Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Discoveries of new planets have revealed countless worlds much stranger than Earth. Some of these strange worlds don’t have stars; others are made out of diamonds. Will we ever find a planet like Earth, or are these distant worlds stranger than fiction?

A stellar explosion, the supernova is the sensational death of a star. It can shine as bright as 100 billion Suns and radiate as much energy as the Sun would emit over 10 billion years. Jets of high-energy light and matter are propelled into space and can cause massive Gamma Ray Bursts and emit intense X-ray radiation for thousands of years. Astronomers believe that this process creates the very building blocks of planets, people and plants. Meet the world's leading Supernova hunters, and take a look at recorded supernovas throughout history.

The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is getting ready to feast. A gas cloud three times the size of our planet has strayed within the gravitational reach of our nearest supermassive black hole. And across the globe, telescopes are being trained on the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, some 27,000 light years from Earth, in the expectation of observing this unique cosmic spectacle. For cosmic detectives across the Earth, it is a unique opportunity. For the first time in the history of science, they hope to observe in action the awesome spectacle of a feeding supermassive black hole.

A dynamic journey behind the scenes of the next step in the evolution of telescopes: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. A new generation has been inspired to design and build this massive instrument, which is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope and will be a veritable time machine, capable of looking back on the origins of our universe and identifying signatures of potential life on planets far outside our solar system". With unprecedented access to the people and technologies that power its creation, including astrophysicists, engineers at Northrop Grumman, and personnel from NASA'S Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute, the operations center for Hubble and Webb, Telescope spotlights the high-stakes mission of building this massive new scientific instrument. The film is a comprehensive look at the dynamic history of 400 years of telescopes starting with Galileo in 1609. The Webb is the next great telescope in society's ongoing mission to see farther into the universe and answer fundamental questions that have haunted mankind from the beginning of time. Directed by Oscar nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn

What sort of alien civilizations might exist in the vastness of space? Terra is the fictional world imagined in Episode 4, a planet nine billion years old, twice as old as Earth. Old enough that a truly advanced intelligence could evolve. It was once a fertile world, now it is barren. But life can still thrive here in artificial domes. Over time, they've evolved not to need their bodies. They exist only as neural tissue. They never age, they never die. They're monitored and maintained by robots.
If alien civilizations are statistically so likely, why haven't astronomers found any sign of them? Where is everyone? Every time we look at an individual star, that's like dropping a bucket in the ocean. We're going to have to look at a lot of stars and to search through a lot of data until we find the clue that leads us to another civilization.

Do other worlds tremble and heave with geological life? On Mars, we found a volcano to dwarf Mount Everest. On the moons of the giants our understanding of volcanoes was changed forever.