Tag: skyatnight

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:
The team explores one of the greatest discoveries of modern astronomy – that our universe is expanding – and the new questions it raises about how the cosmos works.

In the 1920s, astronomers studying galaxies realised they were moving away from us, with the most distant ones receding the fastest. The
conclusion was revolutionary: space itself was stretching, and the universe was expanding in every direction. But once this discovery was made, a new challenge emerged – how fast is the universe expanding, and what could that tell us about its age, size and ultimate fate?

Chris Lintott travels to the University of Oxford to explore one of the most extraordinary tools astronomers use to answer these questions – the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. Working with Professor David Alonso, Chris learns how scientists use the CMB as a starting point for measuring cosmic expansion. He discovers how the Simons Observatory, a network of telescopes in Chile, is creating the sharpest map yet of this ancient light. These observations promise to refine our understanding of the expansion rate and may shed light on a long-standing puzzle known as the ‘Hubble tension’, where different measurements of expansion don’t agree.

Meanwhile, Maggie Aderin-Pocock investigates a different cosmic speedometer: supernovae, or exploding stars. Meeting Dr Philip Wiseman at the University of Southampton, she learns how type 1a supernovae, which shine with a predictable brightness, can be used to measure cosmic distances. A discovery in the 1990s revealed something astonishing – not only is the universe expanding, but the expansion is accelerating. The Vera Rubin Observatory, with its enormous mirror and world-record-breaking camera, is about to survey the southern skies, capturing supernovae in unprecedented numbers. With its data, astronomers hope to refine how fast the universe’s expansion has accelerated over billions of years.

George Dransfield takes on the most mysterious part of the story – dark energy. Coined to explain the force driving the acceleration, dark energy remains entirely unknown. At the University of Portsmouth, George meets Dr Seshadri Nadathur, who is part of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project. By mapping tens of millions of galaxies across 11 billion years of cosmic history, DESI is building the largest 3D map of the universe ever made. This map is revealing subtle patterns in how galaxies are distributed, providing new insights into how fast the universe has expanded over time – and whether dark energy itself has changed throughout cosmic history. Together, these projects reveal both the power and the limits of our current models of cosmology. Different methods of measuring expansion don’t line up, and far from being a mistake, this mismatch may be a vital clue that new physics is waiting to be discovered.

As ever, Pete Lawrence is on hand with his guide to the skies this month, including how to catch Saturn’s rare ring and moon events, as well as highlights of the autumn equinox.

With cosmic clues building from the earliest light of the Big Bang to the faint glow of distant supernovae, the programme takes viewers on a journey through one of the most profound questions in science: how fast is our universe expanding, and what might that reveal about its past, present and future?

Links:
The Sky at Night

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:
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a discoverer and an explorer of the distant cosmos, and she has walked among the stars. She discovered the first pulsar in 1967 – a discovery so important in our understanding of the universe that it would earn a Nobel Prize. But Jocelyn didn’t receive it.

All her life a deep thinker, a dedicated Quaker and a fierce advocate for equal opportunity in physics, Jocelyn has carved an astonishing career doing and communicating science, changing the face of astronomy as a result.

Jocelyn was determined to succeed in an environment not made for her, and her story resonates with young and old, student and professor – and anyone who has ever felt like they may not really belong.

In this film, we hear Jocelyn’s story direct from the subject herself and learn how, from the small town of Lurgan in Northern Ireland, she rose to worldwide recognition. It is a tale of determination and triumph against the prejudice and misogyny of the time.

Alongside the history are the enigmas themselves: pulsars. The conditions surrounding these objects make them the most extreme laboratories in the cosmos, uniting the most complex and cutting-edge physics under one roof. Matter crushed down into its densest form, encased within extreme magnetic fields – and they are even telling us the secrets of the very make-up of our universe. Some flavours of these objects are so dramatic that just one outburst can briefly outshine an entire galaxy.

With Dr Vanessa Graber from Royal Holloway, University of London, Maggie delves into the concealed interiors of pulsars and the exotic states of matter that form them. With superfluids of neutrons hosting quantum tornados and searing hundred-million-degree plasma, pulsars are not the once-predictable characters we thought them.

Chris, meanwhile, is at the University of Oxford with Dr Kaustubh Rajwade, studying the oddballs of the pulsar family and how to decode their messages. As a blast of radiation travels from a pulsar to our detectors, the history of its journey through the universe is imprinted on the signal. We learn how to use this to see the unseen – the parts of the cosmos that are almost impossible for us to observe – revealing its detailed structure for the first time.

In conversation, Jocelyn joins PhD student Aida Seye to discuss shared passions and challenges in chasing cosmic dreams. Aida is a recipient of the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund, instigated by Jocelyn to support PhD students from underrepresented groups. Aida is studying the structure of the Milky Way, with the aim of bringing us closer to solving the mystery of dark matter.

Links:
The Sky at Night

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:
The team explore one of the biggest stories in space news, the ‘city killer’ asteroid 2024 YR4. First observed on 27 December 2024, it soon became one of the biggest threats from an asteroid ever detected, with the potential to cause a heat blast that could vaporise solid rock, wind blasts five times the speed of the strongest hurricane and a shockwave that would flatten buildings and trees for hundreds of miles. This was a potential natural disaster we needed to respond to as a planet. So how well did we do? Our team of presenters are on hand to find out, and while YR4 was later downgraded to a near miss, what has it told us about our ability to react when an asteroid strike is on its way? George Dransfield kicks off, talking us through the damage an asteroid like YR4 could do and why some say we are overdue an asteroid strike of this size. But how will we know if it’s truly on its way? Chris Lintott meets Dr Meg Schwamb at a football pitch – which it turns out is the perfect place to explain how the probability of a strike is calculated. Following the same highs and lows they do when a ball just misses the goal, they explain why the probability of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting earth first rose so quickly before it fell. It turns out it wasn’t the maths being wrong!

Luckily, next time the numbers say an asteroid impact is on its way, we do have ways of defending ourselves, Maggie Aderin-Pocock takes a tea break to explain some of the options, from nudging it to nuking it – they all have their pros and cons. But to know our best plan of action, we need to understand more about the asteroids, and George meets up with Dr Carly Howett to find out how Nasa’s Lucy Mission could provide us with invaluable information for any future strikes. With this wealth of information about any potential asteroids heading our way, Maggie meets Prof Hugh Lewis in Southampton to discover how the international community is set up to respond to any future threats, and to find out who will decide what action to take and the possible consequences it may have. But the skies and the asteroids in it aren’t just a scary threat to humanity; when we stop and look up, there are some beautiful sights to be seen, and Pete Lawrence is on hand to tell us what to look out for in the coming months. Join us for an exciting episode that looks beyond the headlines, to see what efforts were made to protect us from an asteroid that could have wiped out a city the size of Greater London – and beyond.

Links:
The Sky at Night