Cosmos A Spacetime Odyssey

Episode 8 Summary

The constellation of the Pleiades provides a vehicle for us to explore myth, astrophysics, and the sociology of science.

Our distant human ancestors used the Pleiades as a clock to time their planting seasons, making agriculture possible and as a result our species moved indoors and lost sight of them altogether. For the early Celtic people, the Pleiades became a symbol for what we now call Halloween. This open star cluster also played a role in the Native American Kiowa legend of the formation of the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.

When the ancient Greeks looked up at the Pleiades, they also saw Orion lustfully chasing the seven sisters across the sky – a hot pursuit lasting eons.

The modern “sisters of the sun” were a team of early 20th century female astronomers at Harvard, led by two deaf scientists. Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt worked with dozens of women to classify some 400,000 stars. It’s also the story of young British beauty Cecilia Payne, the genius who joined forces with them. Payne’s courageous defiance of the world’s leading astronomer gave us our understanding of the true composition of the stars.

The Ship of the Imagination makes us an eyewitness to the lives and deaths of stars – including our own Sun. We travel through the Window on the Future to experience the last perfect day on Earth… And to the world of a binary star system to witness its own cataclysmic demise.

We venture deep into the Australian outback, away from the light pollution of cities to see the stars as sharply as our ancestors must have seen them. We are searching for Eta Carina, some 7500 light years away, and the evil twin that will gravitationally torment it until it becomes… not a mere supernova, but a hypernova that will one day light up the night in the southern hemisphere like another full moon!

We visit a Tuscan vineyard to see how sunshine is transformed into moonshine.

And finally, a trip to the planet of a star orbiting a globular cluster where a still “more glorious dawn” awaits –- not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise, a morning filled with two hundred billion suns — the rising of the Milky Way.