The Planets. Andrew Cohen

      

      ANDREW COHEN

      WITH

      PROFESSOR BRIAN COX

      THE PLANETS

      © JEFF DAI / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

       COPYRIGHT

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2019

      Text © Brian Cox & Andrew Cohen 2019

      Images © Individual copyright holders

      Diagrams © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      By arrangement with the BBC

      The BBC logo is a trademark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence

      BBC logo © BBC 2014

      Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      Jupiter cover image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

      All other cover images: Shutterstock

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this eBook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

      Source ISBN: 9780007488841

      Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008313470

      Version: 2019-05-17

      TO ANNA – AMONGST THE VASTNESS OF THIS STORY HOW LUCKY AM I TO HAVE FOUND YOU.

      ANDREW COHEN

      CONTENTS

       COVER

       TITLE PAGE

      COPYRIGHT

       DEDICATION

       SOLAR SYSTEM

       AN INTRODUCTION

      © pg005 Shutterstock

       MERCURY + VENUS

       A MOMENT IN THE SUN

      © pg005 Shutterstock

       EARTH + MARS

       THE TWO SISTERS

      © pg005 Shutterstock

       JUPITER

       THE GODFATHER

      © pg005 Shutterstock

       SATURN

       THE CELESTIAL JEWEL

      © pg005 Shutterstock

       URANUS NEPTUNE PLUTO

       INTO THE DARKNESS

      INDEX

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

       ABOUT THE BOOK

       ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

      AN INTRODUCTION

      SOLAR SYSTEM

      PROFESSOR BRIAN COX

      © Shutterstock

      WANDERING LIGHTS

      In the daytime, our universe stretches only as far as the horizon. The Sun hides in plain sight because it is too bright for us to see it directly. Only rarely do we glimpse a watercolour moon. Unless we think hard, our intellects are confined to the surface of the Earth. After sunset, beyond cities, the Universe appears; a destination for the imagination, albeit separated by a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. This may be true for the stars, but it is not so for the planets. There are times when Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn dominate the sky; bright lights that shift position nightly against the fixed stars, commanding our attention even if we aren’t certain what we’re looking at. The distances are still vast by terrestrial standards, but despite appearances the gulf is certainly not unbridgeable, because we have visited all of these planets and taken our first steps into the outer reaches of the Solar System beyond. And yet the wandering lights in the dark still feel detached from human affairs, and the time and effort we’ve spent in visiting them might seem to be an indulgence. This assumption, however, is profoundly wrong.

      The exploration of the planets is not an indulgence. If we want to know how we came to be here we need to understand the histories of the planet that gave birth to us and the system that gave birth to it. We are children of Earth and also children of the Solar System.