NOVA Universe Revealed - First Season

In a universe that shines with innumerable stars,

born from countless more stars

that have come and gone before them,

rages the life-giving fire of our sun.

The sun is the king of the solar system.

It has essentially all the mass and all the energy.

Familiar and yet unknown.

Even though we've looked at it for a really long time,

the sun is still full of mysteries.

Why is it hotter in its atmosphere than on its surface?

What drives the solar wind?

Only now we take our first steps closer

to understanding our star...

It is the first time

that we're actually going in to touch the sun.

And it's already really started

to truly transform our understanding

for how the sun works.

...Uncovering the secret power of all stars...

As you can imagine, when you have a huge blob of flaming gas,

the core is usually the hottest.

And it is where the magic is happening.

...Perhaps even finding clues

to the stars that came before it...

If we understand where the sun comes from,

we can understand a little bit more

about where life has come from.

...And, ultimately, its fate.

It has about another 4.6 billion years of nuclear fusion left.

And then it will start to change.

It will start to evolve.

We really need to understand

what will happen to our own sun,

because that will impact Earth.

The sun is just one among

hundreds of billions of stars in a galaxy among trillions.

We live in "The Age of Stars."

Right now, on "NOVA."

93 million miles from Earth,

our nearest star, the sun.

A permanent fixture for life on our planet.

Humans have always been fascinated by the sun.

I think because it is so constant

compared to our daily life.

It's been rising and setting since the day that we were born.

We keep time by it, we keep our calendars by it.

Without it, life wouldn't be possible here on Earth.

The sun is just one of more than

a billion trillion stars in the universe.

Why is it around our star that life has emerged?

We want to know where do we come from,

and what are our cosmic origins.

If we understand where the sun comes from,

we can understand a little bit more

about where life has come from.

But our star is an enigma.

The sun is still full of mysteries.

Why is it hotter in its atmosphere than on its surface?

What drives the solar wind?

We've spent millennia studying from afar.

But only now are we getting close enough

to truly reveal its secrets.

The sun's not a very nice environment.

It's not easy to get up close to the sun.

It's an enormous ball of hydrogen,

and it's putting out a tremendous amount of energy.

Its surface is a bubbling caldron of 10,000-degree plasma.

We can actually see cells of hot gas

rising and falling, it's incredible imagery.

And then above that, you have this

very thin atmosphere that's a million degrees.

Super hot.

Seeing these images is like revealing something

that's been right in front of us, but hidden for so long.

Occasionally you might see this enormous coronal mass ejection

erupting from the star.

We now stand on the threshold

of being able to survive a close encounter.

With a new heat-resistant probe

that's giving us an up-close look

at our sun for the first time.

Status check.

Go Delta.

Go PSP.

Minus 15.

Launch night,

I was sick to my stomach.

Five, four,

three, two, one, zero.

Lift off,

of the mighty Delta 4 heavy rocket with NASA's

Parker Solar Probe.

There we go.

The Delta 4 heavy is a very slow rocket

compared to the other launches I've seen.

So I just saw fireballs,

and was very, very frightened for a while.

25 seconds into flight.

It is quite scary to think about all that power in the rocket

underneath that, you know,

relatively small spacecraft sitting on top.

...continue to look good on all three boosters.

Then realizing that this was all okay

as it slowly made its way up into the sky.

Now 50 seconds into flight.

And we have jettisoned both strap-on boosters.

Parker is just an exquisite mission.

It will be the closest that our species has thus far come

to literally touching the sun itself.

The Parker Solar Probe is traveling to a place

that has been completely unexplored up close.

Until now.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe,

a daring mission to shed light

on the mysteries of our closest star.

This is a journey into Never-Never Land, you might say.

During its seven year mission,

the Parker Solar Probe will attempt a series of dives

towards the surface of the sun.

Its goal is to understand how the sun sheds its energy.

Orbiting a total of 24 times...

Each pass taking it perilously closer.

So close it will enter the sun's atmosphere.

Braving temperatures no spacecraft has ever endured.

And traveling faster

than any other human-made object has before.

The mission is still in its early days.

But in the coming years, the Parker Solar Probe

will help us unlock not only the secrets of our own sun

but all stars.

Including those that hold the key to the sun's origins,

and our own.

We can look at the processes, look at what's inside the sun,

and understand how it had to become that.

What were the generations of stars before that?

What was its ancestry?

The sun's story can be traced back

to its most distant stellar ancestors,

the very first stars in the universe.

Almost 100 million years after the Big Bang,

the universe is dark and cold--

not a single star shining.

But this universe is far from empty.

Something is growing in the void.

Stretching out tendrils.

The early universe was largely hydrogen and helium,

and only small amounts of other materials.

None of the elements we see these days,

no carbon, oxygen, iron, none of that.

Even though the name "the Cosmic Dark Ages"

suggests that there might not have been

anything particularly interesting going on,

it was really kind of laying the groundwork

for the construction of

the cosmic web.

The cosmic web is literally

the structure of the universe itself.

The cosmic web is unimaginable in scale.

Huge clouds of gas are drawn together

by the gravity of a mysterious, invisible form of matter

called dark matter,

creating a great network of filaments.

A web the size of the cosmos.

The gas in these tendrils

is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium.

Where these great filaments cross

are the places where the first stars will one day be born.

The cosmic web has been shaping our universe

for 13.8 billion years.

And it's still doing so today.

But it's only recently

that we've actually been able to see it.

The image that we have here is absolutely amazing.

It's one of the most fundamental pictures

that we can take in our universe.

And it's actually a direct image

of some of the largest structures that exist,

the filaments of the cosmic web.

Now the bright dots that you see over here,

they're entire galaxies.

Now, if I take those away,

what you can see much more clearly

is the faint glow of the hydrogen and helium

that exists on the tendrils of the cosmic web.

And it's on this cosmic web,

that the story of our sun

and the stars in the night sky begins.

As time passes in the early universe,

the cosmic web continues to grow...

Gas, rushing along these great tendrils,

traveling down towards the intersections.

It is being pulled to these points by gravity.

And as more gas joins, this force becomes ever stronger,

creating great clouds staggering in size.

They grow denser,

hotter,

as gas is relentlessly added

until, at last, the conditions become so extreme

that there is a sudden moment of ignition.

The birth of the very first star in the universe.