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Our world, warm, comfortable, familiar...

...but when we look up, we wonder:

Do we occupy a special
place in the cosmos?

Or are we merely a celestial footnote

Is the universe welcoming or hostile?

We could stand here forever, wondering

Or we could leave home on
the ultimate adventure

To discover wonders

Confront horrors

Beautiful new worlds

Malevolent dark forces

The Beginning of time.

The moment of creation.

Would we have the courage
to see it through?

Or would we run for home?

There's only one way to find out

Our journey through time and
space begins with a single step.

At the edge of space, only 60 miles up...

...just an hour's drive from home

Down there, life continues.

The traffic is awful, stocks go on trading...

...and Star Trek is still showing

When we return home, if we return home...

...will it be the same?

Will we be the same?

We have to leave all this behind

To dip out toes into the vast dark ocean

On to the Moon.

Dozens of astronauts have
come this way before us

Twelve walked on the moon itself

Just a quarter of a million miles from home.

Three days by spacecraft

Barren.

Desolate.

It's like a deserted battlefield

But oddly familiar.

So close, we've barely left home

Neil Armstrong's first footprints.

Looks like they were made yesterday

There's no air to change them.

They could survive for millions of years

Maybe longer than us.

Our time is limited

We need to take our own giant leap

One million miles, 5
million, 20 million miles.

We're far beyond where any
human has ever ventured

Out of the darkness, a friendly face

The goddess of love, Venus.

The morning star.

The evening star.

She can welcome the new day in the east...

...say good night in the west

A sister to our planet...

...she's about the same
size and gravity as Earth.

We should be safe here

But the Venus Express space
probe is setting off alarms

It's telling us, these dazzling clouds,
they're made of deadly sulfuric acid

The atmosphere is choking
with carbon dioxide

Never expected this Venus
is one angry goddess.

The air is noxious, the
pressure unbearable.

And it's hot, approaching 900 degrees

Stick around and we'd
be corroded suffocated,

crushed and baked

Nothing can survive here.

Not even this Soviet robotic probe.

Its heavy armor's been trashed
by the extreme atmosphere.

So lovely from Earth, up
close, this goddess is hideous

She's the sister from hell.

Pockmarked by thousands of volcanoes

All that carbon dioxide is
trapping the Sun's heat.

Venus is burning up.

It's global warming gone wild

Before it took hold, maybe
Venus was beautiful, calm...

...more like her sister planet, Earth.

So this could be Earth's future

Where are the twinkling stars?

The beautiful spheres
gliding through space?

Maybe we shouldn't be out
here, maybe we should turn back

But there's something about the Sun,
something hypnotic, like the Medusa

Too terrible to look at, too powerful to resist

Luring us onward on,
like a moth to a flame.

Wait, there's something
else, obscured by the sun

It must be Mercury.

Get too close to the sun,
this is what happens.

Temperatures swing wildly here

At night, it's minus 275 degrees...

...come midday, it's 800 plus.

Burnt then frozen.

The MESSENGER space probe is
telling us something strange.

For its size, Mercury has a
powerful gravitational pull.

It's a huge ball of iron, covered
with a thin veneer of rock

The core of what was once
a much larger planet.

So where's the rest of it?

Maybe a stray planet
slammed into Mercury...

...blasting away its outer layers
in a deadly game of cosmic pinball

Whole worlds on the loose careening
wildly across the cosmos...

...destroying anything in their path

And we're in the middle of it

Vulnerable, exposed, small

Everything is telling us to turn back.

But who could defy this?

The Sun in all its mesmerizing splendor

Our light, our lives...

...everything we do is controlled by the Sun

Depends on it

It's the Greek god Helios driving
his chariot across the sky

The Egyptian god Ra reborn every day

The summer solstice sun
rising at Stonehenge.

For millions of years...

...this was as close as it got
to staring into the face of God

It's so far away...

...it is burned out, we wouldn't
know about it for eight minutes

It's so Big, you could fit
one million Earths inside it

But who needs numbers?
we've got the real thing

We see it every day, a
familiar face in our sky

Now, up close, it's unrecognizable.

A turbulent sea of incandescent gas

The thermometer pushes 10,000 degrees...

...can't imagine how hot the core is,
could be tens of millions of degrees

Hot enough to transform
millions of tons of matter...

...into energy every second

More than all the energy
ever made by mankind

Dwarfing the power of all
the nuclear weapons on Earth.

Back home, we use this
energy for light and heat

But up close, there's nothing
comforting about the Sun.

Its electrical and magnetic forces
erupt in giant molten gas loops.

Some are larger than a dozen Earths

More powerful than 10 million volcanoes.

And when they burst through they
expose cooler layers below...

...making sunspots.

A fraction cooler than their
surrounding, sunspots look black...

...But they're hotter than anything on Earth.

And massive up to 20
times the size of Earth.

But one day, all this will stop

The Sun's fuel will be spent.

And when it dies, the Earth will follow

This god creates life, destroys it...

...and demands we keep out distance

This comet strayed too close

The Sun's heat is boiling it away...

...creating a tail that
stretches for millions of miles.

It's freezing in here.

There's no doubt where this comet's from,
the icy wastes of deep space

But all this steam and geysers and dust...

...it's the Sun again, melting
the comet's frozen heart.

Strange.

A kind of vast, dirty
snowball, covered in grimy tar

Tiny grains of what looks
like organic material...

...preserved on ice,
since who knows when...

...maybe even the beginning
of the solar system.

Say a comet like this crashed into
the young Earth billions of years ago.

Maybe it delivered organic
material and water...

...the raw ingredients of life

It may even have sown the
seeds of life on Earth...

...that evolved into you and me

But say it crashed into the Earth now

Think of the dinosaurs, wiped
out by a comet or asteroid strike

It's only a question of time.

Eventually, one day, we'll
go the way of the dinosaurs

If life on Earth was wiped
out, we'd be stuck out here...

...homeless, adrift in a hostile universe

We'd need to find another home

Among the millions, billions of planets...

...there must be one that's not too hot,
not too cold, with air, sunlight, water...

...where, like Goldilocks,
we could comfortably live

The red planet

Unmistakably Mars.

For centuries, we've looked
to Mars for company...

...for signs of life

Could there be extraterrestrial life here?

Are we ready to rewrite the history books,
to tear up the science books...

...to turn our world upside down?

What happens next
could change everything

Mars is the planet that most
captures our imagination.

Think of B-movies, sci-fi
comics, what follows?

Martians?

It's all just fiction, right?

But what it there really is something here?

Hard to imagine, though. Up
close, this is a dead planet

The activity that makes the Earth livable
shut down millions of years ago here

Red and dead

Mars is a giant fossil.

Wait. Something is alive

A dust devil, a big one

Bigger than the biggest
twisters back home.

There's wind here

And where there's wind, there's air

Could that air sustain extraterrestrial life?

It's too thin tor us to breathe.

And there's no ozone layer

Nothing to protect us against
the Sun's ultraviolet rays.

There is water...

...But frigid temperatures keep
it in a constant deep freeze

It's hard to believe anything could live here

Back on Earth, there are creatures that
survive in extreme cold, heat...

...even in the deepest ocean trenches

It's as though life is a virus.

It adapts, spreads

Maybe that's what we're doing right now...

...carrying the virus of
life across the universe.

Even in the most extreme conditions
life usually finds a way.

But on a dead planet?

With no way to replenish its soil,
no heat to melt its frozen water?

All this dust, it's hard
to see where we're going

Olympus Mons, named after
the home of the Greek gods

A vast ancient volcano.

Three times higher than Everest.

There's no sign of activity.

Since its discovery in the 1970s,
it's been declared extinct

Hang on.

These look like lava flows.

But any sign of lava should be long gone,
obliterated by meteorite craters

Unless, this monster
isn't dead, just sleeping

There could be magma flowing
beneath the crust right now...

...building up, waiting to be unleashed

Volcanic activity could be melting
frozen water in the soil...

...pumping gases into the atmosphere,
recycling minerals and nutrients

Creating all the conditions needed for life

This makes the Grand canyon look
like a crack in the sidewalk

Endless desolation...

...so vast it would stretch all
the way across North America.

But here, signs of activity, erosion,
and what looks like dried up river beds

Maybe volcanic activity
melted ice in the soil...

...sending water gushing
through this canyon.

Underground volcanoes could still
be melting ice, creating water

And where there's water, there could be life

The hunt for life is spearheaded
by this humble fellow...

...the NASA rover, Opportunity.

It's finding evidence that
these barren plains...

...were once ancient lakes or oceans
that could have harbored life

Look at those gullies.

Probes orbiting Mars
keep spotting new ones.

More proof that Mars is alive and kicking...

...that water is flowing
beneath its surface right now

Water that could be sustaining Martian life

Now, all we have to do is find it

Maybe we've already found what
we're looking for on Earth

Some think that life started
here and then migrated to Earth

An asteroid impact could've
blasted fragments of Mars...

...complete with tiny
microbes out into space...

...and onto the young Earth where
they sowed the seeds of life

No wonder we find Mars fascinating,
this could be our ancestral home

It could be we are all Martians

The Mars we thought we knew is gone...

...replaced by this new,
active, changing planet.

And if we don't know Mars,
our next door neighbor...

...how can we even imagine
what surprises lie ahead

Our compass points across the cosmos...

...back in time 14 billion years...

...to the moment of creation.

This is getting scary.

It's like being inside a giant video game

But these are all too real.

Asteroids, some of them
hundreds of miles wide

This one must be about 20 miles long.

And there, perched on it, a space probe.

Can't have been easy...

...parking on an asteroid
traveling at 50,000 miles an hour.

It's a lot of effort just
to investigate some rubble.

Rubble that regularly collides...

...breaks up and rains down
on Earth as meteorites.

Our ancestors saw shooting
stars as magical omens.

And they were right

Rubble like this came together
to make the planets...

...including our own

Pretty magical.

By dating the meteorites found on Earth...

...we can tell the planets were
born 4.6 billion years ago.

These are the birth certificates
of our solar system.

For some reason, these rocks
didn't form into a planet

Something must have stopped them

Something powerful.

Jupiter.

What a monster

At least a thousand time
bigger than Earth...

...so vast you could fit all
the other planets inside it

Something this massive
dominates its neighbors

Its gravity is pulling the asteroids apart

And it's breathtaking

But this beauty is a beast.

It's almost all gas.

Land here and we'd sink straight
through its layers into oblivion.

And Jupiter's good looks?

The product of ferocious violence

It's spinning at an incredible rate...

...whipping up winds to
hundreds of miles an hour...

...contorting the clouds into
stripes eddies, whirlpools...

...and this, the legendary Great Red Spot

The biggest, most violent
storm in the solar system.

At least three times the size of Earth,
it's been raging for over 300 years

All these churning clouds must
have sparked an electrical storm

Just one bolt is 10,000 times
more intense than any at home.

Looks like the safest place to
see Jupiter is from a distance

Up there at the poles...

...those dancing lights, they're
like the auroras back home.

But the Geiger counter is going wild

Even these are deadly,
generated by lethal radiation

Out here, nothing is what it seems.

The universe is full of terrors, traps.

Maybe this is a safe haven,
the multi-colored moon, Io

Wrong

Very wrong.

Those brilliant colors are molten
rock, volcanoes spewing lava.

Our journey across the universe is
turning into a struggle for survival

We've got to hope that if
we outlast the dangers...

...we'll be rewarded by
wonders beyond imagination

Four hundred million miles from Earth...

...flying a commercial airliner
here would take nearly a century

What a weird looking place...

...and yet, strangely familiar

A bit like the Arctic, with all that
ice, all those ridges and cracks

It's Jupiter's moon, Europa.

And maybe, like the Arctic,
this ice is floating...

...on water, liquid water

But we're half a billion miles from the Sun.

Surely, Europa is frozen solid

Unless, Jupiter's gravity is
creating friction deep inside...

...heating the ice into water, allowing
life to develop in the water...

...beneath its frozen crust.

We might be feet away from aliens

From a whole ecosystem of microbes,
crustaceans, maybe even squid

The only thing between us and
the possibility of alien life...

...this layer of ice.

But until we send a
spacecraft to drill here...

...Europa's secrets will
remain beyond reach

It's captivated our
imaginations, haunted our dreams

And here it is, spinning before our eyes

Saturn.

Named for the Roman god...

...who reigned over an golden
age of peace and harmony

This planet's a giant ball of gas,
so light it would float on water

Its spectacular rings would stretch almost
from Earth to the Moon.

There's the Cassini orbiter

It's picking up ghostly radio emissions

Probably generated by
auroras around Saturn's poles

This is the real music of the spheres.

Cassini's telling us where
these rings came from.

They're the remnants of a moon
shattered by Saturn's gravitational pull

Incomparable beauty from total destruction

Billions of shards of ice

Some as small as ice cubes,
others the size of houses.

They collide, break apart, reassemble

It's like a snapshot of
our early solar system...

...as dust and gas orbited
the newly born Sun...

...and gravity worked this magic
pulling the lumps together...

...until from space trash
like this, our home emerged

We could stay here forever

But there's so much further
to go, so much more to see.

Like this moon wrapped
in thick clouds, Titan.

There's an atmosphere down here

There's wind, rain, even seasons

Rivers, lakes and oceans

It looks so familiar, so similar to Earth.

But that's not water, it's liquid natural gas

Hundreds of times more natural gas than
all the Earth's oil and gas reserves

Maybe, one day, we'll use
this energy to fuel a colony.

Assuming there isn't life here already

The Huygens space probe
is here to find out

It's telling us there's
organic material in the soil.

But it's so cold, minus 300 degrees

There's no way life could develop

Unless Titan warms up.

The Sun is supposed to get hotter

When it does maybe life
will spring up here...

...just like it did on Earth

And as the Earth gets too hot for
us, maybe we'll move to Titan.

One day, we might call
this distant land home

Home.

We're at least 700 million miles away now.

After this we lose visual contact with Earth.

We're standing on a cliff

Looking out over a great
chasm that stretches...

...to the beginning of time.

Do we have the courage to jump?

We're in the solar system's outer reaches.

Unseen from Earth, unknown
for most of history

It's like diving into the depths of the ocean

Those rings make it look like Uranus
has been tilted off its axis...

...toppled over by a stray planet

It's eerie out here.

Already beginning to feel small, lonely

Maybe this is how we'll feel
at the edge of the universe

But we've barely left the shore

If the solar system was one mile wide,
so far we've traveled about 3 inches

Out of the deep, another strange beast...

...the god of the sea, Neptune

This world is covered in methane gas

And a storm as big as Earth...

...whipped up by savage
thousand mile-an-hour winds

Back home, it's the Sun
that drives the wind...

...But Neptune's far away.

Something else must be
creating these ferocious winds

But what?

We know very little about
our own solar system.

After all those balls of gas a solid moon...

...Triton.

Solid but not stable

Just look at those geysers...

...cosmic smokestacks
pumping out strange soot.

And this moon is revolving
around Neptune...

...in the opposite direction
of the planet's spin.

A cosmic battle of wills...

...that this angry moon is destined to lose

Neptune's massive gravity
is pulling on Triton.

Slowing it down, reeling it in

One day, it will be ripped apart by Neptune

And that's it

No more moons, no more
planets in our solar system.

It's getting colder, we're
getting further from the Sun...

...slipping from the grip of
its gravitational tentacles.

But this isn't a void

It's teeming with frozen rocks.

Like Pluto.

Until recently, we thought Pluto was alone.

Beyond it, nothing

We were wrong

More frozen worlds

Discoveries so new nobody
can agree what to call them

Plutinos, ice dwarves, cubewanos

Our solar system is far more chaotic and
strange than we had imagined

Now we're 8 billion miles from home.

The most distant thing ever
seen that orbits the Sun...

...another small, icy world,
Sedna, discovered in 2003

Its orbit takes 10,000 years to complete.

Hang on, there's something else out here.

Ten billion miles from home
the space probe, Voyager 1.

This bundle of aluminum and antennae...

...gave us close up views
of the giant planets...

...and discovered many
of their strange moons.

It's traveling 20 times faster than a bullet,
sending messages home

That gold plaque...

...its a kind of intergalactic
message in a bottle.

A greeting record in different languages

And a map showing how to
find our home solar system

The great physicist, Stephen Hawking...

...thinks it was a mistake
to roll out the welcome mat.

After all, if you're in the
jungle, is it wise to call out?

These comets look like
the ones we saw earlier.

There's a theory that the raw
materials for life began out here...

...on a rock like this until
something dislodged it...

...sending it hurting towards the Earth

And seeding all this ice, maybe
comets carried water to Earth too

The water in the oceans, in your body...

...all from this distant celestial ice machine.

We're 5 million, million, that's
5 trillion miles from home.

But this is still only a baby step.

Ahead, trillions of miles, billions of stars.

Time to stop looking back
and start looking ahead...

...to step out into the big, wide universe

Interstellar space.

Billions of stars like our own Sun...

...many with planets,
many of those with moons.

It's hard to know which way to go

There are infinite possibilities.

We're going to need a serious
burst of acceleration.

Twenty-five trillion miles from home.

A 150,000-year ride in the space shuttle.

And we're only just reached the
first solar system beyond...

...Alpha Centauri

Not one but three stars.

Spinning around each other
locked in a celestial standoff

Each star's gravity attracting the other...

...their blazing orbital
speed keeping them apart.

Get between them and we'd be vaporized...

...trillions of miles from home.

So far that miles are
becoming meaningless.

Out here, we measure in light years.

Light travels 6 trillion miles a year...

...so we are over four
light-years from home.

Distances so vast they're mind-boggling

Who knows what strange forces lie ahead...

...what we'll discover when...

If we reach the edge of the universe

Ten light years from Earth,
the star Epsilon Eridani

Spectacular rings of dust and ice

And somewhere in there, planets
forming out of debris...

...being born before our eyes.

Asteroids and comets everywhere

We could almost be looking
at our own solar system...

...billions of years ago.

With comets delivering the
building blocks of life...

...to these young planets.

At the center of all the action,
a star smaller than our sun...

...still in its infancy.

Any life in this solar system
would be primitive at best

There must be more mature
solar systems out here...

...But finding them is like looking for
a needle in a cosmic haystack

Twenty light years from Earth.

Star Gliese 581

It's about the same age as our sun.

This planet is just the
right distance from its sun

Any closer and water would boil away,
any further and it would freeze

Ideal conditions for life to emerge

And if a comet has struck, delivering water
and organic materials...

...then life, complex beings like us,
even civilizations like our own...

...could be down there right now

They could be tuning into our TV signals...

...watching shows from 20 years ago.

But until we devise a
way of communicating...

...over these vast distances,
all we can do is speculate

Us and them, living parallel lives...

...unaware of each other's existence.

Unless life has come and gone

That's the problem with comets.

They're creators and destroyers...

...as the dinosaurs the hard way

This is the needle in the cosmic haystack...

...the closest we've come to a habitable
solar system like our own...

...but it's a chance encounter.

There could be hundreds...

...millions more solar systems like
this out there or none at all.

Some of the atmosphere on
this planet, Bellerophon...

...is being boiled away by its nearby star.

From Earth, we can't see
planets this far out.

They're obscured by the brilliance
of their neighboring stars.

But the planets have a minute
gravitational pull on those stars.

Measure these tiny movements
and we can prove they exit

That's how we tracked down
Bellerophon in the 1990's...

...and hundreds of other distant planets

Sixty-five light years from Earth...

...turn on your TV here and you'd
pick up Hitler's Berlin Olympics

The twin stars of Algol.

Known to the ancients as the demon star

From Earth, it appears to blink as one star
passes across the other.

Up close, it's even stranger.

One star is being sucked towards the other

Almost 100 light years from home...

...faint whispers from one of
the first ever radio broadcasts

From here on out, it's as
if the Earth never existed

Feels like a life time since
we stood on that beach...

...looking up at the sky,
wondering where and how we fit in

We've learned one thing for sure

The universe is too bizarre, too startling...

...for us to guess what lies ahead

Deep inside our galaxy, the Milky Way

Pinpricks of light that have
inspired a thousand and one tales

The Seven Sisters, the daughters
of the ancient Greek god, Atlas...

...transformed into star
to comfort their father...

...as he held the heavens on his shoulders

And this giant, Betelgeuse

The brightest, biggest
star we've seen so far.

Six hundred times wider than our sun

But this, it's not a star...

...not a planet, not like anything we've seen.

A ghostly specter, more than
1,300 light years from Earth...

...Orion's dark cloud

Dust and gas shrouding us

There, deep inside, a light, pulling
the dust and gas towards it...

...heating up, merging into
a ball of burning hot gas.

Like a star, like our sun in miniature.

Inside, it's millions of degrees

So hot, it's beginning to
trigger nuclear reactions...

...the kind that keep our sun shining...

...making energy, radiation, light

A star is being born.

Orion's dark cloud is a vast star factory

We're witnessing the birth
of the future universe.

We've come to expect destruction...

...but this is one of the universe's
greatest acts of creation.

Star birth.

This doesn't look right

Jets of gas exploding out
with tremendous force...

...blasting dust and gas
out for millions of miles.

It's unbelievably violent and creative

Nebula...

...vast glowing clouds
of gas hanging in space.

With no wind out here, they'll take
thousands of years to disperse

They seem to be forming
a vast stellar sculpture.

Nature is more than a
scientist, an engineer...

...it's an artist on the grandest of scales

And this is a masterpiece

Stars are born, grow
up, and then, then what?

Do they die?

Do they slip quietly into the
night or go out with a bang?

Somewhere between here and the edge
of the universe lies the answer.

Luminous clouds, suspended in space...

...encircling what was once
a star like our own sun.

All that's left of it are
these brightly colored gases...

...elements formed by nuclear
reactions deep inside...

...released into space on its death

Green and violet, hydrogen and helium...

...the raw materials of the universe.

Red and blue, nitrogen and oxygen...

...the building blocks of life on Earth

For us to live, stars like this had to die

Every atom in our body was
produced by nuclear fusion...

...in stars that died long
before the Earth was even born.

We are all the stuff of stars

Our family tree begins here

At its heart, the ghost of a star...

...a white dwarf

White, hot, small...

...but unbelievably dense

In the star's dying
moments, its atoms fused...

...and squeezed together...

...making it so dense that just a teaspoon
of this white dwarf would weigh 1 ton

It's a chilling premonition of our sun's fate.

Six billion years from now,
it will become a white dwarf

Its death will herald the end of life on earth

Makes you wonder how many other
world have come and gone...

...celestial stories left untold, lost forever.

But the greatest story of
them all is still to be told

We must go back through time
to the very first chapter...

...to learn how the universe began.

The scattered remains of dead star...

...the Crab Nebula

Six thousand light years from home,
deep inside a stellar graveyard

We've learnt so much...

...seen things we'd never
have believed possible

Now, sights like this, wonders
once beyond imagination...

...we take in our stride

We're ready to face whatever lies ahead

Determined to reach the
edge of the universe

This is the calm after the storm,
after an massive explosion...

...a supernova that turned
a star into dust and gas

The eye of the storm.

A spinning pulsating star, a pulsar.

The gravity has squeezed the
giant star's core down to this

It's just 12 miles
across, unimaginably dense

One pinhead of this
would weigh hundreds...

...maybe millions of tons.

And as it shrank, like a figure
skater spinning on the spot...

...arms outstretched, then pulling them in...

...it began to spin faster.

Two beams of light, energy,
radiation, spinning 30 times a second

Powering the huge cloud of dust and gas

There's so much radiation here,
more even than on the Sun.

That was easily the deadliest
thing we've encountered so far

Once, it would have terrified us

But now we realize that
without the dangers...

...there'd be no wonders

Without the nightmares,
there'd be no dreams

Getting a strange sensation

A feeling as though there's
something bad out here...

...a malevolent presence.

The one thing we didn't want to encounter

Impossibly black, blotting
out the stars behind it

We are staring into the face of extinction...

...the remains of a giant star...

...a black hole.

Far denser than a pulsar...

...and impossible to resist

Its gravity is so intense,
not even light can escape.

This asteroid, it's a lump of solid rock...

...but it's actually stretching, being dragged
towards the gaping hole

Inside, there's no matter as we know it.

No time, no space, all the
rules of physics collapse.

The asteroid is gone

Nobody really know where

This is the edge of human understanding

There could be millions
of black hole creeping...

...around our galaxy...

...more perhaps than all
the stars in the sky...

...But we wouldn't see them
until it was too late.

Like this star, spiraling...

...disappearing, down an invisible sinkhole

Who's to say we don't live
inside a vast black hole...

...that the whole universe
isn't inside one right now...

...inside another universe?

Think about it for too
long and your mind reels

Sometimes it feels like the
more we see, the less we know.

And we're still in our own
galaxy, the Milky Way..

...the vastness of the universe
beyond still lies ahead

The wonders, the dangers, the
secrets, they're out there...

...waiting to be discovered

Seven thousand light years from home

It's as though we're in a
forest thick with trees.

Each so beautiful, so fascinating,
it's impossible to look beyond...

...to see the bigger picture.

We have to find a way through...

...to reach the clearing at the galaxy's edge

But faced with sights like
this, its hard to leave

A colossal glowing cloud topped
by these great towers of dust...

...the Pillars of Creation

Like a gateway into the unknown.

A star factory packed with
embryonic star systems...

...each larger than our solar system.

we have to resist its siren
song, tear ourselves away...

...to carry on towards
the edge of the galaxy

Dazzled by the Milk Way's beauty,
we've been blinded to its terrors...

...and strayed into a cosmic minefield

Like an explosion in slow motion.

A massive star, millions of
times brighter than our sun.

It's going into meltdown

The fuel that sustains it is running out...

...the nuclear reactions
that power it winding down

We're watching its death throes

An even bigger, dangerously unstable star

But this one's about to explode

And when a star this big dies...

...it's a hundred times more
violent than a supernova.

We've stumbled into the most
violent star death of all...

...a hypernova.

The core's collapsed, it's
becoming a black hole.

And that's the shock wave,
surging through the star...

...ripping its outer layers into space.

Deadly hypernovas, frozen comets...

...scorched planets,
white dwarves, red giants

Tiny drops in a vast pool of white light...

...our home galaxy, the Milky Way

We wanted to know where we fit in

Here's our answer.

Civilizations, past and present

Everyone that's ever lived

The smallest bug, the highest mountain...

...all of it invisible, not even a tiny speck.

Our home is a minor planet
orbiting an insignificant star.

It is disappeared right
now, who would even notice?

And yet, so far, we've found
nowhere else we would rather live...

...nowhere we could live

It's only now, far from home...

...that we're beginning to truly appreciate it.

Look at all these stars,
hundreds of thousands of them

Surely one of them, more than one,
must be capable of supporting life.

Maybe here in this swarm of
stars, the Great Cluster

Back in the 1970's, astronomers
sent a message in this direction...

...detailing the structure of our
DNA and our solar system's location

But the message won't arrive
here for another 25,000 years.

We haven't found alien life yet

But neither have we found
any reason to believe...

...it isn't out there somewhere.

There's an equation devised...

...to estimate the number of
other advanced civilizations

The result is startling.

There could be millions of
civilizations just in our own galaxy.

Everything we've seen so
far is inside the Milk Way

Now we're ready to
leave our home galaxy...

...to enter intergalactic space.

Here's our chance to solve
the ultimate mystery...

...and experience the moment of creation.

Beyond the Milk Way...

...through the vast
expanse between galaxies.

Against all the odds, we've
made it to intergalactic space

Out here, there's no horizon in sight.

Even the closest galaxies are hundreds
of thousands of light years away

The remains of galaxies ripped apart...

...By the Milky Way's huge
gravitational pull...

...scattered among nothing

This is as close as the universe
gets to a perfect vacuum.

But even this isn't totally empty.

There are thin wisps of
gas, tine traces of dust

And something else, dark matter

So mysterious, we can't see it...

...feel it, taste it, touch it or even measure it.

Yet so common, it could
make up over 90 percent...

...of all the matter in the universe.

If dark matter does exist...

...it means there's no
such thing as empty space.

Even out here, we're surrounded by matter

We think it exists because of
its apparent hold on galaxies

Like this one, the Large Magellanic Cloud

A 6-billion-year journey in
today's fastest spacecraft...

...160 thousand light
years from the Milky Way...

...at the edge of its gravitational reach

This galaxy should spin off into space,
but something is holding it here...

...something invisible,
powerful, dark matter

Stars, clusters of stars, nebulae...

...it's a vast astronomical treasure trove.

But look at this, it's like
a string of gleaming pearls.

It's a fireball...

...expanding out from what must
have been a massive explosion.

A supernova.

So bright that when light
from the explosion...

...reached Earth 20 years ago...

...it was visible to the naked eye

And so violent, it triggered a
string of nuclear reactions...

...forcing atoms together,
creating new elements...

...gold, silver, platinum,
blasting them out into space.

The gold in the ring on you finger...

...was forged in a massive
supernova like this...

...trillions of miles away,
billions of years ago.

Before we left home, the
universe seemed desperate...

...something out there, up in the sky.

But now we know better.

We are the universe, and it is within us

It's comforting to remember as
we venture through this abyss.

Further and further

Faster and faster

The Andromeda Galaxy two and
half million light years away

It's racing through space...

...everything blown apart,
like shrapnel in an explosion.

We're seeing this galaxy as it was...

...when our ape-like ancestors
first walked on the African plains

Further through space,
and further back in time

Hold on. This doesn't look right

A whole galaxy exploding?

The only thing large enough to
cause an explosion on this scale...

...is another galaxy.

It looks like the end of the world

But this galaxy won't die, it will be reborn.

A new shape, perhaps even new stars...

...as dust and gas collide,
creating friction, shockwaves...

...triggering the birth of stars.

There's order in this chaos, a
pattern behind the infinite variety...

...an endless cycle of birth and
death, creation and destruction

It's a pattern woven through
the vast fabric of space...

...that binds each of these galaxies

There are billions of galaxies...

...each with billions, even trillions of stars.

Maybe more stars than
there are grains of sand...

...on all the beaches on Earth.

We're finally beginning
to see the big picture...

...and it's grander than we ever imagined

This galaxy, the huge Pinwheel Galaxy...

...is so far from Earth that if
we send a message home now...

...it will take 27 million years to get there.

Who knows whether our
species, our planet...

...will still be around to receive it?

We travel on, back through time

Past the point where the
dinosaurs were wiped out...

...past the moment where the
first creatures crawled onto land

Two billion light years from home.

Closing in on the edge of the universe

Going back to the beginning of time

This isn't a galaxy. It's
brighter than a hundred galaxies

A blinding beam of energy
surging for trillions of miles.

Something this big, this bright,
must be incredibly powerful

Experience tells us, out
here, power equals danger

It looks like a quasar, the
deadliest thing in the universe

Our journey could be over

The deadliest, most powerful
thing in the universe.

A quasar.

A swirling cauldron of superheated gas

This beast has a heart of darkness,
a super-massive black hole...

...as heavy as a billion suns.

It's ripping apart whole stars...

...devouring them until they're nothing...

...lost forever from the visible universe

We think, we hope, we pray...

...we've seen the worst the
universe can throw at us.

But no one can know what lies ahead

We'll need to go further, go faster

Eight billion light years from home.

More galaxies, but these look different

Ragged, small, close together

We're so far back in time...

...we're seeing these galaxies as they were
before the Earth was born

They're still young, still growing.

We're getting close to
where and how it all began

Look at the galaxies now.

They're more like primitive plankton
floating in a vast dark ocean

Clouds of dust and gas...

...dancing, twirling, merging
to make embryonic galaxies.

They're disappearing

We've gone back before
the stars were born...

...into a cosmic dark age

And before that, light, the afterglow...

...from the massive explosion
that created the known universe

This is it.

We've made it

The edge of universe...

...80 Billion trillion miles from home...

...13 and a half billion years ago

The very instant of the Big Bang...

...the most violent, most
creative moment in history.

Everything that's ever happened
follows from this moment.

Every religion, every
culture, has pondered it

But we still don't known what
sparked this act of creation or why

This is where our journey ends...

...and the universe begins

An infinitely hot, small, dense point erupts

Creating space, time,
matter, our universe itself.

First, it's the size of a subatomic particle.

The tiniest traction of a second later...

...it's big enough to hold
in the palm of your hand

Moments later, it's the size of the Earth.

Today, the light from the Big
Bang is still spreading out

You can hear it as a radio hiss

See it as television static.

All the wonders we've
seen on our journey...

...are sparks flying out from the Big Bang.

Galaxies, stars, planets...

...all cosmic debris

We go forward through time...

...riding the blast wave

Until we reach another cooling cinder...

...swirling in the afterglow of the Big Bang.

We're back where we started

Home.

Only now can we really know it.

Smaller, more fragile than we ever imagine

Destined to die swallowed by a dying sun

But we shouldn't despair.
We should rejoice

We've managed to experience
the wonders of the universe

We should celebrate our achievements...

...and enjoy our moment in the sun

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