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Planets & Solar System: The Complete Manual. An essential guide to our solar system PDF

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W E Planets & N Solar System The Complete Manual An essential guide to our solar system Over 500 amazing facts Welcome to Planets & Solar System The Complete Manual Throughout history, humankind has looked up at the stars and wondered what they were. Playing a central role in mythology, philosophy and superstition, it wasn’t until the rise of astronomy that we began to understand these celestial bodies. After Galileo Galilei’s incredible discovery, we now know the role of the Sun as the centre of a system of planets, dubbed the Solar System. As new technology advances we discover more and more about our fellow planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and the dwarf planet Pluto. Read on to discover just how much we’ve learned about our neighbours so far, and how much more knowledge is still to come. Planets & Solar System The Complete Manual Imagine Publishing Ltd Richmond House 33 Richmond Hill Bournemouth Dorset BH2 6EZ (cid:8) +44 (0) 1202 586200 Website: www.imagine-publishing.co.uk Twitter: @Books_Imagine Facebook: www.facebook.com/ImagineBookazines Publishing Director Aaron Asadi Head of Design Ross Andrews Production Editor Sanne de Boer Senior Art Editor Greg Whitaker Assistant Designer Alexander Phoenix Photographer James Sheppard Printed by William Gibbons, 26 Planetary Road, Willenhall, West Midlands, WV13 3XT Distributed in the UK, Eire & the Rest of the World by Marketforce, 5 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5HU Tel 0203 787 9060 www.marketforce.co.uk Distributed in Australia by Gordon & Gotch Australia Pty Ltd, 26 Rodborough Road, Frenchs Forest, NSW, 2086 Australia Tel: +61 2 9972 8800 Web: www.gordongotch.com.au Disclaimer The publisher cannot accept responsibility for any unsolicited material lost or damaged in the post. All text and layout is the copyright of Imagine Publishing Ltd. Nothing in this bookazine may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publisher. All copyrights are recognised and used specifically for the purpose of criticism and review. Although the bookazine has endeavoured to ensure all information is correct at time of print, prices and availability may change. This bookazine is fully independent and not affiliated in any way with the companies mentioned herein. Planets & Solar System The Complete Manual © 2016 Imagine Publishing Ltd ISBN 978 1785 462 801 Part of the bookazine series CONTENTS 8 B irth of the Solar System 64 M ars Travel back to where it all began and discover Could there have been life on Mars? We're how our Solar System came to be curious to discover 20 I nside the Sun 80 J upiter Find out what makes the centre of our This gas giant is the largest in our Solar universe tick System, but it's special in more ways too 92 S aturn The rings of Saturn are a mesmerising phenomenon and continue to amaze us 24 Mercury 104 U ranus The smallest planet in our system has its This ice-cold planet has many secrets own unique story to tell hidden within its layers 36 V enus 112 N eptune There's a reason this earth-like planet is The distance may make it hard to research, named after the goddess of love but distance makes the heart grow fonder 48 E arth 122 P luto You may think you know Earth, but why is it This dwarf planet may have lost its status, the only planet to host life? but it won our hearts 6 7 Birth of the SOLAR SYSTEM How did our Solar System form? Astronomers thought they knew. But now, new research is turning many of the old ideas on their heads Around 4.5 billion years ago, our Sun and but also that the young Solar System was rather all the other objects that orbit around it different from that we know now. were born from an enormous cloud of The so-called ‘nebular hypothesis’ – the idea interstellar gas and dust, similar to the glowing that our Solar System arose from a collapsing emission nebulae we see scattered across today’s cloud of gas and dust – has a long history. As night sky. Astronomers have understood this early as 1734, Swedish philosopher Emanuel basic picture of the birth of the Solar System for a Swedenborg suggested that the planets were long time, but the details of just how the process born from clouds of material ejected by the Sun, happened have only become clear much more while in 1755 the German thinker Immanuel Kant recently – and now new theories, discoveries and suggested that both the Sun and planets formed computer models are showing that the story is alongside each other from a more extensive cloud still far from complete. Today, it seems that not collapsing under its own gravity. In 1796, French only did the planets form in a far more sudden mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace produced a and dynamic way than previously suspected, more detailed version of Kant’s theory, explaining 8 how the Solar System formed from an initially very centre of the system, spin much faster than shapeless cloud. Collisions within the cloud it does? Solutions to these problems would not caused it to flatten out into a spinning disc, while come until the late 20th Century, and some of the concentration of mass towards the centre them are still causing doubts even today. caused it to spin faster (just as a pirouetting ice Much of what we know about the birth of our skater spins faster when they pull their arms Solar System comes from observing other star inwards towards their bodies). systems going through the same process today. In the broad strokes described above, Laplace’s Stars are born in and around huge glowing model is now known to be more or less correct, clouds of gas and dust, tens of light years but he certainly got some details wrong, and left across, called emission nebulae (well known some crucial questions unanswered – just how examples include the Orion Nebula, and the and why did the planets arise from the nebula? Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius). The nebulae glow And why didn’t the Sun, concentrating more than in a similar way to a neon lamp, energised by 99 per cent of the Solar System’s mass at the radiation from the hottest, brightest and most 9 Planets & Solar System massive stars within them, and remain active for Inside the nebula, stars are incubated in huge perhaps a few million years, during which time opaque pillars of gas and dust. As these pillars they may give rise to hundreds of stars forming a are eroded by outside radiation from massive loose star cluster. Since the brilliant, massive stars stars that have already formed, they break apart age and die rapidly, it’s only the more sedate, into isolated dark globules whose internal gravity lower-mass stars like our own Sun that outlive is strong enough to hold them together – the both the nebula and the slow disintegration of seeds of individual solar systems. Gas falling the star cluster. towards the very centre of the globule becomes Star birth nebulae develop from the vast concentrated, growing hotter and denser until amounts of normally unseen, dark gas and dust eventually conditions are right for nuclear fusion, that forms the skeleton of our Milky Way galaxy, the process that powers the stars, to begin. As and subside as the fierce radiation from their the star begins to generate energy of its own, most massive stars literally blows them apart. its collapse stabilises, leaving an unpredictable The initial collapse that kick-starts formation can stellar newborn surrounded by a vast disc of gas be triggered in several ways – for instance by a and dust that will go on to form its solar system. shockwave from a nearby exploding supernova, But how? or by tides raised during close encounters with The first person to put Laplace’s hypothesis other stars. However, the biggest waves of star on a sound theoretical footing was Soviet birth are triggered when material orbiting in our astronomer Viktor Safronov, whose work was galaxy’s flattened outer disc drift through a spiral- first translated from Russian in 1972. Safronov’s shaped region of compression that extends from modified ‘solar nebular disk model’ allowed the the galactic hub and gives rise to our galaxy’s Solar System to form from much less material, characteristic shape. helping to resolve the problem of the Sun’s slow "Star birth nebulae develop from the vast amounts of unseen, dark gas and dust that forms our Milky Way” How stars are formed Disturbed nebula Slow collapse Flattening disc A star is born when a cloud of Denser regions in the nebula Collisions between randomly interstellar gas and dust passes collapse under their own moving gas clouds and dust through a galactic density gravity. As mass concentrates particles tend to flatten out wave, or is compressed by towards their centres, they their motions into a narrow shock from a nearby supernova begin to spin more rapidly, and plane, creating a disc that spins or tides from a passing star their cores grow hotter ever more rapidly 10

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