Known Universe (2009) s03e08 Episode Script

Narrator: In the known universe, everything has an expiration date.
David: Whoa, Jesus.
Narrator: We're probing the most remarkable deaths in our cosmos, from those caused by our own planet.
Mike: It's vaporizing.
Narrator: To stars in double trouble.
But just when the situation is looking grim.
Andy: Whoa, they're really shooting fire out now! Narrator: The universe can find light in the darkest of places.
Sigrid: Can you actually take us into a black hole? Andrew: Let's go.
Narrator: Don't look back; prepare for the beginning of the end.
Here in Atlanta, Georgia, this 16-story building is about to meet its maker.
And theoretical physicist David Kaplan is doing the final rounds.
David: Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
16 and then 17; that's last group? Jim: It's the last group.
Narrator: From a safe distance, he's about to see this big structure become nothing but a pile of rubble.
David: 5, 4, 3.
Narrator: But is this the end? David: 2.
Narrator: Or the beginning? David: 1! Whoa.
Andy: Does anything in the universe truly die or end? On Earth, when an animal dies, it decomposes and its molecules get absorbed into the soil, the air, and that gets reincorporated into the next generation of creatures.
Sigrid: We also see this in the universe.
When one star dies, another star is born.
In fact, our own sun is what we call a second-generation star and its here because there was another star that died.
Narrator: Planets, stars, even galaxies they're all staring down the barrel at eventual destruction.
We're about to take a journey from life to death and back again.
And it all starts right here on earth, where David Kaplan is preparing for one building's explosive demolition.
David: This building is going to come to its end.
Like all things in the universe, its lifespan is finite.
But for 50 years, hundreds of people called this apartment building home.
In a matter of seconds, this 16 floors of concrete and steel are gonna come crashing down, using only 150 pounds of explosive material.
So let's usher in its demise.
Narrator: But ending a building is no simple task and that's why Atlanta demolition contractors and experts like Jim Redyke have a very specific plan to bring it down.
David: One of the first things you think about when you look at a building that you have to demolish? Jim: I want to see how much room I have around the structure, so I know how to design the blast.
I call it my exposure.
David: "Exposure," meaning? Jim: How the neighborhood is gonna be affected.
David: And how do you control which way it goes? Jim: By the elimination of columns in the sequence in which you want the building to fail.
You'll notice the numbers painted on the columns that's the sequence in which the detonation of explosives are gonna happen to create that failure.
My simple illustration is that you have a three legged stool and you knock one leg, the stool is gonna fall in that direction.
David: I see, so you're basically taking full advantage of gravity.
Jim: Yes.
David: And using as little explosive as possible and allowing gravity to twist and destroy the building.
Jim: Correct.
Narrator: 17 sets of delayed explosives have been placed, all attached to a central detonation chord that will fire them in succession, once the scheduled zero hour has arrived.
David: There are thousands of people who have come to celebrate this building's demise, and we're moments away from it happening.
Man: There's a white car.
David: In the lot? Oh yeah, it's still there.
Man 2: They don't know who's car it is.
David: That's my car.
Man 2: Holy (bleep), man! David: Oh, my God.
I didn't park it.
Man: Can't move it now.
David: We're one minute away from seeing this thing come down and seeing what happens to the car that I accidentally left in that parking lot.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1! Whoa, Jesus! Those are the fuses.
Wow, woo, oh my God! Holy cow, that came down fast! I saw the fuses go bam, bam, bam, and nothing was destroyed.
There's a 9 second delay and then you saw the pillars start blasting out.
But the explosions were small they were just taking out the concrete and after about the 7th one, I saw the corner start to fall and the roof got ripped apart.
Gravity was doing almost all the work in taking that building down.
It was incredible.
Holy cow, oh my God! Well, it seems I accidentally left my car here next to the building.
Besides a little bit of dust, I think we're okay.
But I'd rather see the building, so let's go take a look.
Well, this building is dead.
It had a life for about 50 years, as an apartment building, and now it's just a pile of rubble, which seems to have no use.
But actually, this stuff, like this steel rebar here, could potentially be in your toaster in 10 years.
This material has a life that continues.
It's a conservation of mass.
The mass before and the mass afterwards is the same.
You've just changed the shape of it, but that stuff is going to live on.
Narrator: So what looks like the end for this building isn't really the end at all.
But how does this translate to the universe? Well, in space, debris is everywhere.
But around our planet, it's collecting at an alarming rate, and an entire building's worth of rubble can't stack up to the gigantic cloud that's circling earth.
Sigrid: Every time we launch something, it's just generating more and more junk in space.
This debris was primarily generated by old rocket bodies and also satellites.
Narrator: And that's the real problem with space debris there's too much of it.
The U.
S.
currently tracks around 20,000 individual pieces floating in low earth orbit.
And more is created every time one piece smashes into another.
Sigrid: Every time that you have a collision, you're generating more pieces of debris.
Those pieces of debris then collide with more pieces of debris and you get this cascade to smaller and smaller sizes.
Narrator: So just like our building, what started out as one solid piece can become thousands or even millions.
But this debris that's rapidly multiplying in space doesn't end as a passive junk heap.
It finds new life as high-energy projectiles.
Mike: Space junk debris can pose a real problem because it's going so fast.
Orbital velocity is 17,500 miles an hour.
Something like the size of a flake of paint can be deadly.
Narrator: All this fast-moving space debris, even as small as a centimeter across, poses a big threat to astronauts and spacecraft in orbit.
In 2009, the collision of two satellites created debris that nearly hit the International Space Station months later.
Mike: If there's a known piece of space debris that's in the path of the International Space Station, we will try to maneuver away from it and also try to shelter the crew as much as possible.
But sometimes you're relying on good fortune that you don't get hit by something.
Narrator: So what can bring this giant horde of space junk to an end? Our own planet.
Our atmosphere has the power to reduce a lot of this deadly debris to little more than dust, and at the Johnson space center in Houston, Texas, astronaut Mike Massimino is going to see how.
Mike: In space, a bolt like this, this size can cause you trouble if it would hit the space station or a space walking astronaut.
We're gonna see what happens to it if it were to come into the Earth's atmosphere, whether it would make it all the way down to the Earth.
Narrator: This lab is typically used to test materials that protect the space shuttle on its re-entry to earth.
They replicate the extreme heat that occurs when objects at high speed collide with the earth's atmosphere.
And now they're going to try to kill off this aluminum bolt.
Mike: Smells like someone's been cooking in here.
How do you heat this stuff up? Steve: Nitrogen and oxygen it's independently controlled.
We mix that in the proper ratio to simulate Earth's atmosphere.
So that hot gas is then supersonically accelerated into this vacuum chamber.
Mike: Okay, let's shut the door and light it up, see what happens.
We're about to start the test.
They're heating up the gas inside the chamber up to 10,000 or 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's really hot.
It's even hotter than Houston in the summertime.
We're gonna swing the bolt into the stream.
You got a nice, nice shot of it there.
Oh it's going.
It's like it's just melting.
It's vaporizing.
Oh my gosh, that was quick.
Steve: Alright, 16 seconds.
Mike: 16 seconds.
How hot did it get? Steve: We're looking at about between 1,800-1,900 Fahrenheit.
Mike: That was cool.
Alright Steve, let's see what happened here.
Aluminum, forget it.
You don't have to worry about getting hit with an aluminum bolt.
Steve: Aluminum is very, very low mass.
It stands a very poor chance of making it all the way to the ground.
Mike: But things do make it? Steve: Things do make it.
Mike: Okay, so what do they have that this stuff doesn't have? Steve: They're lucky.
They're bigger.
They're bigger, they're also made out of a more resilient material.
Mike: But that bolt coming into the Earth's atmosphere would be burned up and be no issue.
Narrator: Earth's atmosphere is the last stop for many of the small objects that whip around our planet.
But some objects, like larger asteroids, can hold up to this planetary defense.
And they can bring death to a planet not just by an assault on its surface, but by shutting down its entire internal engine.
how big the end can be in the universe shows that on earth destruction and creation happen on a daily basis.
We've seen how our atmosphere can put an end to incoming debris, but space has an even greater killer, radiation.
Andy: Charged particles can actually damage our cells, break apart our DNA and give us cancer.
Luckily, we're shielded on Earth by the magnetic field.
If we went to a planet like Mars, it doesn't have a magnetic field to protect us and so we'd really be in danger.
Narrator: So just how effective is our magnetic field at saving us from radiation, compared to mars? To find out, aerospace engineer Sigrid Close and astronomer Andy Howell are creating their own cosmic shooting gallery.
Sigrid: So Andy, we have a target, you have a gun and a bullet.
What are you gonna do here today? Andy: We're gonna symbolize what it's like to perceive solar radiation on Earth.
This bullet is gonna represent a charged particle from the sun.
We're gonna shoot this one particle and see what kind of damage it does.
Narrator: This lone bullet represents the amount of radiation that can survive the earth's magnetic field and hit life on our surface.
But this small of a dose of radiation doesn't have much of an effect on humans.
Sigrid: Okay, so this was meant to simulate one particle here on Earth.
So if we want to understand what would happen to an astronaut if they went to Mars, we need more bullets? Andy: We need a thousand times more bullets.
I'm thinking machine gun.
Sigrid: Uh, that sounds scary.
Andy: Hey, you gotta fire, too.
We got Tommy guns.
Each one of these snail drums here holds 50 bullets.
Sigrid: Let's do it.
Are you ready, Andy? Andy: Yeah.
You ready, Sigrid? Sigrid: Let's do it.
My heart's beating like a rabbit right now.
Andy: Love that smell.
Sigrid: Wow, we did a lot of damage.
Andy: Yeah, we did.
So we put 500 rounds into this thing.
If one bullet represents the dose we get on Earth in a year, then 500 rounds represents what we'd get on Mars in only half a year.
Sigrid: Exactly.
Andy: Really makes you appreciate this magnetosphere we've got protecting us right now.
Narrator: Our magnetic field is a powerful defense that keeps radiation at bay and our planet alive.
But can a planet's magnetic field actually disappear? Some scientists think that's exactly what happened to our neighbor, mars.
Sigrid: We think that at one point, Mars may have had a magnetic field, similar to what we have here on Earth.
Narrator: And its vanishing act may have led to Mars' eventual death.
Around 4 billion years ago, Mars is believed to have been a life-like planet, with water and a relatively thick atmosphere.
But the beginning of the end is approaching in the form of an asteroid a quarter the size of the planet's diameter.
And one theory says that it was this impact that killed off Mars' magnetic field.
How? By shutting down the internal process that creates it, convection.
Andy: Convection is just a way of transporting heat from one place to another.
It happens in, say, a boiling pot of water, where you get the really hot flame down at the bottom and then the water wants to get rid of this energy, and so it starts bubbling and churning.
Narrator: In a planet like earth or early Mars, this churning in the core creates a planet's magnetic field.
So to shut that process down, you need an incredible amount of power, like an asteroid impact.
When the asteroid hits, it sends a shockwave of heat racing through the planet.
As it hits the core, it heats the outside to the same temperature as the center, stopping convection, which causes the magnetic field to dissipate.
Subsequent asteroid impacts may have prevented the field from ever reforming, leaving Mars wide open to constant radiation a planetary death sentence.
But as with everything else in the universe, this death isn't necessarily the end.
Sigrid: When a comet or an asteroid crashes into a planet, it can cause widespread devastation.
Narrator: But there can be more to an asteroid hit than just the crash landing.
David: Let's say it has something interesting in it maybe a little bacteria.
The death of an asteroid might mean the birth of something new.
Narrator: So the same type of incredible impact that brought death to Mars may also have had monumental consequences for another planet, earth.
Andy: We have good evidence of pieces of Mars that are in Antarctica.
And these arrive on Earth because when an asteroid hits Mars, it can actually shoot rubble up into space and it can go so fast that it leaves the planet.
Some of that material kicked off of Mars can actually find its way to Earth.
Narrator: Because of evidence of water on Mars, it is possible that ancient life existed there.
And if so, it could have hitched a ride to earth on one of these asteroids.
Sigrid: Since we still don't have a good idea how life formed on Earth, this is one of things that scientists are looking at as a way to explain our existence here.
Narrator: But this theory is controversial.
Andy: To me, you can generate everything we need to make life here on Earth.
We don't need to bring it in from somewhere else.
It's possible that it happened, but I'll believe it when I see the evidence.
Narrator: That evidence may be on Mars or it may be on earth, in a meteorite buried somewhere.
But while two planetary neighbors sharing material could have generated life, two stellar neighbors sharing material has an entirely different outcome an; explosive demise unlike any other in the universe.
no matter how powerful is never the final outcome.
We've seen the unimaginable force of asteroid impacts that may have killed Mars' magnetic field and left it a Barron wasteland, but also how these same disastrous strikes could have led to life traveling to earth.
But neighbors in space don't always get along, like when two stars are locked in orbit around each other in what's called a binary star system.
Andy: Most stars are binary stars.
So when you look up in the sky and you see all these apparent single stars, more than 50% of the time, there are two or more stars there.
Narrator: But if one of these stars is a dead star, called a white dwarf, its partner is in for a huge surprise.
Andy: A white dwarf star is just a burned out core of a star like the sun.
If a white dwarf happens to be in a binary system with another star, it can actually come back to life by essentially stealing the life force from another star.
So it's kind of like a zombie.
Narrator: And a zombie star is the last thing you want to be living with.
As a white dwarf orbits with its companion, it steals some of its matter.
But there's a limit to how much it can take.
As the other star feeds it more and more, the interior of the white dwarf rises in temperature and pressure until it ignites in a deadly supernova explosion.
This destructive behavior is one of the most common forms of supernovae in the universe.
But where else can we see runaway combustion turned catastrophic? Right here on earth, in the very dangerous form of wildfires.
And Andy Howell is about to see how these two endings intersect, at the IBHS Research Center in South Carolina.
Andy: They've set up some kind of experiment here in this test chamber, and it says it's hazardous, so I feel like I need to go in there and see what they got.
This thing is like an aircraft hangar.
It is massive.
Narrator: Here, buildings try to stand up to various natural disasters like today, where it's house versus wildfire.
Andy: So we're in this huge warehouse.
This is a pretty incredible setup.
What's going on? Steve Q: The whole purpose here is to demonstrate the vulnerabilities of different materials to wildfire, so we're interested in whether a little bit of the house starts and then whether the fire grows.
Narrator: These 100 fans will blow burning embers at the test home, which is built with common construction materials and surrounded by flower bed mulch and gutters filled with dry leaves.
These vulnerabilities can turn into ignition points that can send the whole house up in a blaze.
Andy: So a supernova happens about every second in the universe.
That's when a star blows up because it gets ignited on the inside.
And how it blows up is very complicated.
So it all depends on where you ignite it and what the fuel is.
It's a lot like this house a lot of different ignition points.
Parts of the house will survive, other parts will burn it just depends on the material that it's constructed of.
Narrator: The test house our white dwarf is about to be hit with the burning embers, which represent material flowing from the companion star.
Andy: Whoa! Wow, they're really shooting fire out now.
So all those embers are possible ignition points to our white dwarf there.
Man, that is scary.
That is like deep down, primal scary.
And you can really tell it's all about the combustible materials you have around your house.
Unfortunately, white dwarf stars are not built out of safe stuff.
They're built out of carbon and oxygen, and that stuff just boom it just goes, goes up like dynamite.
This is awesome.
I can actually even feel the heat.
Narrator: The house is igniting on the outside, but if this were a white dwarf, the material would have a different effect, causing the star to grow in mass.
And that would cause it to ignite on the inside.
Nothing would stop the white dwarf from exploding.
But here, they're going to save the house from being a total loss.
Andy: Aww, they're stopping the fun.
So I just got out of the control room into where the house actually burned, and you can really smell the burning.
It could be dangerous out here, so I got a hardhat.
You know, real science is done with hardhats and caution tape.
I love it.
We're gonna go try to find Steve and see what he can tell us about how the experiment went.
What starts off as this little ember can really turn into a big problem if it hits an ignition point.
Steve Q: That's right.
The home doesn't burst into flames when a wildfire passes.
It is the embers that the wildfire generates that falls near or on the house, small fires starts, no one's there to suppress it, and that's the likely scenario.
Andy: This is impressive, but it is puny compared to the power in a white dwarf star.
When it blows up, it's the power of all the stars in the galaxy all at once, and you can see it from across the universe.
Narrator: A house caught in a wildfire here on earth can quickly turn to a pile of ashes.
But out in space, the explosion of a white dwarf supernova takes all of that matter and spreads it out, providing the raw materials for new stars throughout the galaxy.
But there's an alternate ending for a binary star system, and this grand finale is an epic performance.
One star vanishes, while the other speeds out of control like a runaway train.
life and death in the universe, there's been huge finishes for planets and stars.
But for a binary star system, the most astonishing end is yet to come, not in the immense explosion of a supernova, but in the creation of something called a hypervelocity star.
Andy: Hypervelocity stars are really cool because they're unlike the general run-of-the-mill stars that are trapped in our galaxy.
They can actually escape a galaxy.
Narrator: How can a star escape a galaxy? Once again, it all comes down to a battle between life and death.
As a binary star system makes its way innocently through the galaxy, if it takes a wrong turn, it could find a super massive black hole and get too close for comfort.
The gravity of the black hole captures ones star, which results in the other being hurled away at incredible speed.
David: A binary system is held together by gravity.
But near a black hole, where the gravity is quite fierce, you can imagine something very dramatic happening, where the black hole rips off one of the stars and the other one, which was trapped in this binary, now has the freedom to go flying.
Narrator: Around 16 of these stars have been discovered, and most are thought to be outcasts from our own Milky Way galaxy.
But just how does this process work? Here on earth, can we recreate the death of one star to launch another? Andy Howell and Sigrid Close are preparing to see, with Steve Jacobs' special simulator.
Sigrid: Hey, Jake.
Steve: How you doing? You can tell what we have here, right? Andy: A slingshot.
Steve: A slingshot.
This is the star, and this is the other star in the binary system.
What do you think will happen to this star if there's no mass on the other end of the rope? Sigrid: Shooting out.
Steve: Shooting out, and if that works we'll demonstrate what happens when a binary star approaches a black hole.
I'm gonna go fire this thing up here and you're gonna go up on the hill, a safe distance and watch.
Andy: Can't wait.
Sigrid: Okay.
Narrator: To get this death and rebirth scenario right, we'll spin this launcher in a circle.
The star that's being slowly pulled towards the black hole is a sandbag with a hole cut in it.
As the bag empties, it will slowly shrink down.
With nothing to hold the other star this cannonball in place, it should shoot out like a runaway freight train.
Andy: Jake's putting the final touches on our star chucker over there.
Stars can zoom out really fast in a binary system when they go haywire, and it looks like our simulated star's gonna do the same thing, so I'm standing as far away as possible.
Sigrid: My plan is to stand behind Andy.
He's a lot taller than I am, so I figure I'm gonna be protected.
Steve: I'm gonna fire this thing up and you better duck.
Sigrid: So Andy, we killed our binary star system, but we created a hyper-velocity star.
Andy: Exactly.
The key, though, is you've got to get rid of one of those stars so that the other one can be free.
It's trapped in this bad marriage, basically.
And then you've got to get rid of one partner so the other one can escape.
Sigrid: I don't know if I like that analogy.
Andy: Well, it happens everyday, both in real life and in the Milky Way.
Narrator: The end of this binary star system means life for the hypervelocity star continues as it cruises past other galaxies.
But what fate awaits its companion? It's been captured by the universe's supreme executioner; a super massive black hole.
The star might safely orbit around it for a while, but with a black hole, it's only a matter of time.
And to see what that ending brings, we have to go into the abyss itself.
how the bell tolls for everything in the cosmos, and also how rebirth isn't far behind.
But all of this destruction pales in comparison to the gravitational death grip of the universe's biggest graveyards; black holes.
Andy: If you find yourself starting to fall into a black hole, you can just kiss your ass goodbye because you are done.
There is nothing that can save you.
Narrator: We could never re-create any of the intense forces surrounding a black hole here on earth, but at the University of Colorado at Boulder, inside this concrete bunker, one of the largest centrifuges in the U.
S.
can multiple the earth's gravity up to 200 times.
So we can see what happens when gravity turns killer, and Sigrid Close is getting that rare chance.
Sigrid: Wow, this is so cool.
Nate: Yes, you're standing in the centrifuge now.
It's a 36-foot diameter room.
This arm spins around.
Anything we've placed on the basket will experience the G-force.
Sigrid: Can you explain what a G-force is? Nate: A G-force is the acceleration due to Earth's gravity.
Narrator: One "G" is what we feel just standing on earth.
Some of the fastest rollercoaster's hit 5 g's for a moment, and fighter pilots can withstand up to 10 g's with special training.
But this centrifuge ups the ante.
Nate: When we hit 200 G's, this arm is spinning three revolutions per second.
Sigrid: So can we actually test it now? Nate: Yes.
Sigrid: Alright great, lets do it.
I'm curious, what happens to the human torso when it's subjected to a lot of G's, so I'd like to use this turkey as an experiment to test in your chamber.
Narrator: Since we'd never put a human inside this and the average torso weighs about 50 pounds, our substitute victim is a 25-pound turkey, and on top, the 15-pound lid, and two 5-pound weights.
It all adds up to a chance to see what happens to flesh and bones in the face of relentless gravity.
Man: Sigrid, would you like to hit the run button? Sigrid: I would love to do this.
I get to smoosh the turkey.
Nate: We are now up above 10 G's and you can see the turkey is compressing quite a bit.
Sigrid: So the turkey's feeling some pain? Nate: Yeah.
Narrator: Passing 25g's, our human body stand-in appears to be holding on for dear life.
Sigrid: How many G's are we up to now? Nate: We are now up to about 40 G's.
Ken: Well, at 70 G's, we would now be expecting 1,750 pounds total weight.
Nate: My guess is the ribcage has already collapsed.
Sigrid: I think it's time to put the turkey out of its misery.
Let's stop this and go check it out.
Ken: Alright.
Sigrid: Okay, let's get our turkey out of the oven.
Nate: Hoping this runs out onto me.
Sigrid: It is disgusting.
Nate: Let's pull it out, see what it looks like.
Parts are moving that shouldn't be moving.
Sigrid: I've been a vegetarian for a long time, so I'm not used to seeing juicy bits of blood and dead carcass hanging about, so it was a little hard.
Nate: It does feel looser than when I put it in.
Um, it has some new joints.
Sigrid: Oh, sick! Do you see that? Narrator: If this were a human body, the ribs likely would have been crushed around 30 G's, and the arteries in the heart would have started to tear at 50 g's.
Luckily, most people black out at 5 g's, within 5 seconds.
Sigrid: I have to say, this is the grossest experiment that I personally have ever been a part of.
I don't want to do this again.
Narrator: At around 70 G's, the human torso wouldn't stand a chance.
But falling into a black hole is only one way to go.
Narrator: Even if you were just orbiting a black hole, you could be ripped apart by the immense power of something called tidal forces.
David: A black hole has an amazing amount of gravitational force near it, and it's so dramatic that, for example, my feet would feel a very different gravitational force than my head.
So as I fell into a black hole, I would be stretched into spaghetti.
Narrator: So what would happen if you were actually approaching one of these monsters? Now, physicists have a way to travel inside one and see just what happens in our galaxy's biggest burial ground.
with destruction and rebirth, we've witnessed the crushing power of extreme gravity.
But real life black holes possess far more gravity than what we can imitate on earth.
What's it like to fall into an actual black hole? Sigrid Close is about to find out.
Inside the Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado, professor Andrew Hamilton will guide Sigrid through a simulated journey into the black hole at the center of the milky way.
4 million times the mass our sun, it's the largest black hole in the galaxy.
Andrew: Everything that you're looking at here is not really an artist's impression, but the best science that we have at the present time.
Sigrid: Andrew, where are we at here? What am I seeing? Andrew: We're in orbit around a black hole.
Its radius is about 10 times the radius of the sun, so it's pretty gigantic on the sky.
Sigrid: So what is this wave-like activity that I'm seeing? Andrew: A real black hole is usually not isolated.
It's surrounded by gas and other stuff that it feeds on.
Narrator: If anything starts to fall in, it can't escape once it reaches the edge of the abyss, called the event horizon.
Andrew: This is the horizon.
This is the point of no return.
Sigrid: Can you actually take us into a black hole? Andrew: Sigrid, do you know this is a one-way trip? Let's go.
Narrator: After you cross the event horizon, your mass becomes part of the black hole itself.
Sigrid: Andrew, so we're actually at the end of our journey.
We have been vaporized? Andrew: Yes, I'm afraid so.
Sigrid: But it's not black.
Andrew: There is a myth that once you've fallen through the event horizon of a black hole that you go into a place which is totally black and that's the end of it.
Well, that's not true.
Sigrid: The last thing that I see before I die is light, because it's not black inside a black hole because all the light's getting sucked in.
So you're at this pinpoint of light and you see these beautiful white streaks emanating out.
It's quite pretty.
Narrator: So, like everything else in the universe, a black hole has a surprise ending.
What you might think is cold and dead is actually a treasury of matter and light on the inside.
But even the dominance of a black hole is not the biggest downfall in the universe.
What can surpass it? The complete deformation of an entire galaxy.
Sigrid: We know that galaxies live in these things called clusters a whole bunch of galaxies together.
But between the galaxies, there isn't just the vacuum of space.
You actually have gas, and that gas has enough energy behind it that can actually exceed the gravitational energy of the galaxy and can distort its shape.
Narrator: It's a decimating process called, "Ram Pressure Stripping.
" So how does a galaxy strip? As it races through space, it passes through the intensely hot x-ray emitting gas of the cluster.
Powerful winds slash through it, ripping away gas, which can prevent future star formation and leave the galaxy disfigured.
But in the gas that's been stripped away, sometimes new life can be created in the form of a new star.
Andy: If you're on a planet around one of those stars, your night sky would look very different from how ours looks on Earth.
On Earth, everything we see in the night sky is a star, but if you were outside of your galaxy, you wouldn't see any stars in the night sky.
Everything you see would be a galaxy.
And in fact, the night sky would be dominated by the huge presence of the galaxy your star system used to call home.
David: Why do we study all of these things the life and death of things, objects, stars, galaxies, ourselves? Why, why do we do all that? Andy: New life can only happen out of death, and this is happening continuously every day in the universe.
David: You want to be connected to a bigger universe and all of these analogies the cycles of life, the cycle of material, how the universe works.
We've become something that's much bigger than ourselves.