All language subtitles for Cosmos S01E08 Sisters of the Sun (1080p x265 10bit)

We pulled
the stars from the skies...

...and brought them
down to Earth.

But at what cost?

When we turned on
all these lights...

we lost something precious.

The stars.

"Sisters of the Sun"

A long time ago,
in a world lit only by fire,

our relationship with the stars

was far more...

personal.

For thousands of generations,

we watched the stars

as if our lives depended on it.

Because they did.

We humans were not the biggest,

the strongest, nor the fastest

of all the animals
we competed against.

But we did have
one thing going for us...

our intelligence.

One aspect of that was a genius

for pattern recognition.

Night after night,
we watched the stars.

And over time,
our ancestors noticed

that the motions of the stars
across the nights of the year

foretold changes on Earth

that threatened or enhanced
our chances for survival.

In a time when our imaginations

were the only stage
where stories came to life,

before there were movies or TVs

or electronic devices
of any kind,

every human culture
connected the dots

to form their own pictures.

These images became the
illustrations of a storybook

that, on a deeper level,
was also a survival manual.

The names and personalities
of the gods, heroes,

farm animals
or familiar objects

varied from culture to culture.

But there was one particularly
gorgeous group of stars

known to the Ancient Greeks
and to us today

as the Pleiades,

a star cluster formed
about 100 million years ago.

Each of them is some 40 times
brighter than our Sun.

And Alcyone, the most luminous,

outshines our Sun 1,000 times.

For ages, the Pleiades
have been used as an eye test

for people all over the world.

If you could see
at least six of them,

you were considered normal.

If you saw more than seven,

you were an ideal candidate
for a warrior or scout.

Among the Ancient Celts and
Druids of the British Isles,

the Pleiades were believed to
have a haunting significance.

On the night of the year
that they reach

the highest point
in the sky at midnight,

the spirits of the dead were
thought to wander the Earth.

This is believed to be
the origin of the holiday

once known as Samhain,

now called Halloween.

All over the Earth,
our ancestors told

wonderful stories to explain

how the Pleiades came
to be in the sky.

For the Kiowa people
of North America,

it happened something like this.

Long, long ago,
some young women

snuck away from their campsite

to dance freely
beneath the stars.

Rock, save us!

Rock, take pity on us!

The rock heard
their cries and grew taller.

Until it became what is today
known as the Devil's Tower.

The maidens were transformed
into the stars of the Pleiades,

which may be seen hanging
above the tower in midwinter.

The Ancient Greeks
also saw those seven jewels

as seven maidens,

the seven daughters of Atlas,

pursued not by bears, but by...

Orion the hunter,

who spied them when he was
out walking one day.

Orion became mad with desire.

For seven years,
he chased them relentlessly.

- Exhausted...
- Zeus, help us.

...they prayed to Zeus
for deliverance.

Zeus, the king of the gods,
felt sorry for them,

and transformed
those seven maidens

into the Pleiades.

But the gods are,
if anything, capricious.

When Orion was killed
by the sting of a scorpion,

Zeus placed him in the sky where
he could resume his pursuit

of the seven gorgeous sisters.

Our ancestors, they wove

brilliantly imaginative stories.

But they can bring us
no closer to the stars

than our dreams.

It took yet another
few thousand years

until three brilliant scientists
unlocked the secrets

of the true lives of the stars.

In 1901,

Harvard was a man's world.

But an astronomer named
Edward Charles Pickering

broke that rule.

Oh, Pickering's office
is just down the hallway.

And that door over
there leads to the room

where he keeps his computers.

We're supposed to call those
women "computers," but, uh,

I've heard more than one fellow
refer to those gals

as "Pickering's Harem."

Pickering
assembled a team of women

to map and classify
the types of stars.

One of them provided the key
to our understanding

of the substance of the stars.

And another devised a way
for us to calculate

the size of the universe.

For some reason, you probably
never heard of either of them.

Wonder why.

That's Annie Jump Cannon,
the leader of the team.

Before she was through,

she catalogued a quarter
of a million stars.

Number 11 is a B7.

That's Alcyone in the Pleiades.

Cannon lost her hearing
during a bout of scarlet fever

when she was a young woman.

Number 12 is a B6.

That's Henrietta Swan Leavitt.
She's also deaf.

And she's the other
great scientist in the room.

Leavitt discovered the law
that astronomers still use

more than a century later

to measure the distances
to the stars

and the size
of the cosmos itself.

Annie Jump Cannon sent out
a Christmas card explaining

what she and her sisters
were actually doing.

The light from a star
is allowed

to fall through a prism placed
in the telescope, she wrote.

Thus magnified, the starlight
is split up into a band

showing its component colors,

the red rays going to one end
and the violet to the other.

This is the spectrum
of the star.

It shows the presence
of fine, dark lines.

By comparing them
with lines given

by glowing substances
in the laboratory,

we can determine that the same
elements familiar to us

on the Earth also exist
in the outermost star.

This is plate number 12358B.

Number one at this plate
is a B-type star.

Make that a B2.

It took Cannon decades

to classify
the spectral character

of hundreds of thousands
of stars

according to the scheme
that she devised.

Cannon discovered
that the stars fell

into a continuous sequence
of seven broad categories

according to their spectral
line patterns.

Each was designated
by a letter.

But the spectral lines of two
stars in the same letter class

could differ in subtle ways,

minute variations
that Cannon learned

to recognize from memory.

To distinguish these spectra
from one another,

she assigned ten numerical
subcategories for each class.

Annie Jump Cannon
organized the stars,

but it would fall to another
scientist to decipher

the hidden meaning in her work.

In the England of 1923,
women were forbidden

from pursuing
advanced degrees in science.

But Cecelia Payne had attended
a lecture in London

by the astronomer
Sir Arthur Eddington,

the first scientist
to provide evidence

that Einstein's revolutionary

General Theory of Relativity
was correct.

From that moment on,

she knew that nothing
would deter her

from pursing her big dreams.

She resolved to emigrate
to America,

where women had already
gained the freedom

to study the stars.

Her application was accepted
at Harvard.

What she would discover there
would challenge

one of the central beliefs
of astronomy.

The resulting impact

would be the dawn
of modern astrophysics.

As the decades passed,

Annie Jump Cannon and her team
kept sifting the stars,

checking each one's
spectral signature

with a fleeting glance
and then dropping them

into one of seven categories.

They became hundreds
of thousands of dots

in a larger picture which
no one could yet understand.

Into this community of women
came one more.

Well, hello there.

You must be Miss Payne.

We've been waiting for you.

Come on in.

Cecilia Payne had
never experienced such kindness

in a scientific setting before.

This sisterhood
generously shared

the fruits of their labors
with her,

and she turned
their observations

into a radical new
understanding of the stars.

The two women became
great friends.

Cannon taught Payne everything
she had learned

about stellar spectra.

And Payne began to analyze
Cannon's data

to see if she could determine
the actual chemical composition

and physical state of the stars.

She brought to this work
her expertise

in theoretical
and atomic physics.

The most prominent features
in the spectra of stars

showed the presence
of heavy elements

such as calcium... and iron,

which are among the most
abundant elements in the Earth.

So astronomers
naturally concluded

that the stars were made

of the same elements
as the Earth

and in roughly
the same proportions.

In 1924, Henry Norris Russell
was the dean

of American astronomers,
having made major contributions

to our understanding
of the stars.

40 to 45 of
the chemical elements

that we have here on Earth

are also present
in the spectrum of the Sun.

So we can assume
that the composition of the Sun

resembles that of the Earth.

If one were to heat the crust
of the Earth to incandescence,

its spectrum would resemble
that of the Sun.

Annie, I think I now
understand what it all means.

All your years of work.

Tell me.

I've calculated
what the spectra

should look like
across a wide range

of temperatures, and they match

your system
of classification perfectly.

The spectrum of any star
tells you exactly how hot it is.

Your "O-B-A-F-G-K-M" is really
a temperature scale of the stars

from the hottest to the coldest.

Here's the headline, Annie.
Thanks to your work,

I've discovered that the stars
are made almost entirely

of hydrogen and helium.

There's a million times more
hydrogen and helium

than the metals in the stars.

I know, it sounds daft.

Are you certain?

Has anyone else checked
your calculations?

Not yet,
but it's all in my thesis,

which is already on its way
to Professor Russell.

Poor woman.

Russell felt
sorry for Cecilia Payne.

Her thesis appeared to him
to be fundamentally flawed.

It is clearly impossible
that hydrogen should be

a million times more abundant
than the metals.

Her carefully
gathered evidence flew in the face

of conventional
scientific wisdom.

"How could I be right,"
she asked,

"if that must mean

that such a distinguished
scientist was wrong?"

Despite her confidence
in the quality of her research,

she caved and added a sentence
to her thesis

that undermined
its greatest insight.

It would be four years

before Russell realized
that Payne was right.

To his credit,
as soon as he did,

he acknowledged
that it was her discovery.

Payne's "Stellar Atmospheres"
is widely regarded

as the most brilliant
PhD thesis

ever written in astronomy.

It became the standard text
in its field.

I was to blame for not
having pressed my point.

I had given in to authority
when I believed I was right.

If you are sure of your facts,

you should defend
your position.

The words of the powerful

may prevail in other spheres
of human experience,

but in science, the only thing
that counts is the evidence

and the logic
of the argument itself.

Cecilia Payne's interpretation
of Annie Jump Cannon's sequence

of stellar spectra
made it possible for us

to read the life stories
of the stars

and to trace the story of life
itself back to its beginnings

in their fiery deaths.

There are many kinds of stars.

Some are bright like the Sun.

Some are dim.

The greatest stars
are ten million times larger

than the smallest ones.

Some stars are old
beyond imagining,

more than ten billion years
of age.

Others are being born
right now.

When atoms fuse
in the hearts of stars,

they make starlight.

Stars are born in litters,

formed from the gas and dust
of interstellar clouds.

The mass of the individual
stars in a litter

can range from the runts--
not much larger

than the largest planets--

to the supergiant stars
that dwarf the Sun.

The stars in the nebula below
Orion's Belt are newborns,

around five million years old,

and still swaddled
in the gas and dust

that gave birth to them.

The stars in the Pleiades
are already toddlers,

about 100 million years old.

They've shed their blankets
of gas and dust,

but they're still bound
together

by their mutual gravity.

Another few hundred
million years,

and they'll drift apart
and go their separate ways,

never to meet again.

Most of the stars of the
Big Dipper are adolescents,

roughly half a billion
years old.

They've already drifted apart
from their birth cluster,

although we can still trace
their common ancestry.

Eventually, they'll spread out
around the Milky Way galaxy.

But most of the familiar
constellations

are a mix of entirely
unrelated stars,

some faint and nearby,

others bright and far away.

Our own Sun?

From the distance
of even a few light-years,

it's hard to find
amidst the other stars.

It's that one.

Our Sun is middle-aged

and a long way
from where it was born.

Its sister stars,

hatched from the same
interstellar cloud,

are dispersed
throughout the galaxy.

Many of them have
their own planets.

Perhaps some of them nurture

the evolution of life
and intelligence.

Most of the stars
in our night sky

actually orbit around one
or more stellar companions.

With the naked eye,

we usually can't see
the fainter members

in such double
and multiple star systems.

On a world with three suns,

the nights would be rare

and the days might alternate
between red and blue.

It is the destiny
of stars to collapse.

Of the thousands
of stars you see

when you look up
at the night sky,

every one of them is living

in an interval
between two collapses...

an initial collapse of a dark,
interstellar gas cloud

to form the star,

and a final collapse
of the luminous star

on its way
to its ultimate fate.

Gravity makes stars contract,

unless some other force
intervenes.

The Sun is a great, big ball
of incandescent gas.

The super hot gas in its core

pushes the Sun
to expand outward.

At the same time,
the Sun's own gravity

pulls it inward to contract.

And our Sun is poised
between these two forces

in a stable equilibrium

between gravity
and nuclear fire,

a balance it will maintain

for another four billion years.

But as the Sun
consumes hydrogen,

its core very slowly shrinks,

and the Sun's surface
gradually expands in response.

It happens very slowly,

imperceptibly,

over the course
of millions of years.

But in about a billion years,

the Sun will be
ten percent brighter

than it is today.

Ten percent may not
sound like much,

but that extra heat
will have a big effect on Earth.

When the Sun finally exhausts
its nuclear fuel

four or five
billion years from now,

its gas will cool
and the pressure will fall.

The Sun's interior

can no longer support the weight

of the outer layers,

and the initial collapse
will resume.

Nothing lasts forever.

Even the stars die.

Helium, the ash

of ten billion years
of hydrogen fusion,

has built up in the core.

With no nuclear fire
to sustain its weight,

the core collapses
until it becomes hot enough

to start fusing helium
into carbon and oxygen.

The core of the Sun

is now much hotter
than it was before.

Its atmosphere rapidly expands.

Over the next billion years,
it'll become bloated

to more than 100 times
its original size--

a red giant star.

It will envelop and devour

the planets Mercury...

...and Venus...

...and possibly the Earth.

I like to think that

tens of millions of years
before that far distant future,

if there still be life
born of Earth,

it will have found new homes
among the stars.

Once the Sun burns
through its helium,

it will become highly unstable,

casting off its outer layers
into space.

The exposed, super hot core

will flood its surroundings

with high-energy
ultraviolet light.

The atoms will perform
a wild, fluorescent dance.

The Sun will collapse
like a souffl�,

shrinking a hundredfold
to the size of the Earth.

And at that point,
the Sun will be so dense

that its overcrowded electrons
will push back,

stopping any further
contraction.

The kernel of light
at the center

will be the only part
of the Sun that endures,

a white dwarf star
that will go on shining dimly

for another 100 billion years.

Will the beings
of a distant future,

sailing past
this wreck of a star,

have any idea of the life
and worlds that it once warmed?

The psychedelic death shrouds

of ordinary stars are fleeting,

lasting only
tens of thousands of years

before dissipating in
the interstellar gas and dust

from which the new stars
will be born.

The stars in
a binary star system

can have a different fate.

Sirius, the brightest star
in the night sky,

has a very faint
stellar companion--

a white dwarf.

It was once a Sun-like star.

Someday, when Sirius
runs out of fuel

and becomes a red giant,

it will shed its substance
onto the white dwarf.

The intense gravity
of the companion

will attract that gas,

pulling it into
a spiraling disk.

When the gas
from the larger star

falls onto the surface
of the white dwarf,

it will trigger
nuclear explosions.

The greatest burst will release

100,000 times more energy
than the Sun.

Each one of those star bursts
is called a "nova,"

from the Latin for "new."

A star about 15 times
as massive as the Sun,

one like Rigel,
the blue supergiant

that forms the right foot
of Orion,

has a different fate in store.

Its collapse will not be stopped
by the pressure of electrons.

The star will keep
falling in on itself,

until its nuclei
become so overcrowded

that they push back.

Rigel will shrink down
about 100,000 times,

until there's no space left
between the nuclei

and it can shrink no more.

At that point, it ignites

a more powerful
nuclear reaction, a supernova.

Most stellar evolution

takes millions
or billions of years.

But the interior collapse

that triggers a supernova
explosion takes only seconds.

What remains will be
an atomic nucleus

the size of a small city--

a rapidly rotating neutron star
called a pulsar.

But for a star more than

30 times as massive
as the Sun--

a star like Alnilam,
in Orion's Belt--

there will be no stopping
its collapse.

In a few million years,

when Alnilam runs out of fuel,

it, too, will go supernova.

The imploding core of Alnilam

will be so massive
that not even nuclear forces

will be strong enough
to hold off its collapse.

Nothing can withstand
such gravity.

And such a star has
an astonishing destiny.

It will continues to collapse,

crossing a boundary
in space-time

called the "event horizon,"

beyond which we cannot see.

When it traverses
that frontier,

the star will vanish
completely from sight.

It will be inside a black hole,

a place where gravity
is so strong

that nothing, not even light,
can escape.

But there's an even

more dramatic fate

that awaits a rare kind of star.

There's one of them
in our galaxy.

It's so unstable
that when it goes,

it won't become a mere nova
or supernova.

It'll become something
far more catastrophic...

a hypernova.

And it could happen
in our lifetime.

There are few places on Earth
to get a better view

of the night sky
than the Australian Outback.

No buildings,

no cars, streetlights,
nothing out here;

just lots of starlight...

and the occasional kangaroo.

You can get
a particularly good view

of the Milky Way from down here.

The center of our galaxy

rises high in the sky,

and it arches across the heavens

like the backbone of night.

We live in a spiral galaxy.

And when we look
at the Milky Way,

we're seeing light from billions
of stars in its spiral disk.

And under this beautiful
dark sky,

you can see that the Milky Way
isn't a uniform band of light.

There are dark patches,
breaks in the starlight.

Those dark patches are caused
by interstellar dust.

The dust blocks the starlight,
and there's lots of it.

Most cultures looked up
at the stars

and connected the dots

to form familiar images
in the sky.

Constellations.

But the Aboriginal people
of Australia

saw a pattern in the darkness

running through the Milky Way.

They saw an emu, a large bird

native to this continent.

Not in the stars,
but in the absence of stars.

There are so many ways
to look at the night sky.

For a million years or more,
we've watched the sky.

And a lot's happened
in that time.

Supernova explode in our galaxy
about once a century.

If we could compress
all those nights of stargazing

into a single minute,

this is what we would see.

Now, if our eyes
were telescopes,

if they were light buckets
as big as wagon wheels

and our vision was not limited
to just one kind of light,

then this is the Milky Way
we would see.

A galaxy in near-infrared light

with streaming tendrils of dust

hurled outward
by those exploding supernovas,

silhouetted against a backdrop

of countless stars.

About 7,500 light-years away,

in another part of our galaxy,

there is a place of upheaval

on an inconceivable scale.

This is the Carina Nebula.

A star-making machine.

It takes a ray of light
50 years to cross it.

The titanic stars born here

sear the surrounding
gas and dust

with their fierce
ultraviolet radiation.

When a massive star dies,

it blows itself to smithereens.

Its substance is propelled
across the vastness

to be stirred by starlight

and gathered up by gravity.

Stars to dust

and dust to stars.

In the cosmos,
nothing is wasted.

But there's an upper limit
to how massive a star can be.

Back in the 17th century,
when Edmond Halley

crossed the equator to map
the southern constellations,

Eta Carinae seemed
like just another faint star.

But in 1843, Eta Carinae

suddenly became the second
brightest star in the sky,

outshined only by Sirius.

And it's been
flipping out ever since.

That dumbbell-shaped cloud

is the expanding remnant
of that event.

At its center
is one crazy star.

Talk about unstable--

Eta Carinae
is at least 100 times

more massive than the Sun,

and pouring out
five million times more light.

It's pushing the upper limit
of what a star can be.

What's more, there's
evidence that Eta Carinae

is being gravitationally
tormented by an evil twin--

another massive star
in orbit around it

as close as Saturn is
to the Sun.

The core of a supermassive star
pours out so much light

that the outward pressure can
overwhelm the star's gravity.

If a star is too massive,

its radiation pressure
overpowers its gravity

and blows the star apart.

The fate of Eta Carinae
was sealed

when it was born
millions of years ago.

When it finally does blow up--

and who knows,
maybe it already has;

after all, we're looking at it
by light that left the star

7,500 years ago--

it will be a cataclysm unlike
anything we've seen before.

A hypernova.

An explosion so powerful,
it'll make a supernova

seem like a firecracker
by comparison.

If there are
nearby solar systems

with planets harboring life,
their days are numbered.

A hypernova spews
so much radiation into space--

not just light,
but X-rays and gamma rays--

that planets that are dozens

or perhaps hundreds
of light-years away

could be stripped
of their atmospheres

and bathed in deadly radiation.

It would wreak havoc

in thousands
of nearby star systems.

Right about now,
you're probably asking yourself,

"Are we safe?"

If Eta Carinae blows up,

what happens to Earth?

Rest assured,
Earth will be just fine.

Remember,
we're 7,500 light-years

away from Eta Carinae.

The intensity of radiation
from a star,

even an exploding star,

falls off rapidly
with distance.

But still, Eta Carinae
in its death throes

will put on quite a show.

It will light up the night
of the southern hemisphere

with the brightness
of a second moon.

The most dramatic swan song
a star can sing.

Our ancestors
worshipped the Sun.

And they were far from foolish.

It makes good sense
to revere the Sun and stars,

because we are their children.

The silicon in the rocks,
the oxygen in the air,

the carbon in our DNA,
the iron in our skyscrapers,

the silver in our jewelry

were all made in stars
billions of years ago.

Our planet, our society
and we ourselves

are stardust.

Well, what is it
that makes the atoms dance?

How is the energy
of a star transformed

into everything
that happens in the world?

What is energy?

We're awash in it.

When hydrogen atoms fuse
inside the Sun,

they make helium atoms.

And this fusion emits
a burst of energy

that can wander inside the Sun
for ten million years

before making its way
to the surface.

And once there, it's free to fly

straight from the Sun
to the Earth

as visible light.

If it should strike
the surface of a leaf,

it will be stored in the plant
as chemical energy.

Sunshine...

into moonshine.

I can feel my brain turning
the chemical energy of the wine

into the electrical energy
of my thoughts

and directing my vocal chords

to produce the acoustic energy
of my voice.

Such transformations of energy

are happening everywhere
all the time.

Energy from our star

drives the wind and the waves

and the life around us.

How lucky we are to have this
vast source of clean energy

falling like manna
from heaven on all of us.

To Annie Jump Cannon,

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

and Cecilia Payne

for blazing the trail
to modern astrophysics.

And to all the sisters
of the Sun.

There's no refuge
from change in the cosmos.

Some ten or 20 million years
from now,

it'll seem for a cosmic moment

as if Orion is finally about
to catch the seven sisters.

But before he has them
in his clutches,

the biggest stars of Orion
will go supernova.

Orion's pursuit of the Pleiades
will finally end,

and the seven sisters

will glide serenely
into the waiting arms

of the Milky Way.

We on Earth marvel--
and rightly so--

at the return
of our solitary Sun.

But from a planet
orbiting a star

in a distant globular cluster,

a still
more glorious dawn awaits.

Not a sunrise...

but a galaxy rise.

A morning filled
with 200 billion suns.

The rising of the Milky Way.

An enormous spiral form
with collapsing gas clouds,

condensing planetary systems,
luminous supergiants,

stable middle-aged suns,
red giants, white dwarfs,

planetary nebulas, supernovas,

neutron stars,
pulsars, black holes

and, there is
every reason to think,

other exotic objects
that we have yet to discover.

From such a world,
high above the Milky Way,

it would be clear,
as it is beginning

to be clear on our world,

that we are made by the atoms
and the stars,

that our matter and our form

are forged by the great
and ancient cosmos,

of which we are a part.