Product: NOVA: Monster of the Milky Way (1974)
Rating: 4.0
THERE'S SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE, WHAT IT IS AIN'T EXACTLY CLEAR
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.