What is Light? | Chasing Starlight 5

Your eyes are fine-tuned by thousands of years of evolution to see what is called visible light. But this makes up only a tiny fraction of all the light out there.

Even though invisible, the light you cannot see plays a significant role in your life, from helping you communicate over long distances, having safe plane landings in the fog or getting your broken bones checked.

When it comes to space, whole new realms are uncovered by this invisible light. Join ESO astronomer, Suzanna Randall, in the latest episode of Chasing Starlight and discover what different types of light reveal about the Universe.

00:00 Introduction
00:38 Why do we see only a part of the electromagnetic spectrum?
01:43 What can we observe with optical telescopes?
02:44 What can we observe in the infrared?
04:02 What about the low energy part of the spectrum?

Credit:

Directed by: L. Calçada, M. Kornmesser, M. Wallner
Hosted by: S. Randall
Written by: S. Randall, B. Ferreira
Editing: M. Kornmesser, L. Calçada
Videography: A. Tsaousis

Animations & footage: ESO, M. Kornmesser, L. Calçada, NASA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI), The Planetary Society, ZDF, VLA/NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA/Spitzer/JPL-Caltech, ESA, Hubble (STScI), XMM-Newton/ESA, NASA/Chandra/CXC, C. Malin, N. Risinger, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, A. Boley, A. Kritsuk and M. Norman, the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, S. Guisard, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Wong et al., Igor Chekalin, J. Pérez M.-R. Cioni/VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey, Digitized Sky Survey 2 and ESO/Nogueras-Lara et al.

Additional footage:
BBC, Rise of the Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates
Presenter: D. Attenborough
Director: D. Lee
Series Producer: A. Geffen

Music: Videvo
Web and technical support: G. Bazin, R. Shida
Scientific consultant: P. Amico, J.C. Muñoz Mateos
Promotion: O. Sandu
Filming locations: ESO Supernova (supernova.eso.org)

Produced by ESO, the European Southern Observatory (eso.org)

Usage of ESO Images, Videos, Web texts and Music