Season 1
Episode: 1x01 | Airdate: Jul 20, 2009
Scientists have been reconstructing the history of the Moon by scouring its surface, mapping its mountains and craters, and probing its interior. Find out what the origins of the Moon can tell us about our own planet's beginnings.
Episode: 1x02 | Airdate: Jul 27, 2009
Massive solar eruptions can pose a serious threat to our high-tech society. Learn about the havoc caused by the solar storms of Halloween 2003 and 1859. Dive into the inner regions of the Sun to find out what can cause our star to turn angry.
Episode: 1x03 | Airdate: Aug 12, 2009
Monster storms around the world seem to be occurring with greater frequency. But what is causing these typhoons and hurricanes that leave so much destruction in their wake? Can science unlock the mysterious origins of these super storms and is the worst still yet to come?
Episode: 1x04 | Airdate: Aug 25, 2009
From the Cassini spacecraft comes one of the greatest photographic collections of all time. Scientists are using images of Saturn's moons to uncover a trail of clues pointing to the energy sources and complex chemistry needed to spawn life.
Episode: 1x05 | Airdate: Sep 27, 2009
Our Milky Way Galaxy is thought to harbor millions of black holes, the ultra dense remnants of dead stars. But now, in the universe far beyond our galaxy, there's evidence of something far more ominous. A breed of black holes that has reached incomprehensible size and destructive power. Just how large, and violent, and strange can they get?
Episode: 1x06 | Airdate: Oct 20, 2009
The mind-blowing answer comes from a theory describing the first micro-moments of our universe. Just as scientists began to make precise measurements of the observable universe, new ideas suggest that our visible patch is an impossibly small portion of the whole.
Episode: 1x07 | Airdate: Nov 10, 2009
Time is flying by on this busy, crowded planet as life changes from second to second. At the same time, the arc of the human lifespan is getting longer: 67 years is the global average, up from just 20 years in the Stone Age. How much time does the universe have? The answer may depend on whether Stephen Hawking was right in his theory that describes how black holes shed mass and eventually decay.
Episode: 1x08 | Airdate: Nov 18, 2009
This is the ultimate buddy movie. November 14, 1969. Three astronauts with spacesuits, food, water, and a battery of scientific and communications equipment prepared to fly to the moon. Thousands gathered at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. How would the launch fare in a powerful electrical storm now gathering above the launch pad? That was just the start of Apollo 12's incredible journey.
Episode: 1x09 | Airdate: Dec 9, 2009
Episode: 1x10 | Airdate: Dec 21, 2009
Mars appears to be devoid of all life, but what about below the surface? Could this dusty red planet ever have been host to a multitude of microbiological life? Come explore these questions with the latest imagery and data from NASA.
Episode: 1x11 | Airdate: Jan 8, 2010
The latest from the planet-hunting frontier. Find out what we are learning about our place in the cosmos from the search for earth-like planets. This journey started tens of thousands of years ago, when humans began to fan out across the planet, following unknown pathways, crossing unmeasured distances. We traced coastlines, and sailed uncertain seas.
Episode: 1x12 | Airdate: Feb 8, 2010
Episode: 1x13 | Airdate: Jun 9, 2010
Why did Earth thrive and our sister planet, Venus, became a dead planet alien to life? From the fires of our sun's birth, twin planets emerged. But heir paths diverged, as nature draped one world in the greens and blues of life, while enveloping the other in acid clouds, high heat and volcanic flows. Scientists are looking for clues in Venus' history that explain its disastrous turn for the worst.
Episode: 1x14 | Airdate: Sep 10, 2010
All across the immense reaches of time and space, energy is being exchanged, transferred, released, in a great cosmic pinball game we call our universe. This episodes traces the progression of energy events from the smallest and coldest, to the hottest and most powerful in all the cosmos.
Episode: 1x15 | Airdate: Nov 23, 2010
Explore the biggest question of all. How far do the stars stretch out into space? And what's beyond them? In modern times, we built giant telescopes that have allowed us to cast our gaze deep into the universe. Astronomers have been able to look back to near the time of its birth. They've reconstructed the course of cosmic history in astonishing detail.
Episode: 1x16 | Airdate: Feb 21, 2011
Episode: 1x17 | Airdate: Aug 19, 2011
One of the deepest mysteries about how our universe came to be may finally be yielding to human investigation. Scientists are mounting new efforts to figure out how matter survived, and what happened to its birth twin, a mysterious substance known as antimatter?
Episode: 1x18 | Airdate: Oct 14, 2011
Cosmology has been turned on its head by a stunning discovery that the universe is flying apart in all directions at an ever-increasing rate. Find out what this Nobel Prize winning discovery means for the future of our universe.
Episode: 1x19 | Airdate: May 11, 2012
Astronomers have been tracking stars at the center of the Milky Way galaxy to probe a monster black hole that lurks in its dense gas clouds and star fields. They have turned up the best proof to date that black holes exist. Now, they are shooting for the first direct image of a black hole.
Episode: 1x20 | Airdate: Nov 29, 2012
It was one of the greatest mysteries in modern science: a series of brief but extremely bright flashes of ultra-high energy light coming from somewhere out in space. These gamma ray bursts were first spotted by spy satellites in the 1960s. It took three decades and a revolution in high-energy astronomy for scientists to figure out what they were.
Episode: 1x21 | Airdate: Feb 15, 2013
Modern science has linked polar light shows, called auroras, to vast waves of electrified gas hurled in our direction by the sun. Today, researchers from a whole new generation see this dynamic substance, plasma, as an energy source that may one day fuel humanity's expansion into space. What can we learn, and how far can we go, by tapping into the strange and elusive fourth state of matter?
Episode: 1x22 | Airdate: Apr 7, 2013
Having travelled tens of billions of kilometres away from Earth, the two Voyager spacecraft are streaking out into the void. What will we learn about the galaxy, the universe, and ourselves from Voyager's epic journey to the stars?
Episode: 1x23 | Airdate: Oct 4, 2013
With the polar ice caps continuing to melt and sea levels on the rise, scientists are looking back into our global climate history to see where our planet may be headed 1,000 years into the future and beyond.
Episode: 1x24 | Airdate: Feb 3, 2014
Episode: 1x25 | Airdate: May 24, 2014
They are eruptions so vast, so Earth-shattering, they have changed the history of our planet. Climate collapse. Toxic turmoil. Mass extinction. Worse than a killer asteroid, or nuclear war, they are Earth's most destructive Supervolcanoes.
Episode: 1x26 | Airdate: Jul 21, 2014
As warming global climates eat away at the ice sheets that cover the continent of Antarctica, researchers are closely studying its impact on the rest of the world. The scientific data being collected suggests that the fate of the world as we know it may be linked to the fate of Antarctica.
Episode: 1x27 | Airdate: Sep 19, 2014
Are the physical laws of the universe so exact that the formation of life was merely an inevitable outcome? Or is the existence of life just a lucky roll of the cosmic dice? We look for the answer in the rise of the two most important components for life: dust and water.
Episode: 1x28 | Airdate: Oct 29, 2014
Explore the challenges of interstellar flight and the technological possibilities that may one day send us on a long voyage out into the depths of the galaxy. What imperatives will motivate the launch of the first interstellar mission: scientific curiosity, or the need to survive beyond our home planet?
Episode: 1x29 | Airdate: Dec 13, 2014
Episode: 1x30 | Airdate: Jul 31, 2015
Episode: 1x31 | Airdate: Dec 19, 2015
Episode: 1x32 | Airdate: Jun 16, 2016
Planet hunters have detected nearly 5000 confirmed and candidate planets beyond our solar system. Most sun-like stars, it seems, are ringed with giant planets that crowd their parent stars and leave no room for planets like ours. The old theories about planetary formation are giving way to a new one defined by fierce gravitational battles and titanic collisions. How did Earth manage to survive?
Episode: 1x33 | Airdate:
Asteroids racing through the solar system have smashed into Earth before. What are the chances we'll get hit again? Armed with new defensive technologies, scientists are getting ready for the inevitable day, a decade, century, or millennia from now: the Day of the Asteroid.
Episode: 1x34 | Airdate:
Episode: 1x35 | Airdate:
