NOVA delves into the vastness of space to capture moments of high drama in the new NOVA Universe Revealed, a five-part series premiering October 27.

State-of-the-art animation provides photorealistic glimpses of the birth of a star, the chaos created as two galaxies collide and the power of a supermassive black hole as it flings a star violently across its galaxy.

Informed by huge advances in scientific understanding and the reflections of almost 60 scientists, the series brings viewers face-to-face with the cosmos and reveals how its fate is intertwined with our own.

“The amount that humanity has learned in the last ten to twenty years about the way the universe works is staggering,” says Chris Schmidt, co-executive producer of NOVA.

“Extraordinary events laid the way for our own arrival on this tiny planet that orbits just one star of the trillions of stars that make up the visible universe,” says BBC Executive Producer Andrew Cohen.

“It takes a huge scientific community to make the discoveries this series is talking about,” says Caitlin Saks, senior producer for the series. “Our interviewees included individuals who were at the launch of major space telescopes — you really get the emotion of those moments.”

“Because of COVID, we had to choose just a few locations and try to get as many scientists as we could to those locations,” she said.

“The film industry has had to change,” said Saks. “Our producer was no longer sitting across the room from the person they’re interviewing. They were sitting an ocean away.”

“All five of the films have the same kind of arc,” adds Schmidt. “They all show us the beginning and the end of the universe and relate back to the emergence of life.”

The five episodes roam through time and space:

  • Age of Stars is a spectacular voyage to discover the sun’s place in a grand cycle of birth, death and renewal.
  • Milky Way explores the wonders and mysteries of our galaxy—the giant city of stars we call home.
  • Alien Worlds visits bizarre worlds orbiting distant suns, tackling the age-old question, are we alone?
  • Black Holes explores the universe’s most powerful and enigmatic objects and how they reshape entire galaxies, warp the fabric of space and time and might be portals to another universe.
  • Big Bang winds back the ages to discover new clues about this ultimate genesis and what happened in the universe’s first few seconds.

The series will be accompanied by a podcast “NOVA Now Universe Revealed,” a spinoff of NOVA’s signature podcast “ NOVA Now,” which is hosted by Dr. Alok Patel.

NOVA Universe Revealed premieres Wednesdays, October 27–November 24, 2021, at 9pm on GBH 2 and will be available for streaming online at pbs.org/nova and on the PBS Video App.

To celebrate the release of NOVA Universe Revealed, GBH will host a space-themed trivia night on October 27 at 7pm. Check back here for details.