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The Sky at Night is a monthly documentary television programme on astronomy produced by the BBC.

The show had the same permanent presenter, Patrick Moore, from its first broadcast on 24 April 1957 until 7 January 2013. The latter date was a posthumous broadcast, which followed Moore’s death on 9 December 2012. This made it the longest-running programme with the same presenter in television history. Many early episodes are missing, either because the tapes were wiped, thrown out, or because the episode was broadcast live and never recorded in the first place. Beginning with the 3 February 2013 edition, the show was co-presented by Lucie Green and Chris Lintott. Since December 2013 Maggie Aderin-Pocock has been a presenter. The programme’s opening and closing theme music is “At the Castle Gate”, from the incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande, written in 1905 by Jean Sibelius, performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.

This episode:
Chris Lintott and the team explore the extraordinary engineering, both on Earth and millions of kilometres above it in space, that is transforming modern astronomy and revealing parts of the cosmos once thought forever beyond our reach. George Dransfield travels to Marseille to investigate KM3NeT, one of the most ambitious scientific instruments ever constructed. Covering more than a cubic kilometre of the Mediterranean Sea, this vast underwater observatory is searching for neutrinos, elusive ‘ghost particles’ that pass through planets, stars and even our own bodies almost entirely unnoticed. By detecting these cosmic messengers, astronomers hope to uncover the origins of some of the most violent and energetic events in the universe, from exploding stars to the environments around supermassive black holes. The programme also explores gravitational-wave astronomy and the remarkable international network of detectors capable of measuring distortions in space-time smaller than an atom. These instruments have opened an entirely new way of observing the cosmos, allowing scientists to detect collisions between black holes and neutron stars across the Universe.

In Cambridge, Chris visits a team attempting to tackle one of cosmology’s biggest mysteries using a tabletop experiment. By cooling atoms to almost absolute zero and manipulating them with ultra-precise lasers, researchers are building a laboratory system that could one day probe some of the quantum physics thought to have shaped the universe in its earliest moments. Finally, Maggie Aderin explores Nasa’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a new observatory designed to search for distant worlds beyond our solar system. Its revolutionary coronagraph will suppress the overwhelming glare of distant stars, potentially allowing astronomers to directly image planets orbiting them and paving the way for future missions that could search Earth-like worlds for signs of life. From particle detectors deep beneath the Mediterranean to ultra-cold quantum experiments and next-generation space telescopes, this programme reveals how human ingenuity is creating entirely new ways to explore the cosmos and uncover its deepest secrets.

Links:
Engineering the Universe