Customer Reviews

NOVA: Monster of the Milky Way

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The monster of the Milky Way is of course--no, wait for it. But it's big, really big. Bigger than a Buick. How do we know what's there, with all the gas and dust blocking our view of the galaxy center? "Monster of the Milky Way" explains how. My test for Nova programs is how many times I want to watch them. This episode premiered only a few weeks ago yet I've seen it three times already. There's a lot of thought provoking ideas in this episode, including the fate of the Milky Way and our big galactic neighbor 2.2 million light years away, Mr. Huge Andromeda Galaxy, M31. I don't want to spoil the "plot" of this episode because at its heart it is a detective story, but it follows astronomers as they try to discern just what all that mass at the center of the Milky consists of, and what that means for the future of our galactic neighborhood. This episode is one of the better ones about astronomy. The monster at the heart of the Milky Way and its brethren are the subject of cutting-edge ideas in cosmology these days, and this fresh Nova program takes you right into the current research.

I am a physicist and this program was quite interesting for me. Difficult research is presented in very simple manner and can be understood by almost everyone. Some facts were new to me and I truly enjoyed watching it. I would give it 5 stars, but there is something on the back of my mind - at the end I found it a little bit too simple in terms of visual contents.

This is just terrific in every way. The provider was swift and professional and the video itself is amazing. The NOVA group continues to take complex ideas and concepts easier for the lay person to understand. Truly GREAT.

The documentary makes me hypothesize that probably spiral galaxies are made from
spherical galaxies because of the super massive black hole in their center.
What formed first, the spherical galaxy of the black hole in the centre, is a
seperate topic.
But as explained in the program, the galaxies would start as normal spherical
ones and the black holes jets would create these huge voids in two opposite
directions due to their sterilization effect on normal gas and matter.
These voids would create a gravitational imbalance in the structure of the
spherical galaxy forcing it to collapse into a spiral disc shaped one,
with the jets perpendicular to the plane of the spiral galaxies disc.

I just finished watching "Monster of the Milky Way" and it fell short of my expectations on several counts. This program should be have been edited to 30 minutes since the bulk of the information was padded with melodramatic rephrasings of what had already been said. The "acting" and music was a little over the top and outright unbelievable at times which led me to feel as though I were being spoon-fed watered down information. For example, I need not be reminded: "if you were to stick your finger in a black hole, it isn't coming out!" Visually, the computer-simulations and overall presentation was rather excellent; though some who are more enthusiastic about astronomy may disagree. I would recommend this program as one to watch your television listings for, but not necessarily one to own. 3 Stars!

The subject is interesting but because the knowledge about Black Holes is so small, it became boring to watch the whole documentary. This should have been a 30 minute piece. Black Holes are very interesting in that they are not "visible" and are so incomprehensibly big (mass of billions and billions of suns) with gravitational pull to match. But that is about all they know. My attention waned through most of the documentary. Andrea Ghez of UCLA and Reinhart Genzel of Germany are brilliant and competitive astronomers are just starting to study these phenomena, so not much new other than black holes feed from nearby space dust off and on - and their location is can be determined by suns orbiting close by.

My surprise in watching this is that there is a lot of dust in the universe and in our Milky Way. So much dust we cannot see the center of the Milky Way unless we use ultraviolet light. By using this technique astronomers found the center of the Milky Way and found our Black Hole. They also showed how they determined that virtually every other galaxy has a black hole, so they are common.

Black holes are monsters but still mysterious and vague.