00:00The question of what is out there has always followed the money, and in the early 20th century
00:16it headed across the Atlantic to California, where they were enjoying an oil rush.
00:21Oil and railway barons, like Renaissance princes before them, craved the sort of fame that
00:30astronomy could bring.
00:37One philanthropist who had made his money building pipelines and selling hardware helped finance
00:42the next radical shift in our view of the cosmos.
00:48Andy Hooker was persuaded to donate $45,000 towards building the largest telescope the
00:55world had ever seen, and they dragged it up Mount Wilson, this mountain, which is just
01:00outside Los Angeles.
01:10It is a fantastic structure.
01:12Over 100 tons of pipework, hardware and glass, floats on a bed of mercury, allowing it to
01:19compensate for the Earth's rotation.
01:23Isn't that magnificent?
01:27Over 90 years old and still fully operational.
01:39But for this gargantuan telescope to fulfil its true potential, it would need a character
01:44who was also larger than life.
01:48Now, Hubble was a brilliant astronomer, and he had the world's largest telescope.
01:55Now, the thing is, even with a telescope this big, the human eye is just not good enough
02:00to pick up the detail that was needed.
02:06So there was a camera attached to the telescope.
02:10On the 6th of October 1923, Hubble took a photograph that must rank as one of the most significant
02:17photographs ever taken.
02:21This photograph demonstrated for the first time just how vast the universe truly is.
02:28Now Hubble realised that he could prove for the first time that the nebula was actually
02:33a galaxy, and it sat way outside our own galaxy.
02:41Suddenly the human race, our world, our concerns became cosmically insignificant.
02:48We're just one small planet in a vast galaxy that sits amongst billions of other galaxies.
03:03The implications of what they had found were disturbing.
03:06The universe was vast, possibly limitless, but what they did next was even more shocking.
03:14They linked this giant telescope up with a device called a spectrograph, and they pointed
03:20it once more at the skies.
03:23They were hunting for objects which they now believed to be galaxies, and using the spectrograph,
03:28they measured the speed at which those galaxies were either coming towards or away from us.
03:33What they found was the vast majority of these galaxies were actually receding, and some at quite
03:45astonishing speeds of well over a million miles an hour.
03:50So, now the implication of this was obvious.
03:54The universe is expanding.
03:58Now this really blew out of the water the old way of thinking.
04:02Gone forever was the old static stable Newtonian clockwork model.
04:08It seems now we are actually living through a giant cosmic explosion.
04:16It seems our universe had a beginning.
04:23Thirteen billion years ago.
04:27This became known as the Big Bang.
04:32Edwin Hubble never felt he achieved the recognition he craved for his discovery of the vastness of
04:39the cosmos.
04:42But floating high above the Earth is the ultimate tribute to this eccentric astronomer, the Hubble
04:49Space Telescope.
04:53400 years since Galileo ground his first lenses, this is what we use to look at what's out there.
05:03It can peer billions of light years across the universe, back in time, towards the birth of everything.
05:23To the stars, we can't believe in the sky.
05:37The stars which stars the sky in the sky, the stars which are on the sky, the lights by the stars,
05:44the sky in the sky that is on the sky.
