‘NOVA’ PRESENTS ‘UNIVERSE REVEALED’

The five one-hour episodes are as follows:

OCT. 27 — “AGE OF STARS” —

The sun is a constant presence in our lives and has been a life-giving source of light, heat, and energy for 4.6 billion years. Yet we’ve only recently begun to unravel its epic history and discover its place among an even grander cycle of birth, death and renewal that makes this the age of stars. To piece together this stellar saga, “Nova” explores new clues from the Hubble Space Telescope and a heatresistant solar probe that’s designed to fly as close to the sun’s million-degree atmosphere as possible.

NOV. 3 — “MILKY WAY” —

The Milky Way, an ethereal city of stars straddling the night sky, is a constant reminder of our place in the galaxy we call home. It’s so vast that even traveling at the speed of light, it would take about 100,000 years to cross it. But what shaped this giant spiral of stars, gas and dust, and what will be its destiny? “Nova” explores the wonders of galactic archaeology revealed by Gaia, a spacecraft that’s creating a precise 3D map and measuring the motions of over a billion stars in our galaxy. The results are unlocking the turbulent history of our cosmic neighborhood, from its birth in a whirling disk of clouds and dust to colossal collisions with other galaxies.

NOV. 10 — “ALIEN WORLDS” —

For nearly as long as humans have gazed up at the night sky, we’ve wondered whether other life forms and intelligences could be thriving on worlds far beyond our own. Answering that question seemed forever fated to remain pure speculation. But over the last few decades, ultra-sensitive telescopes and dogged detective work have transformed alien planethunting from science fiction into hard fact. “Nova” tells the story of how the first breakthrough discoveries of exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars — were made. Then “Nova” reveals the most tantalizing discovery of all: the super-Earths, situated in the “Goldilocks zone,” just the right distance from their sun where life might be supportable, and with one of them signaling life’s essential ingredient, water, in its atmosphere.

NOV. 17 — “BLACK HOLES” —

Black holes have long challenged the best minds in science and gripped the popular imagination. The most powerful and enigmatic objects known, they can reshape entire galaxies, warp the fabric of space and time, and may even be the key to unlocking the ultimate nature of reality. Yet if we can’t see them, how can we investigate them? “Black Holes” tells the story of how a new generation of high-energy telescopes is bringing these invisible voids to light — notably, the discovery that supermassive black holes millions or even billions of times larger than our sun lurk at the center of nearly every galaxy, including our own.

NOV. 24 — “BIG BANG” —

Many think that the Big Bang is when the universe started and time itself began. But what clues can we discover about this ultimate genesis of everything? And can we ever know what existed before the universe’s birthday? In “Big Bang,” “Nova” winds back the ages with the help of animation based on stunning images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Meet infant galaxies like GN-z11, a mere fraction of the size of our Milky Way but filled with vast and violent blue stars that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Before that — before the coming of visible light itself — stretches the “cosmic Dark Ages,” when the only direct clues are ripples in the radiation picked up by the Planck space telescope.