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Wednesday, 6 November 2024

Solar System

But the fool on the hill sees the Sun going down
And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round

I have been watching Brian Cox's series Solar System in absolute astonishment for the past five weeks. Our solar system is bigger and far more complex than we could have imagined only just a few years ago. 

I write this from memory, so may have some things wrong. Whatever I write cannot possibly do the series justice. 

Most of us grew up with nine planets, more recently reduced to eight, but the latest telescopes and space exploration reveal infinitely more objects within the sun's gravitational field than this. Many are very small, while others are quite large. 

And while we may have thought there was little beyond the dwarf planet Pluto, there seem to be millions of icy objects in the same region, known as the Kuiper belt. The largest known so far, discovered only in recent years in the darkness, has been nicknamed FarFarOut. All these objects, like the planets, orbit the sun in the same plane, but even further out lies an enormous sphere of rocks and particles a light year across. It contains mobile objects that travel across the heavens and approach the earth from all directions. They are the comets. 

It is not just the number of objects that is astonishing. It is the variety. They can be made of rock, gas, water ice, nitrogen ice, or something else. Ice can form mountains and canyons ten times the size of those on Earth. Other objects have internal heat sources that create violent monsoons, dust storms, or volcanoes that shoot out into space. 

How these phenomena have formed can often be deduced from space probe photographs and other data. They are subject to similar physical and geological processes whatever they may be made of. Underlying it all are just a small number of forces, mainly gravity. But the gravity of different objects can interact in numerous ways. Some are heated by gravitational friction, alternately squeezed and released by the gravity of a larger planet. 

There are some very strange objects indeed. Once above a few kilometres in size, objects will be shaped by gravity into a sphere, but one body has been seen to defy this law. This is thought to be because it rotates at eight times the speed of the earth, which flattens it into an elliptical shape through centrifugal force. 

The strange rings of Saturn are also down to gravity. They consist of particles of various sizes, possibly from a decaying moon. They orbit at different rates, and the larger objects are gradually speeding and slowing the others with the eventual outcome that all the particles will fall down to the surface of the planet. They have not been there forever, and will in time disappear. It is only coincidence that we are here at the same infinitesimal moment in time, able to see them. 

Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, has a salt lake of water beneath the rocky surface, more than all the water on Earth. This was deduced from the magnetic aurora of the moon, which does not behave as it otherwise should. It has all the conditions we think necessary to support life. What form aqueous life buried deep inside a moon or planet might take, we cannot begin to guess.

But the strangest planet of all is the Earth. It is the only one with liquid water on the surface, maintained by a combination of gravity, temperature, and atmospheric pressure. If different, the water would boil away into space, or freeze solid.

What I like about Brian Cox is that he explains these processes, and how they have been worked out, in lay terms, without exaggeration or the loud, overenthusiastic excitement that spoils so many documentaries these days. Give him the concentration he deserves, and you are rewarded. What he is telling us speaks for itself. It is outrageous. And he laughs, as if he cannot quite believe it either. 

Then I thought about looking into the night sky and the millions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, probably most with solar systems of their own as complex as ours. And the billions of stars and planets in all the other galaxies there are. And the time scales involved: thousands of billions of earth years. 

Unimaginable. Beyond belief. Beyond understanding. 

22 comments:

  1. I have seen some of it but to be honest I found it all quite tedious. Admittedly, that probably says more about me and the things I am interested in than the content of the series. I find Brian Cox irritating. Maybe I would have liked the series better if it had been presented by Brian Blessed.

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    1. If it had been then I wouldn't have watched it - that would be everything I dislike about excitable documentaries. With some thing you get back what you put in, but yes, you have to be interested. It's a bit like me with quizzes. I've even stopped watching UC now Ragan is in the chair.

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    2. I'm not fond of him either. I much preferred the disgruntlement of Jeremy Paxman who, by the way, was born in Leeds, making him a grumpy Yorkshireman like thee and me.

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  2. Brian Cox is very good at explaining complex matters, but I don't get the infinity of space. Surely there must be an end point somewhere.

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    1. It is that it is expanding all the time that I don't get. I don't think it is really possible to understand it.

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  3. My dad was always interested in space, the universe, the solar system and I grew up listening to him talk about it. I struggled with his books about the subject as they were too heavy going for me but, like you, I have found Brian Cox's series fascinating and informative.
    I still struggle with the whole concept though - just too mind boggling for my poor brain to comprehend the enormity of it all.

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    1. Voyager 1 has been going since 1977 and is about 165 AU (distance from Earth to Sun) away. Incredible distances, yet still relatively near. As I say, even Brian Cox laughs as if he can't believe it.

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  4. Thanks for the tip about this show. It sounds fascinating and we'll add it to our lineup. It's always helpful (to me, anyway) to think of how our daily human problems pale against the infinity of space and time. Isn't Europa supposed to be covered with water, too? Or maybe it's any icy surface over liquid water beneath?

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    1. Not sure about Europa - would need to watch again. I really enjoyed it, but as YP says, it is not everyone's interest and not everyone likes Cox. He did another great programme a couple of years ago about the Mars landers, which have a little helicopter that can fly around and film video.

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  5. Oh this looks like it would be a fascinating series. Like Andrew, I never got the infinity of space. I remember as a child trying to wrap my head around that as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep. I don't know why, but the thought of infinity, literal infinity, used to make me afraid.

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    1. It's beyond understanding. To see the world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower, To hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.

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  6. I'd love to watch this series, but it won't be available in Germany because of rights. Anything space is fascinating to me.

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    1. It is a pity BBC / iPlayer is not available outside the UK. Surely there must be some way to see it.

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    2. There is, if one manages to "fake" the IP address of one's computer to make it look like somewhere in the UK. But I am not prepared to do that. Sometimes, documentaries can later be found on youtube, but I haven't checked for this one yet.

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  7. I like Brian Cox's presentation. He's a clever man but not precious.

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    1. Yes. None of the showing off "look at me I'm a presenter" stuff that you get from so many others. Lucy Worsley would be dressed up in a space suit.

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  8. When everything seems lost we can always learn. ;) Space is an exciting place and though I have never watched Brian Cox I am sure his knowledge is exciting. I quite like the idea of 'not knowing' whether there is an end to the Universe or even how it came into being. Look up at the Milky Way and just be overawed.

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    1. Every point of light is a sun, probably with orbiting planets, most with moons. And the Milky Way just one galaxy of millions or billions. And over billions of years, galaxies have been created and destroyed. In all that time, we have been here for only one small arc of our sun's movement round the galaxy. The wonder is part of my sense of spirituality.

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  9. My husband loved all things to do with space and planets. I am afraid it left me completely cold, as it is too incomprehensible to imagine and we shall probably never ever get to explore it. I'm also not a great fan of Brian Cox, so not a programme i would automatically watch.

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    1. We all like different things, but interestingly my wife sat and watched this series as astonished as I was. Neither of us can comprehend it.

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  10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk comes to mind.

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