Orion Nebula.

The stars being born in that concave part facing Earth,

generate heat and light which illuminate the cloud beyond.

A thin curtain of gas and dust called Orion's Veil

partially covers this star and planet-producing region.

So when the bright light of Theta 1-C

shines on a proplyd behind it,

the proplyd and its cocoon of gases

are fully lit and clearly visible.

In this case, with the proplyd more toward

the front and side, the gases appear to trail away

from Theta 1-C.

Here light from Theta 1-C is screened out

by the gases of the proplyd,

so we see the proplyd in silhouette,

with its own protostar glowing red in the center.

So the apparent differences among the proplyds

depend on their location.

Once O'Dell understood these differences,

he was able to determine the structure

of the Orion Nebula itself.

In 2004, O'Dell was able to conduct

an unprecedented large-scale observation

of the Orion Nebula.

This was his previous image.

Now he expanded the area under observation ten-fold,

utilizing the Hubble Space Telescope

for more than 100 hours, he took more than 100 images.

Then he spent two years piecing them together precisely.

The final image is a square 12 light years on a side.

Swirling gases glow vividly with reflected light.

Here and there can be seen newborn stars.

The same composite image reveals new proplyds,

the disk of gas and dust enveloping this protostar

shows in dramatic silhouette,

thanks to light from an established star.

More than 200 proplyds have been observed

in the Nebula so far.

Many stars can be seen in the very moment of their birth,

making the Orion Nebula a precious stellar nursery.

This is Mexico's Baja California peninsula.

Located in the northwest of the country,

it extends deep into the Pacific Ocean.

On a 2,800 meter-high mountain peak here

is located the country's National Astronomical Observatory,

operated by the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

For a number of years now, this observatory

in Sierra de San Pedro Martir,

has been O'Dell's home base of operations.

Here, together with theoretical physicist William Henney,

O'Dell has been studying the behavior of gases

in the Orion Nebula.

They have made a new discovery.

In the images taken by Hubble,

O'Dell noticed unusual forms resembling ripples.

This is the first image ever showing cosmic shock waves.

These are bow shock waves,

phenomena created, it is believed,

by the jets of gas and dust

erupting from the newly-formed protostars.

O'Dell found many of them occurring

in the presence of protostars.

Bow shocks are where gas is pushing against gas,

and it forms a thin layer that is heated up

and become very visible.

Over a long period of time,

the bow shocks spread out like ripples.

O'Dell has been cataloging the various patterns

they form as they spread.

The largest telescope at San Pedro Martir Observatory

has an aperture of 2.1 meters.

It was equipped with an excellent spectrometer,

specifically in order to observe interstellar shock waves.

By comparing and analyzing images from the Hubble

and San Pedro Martir Observatories,

O'Dell and his colleague were able to determine

the speed and direction of some of the bow waves.

Things are moving in Orion.

And what we found was that these objects,

where you see the lines,

are moving in space, and we see this all over,

and they're all expanding away from a region

here in the middle.

The shock waves originate in a specific region.

That's where the protostars producing the shock waves

tend to be concentrated.

It's like a star factory, turning them out

one after another.

O'Dell has dubbed this region Orion South.

Orion South is a region of dense gases

to the lower right of the Trapezium in this image.

The stars born here spread out

into the Orion Nebula.

We knew that something was going on

inside that region, that is that that was

a new area of star formation.

O'Dell is now at work

at what will be the crowning glory

of a 50-year career in astronomy.

And there's a deep connection to a cherished hobby.

O'Dell loves to work with his hands.

Everything from building telescopes to cooking.

One of his hobbies was an unusual one.

Over the years, his wife Sally could not entirely escape

being involved in it.

And then one of the problems was

he loves to fly, and he had an airplane.

I barely do big jets.

I mean, I am a basket case before I get on an airplane.

So I did fly with him a few times,

but he could tell I was really nervous.

O'Dell didn't just pilot airplanes,

he built his own, and he flew them.

He also became skilled in aerobatics.

He participated in competitions

and won many prizes.

That engineering knowledge and skill

also found expression in his work

to get the Hubble Space Telescope up and flying.

O'Dell no longer pilots planes himself,

but he does dream of flying at will

through the Orion Nebula.

To make that new dream a reality,

he's compiling a virtual 3-D map of the Nebula,

and he's excited about it.

rush, no doubt about it.

It just, to me the freedom of motion,

of moving in three dimensions,

which we don't have as humans.

The most difficult part of converting

telescope images into a 3-D map

is determining distances precisely.

We know the Orion Nebula

is 1,500 light years away from us,

but we have had no way of measuring the topography

within the Nebula.

What looks like a flat surface

must be as complex as a mountain range.

O'Dell relies greatly on Gary Ferland's expertise

in theoretical astrophysics.

On the other side of this great big molecular cloud.

One of the simplest things you've done

is the thing that to me has been most useful,

because that's what allowed us to determine

that this was a big bowl here,

and that this part over here

was like a canyon, a straight wall along here.

Ferland developed a special method

to be used in building a 3-D computer model of the nebula.

Here's my coffee cup, a beautiful coffee cup.

In astronomy, we can look at things,

but we can not do that.

We can not look in different directions.

So we have to find very, very clever ways

to do that sort of thing.

Ferland discovered a correlation

between the brightness of a star

and the brightness of the nebula behind it.

And from that, he can figure out how to calculate

the shape of the nebula.

For example, here are two stars of equal brightness,

but one has a bright nebula background,

and the other a rather dark background.

The difference is due to the different distance

between each star and the nebula.

Ferland detects slight differences

in background brightness

and combines those findings

to develop the three-dimensional shape of the nebula.

Too much and often in astronomy,

we just get the two-dimensional image,

like a still picture on the sky,

and we live such a short time,

only 100 years, we don't see things changing.

But actually what's going on out there

is very dynamic, things are happening,

it's very three dimensional and beautiful to look at.

And this fly-through makes it possible

for a person to actually see what it would be like

if we could build star ship and go out there

and see what's going on.

Using this method,

O'Dell was able to clarify the three-dimensional shape

of the Orion Nebula.

If he could travel through the nebula himself,

he knows where he wants to go.

Actually there are two places I'd like to go.

One is close to one of the particular proplyds,

but one that's a very spectacular object.

It would be spectacular to visit.

The other region would be in the veil,

the part that we can see most clearly

by the kind of dark thumb that points in on the left

from the pictures.

The idea of going to a stellar nursery

at its earliest stages would be very attractive.

All aboard, the O'Dell Orion Tour

is ready for departure.

The Orion Nebula, glowing blue and green,

a shimmering cloud in deep space.

We can't see it like this from Earth,

but in the computer, we can approach it

on its own level.

This central area is one light year across.

At the bottom of a giant concavity

shine the four main stars of the Trapezium.

Shock waves ripple all about this great basin.

We approach the dark veil, dense with gases and dust.

Our eyes can not penetrate this darkness.

It is in such dark regions, however,

that stars are born.

Now we're flying over a shimmering cloud canyon.

Off to one side are the four brightest stars

of the Trapezium,

the Orion Nebula's main source of illumination.

The very brightest of them, Theta 1-C,

is 100,000 times brighter than our sun.

The surrounding gases are heated

to 1 million degrees Celsius.

Now, a new cloudy mass comes into view.

This is the star factory O'Dell calls Orion South,

and it's one of the places

on his personal sight-seeing list.

It used to be considered a hilly region of the nebula,

but O'Dell's latest research shows it

to be a detached structure.

Another sight O'Dell wanted to see close up

is one of the proplyds or protoplanetary disks

of gas and dust, centered on a newborn star

with a stellar jet erupting perpendicularly

in both directions.

This proplyd is donut-shaped.

Within it, a planet like Earth might be forming.

An entire solar system could be in the making.

What we can see is only a portion of the Orion Nebula.

Hidden in its cloudy realms are over 300 massive stars,

each shining as brightly as those in the Trapezium.

And even more are continually being formed.

Within one light year of the center,

are some 1,500 newly-minted stars.

The Orion Nebula, a veritable star nursery.

This virtual tour has been the summation

of Robert O'Dell's half century of research

on the Orion Nebula.

And it was spectacular.

You could see those blue stars,

those pale blue stars, the Trapezium stars in the middle,

and then you look more, and you can see the collar

and the nebula itself.

It's just an awesome picture.

And it's still vivid in my imagination.

Hubble has already surpassed

its expected 15-year service life by more than five years,

and it's still sending back a stream

of distinct, vivid images.

As an astronomer, Robert O'Dell devoted enormous efforts

to making the Hubble Space Telescope a reality

and to advancing the study of the Orion Nebula,

the object of his gaze ever since he was a child.

O'Dell's enthusiasm is echoed by astronomers

around the world who share in his success

and strive to learn more.

Because there always seems to be

new problems, new things that we don't understand.

And that's the nature of science,

to learn something, and then you see there's something

over the fence that you don't understand,

so you move forward, you answer those questions,

and piece by piece, you hope you're approaching

the complete picture.

The Orion Nebula is a treasure trove

of both questions and answers.

With every new telescope,

the Orion Nebula will surely be the subject

of further observation.

It will continue to fascinate

as a source of great astonishment

and intriguing mystery,

a challenge and a joy for generations to come.