PBS NOVA · 2021 · Narrator: Talithia Williams
In this five-part series, NOVA delves into the vastness of space to capture moments of high drama when the universe changed forever. State-of-the-art animation gives us astonishing, photo-realistic glimpses of the birth of a star in a stellar nursery, the chaos created as two galaxies collide, and the power of a super-massive black hole as it flings a star across space so violently that it's still traveling 10 million years later. NOVA even takes viewers back on the ultimate time travel voyage, to witness the birth of space and time itself. Informed by huge advances in scientific understanding, the series brings us face-to-face with the most surprising characters in the cosmos and reveals how their fates are intertwined with our own. Take a ringside seat for the greatest show in the universe.
I confess feeling simultaneous embarrassment and exhilaration while watching this series, as I learned something I did not know in each episode. Don't get me wrong: you could fill the Grand Canyon with Things I Don't Know, even if you limit it to Things I Should Know. I'll take the hits to my ego to add "Fermi bubbles" to my vocabulary.
I think this series incorporates nicely into NGSS Physics of the Universe. Especially Segment 6. And there is a refreshing diversity among the on-screen content experts that has been missing from astronomy documentaries of yesteryear.
Watch this on the biggest screen you can manage. The visuals are gorgeous, and the sounds fill the room.
E P I S O D E S
The sun is our life-giving source of light, heat, and energy, and new discoveries are unraveling its epic history. Join NOVA on a spectacular voyage to discover the sun’s place in a grand cycle of birth, death and renewal that makes this the age of stars. Witness how stars of every size and color came to populate our universe; how stars stage a dramatic exit when they explode as supernovae, which can outshine an entire galaxy; and how, billions of years in the future, the age of stars will lead ultimately to an age of darkness.
Featuring Gibor Basri, Sownak Bose, Emma Chapman, David Charbonneau, Christopher Chen, Payel Das, Courtney Dressing, Rana Ezzeddine, Lucie Green, Ghina Halabi, Nia Imara, Kelly Korreck, Philip Muirhead, Eugene Parker, Raman Prinja, Grant Tremblay, and Anjali Tripathi.
Straddling the night sky, the Milky Way reminds us of our place in the galaxy we call home. But what shaped this giant spiral of stars and what will be its destiny? NOVA travels back in time to unlock the turbulent story of our cosmic neighborhood, from its birth in a whirling disk of clouds and dust to colossal collisions with other galaxies. Finally, peer into the future to watch the Milky Way’s ultimate fate as it collides with the Andromeda galaxy, over 4 billion years from now.
Featuring Vasily Belokurov, Sownak Bose, Michelle Collins, Payel Das, Rana Ezzeddine, Gerry Gilmore, Jen Gupta, Nia Imara, David Rosario, and Grant Tremblay.
It’s an age-old question: are we alone? Or do other lifeforms and intelligences thrive on worlds far beyond our own? Ultra-sensitive telescopes and dogged detective work are transforming alien planet-hunting from science fiction into hard fact. Join NOVA on a visit to exotic worlds orbiting distant suns, from puffy planets with the density of Styrofoam to thousand-degree, broiling gas giants. Most tantalizing of all are the Super-Earths in the “Goldilocks zone,” just the right distance from their sun to support life, and with one of them signaling life’s essential ingredient, water, in its atmosphere. Are we on the brink of answering that haunting question?
Featuring Gibor Basri, Jayne Birkby, William Borucki, David Charbonneau, Courtney Dressing, Douglas Lin, Nikku Madhusudhan, Philip Muirhead, Hakeem Oluseyi, Anjali Piette, Sara Seager, Maritza Soto, Clara Sousa-Silva, Anjali Tripathi, and Hannah Wakeford.
Take a seat on the ultimate thrill ride to explore nature’s strangest and most powerful objects. Black holes can reshape entire galaxies, warp the fabric of space and time, and may even be the key to unlocking the ultimate nature of reality. A new generation of high-energy telescopes is bringing these invisible voids to light, showing that “supermassives” millions or billions of times larger than our sun lurk at the center of nearly every galaxy, including our own. But what happens if you stray too close to one? And what lies beyond the black hole’s abyss? If nothing can ever escape it, is that the end of the story? Or could they be a portal to another dimension—or another universe, full of black holes?
Featuring Richard Anantua, Kimberly Arcand, Urmila Chadayammuri, Judith Croston, Sheperd Doeleman, Douglas Finkbeiner, Delilah Gates, Sylvester Gates, Jr., Kirsten Hall, David Kaiser, Sugata Kaviraj, Chiara Mingarelli, Priyamvada Natarajan, Hakeem Oluseyi, Andrew Pontzen, David Rosario, Becky Smethurst, Nial Tanvir, Grant Tremblay, Imogen Whittam.
The Big Bang is when many think the universe started and time itself began. But what clues can we discover about this ultimate genesis of everything? And can we ever know what existed before the Universe’s birthday? With stunning animation based on space telescope images, NOVA explores infant galaxies filled with violent blue stars that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Before that—before the coming of visible light itself—stretch the “cosmic Dark Ages.” But scientists haven’t stopped there; instead, they’ve come up with an incredible theory for what happened billionths of a billionth of a second from the universe’s birth. If they’re right, we’re on the brink of understanding more than we could ever have hoped about our cosmic origins.
Featuring Kimberly Arcand, Urmila Chadayammuri, Chris Done, Cora Dvorkin, Sylvester Gates, Jr., Larry Gladney, Alan Guth, Kirsten Hall, Carole Haswell, Tana Joseph, David Kaiser, Katie Mack, Charlotte Mason, Priyamvada Natarajan, Hakeem Oluseyi, Hiranya Peiris, Andrew Pontzen, Giorgio Savini, Nial Tanvir, and Grant Tremblay.
Question sets are available for individual episodes. The complete series bundle is available at a discounted price. Student documents and answer keys are provided as Google Docs on Google Drive.
On BBC, this series is titled Universe.
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