Hidden Universe Page #2

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the Milky Way

appears to pass over us,

while the telescopes

twist and turn,

tracking distant

objects in the sky.

Nowhere else in the world can you

see the stars shine as brightly.

On the clearest of nights,

you can see your own shadow,

cast from the light of

millions of distant stars.

And as we explore the heavens,

we have found

the birthplace of stars.

This monstrous cloud of gas

and dust is the Carina Nebula.

It's a star factory,

churning out

thousands of stars,

some of which are the

brightest in our Milky Way.

You could

call it a stellar nursery.

Because in

a nebula like this one,

stars are being formed.

And even though these stars

are relatively young,

they're not exactly small.

And there are a huge

range of star types.

In fact, our own sun would have been formed

in a cloud of gas and dust just like this.

Sometimes, these nebula are named

by the shapes that they seem to make.

Here's one with

a great nickname.

The Snow Angel Nebula.

The blue wings of the snow

angel are actually hot gas,

being illuminated by a huge star

forming in the middle of this hourglass.

The astronomers who named

the War and Peace Nebula

could see a dove

dancing in the gas.

I don't see it myself,

and I'm more interested

in the gigantic stars here.

They're shining hundreds

of thousands of times

brighter than our sun.

But not every

nebula is a stellar nursery.

A thousand years ago,

Arabian, Japanese

and Chinese astronomers

all recorded a strange,

lingering light in the sky,

as bright as the full moon.

They were witnesses

to the death of a star.

A supernova explosion that

scattered gas and dust particles

60 billion miles

into the cosmos,

forming this.

The Crab Nebula.

Sometimes, astronomers

look deep into the sky

and see the cosmos

looking right back at them.

This magnificent

eye in the sky

is just the remnants

of a burned-out star

that has shed its outer layers

back into the universe.

By studying

formations like this,

we now know that stars

come and go from the universe.

Just like life begins

and ends here on Earth.

Beyond our Milky Way,

you'll find stars,

gas and dust

clumped together in huge

structures called galaxies.

Galaxies come in

all shapes and sizes,

but what I love

most about them

is that the light that I'm seeing

was created way back in time.

Light from even

the closest large galaxy

takes two and a half million

years to reach us.

And the deeper I

look into space,

the older the light I see.

This means that galaxies

are like fossil records

of how the universe

used to look and act.

So in a way,

my work is a little bit

time travel

and a little bit

cosmic archeology.

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