Cosmic Journeys

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 M...

Massive solar eruptions take aim at our high-tech society. 93 million miles away... an angry sun vents its rage. Dark regions, called sunspots, appeared unexpectedly on its surface...

Why some tropical storms erupt into monster hurricanes capable of wrecking coastlines. Can they be predicted? Hurricanes are tropical storms that feed on solar heat captured by the...

From the Cassini spacecraft comes one of the greatest photographic collections. Scientists are using it to uncover a trail of clues pointing to the energy sources and complex chemi...

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 somet...

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, ne...

How long will the Universe as we know it survive? The answer depends on whether Stephen Hawking's theory about how black holes decay is right. These strange dense objects are like...

It's the ultimate buddy movie. Pete Conrad and Alan Bean were the second pair of Apollo astronauts to land on the moon. They combined precision with a sense of humor. But it was th...

Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of our Milky Way galaxy. And yet, the clues have been piling up that something imp...

Did Mars long ago develop far enough for life to arise? If so, does anything still live somewhere underground? The search for answers has revealed the forces that long ago doomed t...

What is the search for Earth-like planets telling us about our place in the cosmos? Is our Earth one of countless life-bearing worlds strewn about the galaxy, or is it a rare Garde...

Pandora is the idyllic blue world featured in the movie Avatar. Its location is a real place: Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun and the most likely destination for our fi...

Long ago, from the fires of our Sun's birth, twin planets emerged: Venus and Earth. Nature draped one world in the greens and blues of life, while enveloping the other in acid clou...

What's the hottest place in the universe? What's it like inside a Black Hole? This video climbs the power scales of the universe, from the coldest and bleakest reaches of our galax...

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 ou...

The hunt for planets beyond our solar system has reached a fever pitch. Scientists are beginning to envision what these worlds are like, and in the process, redefining what a plane...

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...

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. The scientists who made this discovery...

Over the next decade, the United States, Japan, India, China, Russia, and even private companies, are planning to send spacecraft to explore the moon. These missions are looking fo...

What are the energy extremes that define our universe? And how much power can the cosmos wield? Climb a ladder of increasingly powerful events, from frigid gas clouds to nuclear ex...

Spy satellites first saw these brief but extremely bright flashes of light in the 1960s. For three decades, gamma ray bursts for deep space were one of the persistent mysteries in...

Join a small team of rocket designers as they open a window into the future of space travel.

The two Voyager spacecraft are part of an ancient quest to push beyond our boundaries... to see what lies beyond the horizon. Now tens of billions of kilometers from Earth, two spa...

There are signs that Earth’s great stores of ice are beginning to melt. With sea levels beginning to rise, scientists are looking back at climates past to see where our planet may...

Follow Dr. Ben Longmier and his team into the rugged Alaskan wilderness on a quest to build a whole new type of rocket engine. Their goal is to test sensitive components by launchi...

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 nuc...

The episode of Cosmic Journeys explores the intersection of paleoclimate and current climate science. Through its turbulent history, Antarctica has played an important role in the...

Are the universe and its physical laws so fine-tuned that the rise of life is inevitable? Or is life a fluke, a lucky roll of cosmic dice? We look for the answer in the rise of two...

Explore the challenges of interstellar flight and the technological possibilities that may one day send us on a long voyage out into the galaxy. What imperatives will define the mi...

This staggeringly visual feast of a documentary Brings cutting-edge findings of modern astronomy to life with state-of-the-art animation, informed by supercomputer simulations of c...

Where do you look to glimpse the birth of a solar system like ours? Our sun is thought to have formed along with a range of stellar siblings. This star cluster likely moved out on...

Since its launch 25 Years ago, the Hubble Telescope has returned images of unprecedented beauty of a dynamic and changing universe.

May 22nd, 2011. A powerful tornado cut a mile-wide swath through Joplin, Missouri, the costliest and one of the deadliest tornado disasters ever. What did scientists learn when the...

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 re...

Astronomers are probing the high-energy cosmic frontier with a series of key missions: Fermi, Swift, Chandra, NuSTAR, and Hubble.

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 pare...

A startling collision in an ancient galaxy slews Earth's largest telescopes to a spot in the Hydra constellation. Two rapidly spinning neutron stars have violently merged to form a...