Welcome to a special Sky at Night.
This marks our 60th anniversary.
The first episode of Sky at Night was broadcast live
on the 24th of April, 1957.
And we've come a long way since then.
The programme started before the dawn of the space age,
when the idea of sending probes to distant planets
was nothing more than a dream.
In fact, we knew so little that the idea of advanced life on Mars
seemed a distinct possibility.
So we've come here to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich,
home of British astronomy,
to look back and see how our understanding of the universe
has changed over the past six decades.
Welcome to The Sky at Night.
The 60th is a diamond anniversary.
And the Department of Earth Sciences at UCL have been kind enough
to lend us this.
It's called carbonado, and it's a black diamond.
Now if you have a closer look
it might seem a little disappointing
because it's not bright and shiny, like your everyday diamond,
but it has a much more interesting story.
One that is very relevant to today's programme.
More about that diamond later,
but first, back to the progress we've made in the last 60 years.
We'll be taking a range of subjects
and with the help of The Sky at Night archive,
finding out what we've learned during the time we've been on air.
We'll be going back to 1957,
to see how we observed the night sky back then.
Dallas Campbell will be retracing on a bicycle the journeys that have
taken us from the surface of the Earth to the furthest reaches
of the solar system.
And Jim Al-Khalili will be showing us how in just 60 years
we've created an entirely new history of the universe.
Using maths and physics,
we can really understand how the universe was made,
where it came from, how it works, and how it might possibly end.
But to start we have to go back to the beginning, to 1957.
April 1957 was a very different world.
Our culinary tastes were apparently so unsophisticated
that Panorama could broadcast an April Fool's report
into the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland.
Harold Macmillan had just become Prime Minister.
And a new series, with a new presenter - Patrick Moore - began.
Good evening. Tonight, I want to show you a rather unusual film.
'But at that time our ideas about the solar system
'were very different from what they are today.'
The first programme was about the comet Arend-Roland,
but we don't have a copy.
It was broadcast live and never recorded,
but I do have this book, which Patrick wrote about Mars in 1956.
And after dismissing the idea of Earth-like animal life,
he goes on to say this.
"When we turn to plant life the situation is brighter,
"and as we have seen it is almost certain
"that extensive vegetation does exist on Mars."
It seems ridiculous today,
but 60 years ago it was a widely held belief
that there were plants on the surface of the red planet.
And, really, there's no better example
of how fast our ideas have changed than Mars.
To guide us through 60 years of astonishing discoveries
about the Red Planet, Maggie has been talking to Monica Grady.
Monica, it seems amazing to me
that just 60 years ago people thought that Mars
was covered in vegetation. Why was that?
Well, it's because of pictures like this.
This was taken in about 1956
from one of the Earth's biggest telescopes,
and you can see this big, dark shadow here
right across the front of the planet,
and this is interpreted as being a sort of rainforest.
And at the time, this was the best that the telescope could do.
Yeah, it's pretty fuzzy, you can't see much here at all.
No, you can't.
The problem with looking from Earth
is that you're looking through the Earth's atmosphere,
which immediately starts blurring things,
so what you need to do is get above the Earth's atmosphere.
In 1964, Nasa launched the probe Mariner 4.
Eight months later it flew within 10,000km of Mars,
and pixel by pixel returned 22 images of the planet's surface.
It seems like a long way to go for 20 photographs.
Well, I mean these pictures from Mariner 4
completely changed part of our ideas of Mars.
What do they show us?
Well, for a start you've got this hazy bit here and this is...
Hey, Mars has got an atmosphere,
so that's something that we didn't know,
and you can see more structure here.
You can see that there are these sort of circular patches.
Now, at the time they were called craters,
but there are two sorts of craters.
There's the crater at the top of a volcano
and there's the crater made by impact from an asteroid,
and there's lots of discussion as to what sort of craters they were.
For those who long to find life on Mars,
the Mariner 4 pictures were a disappointment,
but they weren't definitive.
So just four years later Nasa tried again.
Good evening. We've just had some amazing photographs sent back by the
American probe to Mars, Mariner 6.
As Mariner 6 approached in 1969,
there was much excitement that Mars would finally give up its secrets.
Mariner 6 came down over this direction,
over these so-called deserts.
The question is of course, are these dark areas due to organic matter,
vegetation, if you like, or are they not?
But when the pictures came back,
they revealed a dry and barren surface.
Now, what about this all important question of life on Mars?
Primitive life, there may be, I don't even think so.
Intelligent life? Certainly not.
So, in other words, you rather think that Mars is a dead planet?
Absolutely, dead as a dodo.
Once it was realised there was no complex life on Mars,
attention turned to the planet's past.
And here, the story became much more interesting.
So, this is from one of the Viking orbiters,
and it's not a single picture.
It's lots and lots of pictures.
It's a mosaic that has been put together.
But it's glorious. It's absolutely fantastic.
Just looking at these pictures
started to really capture how close Mars was to Earth
in many of its features.
It's got these volcanoes, which are like the volcanoes on Hawaii.
It's got this rift valley, which is like East Africa,
and, of course, it's got its icecaps.
But you've also got the features that on Earth we would interpret
as being from rivers,
so you've got something that looks as if
it's going out into a huge delta.
You've got other channels, meandering channels,
and these were formed by flowing water.
They were formed by rivers.
So, with the orbiter, we suddenly get evidence
for past liquid water on Mars? You do.
So, you get a picture of a planet
which has had all the ingredients,
all the things that would allow life to get going.
So the idea is that, yes, Mars could have harboured life,
it might still harbour life,
but if it is, it's not big life.
We're looking at small life.
So, if we are still looking for life, how do we find out the detail?
Well, what you have to do is, you have to get down there,
so you have to actually land.
That takes us to these pictures?
This brings us right up to date
with the most recent spacecraft to land on Mars,
which is Curiosity,
which landed a few years ago and has been trundling across the surface
near Mount Sharp in the Gale Crater.
It has been taking the most amazing pictures.
These are so brilliant. I feel as if I could step inside.
We've come a long way in 60 years.
We started off with that fuzzy image 60 years ago. We're now on this,
where you can actually see the details of single pebbles.
What are we looking for here?
Well, we're still looking for life on the planet.
We still haven't found it.
So far, a lot of the missions have been following the water.
Now what we haven't done yet is dug below the surface.
Below the surface,
there's a chance that you might find something still living.
Very difficult to get into those places.
We need to get more intelligent rovers and eventually,
we need to get the most intelligent rover of all,
and that's a person.
Can it be me?
I just can't wait to see what the next 60 years bring.
It's going to be brilliant. Yes. Thank you so much for coming in.
My pleasure. Thanks a lot.
Hello, this is Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut,
first landing on the moon, now working on humans to Mars.
I do remember Patrick Moore with great respect, great reverence.
I want to wish The Sky at Night happy birthday,
60 years of all of that wonderful education
as to what is going on up there at night. Thanks so much.
It's been a joy having you with us.
The Sky at Night isn't the only astronomical institution
celebrating its 60th birthday this year.
This is the Lovell Telescope, at Jodrell Bank, in Cheshire.
It was first switched on in August 1957.
It's still one of the most sensitive radio telescopes in the world.
Over the years, we've filmed here on many occasions.
To mark our shared anniversary, we asked Tim O'Brien,
one of the astronomers at Jodrell Bank,
to reveal some of its secrets,
and to celebrate its most important contributions to astronomy.
This is the incredible 76-metre wide 3,200 tonne Lovell Telescope,
the brainchild of Bernard Lovell,
an astronomer who had an ambitious vision.
Back in the 1950s,
Lovell was a pioneer in the relatively untested science
of radio astronomy.
They used huge dishes as aerials,
gathering not light but radio waves from space
in the hope that this would reveal new information about the universe.
His revolutionary proposal was to build this telescope,
ten times larger than any that had gone before.
But in those early days,
few believed in radio astronomy as much as Lovell.
Even as construction began,
he knew he was taking a high-stakes gamble...
..as The Sky at Night discovered years later.
During the building of the telescope,
were there are any real crises, either with design or with cash?
Endless crises.
We started building the telescope in 1952, the foundations,
and very soon discovered that the cost,
whilst going to be far greater than the £30 million we got,
but I didn't tell anybody.
Then we had, I think, the most colossal stroke of luck,
that certainly I've ever had in my life.
The Russians launched the first of the Sputnik.
After a few days, we got a most magnificent radar echo
from the carrier rocket of the Sputnik.
I've still got it, showing it going over the Lake District.
200 miles above the Earth.
And it turned out, to my astonishment,
that this was the only instrument in the world
capable of detecting this rocket.
Suddenly, the telescope became world-famous
and the establishment finally realised its true value.
Now completely operational,
the telescope was pulled in two completely different
and often opposing directions - political and scientific.
The politicians wanted to use it to monitor our Cold War enemies,
tracking Russian missiles and space projects.
But away from the high-profile space tracking work,
the telescope was actually being used for real science,
and those early results were breathtaking.
This is a map of the whole of the sky,
but seen in radio waves rather than visible light.
It revealed that space was awash with radio.
It was a powerful scientific vindication of Lovell's vision.
And all the more amazing,
given that some key components of the telescope
were actually recycled.
We're here at the top of the towers,
right on the axis of the tipping of the ball,
and that tipping of the giant ball is done on these gear racks.
These are actually from the 15-inch guns of two World War I battleships.
Once all the engineering challenges had been overcome,
the new discoveries started to roll in.
When these first radio astronomers started to scan the skies,
they spotted intense points of radio light they called the radio stars.
We used the Lovell Telescope and other radio antennas
spread across the country to zoom in on these points of light.
We found they weren't stars at all,
they were actually distant galaxies
and they were powered by supermassive black holes.
These became known as Quasi Stellar Objects.
The Quasars.
Hardly noticeable to optical telescopes,
these objects completely changed the way we thought about the universe.
Turns out that this new radio sky
is not full of stars held by nuclear fusion,
like we see with our eyes,
it's actually full of supermassive black holes powered by gravity.
Gathering this kind of data from space is a huge technical challenge.
So the Lovell is constantly being updated and improved,
but that leaves it with its own share of quirky idiosyncrasies.
This is the control room.
At its heart is the control desk dating from 1957,
although it is now packed with new electronics.
Back in the day, the control system
was an ingenious electromechanical analogue computer.
There were ten boxes arrayed around the desk here,
packed with dials and whirring gears,
and they were used to drive the telescope
to exactly the position that the astronomers wanted.
Over its 60 years, the dish itself has undergone some major overhauls.
In the 1970s, a new surface was built, several metres above the old.
And this was then replaced again in 2002.
We've also taken the opportunity to upgrade the electronics,
networking it to telescopes right across Britain and around the world.
It gives the Lovell a new and constantly evolving role.
One of the things we're very interested in at the moment
is a very weird phenomenon called fast radio bursts.
These are very brief, fraction of a second,
strong flashes of radio waves
that appear to come randomly from across the sky.
There's about 20 of them known at the moment,
but we estimate that there's probably as many as 10,000 of them
every single day and we've no idea what they are.
Theories range from neutron stars falling into black holes,
to perhaps rather bizarrely, beams of radio energy
that are being used to accelerate alien spacecraft.
Whatever their true origin,
the fast radio bursts and other similar mysteries will, I'm sure,
mean that the next 60 years of radio astronomy
will be just as exciting as the last.
Happy 60th birthday!
What a marvellous occasion.
I think one of my favourite ones was Michael Bentine discussing
if there were civilisations existing on other planets outside the Earth.
They both agreed there wasn't any then behind them appeared,
I think it was a spaceship from another world.
I thought that was inspirational.
What do you think of the planet Earth?
To be frank, old man, not very much.
Technology has transformed every aspect of life since 1957.
Take television for instance.
This is the kind of camera that would have been used
when The Sky at Night was first broadcast.
Its four prime lenses on the front here allowed you to select
between different shot sizes so there's no need for a zoom.
Compare this magnificent machine to what we use today.
This camera is not only smaller but it's much more sensitive
and so we can use it to shoot the night sky.
If technology has changed television,
that's doubly true for space exploration.
To explain how advances in technology have allowed us
to explore the planet around us,
we asked Dallas Campbell to take us on a cycling tour
of the solar system.
The solar system is a pretty big place.
This scale model just outside York, that's the sun behind me,
gives us an idea of some of the challenges faced
in crossing the huge distances in space
and how actually reaching the planets
has stretched our science and our engineering to the limit.
So I'm setting off to cycle between the planets.
Retracing the steps of my six favourite spacecraft.
The pioneering missions that have taken us
from the surface of the Earth to Pluto and beyond.
When The Sky at Night first transmitted,
the space age hadn't even begun.
The first object that made it into orbit
was the Soviet satellite Sputnik, and that wasn't launched
until six months after that first broadcast.
Sputnik was as simple as a spacecraft can be.
Really nothing more than a radio transmitter
that had been strapped to the top of a rocket.
MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN
But it makes my list
because it showed that space travel was possible.
Within a matter of months,
the sights of the world's rocket scientists
were set on the other worlds of the solar system.
The first target was obviously the nearest - our own moon -
and actually from here, it looks really, really close to the Earth,
but this whole model, and that includes the size of the planets
and the distance between them,
is built at the scale of around about 575 million to one,
so in the real world, that distance is around about 250,000 miles.
In the 1950s, getting from A to B was a huge technological challenge.
But within just a couple of years,
The Sky at Night was able to report on Soviet success.
In September 1959,
the Russians landed their Lunik 2 on the moon's surface,
and then in October 1959, came that great triumph with Lunik 3,
which actually went round the moon
and photographed that part of the moon's surface
which we can never see from the Earth
because it's always turned away from us.
Well, I for one certainly won't forget those pictures.
But the real triumph came ten years later
with the second mission on our list, Apollo 11.
That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
This was one of the defining achievements of the 20th century,
but in retrospect, what is startling
is just how simple the technology was.
The guidance computer on the lunar lander
had less processing power than a modern toaster.
When Neil Armstrong returned to Earth,
he came to The Sky at Night studio.
When you were actually walking about on the moon's surface
and kicking about a certain amount of dust,
did you notice any local colour?
The colour is a puzzling phenomenon on the moon.
Aside from the characteristics that I've already mentioned,
you generally have the impression of being on a desert-like surface
with rather light coloured hues,
yet when you look at the material at close range, as if in your hand,
you find it's a charcoal grey, in fact.
And we were never able to find any things
that were very different from that colour.
Having conquered the moon, it was time to start exploring the planets.
Mars was the main target.
A mere 34 million miles from the Earth at its closest approach,
it's still a long way to go.
Reaching it is hard enough,
but putting landers on the surface
is a feat that has proved consistently difficult.
All in all, we've tried to land 17 spacecraft on Mars,
half of which have failed,
which is understandable when you consider
you're actually trying to send packages
of extremely delicate electronic equipment
across tens of millions of miles of hostile empty space
and then land very carefully on the surface.
One of the main difficulties of landing on Mars
is that the atmosphere is so thin that parachutes are of limited use,
so more ingenious ways of landing have to be devised.
Viking, the first craft to successfully land on Mars,
used a system of retrorockets.
The Opportunity and Spirit rovers touched down in a bouncing air bag.
But the next generation of rovers was too heavy for air bags,
so in 2012 Nasa did this.
Just for sheer ambition and panache,
the third of my favourite spacecraft is the Curiosity Sky Crane,
a triumph of engineering and technological sophistication
designed to lower the Curiosity rover onto the Martian surface.
If getting to Mars is hard,
it's still a lot easier than getting to the outer planets,
the gas and the ice giants.
So the next planet out in the solar system, Jupiter,
is just under a kilometre that way - or, in the real world,
just over half a billion kilometres.
And actually getting to it presents a whole new set of challenges.
And that brings us to the next mission,
and, really, it's my favourite of them all.
Though it's actually two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2,
which were both launched in the summer of 1977.
These plutonium powered emissaries
were designed to keep functioning for decades in the depths of space.
They would take advantage of a rare alignment of the planets
that would see them visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus
and eventually Neptune over the course of 12 years.
In early 1978, Voyager 1 approached Jupiter.
The world watched in awe as it returned stunning views
of the planet's clouds, storm systems and moons.
It was the first sign of how these two spacecraft
would go on to transform our concept of the outer solar system.
Moving on from Jupiter, the Voyagers visited Saturn in 1980 and '81,
giving us a tantalising glimpse of the magnificent ring systems.
But to really appreciate the Saturn system,
we needed a spacecraft and a camera that could study the rings
in much greater detail.
For that, we had to wait for another 25 years
and the fifth spacecraft on our list, Cassini,
which entered orbit around Saturn in 2004.
The remarkable thing about Cassini is that it was launched 20 years ago
with the technology that was around at the time.
So its cameras, for example, a resolution of about one megapixel,
a fraction of what's on your smartphone,
and yet that technology is incredibly reliable.
It's still sending back the most extraordinary images of Saturn,
its rings and its moons.
The Cassini mission is scheduled to end in September this year.
After a series of closer and closer flybys to the rings,
it is then going to be crashed into the planet.
A glorious, a poignant end
to one of the most transformative missions ever.
After Saturn, missions get pretty thin on the ground, as do planets.
So our next planet is Uranus,
which is twice the distance from the sun as Saturn is.
Now, for me cycling along here it is about 2.5km,
in the real world up there it is about 1.5 billion kilometres.
There's only ever been one spacecraft that's visited it.
In 1986, Voyager 2 flew within 80,000 miles of Uranus.
Well, just about two minutes ago...
..Voyager 2 passed through its closest approach to Uranus.
And three years later it sailed past Neptune.
After Neptune, Voyager 2 just kept on going,
and now both of the Voyager spacecraft are exploring
the very edges of the outer solar system.
And since those first two Voyager missions,
only one other spacecraft has ventured
into the outer solar system.
The sixth and final spacecraft on our list is New Horizons,
the most technologically sophisticated mission
to visit the outer solar system.
Half the size of Voyager,
it made it all the way to Pluto in just nine years.
In July 2015,
Chris and Maggie were in mission control
as New Horizons aimed to pass between Pluto
and the orbit of its moon, Charon.
OK, copy that.
We're in lock with telemetry with...
Yes!
We've got data!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I told you it would be fine!
I wasn't worried!
The jubilation was justified.
Pluto had been thought to be a frozen and dead world,
but the data that New Horizons returned showed that,
against all expectations,
this tiny world at the edge of the solar system
was alive with active geology.
Blimey!
Here we are. Finally, we make it to Pluto.
Look how tiny Pluto is. And that's one of its moons, Charon.
Now, on my scale, Pluto to the Earth, about 10km.
And in reality it would be round about 6 billion kilometres.
It's amazing to think in the last 60 years
we've developed this technology that's allowed us to explore
pretty much the whole of the solar system,
from the moment that Sputnik first left the Earth
all the way to the New Horizons' mission to Pluto and beyond.
And the extraordinary thing is that every step of the way
along that history timeline,
we have been surprised, we have learned something new.
Nothing is as we thought it would be.
And who knows what our technology will be like
in the next 60 years and what we might find out?
Of course, we've sent many more than six missions into the solar system.
This graphic represents every single probe
that we've sent to the planets,
and between them they have revolutionised our understanding
of the solar system.
60 years ago, we thought there were nine planets orbited by 30 moons.
Now we have just eight planets but over 180 moons.
And it's the moons that have been the greatest surprise,
particularly the icy moons of the outer planets.
Well, I'm joined by Michele Dougherty,
an explorer of the outer solar system -
particularly with Cassini, the mission to Saturn.
I think the thing that strikes me is wherever we've been,
we've been surprised, and maybe nowhere more so than Saturn.
Can you tell us about the exploration of Saturn?
We were launched in 1997, we took a long time to get there,
got there in July 2004,
and we've essentially spent the last 13 years orbiting around Saturn.
The biggest surprise was linked to one of its small moons, Enceladus.
What are we looking at here?
It's a very small world, its diameter is 500km.
We would have long thought if from when it first formed
there were to be some kind of heat in the interior,
but over time that dies away, so we thought it was dead.
But what we are looking at here is a very young surface.
You can see there are some craters on the surface,
but there aren't as many as you would expect.
But I think the most exciting of all are these blue cracks
at the South Pole.
The imaging team on Cassini calls them tiger stripes,
and it was from these cracks
that we found there was this plume of water vapour
coming off from the South Pole.
In fact, we've got an image of the plume.
You can see it better. This is the night side of Enceladus,
what we were just looking at is this surface,
and then there's this jet of material.
Absolutely. If you look really closely,
you can see there are individual plumes
coming out of the different... Separate fountains.
It's not just water vapour.
There's organic material, there is dust.
There's an instrument on board, the Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer,
that can actually taste what's in the plume,
and it found that there was ammonia.
And we found that out, actually, on one of the really close flybys.
It was 25km above the surface.
So you flew straight through the plume?
We flew straight through the plume.
We won't do that again,
because the density of the plume is so strong
that the spacecraft almost began to actually tumble, and so they said,
"No, we aren't going to do that again."
So this is a small moon in the cold outer solar system
with liquid water?
Yes. It's weird, isn't it?
It's very strange. So why is there so much water there?
How is it liquid?
What we think is happening is tidal forces,
as Enceladus is orbiting around Saturn,
on some parts of the orbit, it's slightly closer to Saturn
than on others, and so the gravitational force is stronger,
and so that's where the tidal forces are coming from.
So it's squeezed and then stretched by its orbit?
Absolutely.
I think from my perspective, the most exciting part
is the fact that, you know, people are very interested
about potential habitability.
You know, you need four things for life to be able to form.
You need liquid water...
Got that. You need organic material...
You've seen that too. You need a heat source...
Something's got to be heating this up.
And it needs to be stable over a period of time.
That's what we're not sure about with Enceladus.
So whether we might have got lucky, maybe we saw something that...
This is a recent phenomenon? Absolutely. And it's not just here,
we've seen this sort of thing at Jupiter as well?
There's the Galileo probe to Jupiter.
Tell us about its explorations of the moons?
What the Galileo spacecraft did
is it orbited around Jupiter for four years.
What they found is on some of the close flybys of the moons,
in particular Europa...
So this is Europa, and it looks kind of similar. It does.
You've got cracks and ice and, I guess, no craters again.
I think the difference with Europa
is that they look as if they're icebergs.
We think that there are some very thin surface regions,
because if you have a close-up view of Europa, and I think...
Yes, let's pull one up.
To me, it looks like it's almost as if you're sitting in an aeroplane,
flying over Greenland and you look out of the window
and you see the ice shelf,
and it's almost as if you can see an iceberg breaking off
and moving on a slushy surface.
So we think there might be regions on the Europa surface
where it's really... The ice crust is very thin.
And that's one of the reasons we want to go back,
and so the Juice mission is going to go to Jupiter,
and there's a Nasa mission called Europa Clipper,
which is going to go to Europa.
And thinking back over the 60 years that Sky at Night's been around,
how big a change has there been?
It's a huge change.
No-one thought there would be liquid water oceans
in the outer solar system. It's too cold.
And so that's been a sea change
as far as the search for potential habitability.
We now know you can get most of the conditions that you need
in our outer solar system,
and potentially outside of our solar system.
There are plenty of other places to look in our solar system as well.
Absolutely, that's right.
Hello, and congratulations to the BBC's Sky at Night
on your 60th birthday.
Thank you so much for bringing the wonders of the universe
into our living rooms
and for inspiring me and so many others to look up to the stars.
Amateur observing has always been an integral part of the show,
but even here things have changed.
So we set Pete Lawrence and a group of amateur observers a challenge -
to see if they could capture the night sky
using the technology of the 1950s.
Although the technology used to view the night sky
may have changed over the last 60 years,
amateur astronomers have always had to contend
with a very British problem.
..general direction of the moon, frankly,
I can't see a single star at the moment.
It's totally obscured.
We were hoping to see Vega, the star straight above our heads,
but even that's gone now.
No, we've got to abandon it for a moment or two.
We are blacked out.
These days, we have computer-controlled telescopes
and high sensitivity cameras to capture images of the sky.
But have we lost some of the magic of stargazing as a result?
Tonight I've gathered a group of astronomers
under the impressive Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank,
and we're going to see what amateur astronomy was like, 1950s style.
One of the key things I've noticed
is that there's quite a big difference in type of kit we use.
So, Richard, I've been admiring this scope from across the field,
it's beautiful. How old is it?
This is nearly 50 years old. It's a 1971.
With an open frame like this you can see everything inside, can't you?
You can see the primary mirror at the bottom,
which, actually, looks very clean.
Light from the object in the sky
bounces off the primary mirror at the bottom,
focusing it via the secondary mirror into the eyepiece.
This kind of telescope works just as well with an open frame.
And what I've really noticed about it is how heavily engineered it is
as well, this mount looks...
It's almost overkill, very heavy and very solid,
and it gives it perfect balance.
It does move beautifully.
That move's so smooth. Isn't that gorgeous?
Thank you very much for showing me this.
I wish it was clear, because I'd love to look through it.
Wait a minute, there's some kind of a break over there.
Can you see it? Look, over there.
Something... I can't see anything in it, though.
No.
In the '50s, even when you could see something,
photographing it was complex...
and expensive.
So a lot of amateur astronomers turned to sketching.
Luckily the night before had been beautifully clear
and some of our amateurs were out looking at the moon.
So, Paul, you had a beautifully clear night
and you did some sketching?
I did. I can recognise that straight away.
You've three very distinctive craters, that's Theophilus,
Cyrillus and Catharina.
Yes. What I love about your sketches
is the way you've done them on the black paper.
That's come out so well.
It's much easier to see as well at night with a little light.
It took quite a long time to do that, at least an hour.
If I compare it with a photo I took last night, you can definitely see.
You've got Theophilus up here
with its central mountain peak very clearly,
and you've got Cyrillus underneath
with the two peaks in the centre, there.
You've rendered that really well.
Thank you very much.
At their very best,
amateur sketches are every bit as useful as photos.
These ones from the '30s and '40s
show a ring plane crossing of Saturn
and the surface of Mars in incredible detail.
Just a few minutes to try and get...
The moon is just being awkward.
The moon is just being awkward at the moment, I'm afraid.
Donna, you have performed something of a miracle this evening,
and you actually managed to get a sketch of the moon.
Yes. It was very fleeting, but it was there.
I can recognise that immediately as the Mare Crisium.
It was very hazy, but I was using binoculars.
I found myself actually observing as opposed to just looking.
Do you know, that is really the essence of what you've done here,
and that's... I think that's something which,
to a certain degree, we've lost in amateur astronomy.
Because looking through the eyepiece to sketch something,
you really do have to look at it.
It did make me concentrate, I have to say.
I did actually concentrate.
It's a wonderful feeling, isn't it? Oh, yes.
Although tonight the sky might have been typically disappointing,
I've been powerfully reminded of the romance of sketching
and how it makes the act of observing
a more intense and involving experience.
So if you've got pen and paper at home, why not give it a go yourself?
Now, to find out what's happening in the April and May night sky,
why not pop along to our website and look at our latest star guide?
Also on the website, you can find our viewers' gallery,
showcasing some of the finest images of the night sky
captured by Sky at Night viewers using today's technology.
Happy birthday, Sky at Night!
I watched you when I was a kid in England,
all the nice stuff got me into space,
and then I got involved in Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and now Juno!
Over the past 60 years there's been a transformation
in our understanding of the history of the universe and how it works.
What we call cosmology.
We asked Jim Al-Khalili to explain more.
For thousands of years astronomy was a descriptive science.
Astronomers made ever more detailed maps of the night sky,
but they seldom addressed fundamental questions.
What was a star, a galaxy, a planet?
How did the universe work?
But then, unexpectedly, at the beginning of the last century,
this all changed.
In the early 20th century,
the scientific establishment was rocked by the emergence
of Einstein's theories of relativity
and the bizarre theories of quantum mechanics.
And they began to realise that with this new physics,
not only could they explain phenomena here on Earth,
but that these theories might apply on an epic scale
across the universe as a whole.
And one of the first projects was to try to use this new science
to explain how the universe actually began.
By the 1940s, two schools of thought had developed,
the Big Bang and the Steady State.
The Big Bang theory said that the entire universe
was formed at a single moment.
A cataclysmic explosion from an infinitesimally small point,
marking the birth of space and time, and it's been expanding ever since.
Whereas the Steady State theory said that while the universe
has been constantly expanding,
new matter is being created all the time, everywhere,
always the same, nothing changing, no beginning or end.
In 1957, when The Sky at Night was first broadcast,
this argument over which theory was right was still raging.
Patrick Moore returned many times to this theme over the next few years.
And the one inescapable fact, at least I think it is,
is that you and me and your television set
and the kitchen sink and Aunt Emily, they actually exist.
So the matter making up ourselves must have come from somewhere.
There are some astronomers who believe
in what's known as the Steady State theory,
that the universe has always existed and will exist forever.
But the problem was the Steady State and the Big Bang theories
remained pure conjecture,
because there was no measurable evidence
that would tell which was right and which was wrong.
Then in 1964, an accidental discovery changed all that.
Two young astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson,
had just inherited a strange looking radio telescope, the horn antenna.
But this unlikely telescope would surprise everyone
and reveal how the universe actually started.
The horn antenna was built to look for very specific radio signatures -
microwaves.
Penzias and Wilson tweaked it to make it super sensitive
so they could study the Milky Way.
But then wherever they looked in the sky,
they could hear a very annoying hiss
which they simply couldn't get rid of.
HISSING
Eventually, they realised that this hiss
coming from everywhere in the universe could only be one thing.
It was actually the faint remnant of the Big Bang itself.
The discovery of this hiss, the cosmic microwave background,
by Penzias and Wilson in 1964,
proved, conclusively, that the Big Bang theory was correct.
And it told us something else too,
that astronomy is much more than just a descriptive science.
What's more, using maths and physics,
we can really understand how the universe was made -
where it came from, how it works and how it might possibly end.
The confirmation of the Big Bang by the cosmic microwave background
gave astrophysics a massive confidence boost
and it led to a burst of new and astonishing ideas and discoveries.
One of the insights of this new science
was the idea that gravity plays a key role
in the story of the universe.
As well as describing the orbits of planets around the sun
and the motion of stars within galaxies,
scientists also began to understand that it works within stars,
crushing them together to create the conditions for nuclear reactions
that make stars shine so fiercely.
But their theories also predicted that, on a cosmic scale,
gravity would produce unexpected and bizarre outcomes.
For instance, as stars ended their lives,
the theoreticians suggested they
would continue to collapse under gravity,
crushing their cores until they were just a few kilometres across at
unbelievable densities.
It seemed the stuff of science fiction.
Then in November 1967, and using a rather underwhelming radio antenna,
more like a clothesline than something like this,
a young research scientist by the name of Jocelyn Bell
saw something strange.
In her data was a pulsing radio signal
incredibly fast and incredibly regular.
At first it was genuinely thought that this might be a signal from an
alien world. In fact it was dubbed LGM for little green men.
But it was soon realised that these so-called pulsars were in fact
superdense stars or neutron stars
that physicists had already predicted.
There was another incredible prediction too,
perhaps gravity could crush stars so powerfully
that even light couldn't escape.
These were called black holes.
Over the next few years,
pulsars and black holes shifted from pure speculation
to astronomical orthodoxy.
And it seemed as though the universe was finally beginning to
make some sense.
But then in the mid-1970s,
a new series of observations threatened to turn
everything we thought we knew upside down.
In the USA, scientists led by astrophysicist Vera Rubin,
were studying huge spiral galaxies deep in space.
Rubin had initially thought that
just like the outer planets of the solar system,
the outer stars of the galaxy should be orbiting around
more slowly than the inner stars, but they weren't.
It was as though they weren't obeying the laws of gravity.
Her crazy explanation was that the spiral arms of the galaxy contained
a new kind of material called dark matter.
This invisible material provided the extra gravity needed
to control the motion of the stars.
We just couldn't see it.
Patrick Moore himself sometimes found dark matter hard to stomach.
Well, we can see the effect of dark matter where they have a
gravitational effect and these seem to be definite.
But what is dark matter?
Is it something we can't understand?
More a fudge, isn't it?
Well, you can call it a fudge but it turns out that it's incredibly
consistent with all our observations. Really?
And there was to be more, too.
In the 1990s, as scientists peered deeper and deeper into space,
they noticed another inconsistency.
Sure the universe was expanding but it seemed to be expanding quicker
and quicker. To explain this, theorists came up with the idea of
dark energy,
a mysterious something that pervaded the whole universe and that was
pushing it apart ever more rapidly.
As yet, there is no material evidence
of dark matter or dark energy but if they do exist,
scientists predict that they make up about 95% of the known universe,
meaning almost everything out there in space is a mystery.
As The Sky at Night celebrates its 60th,
it seems as though the universe is more fascinating and more mysterious
than ever before and everything we
thought we knew is still up for grabs.
And one thing is for sure -
the next 60 years is likely to be just as interesting.
Hello, Sky at Night,
well done on the signals
from your very first programme
now having travelled
60 light years into the universe.
Congratulations and let's hope you
haven't started an interplanetary war.
All that cosmology, the Big Bang,
the physics of black holes and pulsars.
It all seems rather distant,
but sometimes you can find a little bit of a distant universe right here
on earth which brings us back to the black diamonds, the carbonados.
To find out more about them, we've been joined by diamond expert,
Adrian Jones.
Adrian, let me give this back before I lose it.
Can you tell me, how does a carbonado differ
from a standard diamond?
They look different. They do.
Especially when you look down a microscope.
Have a quick look and see what you can see.
They look quite grey, there's some shiny bits but one of the strange
things is if they've got lots of holes all over them,
which is a bit unusual, isn't it? It looks porous.
They are, exactly. They look a little bit like pumice.
And the little holes inside them are baffling
because diamonds are formed at very high
pressure and high temperature and normally when you make a very high
pressure, you squeeze things.
It's very hard to imagine how the
holes are formed or remain in the diamond.
Yes. So how do we think they were formed?
One explanation would be that they have been formed at extremely high
temperatures, perhaps high enough to melt the diamond,
so there's a possibility of liquid diamond and there's also the
possibility of vapour diamond making some little holes.
You said there liquid diamond. I didn't know that was possible.
It's certainly extraordinary and not possible on the Earth today.
Yes. This is one of the main lines of evidence these could be
extraterrestrial. So, if they weren't formed on Earth,
where did they originate from?
So, you need something pretty extraordinary,
something rich in carbon because diamonds are made from carbon.
Pressures, perhaps, as great as twice the pressure at the centre of
the earth, temperatures greater potentially than
the surface of the sun. Oh, wow!
One of the few places in the universe where you'd find those
conditions is in heart of white dwarfs -
the collapsed remnants of stars like our sun.
As these stars undergo gravitational collapse at the end of their lives,
they generate the sort of temperatures and pressures within
their carbon-rich cores that would be required to
create carbonado diamonds.
If that white dwarf was then ruptured,
it would be broken into diamond-rich asteroids.
It's thought that all the carbonados on earth may have been delivered by
just one of those asteroids.
So, these carbonados from Brazil and
we know they are found only in Brazil
and Africa, so they probably arrived as a single asteroid made of
carbonado which broke up and
collided with the earth a long time ago.
In fact before Africa and Brazil
were separated by the Atlantic Ocean.
So you find them in both places but they're probably from the same
asteroid. Probably from the same
asteroid which broke up and then distributed
itself over those two continents.
I see. So this is billions of years old?
So billions of years old. Three, maybe four billion years old.
Or three quarters of the age of the earth. Oh, wow!
Gosh. So, our Sky at Night diamond,
we think was probably formed in a white dwarf,
landed on Earth billions of years ago and is now
sitting in front of us...
Yes. ..for our celebrations. That's exactly right, yes.
Well, that's pretty impressive if you ask me.
Thank you so much for bringing them in. Thank you. A pleasure.
Hi, Sky at Night.
Happy 60th from everyone
here at the European Space Agency
and from Rosetta. Nice one, keep up
the good work.
One of the other questions that has haunted astronomy, the proverbial
elephant in the universe is, are we alone?
Not just within our solar system but throughout the cosmos.
In 1957,
nobody knew if there were worlds orbiting other stars.
The first exoplanet wasn't detected
until 1995.
But now we know of over 3,000 planets orbiting distant stars.
In February this year,
the most exciting discovery yet was announced.
A whole system of potentially habitable earth-like planets.
Orbiting the cold dwarf star, TRAPPIST-1.
Chris has been talking to one of the lead scientists on the project,
Amaury Triaud, to find out more.
I think, one of the most significant
discoveries in the Sky at Night's 60 years is just last month
the announcement of planets around
a star called TRAPPIST-1.
Can you tell us what you were looking for and what you found?
What we found is around this small star,
we have seven planets all turning very close to the star.
The outermost planet is only 6% of the Earth's sun.
So all of those will be well within the orbit of Mercury?
Completely. So it's a very packed system.
What do we know about those planets?
All seven planets have sizes and
they are masses measured to be comparable
to the Earth. So they have compositions,
densities comparable to the Earth.
All seven are far enough from the star that we consider them to be
temperate, meaning that under certain
geological and atmospheric conditions,
water could be liquid if there is water there.
And that is why we are so excited
because this is the first system where
we can test whether liquid water can exist on the surface of a world
outside the solar system and then hunt for evidence of life.
A lot of the discussion after the discovery was immediately about the
star. This is a very different star.
Stars like TRAPPIST-1 form the majority of stars in our galaxy.
Most stars are smaller than the sun.
That's right. Just like TRAPPIST-1 and slightly bigger.
Most planets similar in size and mass to the Earth
mostly exist around such stars.
So looking at TRAPPIST-1 is looking at
the majority of earth-like planets in the universe.
But how will new facilities affect this?
I know people are excited about the James Webb Space Telescope,
for example.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be launched in late 2018.
It has the time to study each of the passages of the planet
in front of the star and so through those observations
we will note what type of atmosphere, what climate,
the level of greenhouse gases,
so we will infer the conditions on the surface
in terms of pressure and temperature.
Well, good luck and come back
and tell us as the discovery goes on. Thank you very much.
Well, that's how far we've come in the last 60 years but what about the
future? What will we be talking about in 60 years' time?
We've got our experts here.
Monica, what are you looking forward to?
Well, I'm looking forward to
understanding more about Mars because by six
years' time, we will have found fossilised life on Mars.
I really don't think I'm afraid that we'll find evidence of current life
on Mars but we will have found
evidence that there was life on Mars which
will link to life on Earth and this is, you know,
a really interesting question.
Michelle, what about the outer solar system?
I'm much more interested in the outer solar system, absolutely.
But we've got missions going to Europa.
Where else do you think we will have been?
Well, there's talk about going to
Uranus or Neptune because those are the gas giants
we know the least about in our solar system.
We just had one flyby. That's right, that's right.
But from my perspective,
our understanding of the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn are making us
wonder about whether we might find liquid water outside of our
solar system around some of the exoplanets that have been found.
So let's have a prediction.
In 60 years' time, what's the hot topic in exoplanets?
I think the biggest hot topic is finding out how frequently life can
emerge. Not just is their life but how frequently can we find life in
the universe? So you are convinced we will find life out there and
then we'll just have many examples of it.
I think there will be a lot of claims.
The road is really hard but I do hope that before I pass away,
we will know. But do you think maybe an extraterrestrial intelligence
will have got in touch with us to put everything into perspective?
I've got my list of questions.
They might have the answers, you know?
It's just like you can speculate.
If they do, we'll definitely interview them on The Sky at Night.
That's all we've got time for this month but it's clear there's a lot
to look forward to and whatever happens and whatever is discovered,
we'll be here to report it for you.
We'll be back in June with a special from Rome.
In the meanwhile, enjoy the spring skies,
check out this month's Star Guide
online and, of course, get outside and get looking up. Goodnight.