The Planets Archives

The Planets episode 5 – Into the Darkness: Ice Worlds

Science / 2 minutes of reading / June 26, 2019 / By HDclump

The Planets episode 5: in the final episode, Professor Brian Cox journeys to the remotest part of the solar system, a place that the most mysterious planets call home. These worlds remain shadowy for a simple reason. Beyond Saturn we have only ever visited the most distant planets once. Uranus – barely visible to the naked eye – was once thought to be the furthest planet from the Sun. But with the telescope and some careful viewing we discovered it had a companion: Neptune. Thanks to a rare alignment of the planets in 1976, Voyager 2 was sent […]

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The Planets episode 4 – Life Beyond the Sun: Saturn

Science / 3 minutes of reading / June 19, 2019 / By HDclump

The Planets episode 4 – Life Beyond the Sun: Saturn is the jewel of the solar system, the most seductive of all the planets, but as Professor Brian Cox reveals – it wasn’t born that way. Raised in the freezing outer reaches of the solar system, Saturn began life as a strange planet of rock and ice. Born outside the snow line, with an abundance of building materials, it soon grew to dwarf the Earth, drawing in colossal amounts of the hydrogen and helium that permeated the early solar system. In time Saturn was transformed into a gas

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The Planets episode 3 – The Godfather: Jupiter

Science / 3 minutes of reading / June 12, 2019 / By HDclump

The Planets episode 3 – The Godfather: Jupiter: Professor Brian Cox continues his exploration of the solar system with a visit to a planet that dwarfs all the others: Jupiter. Its enormous size gives it a great power that it has used to manipulate the other planets – a power both for good and bad that it wields to this day. Jupiter is not only the biggest but also the oldest planet in the solar system. It alone witnessed the birth of the Sun and ever since its immense gravity has shaped the destiny of the other worlds.

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The Planets - The Two Sisters - Earth & Mars episode 2

The Planets episode 2 – The Two Sisters – Earth & Mars

Science / 2 minutes of reading / June 5, 2019 / By HDclump

The Planets episode 2 – The Two Sisters – Earth & Mars: early in the story of the planets, there was a beautiful water world, an oasis of hope in a sterile universe. But this was not Earth – this was the young Mars. Professor Brian Cox continues his tour of the solar system revealing that it was once home to not one, but two blue planets. For millions of years, Mars enjoyed oceans blanketed by a thick atmosphere and a temperature climate. Whilst at the same moment Earth was a far less favourable habitat. Our planet was

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