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 90 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.
It is the show-stopper of our solar system basking in its own glow it seduces all admirers. However, it is a beauty with a mean streak. It’s a massive frigid ball of gas surrounded by icy rings hurtling at 40,000 miles an hour. It is a planet of violent weather. The Universe s1e8: Saturn: Lord of the Rings
These huge rings are also unbelievably thin: measuring about sixty-five feet. ibid.
Our sun is one of billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And our galaxy is one of hundreds of billions, maybe a trillion, in the known universe … the realm of alien galaxies. The Universe s1e9: Alien Galaxies
Pictures from the Hubble Space telescope show the wide variety of alien galaxies. ibid.
Galaxies seem to naturally form these spiral density waves. ibid.
There is a region at the core of our galaxy, the Milky Way where nothing escapes … a supermassive black hole. ibid.
A globular cluster usually conceals some mysterious strangers: large blue stars much younger than the small dim stars surrounding them. These unexpected heavenly bodies are known as blue stragglers. The Universe s1e10: Life and Death of a Star
Red Dwarfs: They can be as little as one-tenth the mass of the sun, with surface temperatures thousands of degrees cooler. Red Dwarfs are the most common type of star in the universe. ibid.
A normal supernova arises from the explosion of a star ten times more massive than our sun. Incredibly, Supernova 2006 GY as astronomers have dubbed it seems to have signalled the death of a star 150 or even 200 times more massive – and that’s about as massive as a star can get. 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 Tombaugh captured an image of an object [Pluto] 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.
Uranus seems to be relatively calm. ibid.
Herschel first laid eyes on Uranus through a telescope. 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.
When trekking through the galactic jungles one must steer clear of the cosmic hot zones. The Universe s1e12: Most Dangerous Places
Magnetar: These mischievous stars have the strongest magnetic field in the universe. Scientists have confirmed twelve of these rare stars in our galaxy and there may be more … Magnetars are born from out of the death-throes of massive stars. ibid.
Scientists believe there are millions of wayward black holes throughout our galaxy. ibid.
Quasars are the most energy efficient mechanisms in the cosmos: they give off more power than a hundred normal galaxies and they’re ten trillion times brighter than our sun. ibid.
Are we alone in the universe? Are we the only ones who look up at the stars and wonder, Is there anybody out there? The Universe s1e13: Search for ET
The Miller-Urey experiment had demonstrated that the precursors for living organisms could have been started by a chemical reaction. ibid.
Would extraterrestrial life be water and carbon based? Would DNA shape intelligent life? And would aliens look anything like us? ibid.
Scientists dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life are keenly focused on Europa. ibid.
Tidal heating – and it may create enough heat to keep H2O miles below the surface of Europa in liquid form. ibid.
Titan is an enormous planetary body. The second largest moon in the solar system. 50% larger than the Earth’s moon. If it wasn’t orbiting Saturn, Titan would be a planet in its own right. But most impressive of all, many scientists believe that Titan could now, or at some point in the future, provide a habitat for life. ibid.
To date, no such signal has been detected. ibid.
Some 13.7 billion years ago a mysterious event thrust the universe into motion in a Big Bang. The Universe s1e14: Beyond the Big Bang
Acceptance and understanding are two different things. ibid.
In 1925 in the mountains above Los Angeles astronomer Edwin Hubble saw something in his telescope that destroyed Einstein’s cosmological constant. ibid.
‘Dickie had this idea of looking for the radiation.’ ibid.
This mysterious radiation was coming from everywhere … Penzias & Wilson and the Princeton team published their findings. 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, History 2007
While the pulsar planets might not be pleasant places to visit, they have taught us something fundamental about planet formation in the universe. If nature is so good at making planets even under difficult circumstances then the odds are fairly high that the universe is full of planets. ibid.
They are edging ever closer to finding Earth-like planets. ibid.
The Big Bang singularity gave rise to the entire universe, which includes Space, Time and all the matter that fills it. A similar type of singularity is a white hole – a theoretic object that arises in Einstein’s Theory of Gravity. It’s essentially a black hole in reverse. A point of singularity where matter is ejected. Consequently, some scientists have wondered if the universe could have been created from a white hole. The Universe s2e2: Cosmic Holes
Physicists speculate that if nature uses white holes then they could have been an important element in the earliest stages in the universe. Perhaps even in the formation of the universe itself. ibid.
There are at least two types of black holes: one is called a Stellar Mass Black Hole, which is approximately three to thirty times the mass of our sun. It’s speculated that one hundred million of these exist in our Milky Way Galaxy. And similar numbers exist in other galaxies. The other type is a Supermassive Black Hole, which is millions to billions of times the mass of our sun. ibid.