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The Sky at Night - Space Mysteries
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00:00Space. It's fast, mysterious, and sometimes just plain weird.
00:10It keeps us up at night asking the big questions.
00:14Will I be on time?
00:19But what is time anyway?
00:24Where am I even going?
00:26Tonight, we're teaming up with two other curious minds, Hannah Fry and Dara O'Brien, to tackle the space mysteries that have you scratching your head.
00:38So, the main thing about Wolverine is, where do the blades go?
00:44Yeah, I know, and is he just not uncomfortable all the time?
00:46Hi!
00:47Hello, how are you?
00:48How are you doing?
00:49Nice to meet you.
00:50Hi.
00:51Hey, how are you?
00:52Thanks for having us.
00:54I think we're currently on your show, but then you're really on our show.
00:56I see.
00:57OK.
00:58Are we sure? There's more of us though, aren't there?
01:00It's all democracy.
01:03Buckle up for a cosmic chat about the weird, the wonderful, and the possibly extraterrestrial.
01:10Up to you, George.
01:19We had a long discussion earlier as to whether this was a sky at night meets curious cases, or curious cases meets the sky at night.
01:24There was some fisticuffs back today.
01:26Yeah.
01:27I think you won.
01:28Look at that.
01:29.
01:30.
01:35.
01:35.
01:37.
01:38.
01:58Well, hello and welcome to a special edition of Curious Cases where we're going to do things
02:09a little bit differently tonight because Dara and I are currently in the BBC Radio Theatre
02:14at London's Broadcasting House and we have an audience.
02:16We are going to tackle quite a few of your questions on one single theme, space mysteries and to help us out we have called on some people who know their way around the universe, the presenters from The Sky at Night.
02:36Yes, the longest winning science program in the world, older than Blue Peter, Coronet Street and Doctor Who's 68 years old, The Sky at Night is now.
02:48Wow, what an amazing guest for this evening. Welcome to all of you.
02:51Do you know how special The Sky at Night is, Dara? They had an asteroid named after them, after their show. What was it called, your asteroid?
02:59It's Asteroid 57424 Calum Noctu, which is sort of Latin for The Sky at Night, but the number was the broadcast date of the first episode.
03:08And it looks like a dot. I've seen it in a telescope.
03:13Calum Noctu, that sounds very fancy, doesn't it? I looked up what Curious Cases would be if it was in Latin.
03:17What is it?
03:18It's Curiosa Casibus.
03:20They've got one named after me.
03:22Have you?
03:23Yeah, I do.
03:24Oh, here we go.
03:25Am I the only one?
03:26I've got a full rank in the room.
03:27Yeah, it's Asteroid 4901.
03:29And it's just called O'Brien, which is Latin for Dara O'Brien.
03:34What does yours look like through a telescope?
03:36Mine is a binary system.
03:38Oh, you're just showing.
03:40I mean, I was kind of forced into it, but it is very much my brag.
03:44Yeah, it is.
03:45It's a really interesting system.
03:46There's actually papers about mine.
03:47Okay, well.
03:48I got a pretty good one.
03:50And also, it's not going to wipe out life on Earth.
03:52And that's kind of a, that's an upside.
03:54Yeah, that's also a flex.
03:56Yeah.
03:57Dara O'Brien's coming in.
03:58He's going to wipe out the Earth.
03:59He's not good.
04:00I don't think you'd get one really good week of publicity out.
04:03After that's downhill.
04:04No, you know, honestly.
04:05I'd be on everything.
04:06You'd booked on everything.
04:07Graham Norton, finally return my calls.
04:09Okay, over the past few weeks, we've been asking you to send in your questions about
04:14space mysteries.
04:15And we're kicking off with Ariane in Ireland, who asked, what sound do stars make?
04:20All right.
04:21Shout out to the literalists who will go, oh, it's space.
04:24There's no sound in space.
04:25Like whatever.
04:26George, why is this a brilliant question?
04:27It's totally a brilliant question because stars make sounds.
04:30So they have sound waves travelling through them.
04:33And we actually detect these sound waves on the surface of stars.
04:36And the field study of this is called astro seismology.
04:39So, yeah, it's really, really cool because we can look at the waves as we detect them.
04:44And it tells us something about how big a star is or what it's made of or how dense it is.
04:50Unfortunately, though, because of the vacuum of space and all, those sound waves can't travel
04:55to us as sound waves.
04:56But, you know, we can detect them still by looking at the light.
04:58It makes the star wobble.
04:59It makes the starlight wobble.
05:00And do we ever turn those measurements into a sound wave we can hear?
05:04Yeah, absolutely.
05:05So you just take any wave and you say, this is what it would sound like if it was a sound wave of the same kind of shape and frequency.
05:11So, yeah, sonification of stars is definitely a thing.
05:14What's also really cool is that, like, they work, the stars work really similar to instruments.
05:18So, you know, like, small stars are like flutes and big stars are like trombones.
05:23Like an orchestra.
05:24Yeah, exactly.
05:25You've brought in some space sounds to play for us because you've picked different forms of intergalactic audio to play for us.
05:32Maggie, what did you bring in?
05:34Well, because I wanted to actually go for something that is actually a sound.
05:38Yeah.
05:39And the Cassini-Huygens space mission was a mission to Saturn.
05:42And Cassini went in orbit around Saturn, got some great data.
05:45But Huygens was a little probe made by the European Space Agency.
05:48And it actually landed on this moon, Titan.
05:51And as it actually fell through the atmosphere, because there was an atmosphere and there was a medium to carry the sound, we could actually listen to it.
05:59And I think this is a small section of the end as it actually sort of lands.
06:03I am, as always in these situations, wary of building it up too much.
06:07I know.
06:08I know.
06:10A symphony.
06:11Let's take a moment.
06:12A symphony.
06:13I've not heard this, but I'm taking a wild guess that everyone's imagination is probably imagining something maybe more majestic than we're about to play here.
06:20That's going to be right.
06:21Come on.
06:22It's okay.
06:23Yeah.
06:24Okay.
06:25So this is the sound of the Huygens probe landing on Titan.
06:29Manage your expectations, everybody.
06:31That was very good.
06:38That was very good.
06:39Can we turn this into a competitive thing?
06:41Ooh.
06:44Giving that a 7 out of 10.
06:48All right, George, what sound did you choose?
06:50Can we hear mine first and then see if you can figure out what it is?
06:53Ooh.
06:54Oh, twist.
06:55Okay.
06:56Tease camp.
06:57All right.
06:58Okay, here it is.
06:59Was it a space elephant?
07:15No.
07:16Was it a buried choir?
07:18To me, that sounds like utter despair.
07:24Yeah.
07:25It's not an upbeat noise.
07:27Right?
07:28This is actually a sonification of a black hole at the center of a galaxy cluster.
07:33And so, like, if you can picture those really cool images that we have of black holes.
07:37And what they've done is kind of, like, swept around and, like, made the profile of the wave into a sound.
07:44So this is the sound of kind of sweeping around a black hole.
07:47And it just sounds like the despair at the end of the universe.
07:51Mmm.
07:52I love it.
07:53Absolutely.
07:54Yay!
07:55Yay!
07:56Hey, you know what, George?
07:57Nothing says light entertainment.
07:59Like, the impending death of falling into a black hole.
08:01So, you know.
08:03You've got an eight out of ten.
08:04So, did I?
08:05I got an eight out of ten.
08:06Damn.
08:07Upbeat and chilly.
08:08Never wins.
08:09Oh, sorry.
08:10Yeah.
08:11You went for the kind of big smiler.
08:12It doesn't work.
08:13Yeah.
08:14Existential despair that we got from that was too good.
08:17Chris, what are you about?
08:18Well, I have spared no expense.
08:20And I thought we'd go for the grandest and most important sound of all.
08:24So, just after the Big Bang, when the universe was in a hot, dense state, there was enough matter around that you could have sound waves propagating through the universe.
08:32And we can still see the effects of this in something called the cosmic microwave background, which is the oldest light of all.
08:37So, that means we know what sound waves were there, and we can work out what the spectrum is.
08:42And so, that is the big sound.
08:44Look, he's built it up.
08:45He's built it up.
08:46He's built it up.
08:47Go on, go on then.
08:48So, this is the whole universe as an instrument.
08:53Who did it?
08:54It's sort of space ASMR.
08:57So, the reason it sounds terrible is that you had all these frequencies at once.
09:02So, the point is, the universe didn't just have one note playing.
09:06It was all of them, so you get this sort of white noise.
09:09But that was the whole universe.
09:10Well, ten for honesty.
09:12Yeah.
09:13Ten for sound.
09:14I think you oversold it.
09:15Do you know the bit on the M25 where it changes from a camera camera?
09:19Yes.
09:21No, I think George wins on that round entirely.
09:23I think George wins.
09:24Do you agree, everybody?
09:25Thank you so much.
09:26Yeah.
09:27There we go.
09:32Well, obviously, we are not going to do a show about space mysteries without talking about
09:35aliens.
09:36And this is a question in from Richard in Whitley Bay.
09:39Venus and Jupiter are deemed unseatable for life.
09:42But aren't there points in the upper atmospheres where the temperatures and pressures are similar
09:46to where life is found on Earth?
09:48Could airship drones be sent to look for exotic simple forms of life?
09:52So there's two parts to this, obviously.
09:54George, what exactly are airship drones and why would we be sending them to Jupiter or
09:59Venus?
10:00So airship drones, think a balloon, but they're kind of robotic and you can operate them like
10:05drones remotely.
10:06There have been previously kind of balloons dropped through Venus's atmosphere and they
10:10want to do it again because they want to measure what's there.
10:12I think the issue, though, maybe with sending something like this to Jupiter is that it very
10:16rapidly, like, the pressure gets out of hand.
10:18So, you know, the whole thing would just...
10:21That's the technical term.
10:23It is the technical term.
10:24Yeah.
10:25And I think for Venus, like, you've also got to be careful.
10:27There's a lot of sulfur.
10:28It's a bit acidic.
10:29So, yeah, you've got to design your airship drone pretty carefully.
10:33I mean, you're basically trying to float a hot air balloon over a death planet.
10:36A little bit.
10:37Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:38A little bit.
10:39Yeah.
10:40Maybe more high tech.
10:42There is an exciting history, though, of a series of Russian probes that attempted
10:45to land on Venus with almost hilarious misadventures.
10:49Yeah, they sent out one picture and then they melt.
10:52Yeah, it just melts.
10:53And the temperature and pressure, yeah, is so high.
10:54I think it was 23 minutes that it survived on the surface.
10:57So, one picture and then just melted away because it's horrendous.
11:01Okay, these exotic life forms that we're describing, I mean, what do you think?
11:05Do you think that there could be some genuinely on Venus or Jupiter or elsewhere?
11:10There is this layer in Venus's atmosphere which is about room temperature and pressure.
11:14It's still acidic, as you say.
11:16And what's interesting is that's the layer that our mate Jane Greaves, a few years ago,
11:22announced that she'd found a chemical called phosphine in.
11:25And phosphine on Earth is made mostly, frankly, by penguins.
11:28It's a biosync.
11:29It's made by life.
11:30It's in penguin poo, amongst other things.
11:33And so, the fact that we found it on Venus, maybe it's the product of some volcanism or some weird chemical process.
11:39But it could also be life hanging on in this region.
11:43Venus penguins!
11:44Venus penguins.
11:45Very, very small Venus penguins.
11:47Venus penguins part, specifically.
11:50We always talk about life, but we put conditions of life as we know it.
11:54And I think that life could be so varied or so different from what we anticipate.
11:59Just to name drop, I did have this conversation with David Attenborough once.
12:02Sure.
12:03As you do.
12:04Well, you know, dames.
12:05I imagine we'll have dinner together every week.
12:07We all stick together.
12:09It was a number of years ago.
12:11And I was having a debate.
12:13I feel terrible because I was having an argument with our national treasure.
12:17And saying that I don't know if we actually need water for life.
12:20Life as we know it, yes.
12:22But maybe life not as we know it.
12:25And so, how do you define life?
12:27There might be a whole variety of life that we just don't anticipate.
12:31I don't want microbes, though.
12:33I want little green men.
12:35Luckily for Hannah, our friends at BBC Ideas have been looking at two approaches to finding them.
12:43Hello?
12:44Can you hear us?
12:45I can hear you.
12:46Can you hear me?
12:47Hello?
12:48Is there anybody out there?
12:50Well, that's the question, isn't it?
12:52Has been for as long as anyone can remember.
12:55Are we alone?
12:59It might sound like science fiction, but the universe is so vast.
13:03Many scientists think it's unrealistic to imagine we're the only form of life in it.
13:08The universe is full of natural radio waves generated by stars and planets and galaxies.
13:14But that emission is really very smooth.
13:16That's Mike Garrett, an astrophysicist and active member of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
13:22Artificial radio waves are very spiky because they convey information.
13:28So we're looking for anomalies, a signature of potentially other intelligent civilizations out there broadcasting to the universe.
13:36What SETI assumes is that the aliens are very motivated, that they're going out of their way to send us intentional signals for our benefit.
13:43And that's Douglas Bakoach, the founder of METI, which stands for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
13:50They think listening is not enough.
13:52Maybe we should do the heavy lifting by reaching out first. Someone has to make the first move.
13:57Making the first move in any relationship has its risks. Opening oneself up to rejection. Or worse.
14:05Stories of alien fleets visiting Earth with the sole intention of wiping us out are common ground for science fiction.
14:12But there is a theory that if we're not careful, this could become science fact.
14:17I think one of the things that Stephen Hawking, a famous cosmologist, has said about this idea of transmitting signals is that it might not turn out very well for us here on this planet.
14:29Just like it didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans when Columbus first settled there.
14:35But METI is amongst those who see this argument as a red herring.
14:39It's too late to hide. We're already known in the universe.
14:44Douglas and his colleagues believe that through TV and radio broadcasts, not to mention mobile phone towers,
14:50Earth has been leaking radiation into space for decades.
14:54This leakage is exactly what SETI look for as signs of life elsewhere.
14:59So it stands to reason that if aliens are listening, they could probably already hear us.
15:06Though not against communicating per se, Mike argues that we need to think much more carefully about what we want to say and how we want to say it.
15:17Who speaks for Earth? And who has the right?
15:20When I see a lot of these signals being sent, they don't represent all over this planet.
15:25You know, just arbitrarily sending signals out into space is not very democratic.
15:30The first message sent into space for the benefit of aliens was in 1974, more than 50 years ago.
15:38It became known as the Arecibo message.
15:41And so far, we've received nothing in return, which returns us to Enrico Fermi's question, where is everybody?
15:48There is a conundrum there, right, that when we turned on the opportunity to listen into space, it was strange that there wasn't a cacophony of sounds.
15:57Yes, I think the space age was a bit of a disappointment that we found that Mars just had craters, that Venus was this hellhole and so on.
16:05And I think people just expect it to be obvious that there was life in the cosmos.
16:10And it's not, but the universe is a big place.
16:13Actually, it's just a tiny sort of diversion.
16:16Last time I met David Attenborough, I was, no, no, because we were both doing the pre-Christmas selling books on radio interviews.
16:26And I had some kids book out of the time for a bit of space.
16:29And I, when he sat down, we chatted away from that.
16:31And I said, by the way, I should tell you, the book I've written, yeah, it has some stuff about animals in it.
16:36And Attenborough genuinely leaned in and went, you have planets, I have animals.
16:41That was good.
16:46Thank you very much.
16:47Thank you very much.
16:52Meti will continue reaching out to those planets that orbit within what's known as the Goldilocks Zone.
16:58Not too hot, not too cold, just right for potential life.
17:03Meanwhile, Mike and Seti will keep an ear to the sky, advancing techniques to pick up signals from other worlds.
17:10And maybe one day, just maybe.
17:13If we detect a signal and we know that we are not alone in the universe, I think that should make people happy.
17:19If we discover another civilization and they're very different from us, we'll realize actually how similar we are to our neighbors.
17:32Next up, we've got a question from one of our younger listeners. See what you make of this.
17:36Hello, my name is Molon. I'm 11 and I live in Croydon.
17:40My curious question came to mind when I was watching a video about the edge of space.
17:44And I thought, what is the edge of space?
17:46What's it made of and how can we perceive it?
17:49Space must have an edge if it's expanding, right?
17:52But then how can it be infinite?
17:54Hmm.
17:55Deep, deep.
17:57Okay.
17:58Marlon is already the boss level of this.
18:00I don't even know.
18:02All right, Maggie, give us, like, at least a rope barrier and a bouncer.
18:05Oh, yes, yes.
18:06You know what I mean? That's what I want.
18:07The answer is, we don't know.
18:08There.
18:09I think, because it's trying to understand sort of the concept of the universe.
18:14And so, our current understanding of the universe is it began with something called the Big Bang.
18:20So, a singularity expanded out to create space and time.
18:24And so, if you ask what is beyond space and time, it's a very hard concept to grapple.
18:30We don't know where its limits are.
18:32With things like the James Webb Space Telescope, we look at sort of light coming from the early universe.
18:37But we can't go beyond that because the light won't reach us, if you see what I mean.
18:41So, yes, we are limited in what we know and what we can see.
18:45And we interpret that, but we believe it began and it's expanding outwards.
18:49Any guesses, though, Chris?
18:50Well, we do have this edge to the observable universe.
18:52So, as long as you're a practical astronomer, this question's easy to answer.
18:55Because the edge of the observable universe is the bit whose light is only just reaching us.
19:01So, we can see the bit of the universe which, in the last 13.8 billion years, has had time to send us light.
19:07And that's, you could put a line around that.
19:09If we froze the expansion of the universe, we can say what part of the universe that is.
19:14It's a guess, but the guess is that we live in this tiny fraction of the whole.
19:18So, we've got this little bubble that we can see.
19:20That has an edge.
19:21But the whole thing, well, that could easily be infinite.
19:23And the thing that's impossible to get your head around, I think intuitively,
19:27is the idea that our universe could have started in this Big Bang, this point in time,
19:32but it could have been infinite then, it could still be infinite now, and it's expanding ever since.
19:36I don't have an intuitive answer to it.
19:38It's just the maths tells us that.
19:40Wow.
19:41Great question.
19:42Unsatisfying answer.
19:43Yes, I know.
19:45We have a lot of cosmological questions.
19:47A lot of questions about the shape of the universe.
19:49This one is from Steven.
19:50When everything was created in the Big Bang, it all exploded outward and is still going.
19:57So why is the universe not shaped like a big donut with nothing in the middle?
20:02There's no central point, presumably.
20:03There's no one central point that we've pushed away from.
20:06Because I think the idea of an explosion is a bit of a misunderstanding.
20:09You have been saying explosion for 80 years now.
20:14You've been going out of a...
20:15Big Bang.
20:16Rapid expansion, not explosion.
20:18There's an explosion in and fires out.
20:20And it's sort of a matter starts here and then it's thrown outwards.
20:23But I think this is sort of the singularity, but it expands rapidly, but it expands outwards.
20:29So it isn't like an explosion where all the matter that was there is thrown outwards,
20:32but it's the matter itself is expanding outwards.
20:35And so I think getting...
20:37So then it's less likely to be sort of a donut, a toroid.
20:41It's more likely to be sort of a continuum, but sort of expanding outwards.
20:45But on the name, actually, the BBC is to blame for the name, the fact it's called the Big Bang.
20:50In this very building, Fred Hoyle in 1948, I think, who...
20:56Fred Hoyle was a Cambridge astronomer who didn't believe in the Big Bang Theory.
20:59And he gave a talk about modern cosmology on the radio, and he wanted to disparage it.
21:04So he said, this Big Bang Theory, and the name stuck.
21:08So it was actually named by the theory's opponent, so it's his fault.
21:11But it's so memorable, so it stuck.
21:13In the 90s, American Astronomy magazine got so fed up with this explosion problem
21:18that they had a competition for people to suggest other names for the Big Bang.
21:23And about...
21:24Bang-y but McBang.
21:25Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what would happen now.
21:27But 10,000 people wrote in, and at the end, they had an expert panel judge them,
21:30and they decided that Big Bang was the least worst name.
21:33And so Big Bang won with horrendous space kablooey was second.
21:38Which still has the explosion problem.
21:40Yes.
21:41Yeah. So it's not an explosion, it's a stretching of space.
21:44And that's how you should think about it.
21:45Nonetheless, a donut is different to a sphere because its curvature is different.
21:49We can estimate the curvature of space.
21:51Is this donut-shaped?
21:53Like, there is a theory about this, right?
21:55Because, you know, so the four-dimensional fabric of space-time,
21:59people do actually research, you know, is it flat? Is it curved?
22:02And if it's curved, is it like a saddle? Is it open? Is it closed?
22:05And some people think that it might be shaped like a donut, a torus,
22:08which would be kind of like, you know, going around like that.
22:11Which is pretty cool because then it means that, like,
22:13as you travel through the universe, eventually you'd come back on yourself.
22:16Like if you're inside a video game and it's like, you know, you can kind of go in a loop.
22:19But it's important to say that we know that if it's a donut, it's a very big donut.
22:23Very big.
22:24And that we live only on a small part of the donut.
22:26Yeah. So we're not ruling out the donut.
22:28We're not, but we see that the bit of the universe we can see is pretty flat.
22:31Yep.
22:32And so therefore, for it to be on a donut, we have to only have a tiny bit of the donut.
22:36The same way that if you stood on a football, you'd notice it was round.
22:39You stand on the earth, you have to do a bit more work.
22:41If you stand on something a billion times the size of the earth,
22:43it's very difficult to tell that you're on a sphere at all.
22:46And so we know that our universe appears to be flat,
22:49so you can have these exotic shapes, your donuts or your crumpets
22:53or whatever it is that you want the universe to be like.
22:56But we only see a tiny bit of it.
22:57Are we eliminating what you hinted at there that it would be enclosed?
23:02I mean, like Chris says, we can't fully rule it out, but it's really unlikely.
23:06It looks pretty flat.
23:07So, you know, either the universe really is so much bigger than we can even imagine
23:12and everything that we can see for billions of light years is only a tiny bit
23:17or it's flat as a pancake.
23:18So we could go for pancake universe.
23:19I really like the idea that in maybe a hundred years' time
23:22people will be sitting in this theatre and going,
23:24no, they call it a pancake universe because the BBC...
23:28It wasn't an insult, actually.
23:30Yeah.
23:31OK, so maybe a donut, maybe a pancake, definitely some sort of baked good.
23:35All right.
23:36That is almost all we have time for.
23:37Have we solved anything?
23:39No.
23:40No, no.
23:41That's astronomy.
23:42Do we ever resolve anything?
23:44No, but look, they've been going for 68 years.
23:46They need to go for another 68.
23:48So that's fine by me.
23:53While the cosmos remains mysterious, the skies never fail to inspire.
23:58So we can't finish up without Pete taking us through some of the upcoming sites.
24:05Since the clocks went back last month, darkness arrives an hour earlier.
24:09And that gives us some great opportunities to enjoy the night sky.
24:14Early evening, we've still got the stars of summer, including the Summer Triangle,
24:18which includes the impressive constellation of Cygnus the Swan.
24:22Now, in the core of Cygnus the Swan, you've got an asterism called the Northern Cross.
24:27Later in the evening, you've got the stars of winter beginning to appear.
24:31And that also includes the magnificent constellation of Orion the Hunter, which is a great navigational aid.
24:38And from Orion, we can find other constellations such as Gemini the twins.
24:45To find Gemini from Orion, identify the two brightest stars in Orion, Rigel in the bottom right and Betelgeuse in the upper left.
24:57Extend the line they make up and left for twice the distance.
25:06And you'll arrive at the pair of stars, which represents the heads of the twins Castor and Pollux.
25:13Gemini is one of those unusual constellations that actually looks like what it's supposed to represent.
25:21Well, with a bit of imagination at least.
25:23From the UK, it gets to its highest position in the sky between mid-November and mid-December in the early hours of the morning.
25:32Now, that puts it in a position which lifts it well above any turbulent atmosphere, which you'll find lower down,
25:39which makes it perfect for stargazing.
25:43Gemini is currently home to the gas giant Jupiter.
25:47It's easy to find, being the bright star-like object located just below Castor and Pollux.
25:54And there is a treat starting to come into view.
25:57Due to a Jovian equinox approaching in December 2026,
26:02Jupiter's moon Callisto will be seen appearing to cross Jupiter's disk for the next two years or so.
26:09A great time to watch is in the early hours of the 21st of November,
26:13when you'll be able to see the shadows of Io and Callisto crossing Jupiter's disk at the same time.
26:21Another treat coming at the end of the year is the Geminid meteor shower.
26:26As its name suggests, the shower's radiant is in Gemini,
26:30the radiant being the small area of sky that associated meteors appear to emanate from.
26:36The shower is active between the 8th and 16th of December,
26:41the peak occurring on the night of the 13th into the 14th of December.
26:45With the moon past last quarter and 12 hours of night sky darkness,
26:50it has the potential for a great show this year.
26:53The night sky is something which all of us can enjoy,
26:56so whether you're just looking up at beautiful stars above you
27:00or you're out in the early hours with a telescope and camera,
27:03I hope you get some great clear skies.
27:06As ever, there is an extended online star guide which is available on our website,
27:13which is at www.bbc.co.uk forward slash sky at night.
27:21We love seeing any images you've taken.
27:23These are some of the highlights from what you've recently sent in via our Flickr account.
27:28Well, that's all for this year's series of the sky at night.
27:41We've had a fun packed trip across the cosmos covering everything from potentially hazardous asteroids to the expanding universe.
28:00And all our episodes are still available on the BBC iPlayer.
28:04We'll be back with all the latest astronomical news in spring next year.
28:08But until then, happy stargazing and...
28:11Good night!
28:13Good night!
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