Universe · 13.8 billion years
The Entire History of the Universe
If the whole history of the universe fitted into a single year, the Big Bang would happen on 1 January and all of recorded human history would fit into the last 11 seconds of 31 December.
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What it covers
The documentary opens with the cosmic calendar: the universe's 13.8 billion years turned into a single year. On that scale it travels through the Big Bang, the first light we can still measure, the first stars and the formation of galaxies.
Then it explains how stars forged the atoms we are made of, what black holes are, how the Sun was born and what we know today about the more than six thousand planets found beyond the solar system. It ends with the future: the end of the Sun, the collision with Andromeda and the ideas about how the universe itself might end.
Many of the images are real photographs from the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes.
Chapters and timeline
Select a chapter to jump to that moment in the documentary.
Sources
The specific facts in the documentary (dates, sites, figures) come from these sources.
- Age of the universe, 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years: Planck Collaboration 2020, Astronomy & Astrophysics · doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201833910
- The expansion of the universe: Hubble 1929, PNAS · doi:10.1073/pnas.15.3.168
- The cosmic microwave background: Penzias and Wilson 1965, The Astrophysical Journal · doi:10.1086/148307
- Galaxy MoM-z14, 280 million years after the Big Bang: Naidu et al., The Open Journal of Astrophysics · arXiv:2505.11263
- The 2017 neutron star collision: Abbott et al. 2017, Physical Review Letters · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.161101
- First gravitational waves: Abbott et al. 2016, Physical Review Letters · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102
- Image of the M87 black hole: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration 2019, ApJ Letters · doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7
- Image of Sagittarius A*: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration 2022, ApJ Letters · doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ac6674
- Gaia-Enceladus: Helmi et al. 2018, Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0625-x
- First planet around a Sun-like star: Mayor and Queloz 1995, Nature · doi:10.1038/378355a0
- TRAPPIST-1: Gillon et al. 2017, Nature · doi:10.1038/nature21360
- Phosphorus on Enceladus: Postberg et al. 2023, Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05987-9
- Confirmed exoplanets: NASA Exoplanet Archive · exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu
- The Milky Way and Andromeda: Sawala et al. 2025, Nature Astronomy · doi:10.1038/s41550-025-02563-1
- The expansion is accelerating: Riess et al. 1998, The Astronomical Journal · doi:10.1086/300499; Perlmutter et al. 1999, ApJ · doi:10.1086/307221
- Dark energy may be weakening: DESI Collaboration 2025 · arXiv:2503.14738
About the images
The images are of three kinds: real photographs from NASA, ESA, ESO and the Event Horizon Telescope; scientific illustrations by NASA and ESO of what cannot be photographed; and AI-generated recreations. Researched and reviewed script; produced with the help of AI tools.
