The Universe TV - How the Universe Works TV - Brian Cox TV - Kurt Vonnegut - George W Bush - Voyager: To the Final Frontier TV - Horizon TV - Journey to the Edge of the Universe TV - Tony Robinson TV - Carl Sagan - Alex Filippenko - Michael Mosley TV - Birth of the Solar System TV - David Helfand - Extreme Universe TV - Sarah Zettel - Dan Quayle - Stephen Hawking - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Francis Jeffrey - Michio Kaku TV - Secrets of the Solar System TV -
Venus and Mercury: Two hostile planets that in the history of universe have suffered very different fates ... Both demonstrate the horrors of the planets that have gone horribly wrong. The Universe s1e7: Inner Planets, History 2007
It turns out Venus is less an exotic sister to Earth and more like an evil twin. ibid.
As a result of this retrograde rotation the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. ibid.
Venus is the hottest planet in the whole solar system. ibid.
Carbon Dioxide – CO2 – makes up 95% of the Venuvian atmosphere. ibid.
Venus has many more active volcanoes than we do. ibid.
The atmospheric pressure on Venus is ninety times greater than Earth. ibid.
Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. The planet has no known moons. Mercury has no atmosphere. And it’s known as a Naked Eye planet ... Mercury is the solar system’s tiniest planet. ibid.
The planet orbits the sun in eighty-eight Earth-days. ibid.
A year on Mercury is shorter than a day on the planet. And this sluggish rotation gives Mercury somewhat peculiar weather. ibid.
On Mercury you wouldn’t be able to hear the eruption. ibid.
In the distant corners of our Solar System are the violent ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Blanketed with smoky hazes these outer planets are turbulent and unpredictable. Neptune suffers the fastest winds in our solar system ... Uranus’s inner swarm of moons dash around the planet in less than a day. The Universe s1e11: The Outer Planets
In 1930 at the age of twenty-four [Clyde] Tombaugh captured an image of an object that seemed to validate Lowell’s predictions. The discovery was announced to the world. ibid.
Even though Pluto wasn’t Planet X, could it still be classified as a planet? ibid.
At its closest Pluto is 2.7 billion miles from Earth. ibid.
Would Eris officially become our tenth planet? Or would Pluto-sized objects be reclassified as a whole? ibid.
Our Solar System now officially consists of eight planets. ibid.
Scientific interest in Pluto hasn’t waned. Even as the vote was being taken in Prague, a Nasa spacecraft called New Horizons was already on its way to exploring this far off world. ibid.
Five planetary rings: features that had only previously been seen on Saturn. ibid.
Neptune – a gleaming sapphire some three billion miles from the sun. ibid.
Neptune rotates much faster than Earth and this rapid spin helps to create violent winds. ibid.
Neptune had a great dark spot in its southern hemisphere. ibid.
Scientists were in for another surprise: the largest storm on the planet – the dark spot – simply vanished from the atmosphere. ibid.
Neptune has a complex system of moons – thirteen have been discovered so far. ibid.
Neptune’s largest moon Triton is roughly the size of Earth’s moon; it is the coldest object in our solar system ever observed by astronomers. ibid.
Further discoveries over the next decade would show that eccentric orbits are common in the universe; while the circular orbits of our own solar system seem to be rare. The Universe s2e1: Alien Planets
This is where we live. Our solar system is among the Milky Way’s spiral arms twenty six thousand light years from the bustling centre. The galaxy is so large that it takes the Earth two hundred million years to complete one lap. The Universe s2e4: The Milky Way
Our solar system had made a complete circuit only fourteen times since it formed. ibid.
Lurking in the shadows of the solar system are worlds so chemically active and misshapen they border on the bizarre. These are the moons surrounding the planets of the solar system. The Universe s2e5: Alien Moons
Before the 1990s most astronomers agreed that there were only 34 moons in the solar system. Most of those were regular moons like our own, spherical bodies that orbit their host planet in the same direction it rotates. ibid.
A moon also known as a satellite is a celestial body that orbits a planet. Or a smaller object such as a dwarf planet or asteroid. About 240 moons exist in our solar system alone. And yet Earth’s Moon is the only satellite in the solar system that can perfectly eclipse the sun. The Universe s3e10: Strangest Things
‘All four of the giant planets orbiting the sun have ringed systems.’ The Universe s4e5: The Hunt for Ringed Planets
The balance of gravity holds the ring system in place. ibid.
Earth: The third planet from the Sun is brimming with breath-taking beauty. Unlike any other body in the solar system liquid water covers nearly two-thirds of its surface ... It’s the only planet confirmed to support life in all its forms. The Universe s5e1: Seven Wonders of the Solar System
The Asteroid Belt ... Leftovers from the formation of the Solar System ... We traverse through one hundred million miles of rocks, some as small as a metre or two, others bigger than cities. The belt probably contains millions of rocky pieces, yet if all the asteroids were condensed into one boulder it would be smaller than our moon. ibid.
Ceres is the biggest asteroid in the solar system ... A fourth of the entire mass of the Asteroid Belt ... Scientists recently listed it as a dwarf planet – the same designation given to Pluto. ibid.
It harbours potential weapons of mass destruction. ibid.
Could our sun have an evil companion, an undiscovered death star rotating at the furthest edges of the solar system? The Universe s6e2: Nemesis: The Sun’s Evil Twin
Something is disturbing comet’ orbits right now. ibid.
The first seven hundred million years: the epoch in which the Solar System formed and stabilised. The Universe s6e3: How the Solar System was Made
Our solar system has eight planets and over three hundred moons. All circling the sun. How the Universe Works s1e7: Alien Solar Systems, Discovery 2010
Most of these newly discovered solar systems are nothing like our own. ibid.
Once Gravity takes over, the cloud begins to shrink sucking in more and more gas into an giant spinning disc. Gravity at the centre crushes everything into a dense super-hot ball. It gets hotter and hotter. Suddenly atoms in the gas begin to fuse. And a star ignites. ibid.
Astronaut [Don] Pettit had discovered something huge: in the zero gravity of space, particles of dust don’t float apart, they clump together. ibid.
The oort cloud is so far away light from the sun takes a full year to reach it. ibid.
Moving at one hundred and seven thousand kilometres per hour the Earth takes a year to orbit the sun. ibid.
In our own solar system there are just eight planets. But orbiting six of those planets are moons. Lots and lots of moons. More than three hundred of them. And each one of them is different. How the Universe Works s1e8: Moons
Each moon is unique, but they all have one thing in common. All moons are natural satellites held in place by gravity. But moons do more than just orbit planets. They help stabilise the planets in their orbits and keep the machinery of the solar system running smoothly. ibid.
On the international space-station astronaut Don Pettit was experimenting in zero gravity. He put grains of salt and sugar inside a plastic bag, and instead of floating apart they began to clump together. This is how planets and moons build up. ibid.
The story of moons is the story of gravity. Gravity holds moons in orbit. It heats up their insides and shapes their surfaces. In the end it controls everything about moons, even their survival and destruction. ibid.
The sun contains nearly 99.8% of all the matter in our solar system. How the Universe Works s3e1: Journey from the Centre of the Sun
This is space but not as you know it. Trillions of icy rocks, dark mystical, giant magnetic bubbles each one more than a hundred million kilometers across, and a cosmic war-zone where fields of deadly radiation collide. This isn’t a distant part of the galaxy, this is the edge of our own solar system. How the Universe Works s4e4: Edge of the Solar System
90% of our solar system lies beyond the planets. ibid.