Last year, Saturn moved into a rare position that allowed the Hubble Space Telescope to image its northern and southern aurorae at the same time. From ESA s HubbleCast, with the famous Dr. J.

ESA s new Herschel Space Observatory and NASA s Spitzer Space Telescope combine to show the Milky Way at its coldest and hottest. From NASA/JPL/Caltech s Hidden Universe series.

New infrared images of the fabled Orion Nebula, from the penetrating gaze of ESO s new Vista Telescope. From ESOCast, staring the famous Dr. J.

Adaptation of "Frozen," the Science on a Sphere production from NASA s acclaimed Scientific Visualization Studio. This production was selected as a finalist in the Special Venue category at the 2009 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival.

Pandora is the idyllic blue world featured in the movie Avatar. Its location is a real place: Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun and the most likely destination for our first journey beyond the solar system. Remarkably, it s anti-matter, the science fiction fuel of choice that could take us there. Normally, it s only created in powerful jets that roar out of black holes. We can now produce small quantities in Earth-bound particle colliders. Will we journey out only to plunder other worlds? Or will we come in peace? The answer may depend on how we see Earth at that time in the distant future. The year is 2154. Our planet has been ruined by environmental catastrophe. In the movie Avatar, greedy prospectors from Earth descend on the world of an innocent hunter-gatherer people called the Na vi. Their home is a lush moon far beyond our solar system called Pandora. Could such a place exist? And could our technology... and our appetite for exploration... one day send us hurtling out to reach it? In fact, the supposed site of this fictional solar system is one of our most likely interstellar targets, until a better destination turns up. Pandora orbits a fictional gas planet called Polyphemus. Its home is a real place... Alpha Centauri... the brightest star in the southern constellation of Centaurus. At 4.37 light years away, it s part of the closest star system to our sun. Alpha Centauri is actually two stars, A and B, one slightly larger and more luminous than our own sun, the other slightly smaller. The two stars orbit one other, swinging in as close as Saturn is to our Sun... then back out to the distance of Pluto. This means that any outer planets in this system... anything beyond, say, the orbit of Mars... would likely have been pulled away by the companion and flung out into space. For this reason, Alpha Centauri was not high on planet hunters lists... until they began studying a star 45 light years away called "Gamma Cephei." It has a small companion star that goes around it every 76 years. Now, it seems... it also has at least one planet. That world is about the size of Jupiter, and it has planet hunters excited. Perhaps two-thirds of all the stars in our galaxy are in so-called binary relationships. That means there could be many more planets in our galaxy that astronomers once assumed. At least three teams are now conducting long-term studies of Alpha Centauri... searching for slight wobbles in the light of each companion star that could indicate the presence of planets. If they find a planet that passes in front of one of the stars, astronomers will begin intensive studies to find out what it s like. One of their most promising tools will be the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2014 or 2015. From a position a million miles away from Earth, it will deploy a sun shield the size of a tennis court, and a mirror over 21 feet wide. The largest space telescope ever built, it will offer an extraordinary new window into potential solar systems like Alpha Centauri. With its infrared light detectors, this telescope will be able to discern the chemical composition of a planet s atmosphere... and perhaps whether it harbors a moon like Pandora. One prominent planet hunter predicted that if a habitable world is found at Alpha Centauri, the planning for a space mission would begin immediately. Here s that star duo as seen by the Cassini spacecraft just above the rings of Saturn. To actually get to this pair of stairs, you have to travel as far as the orbit of Saturn, then go another 30,000 times further. Put another way, if the distance to Alpha Centauri is the equivalent of New York to Chicago, then Saturn would be just... one meter away. So far, the immense distances of space have not stopped us from launching missions into deep space. In 1977, the twin Voyager spacecraft were each sent on their way aboard Titan 3 Centaur rockets. After a series of gravitational assists from the giant outer planets, the spacecraft are now flying out of the solar system at about 40,000 miles per hour. They are moving so quickly that they could whip around the Earth in just 45 minutes, twice as fast as the International Space Station. Voyager I has now traveled over 110 astronomical units. That s 110 times the distance from Earth to the Sun... or about 10 billion miles. But don t hold your breath. If it was headed in the right direction, it would need another 73,000 years to travel the 273,000 astronomical units to Alpha Centauri. When it comes to space travel, we ve yet to realize the dream forged by rocketeers a century ago.

Revel in these new images from one of the greatest photo collections every assembled. From the HIRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

The greatest feel-good story in science today. The unstoppable rover Opportunity continues to roll around on the Red Planet, checking on craters and routing out rocks. A nine month mission has now stretched to six years. Now, this amazing robot is about to make tracks to a distant crater and one of the most amazing destinations of all. From NASA JPL.

Hubblecast explores new Hubble Space Telescope images of star birth in the Orion Nebula, and animations illustrating how it happens. ESA Hubble, with the famous Dr. J.

Our team has accidentally run across a secret government video tape that tells the real story behind 2012. An Alien Civilization parked around the planet Saturn is spreading conspiracy theories to distract Earthlings from their ultimate mission: to take control of the Galaxy. Will ordinary humans find out in time?

See the expanded and updated version of this show on... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxG66QMd4wE The search for Earth-like planets is reaching a fever-pitch. Does the evidence so far help shed light on the ancient question: Is the galaxy filled with life, or is Earth just a beautiful, lonely aberration? If things dont work out on this planet Or if our itch to explore becomes unbearable at some point in the future Astronomers have recently found out what kind of galactic real estate might be available to us. Well have to develop advanced transport to land there, 20 light years away. The question right now: is it worth the trip? If things don t work out on this planet... Or if our itch to explore becomes unbearable at some point in the future... Astronomers have recently found out what kind of galactic real estate might be available to us. We ll have to develop advanced transport to land there, 20 light years away.... But that s for later. The question right now: is it worth the trip? The destination is a star that you can t see with your naked eye, in the southern constellation Libra, called Gliese 581. Identified over 40 years ago by the German astronomer Wilhelm Gliese, it s a red dwarf with 31% of the Sun s mass... and only 1.3% of its luminosity. Until recently, the so-called M Stars like Gliese 581 flew below the radar of planet hunters. They give off so little energy that a planet would have to orbit dangerously close just to get enough heat. Now, these unlikely realms are beginning to show some promise... as their dim light yields to precision technologies... ...as well as supercomputers... honed in the battle to understand global changes on this planet... Earth. Will we now begin to detect signs of alien life? Or will these worlds, and the galaxy itself, turn out to be lifeless... and Earth, just a beautiful, lonely aberration? To some, like astronomer and author Carl Sagan, the sheer number and diversity of stars makes it, as he said, "far more likely that the universe is brimming over with life." This so-called "many worlds" view can be traced back to ancient observers... in China, India, Greece and Egypt. The Qur an, the Talmud, and many Hindu texts all imagined a universe full of living beings. In the 16th Century, this view got a boost from astronomer and mathematician Nikolas Copernicus... who came to believe that Earth is not the center of the universe, but revolves around the Sun. Seven decades after Copernicus, Galileo Galilei used his newly developed telescope to show that our Sun was just one among countless other stars in the universe. By the modern era, the "many worlds" view held sway in scientific circles. A variety of thinkers considered what and who inhabited worlds beyond our own. From Martians desperate to get off their planet... to alien invaders intent on launching pre-emptive strikes against ours... or simple life forms on an evolutionary track to complexity. But other thinkers have been struck by a different view. The Greek philosophers Aristotle and Ptolemy believed that humans and Earth are unique. With the spread of Christianity, this Ptolemaic system became widely accepted. The latest variation on this theme is what s called the "Rare Earth" hypothesis. It holds that Earth and sophisticated life were the result of fortuitous circumstances that may not be easy to find again in our galaxy. Does the current search for planets shed light on this debate... sending it in one direction or the other? So far, our only good reference for recognizing an Earth-like planet is... Earth. It does have some fortuitous characteristics... it s dense, it s rocky -- with a complex make-up of minerals and organic compounds -- and it has lots and lots of water. It s also got a nearly circular orbit around the Sun, at a distance that allows liquid water to flow... not too close and not too far away, in the so-called "Habitable Zone." That s defined as the range of distance from a parent star that a planet would need to maintain surface temperatures between the freezing and boiling points of water. Of course, that depends on the size of the planet, the make-up of its atmosphere, and a host of other factors. And whether the parent star is large; medium like the Sun; or small. Some scientists also believe we live in a "Galactic Habitable Zone." We re close enough to the galactic center to be infused with heavy elements generated by countless stellar explosions over the eons... But far enough away from deadly gamma radiation that roars out of the center. If there is a galactic habitable zone... it s thought to lie 26,000 light years from the center... about where we are... give or take about 6,000 light years.

See the updated, expanded version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwkMCHf516s From a distance, our galaxy would look like a flat spiral, some 100,000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxys center. Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of the galactic center. And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important, something strange is going on in there. Astronomers tracking stars in the center of the galaxy have found the best proof to date that black holes exist. Now, they are shooting for the first direct image of a black hole. From a distance, our galaxy would look something like this. A flat spiral, some 100,000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxy s center. That center -- bulging up and out of the galactic disk -- is tightly packed with stars. Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of this so-called "bulge." And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important...something strange... is going on in there. The first to take notice was the physicist Karl Jansky back in the 1930s. He was asked by his employer, Bell Telephone Labs, to investigate sources of static that might interfere with what it saw as the killer app of its time... radio voice transmissions. Using this ungainly radio receiver... Jansky methodically scanned the airwaves. He documented thunderstorms, near and far... and another signal he could not explain. It sounded like steam -- a hiss of radio noise. Jansky narrowed it to a spot in the constellation of Sagittarius, in the direction of the center of the galaxy. Located within a larger pattern of radio emissions... ... Jansky s sighting would become known as Sagittarius A*. The word of Jansky s finding got out. He assured the public that it was not aliens seeking contact. But that s just about all anyone could say... for over three decades. Then Erik Becklin got on the case. Becklin is one of those rare researchers whose curiosity and determination push our understanding to a whole new level. It was the 1960 s and astronomy, like society, was in a period of ferment. Startling new observations were being made... and new interpretations were in the air. Quasars had just been discovered... extremely bright beacons of light from deep space. Were they coming from the centers of distant galaxies? And what powerful objects were generating them? To study an event at the center of a galaxy, you have locate it. Young Becklin first took aim at our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. In ultraviolet light, you can see a dense glow in the middle. Becklin found the point where the light reaches peak intensity... and marked it as the Center. From our orientation in space, all of the Andromeda galaxy is in full view. But our galaxy is a different story. We live inside it, of course. Becklin had to find a way to see through all the dust and gas that obscure our line of sight into the center. So he went to a military contractor... ...and obtained a device that reads infrared light... whose wavelengths are similar to the distances between particles in a dust cloud, allowing them to move right through. Becklin began measuring the brightness of the light as it rose to a peak... marking the location of the galactic center. Pinpointing this site would now allow astronomers to begin probing for details with a new generation of powerful telescopes... to peer into the bright lights... the forbidden zones... deep in the heart of the Milky Way. Becklin wasn t the only astronomer interested in the galactic center. Reinhardt Genzel, and a team based at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, began a similar campaign in 1990... from the New Technology Telescope in the mountains of Chile. A few years later, in 1993, high atop Hawaii s Mauna Kea volcano... Eric Becklin and colleagues, including Andrea Ghez, began using the newly christened Keck Telescope. The American and German groups shared the same goal... to pinpoint the precise location of Sagittarius A*, and find out what it is. Because the object is too small to see... at 26,000 light years away... they would study it by tracking the orbits of stars around it. Even seeing them would take the sensitivity of Keck s wide aperture; an instrument powerful enough to detect a single candle flame at the distance of the moon... Meanwhile, using a similar technique, astronomers had focused the new Hubble Space Telescope on a different galaxy... a giant elliptical cloud of nearly a billion stars, lying some 50 million light years away called M87.

On ne les a jamais directement vus, pourtant nous savons quils sont là, rôdant au milieu de denses amas détoiles, ou errant dans les nébuleuses de la galaxie, où ils chassent les étoiles, ou avalent des planètes entières. Les plus gros trous noirs de l univers.

Watch this and other space videos at http://SpaceRip.com NASA JPL "Reality Check" on all those wacky ideas surrounding the upcoming shift in the ancient Mayan calendar. Our favorite is the planet "Nibiru" that s said to be hurtling into the solar system on its way to Earth.

Discovery of a huge unseen ring around Saturn, from Spitzer Space Telescope s Hidden Universe series.

Beautiful space weather on Saturn, from the Cassini spacecraft. From NASA/JPL.

Ultra high-resolution photos of this historic second manned mission to the moon, including breathtaking photos of the lunar surface. Credit NASA.

National Geographic Adventure Magazine presents the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, including Dean Potter. Watch as he leaps off the Eiger for the world s longest BASE jump. Vote for your favorite adventurer here: http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/best-of-adventure/readers-choice-award ➡ Subscribe: http://bit.ly/NatGeoSubscribe #NationalGeographic #BaseJumping #RockClimbing About National Geographic: National Geographic is the world s premium destination for science, exploration, and adventure. Through their world-class scientists, photographers, journalists, and filmmakers, Nat Geo gets you closer to the stories that matter and past the edge of what s possible. Get More National Geographic: Official Site: http://bit.ly/NatGeoOfficialSite Facebook: http://bit.ly/FBNatGeo Twitter: http://bit.ly/NatGeoTwitter Instagram: http://bit.ly/NatGeoInsta Ultimate Base Jump | National Geographic https://youtu.be/sf49cw0134U National Geographic https://www.youtube.com/natgeo

Watch the EXPANDED and UPDATED version on... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOa2L8_IAnQ It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time. How long it can survive depends on whether Stephen Hawking s theory checks out. Special thanks to Ivan Bridgewater for use of footage. Time is flying by on this busy, crowded planet... as life changes and evolves from second to second. And yet the arc of human lifespan is getting longer: 65 years is the global average ... way up from just 20 in the Stone Age. Modern science, however, provides a humbling perspective. Our lives... indeed the life span of the human species... is just a blip compared to the age of the universe, at 13.7 billion years and counting. It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time... And that even it may be just a blip within the grand sweep of deep time. Scholars debate whether time is a property of the universe... or a human invention. What s certain is that we use the ticking of all kinds of clocks... from the decay of radioactive elements to the oscillation of light beams... to chart and measure a changing universe... to understand how it works and what drives it. Our own major reference for the passage of time is the 24-hour day... the time it takes the Earth to rotate once. Well, it s actually 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds... approximately... if you re judging by the stars, not the sun. Earth acquired its spin during its birth, from the bombardment of rocks and dust that formed it. But it s gradually losing that rotation to drag from the moon s gravity. That s why, in the time of the dinosaurs, a year was 370 days... and why we have to add a leap second to our clocks about every 18 months. In a few hundred million years, we ll gain a whole hour. The day-night cycle is so reliable that it has come to regulate our internal chemistry. The fading rays of the sun, picked up by the retinas in our eyes, set our so-called "circadian rhythms" in motion. That s when our brains begin to secrete melatonin, a hormone that tells our bodies to get ready for sleep. Long ago, this may have been an adaptation to keep us quiet and clear of night-time predators. Finally, in the light of morning, the flow of melatonin stops. Our blood pressure spikes... body temperature and heart rate rise as we move out into the world. Over the days ... and years... we march to the beat of our biology. But with our minds, we have learned to follow time s trail out to longer and longer intervals. Philosophers have wondered... does time move like an arrow... with all the phenomena in nature pushing toward an inevitable end? Or perhaps, it moves in cycles that endlessly repeat... and even perhaps restore what is there? We know from precise measurements that the Earth goes around the sun once every 365.256366 days. As the Earth orbits, with each hemisphere tilting toward and away from its parent star, the seasons bring on cycles of life... birth and reproduction... decay and death. Only about one billionth of the Sun s energy actually hits the Earth. And much of that gets absorbed by dust and water vapor in the upper atmosphere. What does make it down to the surface sets many planetary processes in motion. You can see it in the annual melting and refreezing of ice at the poles... the ebb and flow of heat in the tropical oceans... The seasonal cycles of chlorophyll production in plants on land and at sea... and in the biosphere at large. These cycles are embedded in still longer Earth cycles. Ocean currents, for example, are thought to make complete cycles ranging from four to around sixteen centuries. Moving out in time, as the Earth rotates on its axis, it completes a series of interlocking wobbles called Milankovic cycles every 23 to 41,000 years. They have been blamed for the onset of ice ages about every one hundred thousand years. Then there s the carbon cycle. It begins with rainfall over the oceans and coastal waves that pull carbon dioxide into the sea.

Watch VERSION 2 of this video on.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaX4iGw-b_Y The universe has long captivated us with its immense scales of distance and time. How far does it stretch? Where does it end... and what lies beyond its star fields... and streams of galaxies extending as far as telescopes can see? These questions are beginning to yield to a series of extraordinary new lines of investigation... and technologies that are letting us to peer into the most distant realms of the cosmos... But also at the behavior of matter and energy on the smallest of scales. Remarkably, our growing understanding of this kingdom of the ultra-tiny, inside the nuclei of atoms, permits us to glimpse the largest vistas of space and time. In ancient times, most observers saw the stars as a sphere surrounding the earth, often the home of deities. The Greeks were the first to see celestial events as phenomena, subject to human investigation... rather than the fickle whims of the Gods. One sky-watcher, for example, suggested that meteors are made of materials found on Earth... and might have even come from the Earth. Those early astronomers built the foundations of modern science. But they would be shocked to see the discoveries made by their counterparts today. The stars and planets that once harbored the gods are now seen as infinitesimal parts of a vast scaffolding of matter and energy extending far out into space. Just how far... began to emerge in the 1920s. Working at the huge new 100-inch Hooker Telescope on California s Mt. Wilson, astronomer Edwin Hubble, along with his assistant named Milt Humason, analyzed the light of fuzzy patches of sky... known then as nebulae. They showed that these were actually distant galaxies far beyond our own. Hubble and Humason discovered that most of them are moving away from us. The farther out they looked, the faster they were receding. This fact, now known as Hubble s law, suggests that there must have been a time when the matter in all these galaxies was together in one place. That time... when our universe sprung forth... has come to be called the Big Bang. How large the cosmos has gotten since then depends on how long its been growing... and its expansion rate. Recent precision measurements gathered by the Hubble space telescope and other instruments have brought a consensus... That the universe dates back 13.7 billion years. Its radius, then, is the distance a beam of light would have traveled in that time ... 13.7 billion light years. That works out to about 1.3 quadrillion kilometers. In fact, it s even bigger.... Much bigger. How it got so large, so fast, was until recently a deep mystery. That the universe could expand had been predicted back in 1917 by Albert Einstein, except that Einstein himself didn t believe it... until he saw Hubble and Humason s evidence. Einstein s general theory of relativity suggested that galaxies could be moving apart because space itself is expanding. So when a photon gets blasted out from a distant star, it moves through a cosmic landscape that is getting larger and larger, increasing the distance it must travel to reach us. In 1995, the orbiting telescope named for Edwin Hubble began to take the measure of the universe... by looking for the most distant galaxies it could see. Taking the expansion of the universe into account, the space telescope found galaxies that are now almost 46 billion light years away from us in each direction... and almost 92 billion light years from each other. And that would be the whole universe... according to a straightforward model of the big bang. But remarkably, that might be a mere speck within the universe as a whole, according to a dramatic new theory that describes the origins of the cosmos. It s based on the discovery that energy is constantly welling up from the vacuum of space in the form of particles of opposite charge... matter and anti-matter.

Watch the REVIVED and EXPANDED version of this video on: http://youtu.be/xp-8HysWkxw Meet the new record-holder for largest black hole in the universe.. so far. How big can they get? What s the largest so far detected? Where does an 18 billion solar mass black hole hide? We ve never seen them directly... yet we know they are there... Lurking within dense star clusters... Or wandering the dust lanes of the galaxy.... Where they prey on stars... Or swallow planets whole. Our Milky Way may harbor millions of these black holes... the ultra dense remnants of dead stars. But now, in the universe far beyond our galaxy, there s evidence of something even more ominous... A breed of black holes that have reached incomprehensible size and destructive power. It has taken a new era in astronomy to find them... High-tech instruments in space tuned to sense high-energy forms of light -- x-rays and gamma rays -- that are invisible to our eyes. New precision telescopes equipped with technologies that allow them to cancel out the blurring effects of the atmosphere... and see to the far reaches of the universe. Peering into distant galaxies, astronomers are now finding evidence that space and time can be shattered by eruptions so vast they boggle the mind. We are just beginning to understand the impact these outbursts have had on the universe around us. That understanding recently took a leap forward. A team operating at the Subaru Observatory atop Hawaii s Mauna Kea volcano looked out to one of the deepest reaches of the universe... And captured a beam of light that had taken nearly 13 billion years to reach us. It was a messenger from a time not long after the universe was born. They focused on an object known as a quasar... short for "quasi-stellar radio source." It offered a stunning surprise... A tiny region in its center is so bright that astronomers believe it s light is coming from a single object at least a billion times the mass of our sun... Inside this brilliant beacon, space suddenly turns dark... as it s literally swallowed by a giant black hole. As strange as they may seem, even huge black holes like these are thought to be products of the familiar universe of stars and gravity. They get their start in rare types of large stars... at least ten times the mass of our sun. These giants burn hot and fast... and die young. The star is a cosmic pressure-cooker. In its core, the crush of gravity produces such intense heat that atoms are stripped and rearranged. Lighter elements like hydrogen and helium fuse together to form heavier ones like calcium, oxygen, silicon, and finally iron. When enough iron accumulates in the core of the star, it begins to collapse under its own weight. That can send a shock wave racing outward... Literally blowing the star apart:... a supernova. At the moment the star dies, if enough matter falls into its core, it collapses to a point, forming a black hole. Intense gravitational forces surround that point with a dark sphere... the event horizon... beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. That s how an average-size black hole forms. What about a monster the size of the Subaru quasar? Recent discoveries about the rapid rise of these giant black holes have led theorists to rethink their view of cosmic history.