0:00 Before they were named for the man who found them, the moons of Jupiter were nearly called the Medicean Stars, a cosmic advertisement for a wealthy Italian family.0:16 Last week, we felt the radiation burns on Marie Curie’s own hands through her private words; tonight, we unearth a document from a man who reached for the heavens and pulled them down to Earth.0:36 Ladies and gentlemen, your correspondent brings you this bulletin with a sense of profound and historic gravity.0:47 It comes to you not from a wire service, not from a government communiqué, but from the pages of a book.0:58 A very old book.0:59 A first edition of Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius—The Starry Messenger—printed in the year sixteen ten.1:10 And tucked within its pages, folded once, was a single, brittle sheet of paper.1:18 The ink is a faded sepia.1:21 The handwriting is a frantic, scholarly scrawl.1:26 But the date is unmistakable.1:29 January seventh, sixteen ten.1:32 I am holding it now.1:34 It feels… electric.1:36 It feels like holding a lightning bolt.1:40 It appears to be a diary entry.1:43 One that was never meant to be seen.1:46 I am going to read it to you.1:49 Exactly as it was written.1:52 Padua.1:53 The seventh day of January, in the year of our Lord, sixteen hundred and ten.2:01 The air bites tonight.2:03 A deep, crystalline cold that makes the very stars seem to crackle.2:10 My new perspective glass—twenty times the power of the Dutchman’s toy!—is a marvel.2:18 It drinks the light of the heavens.2:22 Tonight, I turned it toward Jupiter.2:25 And I saw… something impossible.2:29 The planet itself, a sharp, serene disc.2:33 But beside it… three small, bright stars, unseen by any man before me.2:40 Interesting, I thought.2:42 A curious alignment.2:44 I sketched them in my notebook.2:47 Jupiter in the center.2:50 Two stars to the east, one to the west.2:54 All in a perfectly straight line, parallel to the ecliptic.3:00 How… neat.3:01 How orderly.3:02 The heavens are not usually so tidy.3:05 My mind, of course, supplied the logical answer.3:10 They are fixed stars, far in the background, which happen to fall in a line from my vantage point tonight.3:21 A coincidence.3:23 Nothing more.3:24 And yet… I could not shake the image.3:28 The perfection of it.3:30 A jewel and its attendants.3:33 I have looked at the stars my entire life.3:37 I have never seen such a thing.3:40 They were… too bright to be so small.3:44 Too small to be so bright.3:46 Something felt… wrong.3:49 I have been sitting here for hours, the cold forgotten.3:54 My fire has died down to embers.3:58 But a different fire has been lit in my mind.4:02 The question burns.4:04 What if… what if they are not fixed stars at all?4:09 What if they are not behind Jupiter?4:13 What if they are with Jupiter?4:16 The thought is madness.4:18 It violates everything we know.4:21 Everything Aristotle taught.4:24 Everything the Church affirms.4:27 All things in the heavens orbit the Earth.4:32 It is the center.4:33 It is God’s design.4:35 But what if it is not?4:37 What if those points of light… are not stars… but planets?4:43 Moons, like our own moon, but circling another world?4:49 The thought is so vast it makes me dizzy.4:53 If Jupiter has moons… then the Earth is NOT the sole center of motion in the universe.5:02 It cannot be.5:03 If I am right… then the Pole, Copernicus… he was not a heretic.5:09 He was a prophet.5:11 I must be certain.5:13 I will observe again tomorrow night.5:17 And the night after.5:19 I will track their positions.5:22 If they are fixed stars, Jupiter will move away from them.5:28 If they are… satellites… they will move with it.5:32 They will dance around it.5:35 My hand is shaking as I write this.5:39 I feel as though I have peeked through a keyhole into a room no man was ever meant to see.5:48 A room where worlds revolve around other worlds.5:53 Where Earth is but one planet among many.5:57 I do not know if I have discovered a celestial wonder… or ignited a fire that will burn the world I know to the ground.6:09 Perhaps they are one and the same.6:13 That is where the entry ends.6:15 In that single night, on that single sheet of paper, the universe cracked open.6:24 The ancient, Earth-centered cosmos, the one that had stood for two thousand years, was given its mortal wound.6:35 It all began right there, with three points of light that refused to behave.6:43 He would, of course, go on to observe a fourth moon.6:48 He would publish his findings in the very book where this diary page was found.6:56 And he would, as he feared, ignite a fire.7:00 A fire that led to his trial, his condemnation, and his imprisonment.7:07 But tonight, reading this… you feel only the breathless wonder.7:14 The awe of a single human being, alone in the cold dark, staring through a simple tube of glass and seeing, for the first time in all of history… the truth.
