Cosmos: Possible Worlds - First Season

John Goodricke was a man who was permitted only the

briefest glimpse of the stars.

And yet, it could be said that he made one of the

greatest discoveries of all.

He had been left completely deaf by a childhood illness.

And maybe that's why he looked so carefully.

On a clear summer night in 1784,

he went outside to see if a particular star was still

doing something that mystified him.

Something that no other astronomer had ever reported before.

Goodricke couldn't believe his own eyes.

The star, called Beta Lyrae,

changed regularly in brightness over a very brief period of time.

Only days.

What could possibly make a star do that?

Even more surprising, Goodricke found that he could

predict its variations with high accuracy.

What could cause such a change in a star's brightness?

None of the scenarios that came to mind explained the

evidence before him.

And then, he thought of another possibility.

Suppose there was something orbiting Beta Lyrae

that eclipsed the star on a regular basis.

But what could it be?

"A world perhaps?"

How about a trillion?

When John Goodricke's discovery came to the attention

of the prestigious British Royal Society in 1786,

he was immediately made a member.

Word of this honor never reached him,

days later he was dead of pneumonia.

He was only 21.

It would be 150 years before another astronomer

would solve Goodricke's mystery.

And in the process, change our cosmos forever.

Even as a child, Gerard Peter Kuiper could

see farther than anyone else.

He saw stars too distant and too faint for others

to find without a telescope.

This was in the Netherlands more than a century ago.

Back then, the son of a poor tailor could not

hope to become an astronomer.

But the boy would not be stopped.

Back then, astronomers thought that the cosmos consisted of

only a handful of planets, those of our own solar system.

The great multitude of other stars were just barren points

of light that had never given birth to worlds.

We on Earth could still feel special.

Our star system, the scientists told us,

was the rarest of all, one blessed by worlds and moons.

Kuiper yearned to know how our Sun and its planets

came to be.

And made his way to the University of Leiden,

where he quickly distinguished himself.

He was invited to join the dynamic astronomical community

in the United States, but Kuiper had rough edges,

he was argumentative and easily drawn into conflict

with his colleagues.

The prospect of directing a remote observatory far away

from the capitals of scientific culture must have

appealed to him.

And besides, you could see the stars better there

than just about anywhere else.

Kuiper was given an appointment at the McDonald Observatory,

situated in a corner of West Texas.

At the turn of the century, it had been discovered that half

the visible stars were really gravitational pairs.

Most binary stars are like twins,

forming from the same womb of gas and dust.

Others come of age separately and become gravitationally

involved with each other later in their development.

And the other half remain single throughout their lives.

Kuiper chose to concentrate on the binary stars.

He wondered if they could shed light on the way that the

planets in our solar system formed and came to be

gravitationally bound to our Sun.

Bright ascension. 18 hours, 50 minutes.

Declination plus 33 degrees.

2175 minutes.

Mm-hmm.

Kuiper looked at the very same star that

had baffled John Goodricke 150 years before,

but Kuiper was looking at it with a much bigger telescope.

And Kuiper was armed with an awesome power that didn't

exist in Goodricke's time, spectroscopy.

Spectroscopy is a way to dissect the light of any

single star to find its particular atomic and

molecular composition.

Kuiper looked at the spectrum of the light produced

by Beta Lyrae and saw that, as with all stars,

there was plenty of hydrogen and helium,

but there was also iron sodium and silicon.

So far, no surprises there.

Now, here comes the twist.

Bright lines?

Where were those bright lines coming from?

At that time, no astronomer understood why bright lines

would appear in the spectrum of a star.

Kuiper leapt to the conclusion that the two stars

were so close that they were exchanging matter,

super-hot gases that would produce such a signature.

In trying to understand what he had seen that night,

Kuiper discovered and named the most interstellar

relationship in the cosmos.

Stars that are physically locked in everlasting oneness,

bound together by gravity and a bridge of fire

made of star stuff.

A bridge eight million miles long,

connecting two stars,

one three times more massive than our Sun,

the other 13 times greater still.

A contact binary star system.

Why aren't they round like our own star?

They are so closed to one another,

tidal forces of gravity pull them together and stretch them

into flaming teardrops.

The Beta Lyrae system is about 1,000 light-years from earth.

The largest telescopes of the mid-20th century were just not

powerful enough to resolve them as individual stars.

You needed that new power of spectroscopy

to disentangle them.

Kuiper imagined how the formation of the contact

binary star system could have happened.

He deduced that they were formed when a vast cloud of

gas and dust become so dense that gravitational whirlpools formed.

In thinking about these contact binaries,

Kuiper couldn't help but wonder if any of these stellar

courtships ever failed to catch on fire.

Kuiper asked himself, was our world,

our Moon and all the planets of our solar system nothing

more than a failed binary star system?

And if that's how our solar system was created,

had the same thing happened around other stars throughout the cosmos?

Gerard Kuiper had a special power,

he could see farther than anyone else.

He was the first to envision the universe we now live in.

Not a barren vastness meagerly dotted by childless stars,

but one overflowing with possible worlds,

countless planets and moons.

In 1949, Kuiper astonished the world by declaring that

our solar system was not so special after all,

that every other star had its own family of worlds.

A world perhaps?

But science wasn't ready for that universe,

it wasn't even ready to take its first baby steps off the planet.

Why not?

Science was carved up into little kingdoms,

the various scientific disciplines and scientists of

one discipline didn't collaborate with anyone from another.

But this had to change for us to venture beyond Earth.

It all came to a head in a feud between Kuiper and

another great scientist.

Like two stars of a contact binary system,

they could not disengage.

But despite their loathing for each other,

they managed to create a new kind of science and they

pioneered the Space Age,

mentoring its greatest visionary and voice.

Sometimes, the cosmos just barges right in

and breaks down your door, like tonight.

What's going on here?

Our planet is passing through the epic remnants of a comet,

a debris field millions of miles long.

That's why it looks like it's raining stars tonight.

But they're not stars at all,

just bits of rock and ice burning up in Earth's atmosphere.

It's called a meteor shower.

And this one happens at the same time every year.

Why?

Because it takes a year for Earth to orbit the Sun and

return to that same place where the comets

streaked by so long ago.

That's what a year is.

This could be a piece of that comet or possibly

a fragment of an asteroid.

It came from another world,

a leftover from the creation of our solar system.

But how to understand it?

Well, back in Gerard Kuiper's time,

during the middle of the 20th century,

it depended on what kind of a scientist you were.

The geologists would bring their hammers and break this

sucker apart and look at its dust under a microscope to

study its crystalline structure.

It was their way of finding out which missing piece in

this puzzle of Earth the meteorite could provide.

The chemists were searching for the same answers,

but they would drop it in acid to see if it could be

transformed from one compound into another,

torturing it to see if it would give up

its secrets about nature.

The physicists would want to see it at its most naked.

Stripped down to its mass, its density, its hardness.

Its resistance to heat.

The biologist wouldn't even stop to pick it up.

Back then, they would've walked right by it because

they didn't think there was any chance that a meteorite

from space had anything to do with them.

Life could only be from one place, right here, Earth.

And you want to know the craziest thing?