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PBS Space Time
Season 2026 • Episode 7 • Earth’s Core Should Be Impossible. A New State of Matter Explains It.
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PBS Space Time Season 2026, Episode 7: Earth’s Core Should Be Impossible. A New State of Matter Explains It.
Is Earth’s core a solid or a liquid? Yes. The mysteries of our own planet’s interior have, in many ways, been harder to crack than those of the rest of the cosmos. We can send probes to the edge of the solar system, and the 42 billion light years to the cosmic horizon are largely transparent—a big enough telescope can see the most distant galaxy. But the 6400km to Earth’s center are both opaque to light and far beyond the reach of any conceivable drill. The best we can do for most of our planetary depths is to listen to the faint rumblings of distant earthquakes and then try to piece together how those seismic waves bounce around the interior. Watch PBS Space Time Season 2026, Episode 7 Earth’s Core Should Be Impossible. A New State of Matter Explains It. in HD free online. Enjoy high-quality streaming of PBS Space Time Season 2026, Episode 7 and share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Episodes
7 episodes
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20 min
This Particle Solved Everything. We Just Found Out It Isn't Real
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20 min
The Universe Tried to Hide the Gravity Particle. Physicists Found a Loophole.
Physicists have long believed that detecting the particle of gravity—the graviton—was fundamentally impossible, with the universe itself seeming to block every direct attempt. This episode explores a new generation of clever experiments that may finally let us detect gravity’s particle, and why even succeeding wouldn’t quite mean what we think it does.
19 min
The Universe Is Racing Apart. We May Finally Know Why.
We've known that the universe is expanding since 1929, and that its expansion is accelerating since 1998. The culprit behind the acceleration is unknown, so we live with a stand-in term "dark energy". Our modern cosmological model assumes that dark energy has a constant density--always the same amount of the outward-shoving stuff per volume. But there's recent evidence to the contrary--which may be why our primary efforts to measure the expansion rate of the universe disagree with each other.
21 min
Most of Reality Is Invisible. We May Finally Be About to Reveal It.
Some people worried that the large hadron collider would smash particles together so hard it would make black holes that would swallow the earth, open wormholes to other dimensions. It didn’t and won’t. But it may be making a different kind of portal. A portal to the dark sector. This isn’t the Rather, it’s a hypothetical family of elementary particles that exists in parallel to the familiar particles of the standard model, but are invisible to it. Invisible to us, and so could be the answer to the dark matter conundrum. And what is this portal? It’s the particle that the LHC was built to find in the first place - the Higgs boson.
20 min
Something Disturbing Happens When You Solve Einstein's Equations This Way
Kurt Gödel discovered a solution to General Relativity that allows time travel without any exotic physics, revealing that the theory doesn’t actually guarantee a consistent chain of cause and effect . His “Gödel universe” shows that under certain conditions, the structure of spacetime itself can loop back on itself—blurring the line between past and future and exposing a deep limitation in our understanding of reality.
16 min
Earth’s Core Should Be Impossible. A New State of Matter Explains It.
Is Earth’s core a solid or a liquid? Yes. The mysteries of our own planet’s interior have, in many ways, been harder to crack than those of the rest of the cosmos. We can send probes to the edge of the solar system, and the 42 billion light years to the cosmic horizon are largely transparent—a big enough telescope can see the most distant galaxy. But the 6400km to Earth’s center are both opaque to light and far beyond the reach of any conceivable drill. The best we can do for most of our planetary depths is to listen to the faint rumblings of distant earthquakes and then try to piece together how those seismic waves bounce around the interior.
18 min