The Sky at Night

The Sky at Night team investigate the latest science in the hunt for extraterrestrial life. Scientists have never been more obsessed with finding aliens than they are right now. And they're using the most advanced engineering and technology to look in some pretty weird and wonderful places across the universe.

Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock visits Professor Mark Sephton at Imperial College London – one of the scientists leading on the Perseverance Rover mission to Mars. This is the first mission to bring samples of rock from another planet back to earth, and Mark shows how they use images sent from the rover to decide the best places to take the precious samples. He reveals the latest technology used to analyse the samples of Martian rock for signs of life.

April 2023 sees the launch of a major European Space Agency mission to explore habitability on Jupiter's icy moons, with the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer aka Juice. Professor Chris Lintott meets leading scientist Professor Michele Dougherty. She reveals why frozen worlds such as Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are the next hot targets for alien life, and what this has to do with a game of squash.

Our in-house stargazing expert Pete Lawrence tells us how this month we can see Venus in a dramatic scene alongside the Hyades and Pleiades clusters. And George Dransfield is in Chile, searching for earth-like planets outside our solar system. We learn how these potentially habitable exoplanets are identified, as she carries out essential telescope maintenance in the Atacama Desert. Back in the UK, she meets Dr Sean McMahon – an astrobiologist at Edinburgh University investigating how reflected light could be used to search for life on exoplanets in the future.

The Sky at Night team explores the threat of an asteroid impact on earth. Around 2,300 asteroids have been identified as ‘potentially hazardous', and it's thought that a million ‘near-earth objects' are yet to be accounted for. Detecting these possible threats is now a priority for space scientists. And they're developing methods of planetary defence that sound like the stuff of science fiction.

Maggie meets Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, expert in asteroid observation, to learn how the latest technology monitors near-earth asteroids. He explains which ones are a current concern and why we missed the dangerous Chelyabinsk meteor – a 9,000-ton fireball that exploded in the sky above Russia. Could it happen again?

Chris meets the Open University's Professor Simon Green, who has been involved in Nasa's recent planetary defence mission Dart. In this mission, a spacecraft was flown directly into an asteroid in a successful attempt to change its orbit, and the hope is that this could be repeated if an asteroid was identified as a real threat to earth. Simon demonstrates why smashing into an asteroid is even more complicated than it sounds.

Our inhouse stargazing expert, Pete Lawrence, explains how to get a rare sighting of Jupiter passing behind the moon and why it is that we can see the moon in the daytime.

And exoplaneteer George Dransfield is at Royal Holloway University to meet planetary scientist Dr Queenie Chan. Her recent analysis of the famous Winchcombe meteorite offers new evidence in support of asteroids bringing life – as well as destruction – to earth.

The Sky at Night team investigates the incredible science and engineering helping the UK to blast into space. We are now one of the biggest satellite building nations in the world, and the race is on to be the first company to successfully launch a rocket into orbit from British soil.

Chris visits Skyrora, a rocket company near Glasgow, to find out how rockets are built and why launches so often go wrong. Skyrora are planning their first orbital launch later this year; Chris learns how each stage of their rocket is designed for a successful lift-off.

Maggie is given a sneak preview of the brand new National Satellite Test Facility. Until now British-built satellites have been shipped abroad for the final tests of whether they can withstand the harsh environment of space. But this is all about to change with the opening of the huge NSTF. Maggie sees how a satellite up to 7,000kg will be vibrated to simulate launch conditions. She steps inside the vacuum chamber where they will be exposed to extreme temperatures. And she sees the construction of the enormous EMC, where communication signals can be tested in secret.

A result of the rapidly expanding space industry is that nearly 900 objects have been launched into space in the last year. Chris meets Professor Andy Lawrence to talk about the impact this is having on astronomy and the images captured by telescopes such as Hubble.

Another key issue is space debris – shrapnel from defunct missions and missile tests. Astronomers are currently keeping track of more than 23,000 pieces of debris larger than 10cm, and this space junk poses a danger to new satellites as well as the astronauts on board the ISS. Radio astronomer Professor Danielle George visits Clearspace, a company hoping to solve the space junk problem with technology designed to gently capture this debris in orbit.

And our in-house stargazing expert Pete Lawrence shows us why June is a great month for solar observing as well as the summer asterisms.

The Sky at Night team investigates the controversial world of alien communication. The search for life on other planets is one of the most fascinating subjects in science. But what is less reported is the work being done around the world to determine what happens next. If we discover aliens, how would we contact them, what should we say and should we communicate with them at all?

We follow astrobiologist Doug Vakoch on a trip to the UK. Doug runs an organisation aiming to contact extraterrestrials and is here to meet with experts who can help with his mission, including Professor Arik Kershenbaum from the University of Cambridge. Arik is a zoologist who specialises in animal communication and xenolinguistics - the language of aliens. He explains how the common patterns in wolf and dolphin vocalisations can help us to form a message to send to space. Doug also meets Paul Quast, a researcher from the Beyond the Earth Foundation, who is assembling a ‘Companion Guide to Earth' for future humans and passing aliens.

Exoplaneteer George Dransfield travels to the Jodrell Bank Observatory to meet astrophysicist Professor Tim O'Brien. Tim explains how scientists around the world use radioastronomy to listen for extraterrestrial signals. He demonstrates how we might identify an alien ‘technosignature' - a sign of an advanced technological civilisation from another planet.

Professor Chris Lintott delves into the history of scientists trying to send messages to aliens, and he asks if we should really be trying to communicate with them at all.

There has never been a more exciting time to study one of the most mysterious phenomena in space. This month, The Sky at Night team investigate the science of black holes and discover the incredible techniques being used to uncover their secrets, and even help us answer bigger questions about our universe.

Chris meets with Dr Becky Smethurst at the University of Oxford to learn how a black hole forms from the death of a star. He also investigates whether black holes deserve their menacing portrayal in popular culture. He describes what would happen if we got too close to the event horizon and how black holes might actually play a role in lighting up the universe.

Maggie explores how scientists are trying to understand more about black holes by meeting Dr Tessa Baker, who works on LIGO. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is one of the world's largest physics experiments and is not your usual type of observatory; instead of looking - it listens. The next observation run has just started, and Maggie learns what they are hoping to find.

Chris meets with Dr James Nightingale, who has recently discovered one of the largest black holes in space using brand new computational technology and the age-old technique of gravitational lensing. They explore the relationship between black holes and galaxies, as it is thought that within the centre of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole.

We visit our in-house stargazing expert, Pete Lawrence, who shows us how to find a black hole in the sky, and Saturn at its brightest and best.

Finally, George Dransfield visits Dr Silke Weinfurtner at her black hole laboratory, where they are simulating features of black holes here on Earth. They use fluid systems to perform experiments to try to determine if phenomena we think occur around black holes could actually happen.

The Sky at Night team travels to the heart of Chile's Atacama Desert to explore one of the most advanced observatories in the world - the Very Large Telescope, or VLT.

A special Question Time edition of the programme, recorded at the University of Exeter as part of the British Science Association's Science Festival.

The panel is chaired by science journalist Dallas Campbell and made up of The Sky at Night presenters Chris Lintott, Maggie Aderin-Pocock and Pete Lawrence, who are joined on stage by Dr Claire Davies, who studies star and planet formation, and Dr Hannah Wakeford, who specialises in the atmospheres of exoplanets.

The panel answer questions covering all things astronomical from The Sky at Night's avid viewers and from audience members. We also hear about updates from the Voyager missions to life on other planets and discover where the panel would want to send future space probes if they had the chance.

In this special episode to mark the end of another season of The Sky at Night, we team up with Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage to talk all things amateur astronomy. Join Maggie, Chris and Pete, alongside Professor Brian Cox and comedians Robin Ince and Dara Ó Briain, in front of a live audience at the BBC's Radio Theatre. Together they discuss their love of stargazing and share their top tips and favourite kit for looking up at the night sky.

Outside the Radio Theatre, Pete hosts a Star Party. He joins fellow amateur astronomers hoping to get views of the Moon, as well as the giant planets Saturn and Jupiter, using binoculars, telescopes – and the naked eye. But will the clouds part for long enough?

We look back at 66 years of stargazing - and cloudy skies - with The Sky at Night, including some very familiar, but much younger, faces. And of course, Sir Patrick Moore.

Pete invites Professor Leigh Fletcher from the University of Leicester to the Star Party. Leigh explains how images from amateur astronomers on Earth have been used to direct the camera onboard Nasa's Juno mission to Jupiter. And amateurs are playing a critical role in processing the data and images sent back from this gas giant.

And Dr George Dransfield meets Dr Martin Archer from Imperial College London to discover how we can get involved with space science - even when it's cloudy. Martin is involved in a Nasa project called Harp, which is asking citizen scientists to listen to outer space. Martin took inspiration from his previous career as a radio DJ to convert plasma waves that travel through space into sound waves. By analysing these sound waves, we can help scientists work out the impact these plasma waves might have on us here on Earth.