 My background is in astrophysics and before somebody hears I got to work on a public space telescope and we've got to take beautiful images of the universe like this. This is the Orion Nebula seen very prominently in the wintertime and with Hubble we can take exquisitely high resolution images of regions of the universe like this. This is a place where stars are born. Because of Hubble's capabilities we can study these images in such detail we can actually build up 3D models and do something we can never agree to do within anyone's lifetime which is to fly around the Orion Nebula. We can reveal Orion for what it is a city of newly formed stars. Some 1,000 new stars are born here and are sculpted by the great force that surrounds us and penetrates us and literally binds the galaxy together. I am speaking of course of gravity. Stars are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. They combine together through gravity forming a swirling disc that you see here. The pressures and the temperatures at the center of this newly forming star grow hotter and hotter and hotter until finally at some point they become what's known as a protostar. They are not yet fully fledged stars but here in the Orion Nebula we can spot about some 300 examples of these stars and their solar systems under construction. But dominating the center of this nebula are four very large, very bright stars known as the trapezea. These stars are much much hotter, much brighter than our sun. They shine with the light of the mountain of light and energy. It is expanded and child upon these newly forming star systems. So much so that their outer shells, rapid foos are being ablated. They are actually being eroded by these newly forming stars or by these recently formed stars in the distance. But surrounding these protostars are certain stellar discs. We call them protoplanetary discs or propels for short. These discs fall upon the star and actually eject. This is not an animation. These are real images made on the whole telescope of a newly forming star where you can see these bullets, each bullet, about the size of our entire solar system being ejected into space. Eventually the temperatures and the pressures get so high that a star begins to undergo thermonuclear fusion. Hydrogen fuses in the helium releasing gamma rays in the process which are then absorbed and reabsorbed inside the star over a period of about a thousand years until the first light emerges from the newly formed star. The sun begins its 10 billion year lifetime on what is known as the main sequence. This is hydrogen burning and that radiation and energy is anything but just dull and ordinary. These prominences, these coronal mass ejections like you see here from our own sun which are about two to four times the size of Jupiter are ejected into space in speeds of about two million miles an hour. But eventually that hydrogen runs out and the core shuts down. When the core shuts down it begins to fuse into helium. This causes the outer layers of the star to expand and gradually over time our own sun will begin to undergo an expansion in about four billion years hence. The outer layers will become cooler and rather dense and the sun will grow consuming mercury, venous and heat buried possibly to the earth. Stars like our sun undergo this process over a course of about 50 million years. We don't fully understand the physics of exactly what happens here but essentially the outer winds and the outer atmospheres with what used to be the sun are blown out into space in a series of ever increasing winds. These winds cast out the outer nebula of the outer atmosphere into a nebula like this. This is known as the Helix nebula. This is also the Hubble Space Telescope and you can see some extraordinary complexity. In fact, if we look carefully at the details of this nebula we can wrap that into a computer, build up a 3D model of the interior of this nebula. And what looks at first like a donut is actually not quite a donut at all. It's in fact something very extraordinary and involved indeed. What we have is the outer shell kind of expanded initially in more or less a toroidal or donut shaped outflow but then a vast wind blew out in all directions sweeping out and clearing everything out from what used to be the outer atmosphere of what was once a mighty sun. Eventually the outer nebula of the star continues to blow away and this is a very sped up evolution of what will happen to our own sun. Again, about 4 billion years now. It will last again about maybe 10 to 50 million years in the process leaving behind a hot, dense cinder of solid helium about the size of the Earth. This is known as a white dwarf. But for stars that are maybe 10 to 20 times the mass of the sun they are much more violent. These are supernovae explosions. Supernovae are the most powerful explosions since the very beginning of the time of the creation of the galaxy. When a supernova blows up it can outshine all 400 billion stars in the galaxy in which it lives combined. This is the red nebula of the supernova that was witnessed by the Chinese in the year 1054 AD and strangely enough western astronomers didn't record this event. But when we examine the crab nebula with the Chandra X-ray Observatory we can see an object compacted at the center that is literally millions of times denser than the white dwarf that will become our sun. That our sun will become one day. This is a neutron star. A solid degenerate ball of neutrons. No larger than this object that had an island. There is a disc of material just like we saw when the star is forming because this is the material as the star is dying and it is falling on to this pulsar and some of it is being accelerated in a bipolar outflow much like we saw when the star was forming about in this case of a massive star just a million, a few million years ago. Supernovae explosions are so powerful that elements heavier than iron are fused to become things like silver, nipple, gold and the very gold that we wear on our wedding bands or cherish so much on earth are only fused during the first 15 seconds of a supernova explosion. This sends out a tremendous shockwave that accelerates in the interstellar space until finally one day it encounters a cloud of hydrogen, gas and dust and causes that hydrogen to plump up and gravity once again takes over sculpting and drawing in material until eventually new stars begin to form and around one of those stars just maybe there is a disc of that leftover material that continues to form a little eddies form within that disc creating planets and then perhaps one day on one of those planets life begins to evolve and maybe life evolves to the point where it becomes intelligent enough to contemplate the universe that created it. Thank you very much.