Hidden Universe

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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.

I'm trying to help decipher

these distant records

so that we may one day

better understand

the story of our universe.

Since these

objects are so far away,

a new challenge faces

optical astronomers.

Like the heat distortion

you see on a road,

the atmosphere distorts and blurs

light coming in from the universe.

It's what makes the stars

appear to twinkle at night.

To counter this problem,

the VLT has a trick

up its sleeve.

It fires a laser beam 60 miles

up in to the night sky

to create a fixed point.

Almost like a fake star

for the telescope to focus on.

On the ground,

the VLT compensates

by warping the telescope's mirror

hundreds of times per second,

allowing us to capture

the sharpest of images.

If you want

to see what I'm looking for,

don't look at the main

part of these pictures.

Look further, deeper,

into the details of the image.

My work takes me beyond all

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