Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Sam Neill takes the viewer on journeys across the universe. In this episode, we made an exploration of the strange and terrifying world of the universe's ultimate monster - the black hole. Where are they - and is our planet in danger?

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.

This new feature-length biographical film tells the extraordinary and dramatic story of the planet's most famous living scientist, told for the first time in his own words and by those closest to him. Made with unique access to his private life, this is an intimate and moving journey into Stephen Hawking's past and present. Interviewees include Stephen Hawking's sister Mary, his ex-wife Jane, carers and students, as well as colleagues such as Roger Penrose, plus Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Jim Carrey, and Sir Richard Branson This inspirational portrait of an iconic figure relates Hawking's incredible personal journey from boyhood underachiever to scientific genius and multi-million-selling author. And it charts how he overcame being diagnosed with motor neurone disease - and being given just two years to live - to make amazing scientific discoveries and become a symbol of triumph over adversity. Born exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo, Hawking grew up in a family some regarded as eccentric. Always asking questions, he was nicknamed 'Einstein' at school. Hawking blossomed at Oxford, although he only spent an hour a day studying. He noticed that he was becoming clumsy and fell over for no apparent reason. He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, but nevertheless started a family and embarked on his academic career, finding himself at the heart of a searing scientific debate about the origins of the universe. And as he lost the use of his body, Hawking had to find new ways to think. He went on to write the huge bestseller A Brief History of Time, and the film reveals the high and lows of his resulting fame and fortune.

There is a strange and mysterious world that surrounds us, a world largely hidden from our senses. The quest to explain the true nature of reality is one of the great scientific detective stories. Clues have been pieced together from deep within the atom, from the event horizon of black holes, and from the far reaches of the cosmos. It may be that we are part of a cosmic hologram, projected from the edge of the universe. Or that we exist in an infinity of parallel worlds. Your reality may never look quite the same again.

There's something very odd going on in space - something that shouldn't be possible. It is as though vast swathes of the universe are being hoovered up by a vast and unseen celestial vacuum cleaner. Sasha Kaslinsky, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon, is understandably nervous: 'It left us quite unsettled and jittery' he says, 'because this is not something we planned to find'. The accidental discovery of what is ominously being called 'dark flow' not only has implications for the destinies of large numbers of galaxies - it also means that large numbers of scientists might have to find a new way of understanding the universe. Dark flow is the latest in a long line of phenomena that have threatened to rewrite the textbooks. Does it herald a new era of understanding, or does it simply mean that everything we know about the universe is wrong?

By our third year, most of us will have learned to count. Once we know how, it seems as if there would be nothing to stop us counting forever. But, while infinity might seem like an perfectly innocent idea, keep counting and you enter a paradoxical world where nothing is as it seems. Mathematicians have discovered there are infinitely many infinities, each one infinitely bigger than the last. And if the universe goes on forever, the consequences are even more bizarre. In an infinite universe, there are infinitely many copies of the Earth and infinitely many copies of you. Older than time, bigger than the universe and stranger than fiction. This is the story of infinity.