Eight Wonders Of Our Solar System | The Planets | BBC Earth Science

Abroad, the fate of

planets

is intricately linked to that of the star they orbit, so for our own

solar

system

the sun dictates Our fate, just as our sun has changed, so has the potential for life on our

planets

. neighbors. His story shows that habitability is a The delicate balance does not always last, there is only one planet that has retained its water and habitability and that is Earth. What is remarkable about the Earth is the stability of those conditions that the Earth has been able to maintain. Ocean conditions on its surface throughout its history through billions. of years and that is what has facilitated the very rich biological evolution of the Earth.

The Earth is a very special place, it is the only place in the universe where we definitely know that there is life for that to happen, it is not only necessary for liquid water to appear on a planet, but liquid water. Water remains on a planet and that is the magic of the Earth. Thanks to the size and geology of our planet, the atmosphere has remained stable enough for billions of years, protecting the precious water that has allowed complex life to evolve. Life has been woven into the fabric of the Earth. planet and to shape the continents and oceans, life itself maintains the atmosphere that protects our fragile eco

system

s, but as the sun continues to grow, temperatures on Earth rise, altering weather patterns, causing major storms around the planet and devastating droughts as plants die around the world.

Oxygen levels will plummet about a billion years from now, the era of complex life on Earth will finally come to an end. Earth will eventually be like Venus and Mars. Only mainly CO2, there will be nothing else in the atmosphere and it will remain. in that state as a kind of hot furnace planet until finally the sun, when it exhausts its hydrogen and enters a different phase, will become what we call a red giant, you know, like we have seen in other stars in our galaxy throughout the Universe. our sun will continue to get hotter and hotter over time and at that point it will expand enormously to the point where it will almost engulf the Earth entirely and at that point the planets will lose their atmospheres and simply be swept away.

As it exhausts its hydrogen fuel, the Sun's outer edge swells as our star enters its red giant phase, expanding millions of kilometers into space. Mercury is the first to be engulfed and then Venus's fate is sealed. Some models predict that Earth will barely escape the fiery fate. of its neighbors hang beyond the border of the dying star with Mars, but the long era of the four terrestrial planets will be over. The lives lived in one of them are nothing more than a distant memory. Foreigners, the truth is that it has quite boring clouds. There wasn't much to see with the cameras passing near the Voyager planet.

Sensors reveal why Uranus is so monotonous. The temperatures here are the coldest of any world in the

solar

system. There is simply not enough heat to drive the storm seen on Jupiter and Saturn. Uranus is a whole new kind of planet, an ice giant, and more surprises were to come. Uranus has rings that we knew about a long time ago from telescopic observations. The rings were there on Uranus, we didn't know their configuration or their shape. Voyager begins exploring the ring. system and sees something curious in the shadows. Two moons Cordelia on the inner edge of the brighter ring and Ophelia on the outer edge help organize the system.

The particles within the rings can move in or out like these small objects called shepherd moons whose gravitational force can shape and sculpt the Rings themselves, but it is the orientation of the orbits of these moons and the Rings themselves that distinguishes Uranus as the strangest world. Uranus looks strange, the Rings instead of looking like this when you look in a telescope, they are actually orbiting upwards and on the top of the planet everything is tipped like a top this strange orientation hints at an unusual past from the beginning everything in the system The solar system has been rotating in the same direction.

It begins with a large cloud of material that orbits the young foreign Sun. The material comes together to form each of the planets. Today they all orbit around the Sun and rotate on their axes in the same counterclockwise direction as that cloud. primordial except Venus and Uranus which rotate in the opposite direction but Uranus is even stranger because the entire planet is on its side, this was a really strange system, so why is Uranus so tilted on its side if an object the approximate size of Earth crashed into Uranus at the end of its formative history, so that would have had the right amount of momentum to basically knock it over?

On the other hand, all good, the alien may also help explain another of your mysteries of innocence, why the planet is so cold that the impact presumably gave up all that internal energy the planet had when it first formed and made it left a relatively dead and slow world. During this brief encounter, but the traveler's strangest discoveries are yet to come. What drives climate is very different depending on where you are in the solar system. The atmosphere of the Earth and the climate on the Earth largely depends on one thing and that is the sun and the sun shines. its energy goes down through the atmosphere and hits the surface and the surface of the Earth then heats up with the Earth, you have all the energy coming from the Sun heating the surface creating thermals that then drive the atmospheric flows that we see somewhere.

Like Saturn, it doesn't have a surface to heat, so when you compare the climate systems of these giant planets to those we have on Earth, you have to break the rule book a little: the Sun is the great controller of the Earth's atmosphere. Earth, but in the outer reaches of the solar system where Saturn lives, sunlight is 100 times weaker, meaning some other heat source must be driving Saturn's incredible weather. When Cassini studied the cloud tops of Saturn, it was able to infer a great deal about the real strange world that must lie beneath and the source of energy that helps power this planet. meteorology of Saturn's atmosphere and what powers the winds we see in it, etc.

We have now affirmed the belief that Saturn's atmospheric systems are actually powered by energy from below from an internal heat source. On Saturn, they don't run on sunlight like they do on Earth. A deep look inside the planet reveals a heat source formed by extreme temperatures. pressure inside huge clouds of water Cassini records lightning flashes ten thousand times more powerful than any other on Earth while lightning transforms methane gas into huge clouds of sun 8,000 kilometers deep the pressure of the atmosphere is 80 times greater than in the At the bottom of our deepest atmosphere there are enough oceans to transform this rain of graphite into diamonds, but even these diamonds are likely to be destroyed by the pressures of Saturn, eventually dissolving thirty thousand kilometers deep and Saturn's heat source is revealed here.

The pressures are so intense that the atmosphere behaves like a liquid metal capable of conducting. Electricity In this state, molten helium falls as rain and, as it fuses with the surrounding material, kinetic energy is released in the form of incredible amounts of heat, as this extraordinary source of heat that helps drive climate from Saturn was sent to search for the conditions where life could have begun. It is NASA's Mars reconnaissance. Orbiter Foreign sends more data than all other Mars missions combined. Mro has three cameras on board. The first is the Marcy weather camera. Go from horizon to horizon on each orbit, so it builds a map of the entire planet every day so you can see a global weather map every day on Mars The second camera is the context camera provides high resolution and covers around the 99% of the surface mro has made more than 60 thousand orbits its high-resolution cameras reveal Mars in unprecedented detail discovering polar avalanches moving sand dunes and what looked like seasonal flows of sand or even melted liquid water, in 2017 mro directs Its look towards one of the oldest features on the red planet, the Eredania Basin, which is believed to have been an ancient sea.

The Aredania Basin is a huge basin in one of the oldest crusts on Mars. It formed about 3.8 billion years ago and contained more water than 10 times that of the Great Lakes or three times that of the Caspian Sea on Earth and is in The ancient seabed where Mro sees something remarkable. Emeros saw a huge mass of 400 meters. A thick deposit formed from a mineral that forms in deep-sea hydrothermal environments, such as one that might have underwater vents. Mars not only had the same ingredients for life as Earth, but it also had an active environment to activate it.

The Eredonia Basin was an ancient sea 3.7 approximately 3.8 billion years ago and that is around the same time that life first emerged on Earth. This could have been a place where life could have existed because those hydrothermal vents under that sea could have created an environment very conducive to life. These initial conditions on the history of both planets are so similar that it seems reasonable to expect that this could eventually lead to life. These actively fertile conditions are thought to survive in places like the Aredania Basin for hundreds of millions of years, but then, 3.7 billion years ago, something happens that transforms prospects for life on Mars forever Mars underwent a fairly substantial transformation in its climate.

The weather got cold. The liquid water that was there soaked into the ground and froze or froze on the surface. Ultimately, it would be transported to the poles where it forms. The large, thick ice caps we see today become more volcanically active as temperatures plummet, causing catastrophic flooding. The water flows down from the Southern Highlands until, at a place known as ekkasma, it plunges over four kilometer-high cliffs into the largest waterfall. The solar system has ever seen it cascade into a spectacular 10 kilometer wide by one hundred kilometer long Canyon. Once the floods subside, the water disappears, the only trace of its existence etched on the planet's surface.

Neptune, an ice giant with 17 times the mass of the Earth at one and a half billion kilometers further from the Sun than Uranus Neptune is almost chemically identical strangely it couldn't be more different Neptune in some ways was almost a relief because it wasn't featureless, you know, it was like, oh well, a planet with clouds and features again. Neptune was a big thrill, it has swirling clouds, really strong winds at 1500 miles per hour, incredibly fast, the fastest winds we have in the solar system, one of the things Voyager discovered was an immense dark vortex within the atmosphere , a huge dark whirlpool.

Instead we say it's a giant storm but those words don't fully contain we're talking about a storm the size of a planet Earth or bigger prizes keep coming even though it's much further away Voyager discovers that Neptune is warmer than Uranus and The source of the heat is another oddity of this strange planet; In fact, when we look at this dynamic activity in these extraordinarily cold regions, we can't really understand what's going on here. One theory is that the buildup of pressure beneath thick cloud layers turns carbon in methane into a shower made of diamonds that then melt as they fall into the planet's interior, producing additional heat as the heat makes its way through. into the freezing cold of space, shakes the entire atmosphere and shakes the entire atmosphere. winds around the world there are no mountain ranges or valleys or continental borders to get in the way of perfect fluid dynamic flows, what that means is that when you start a weather pattern, when you start a vortex spinning or you start a rising column , there is very little to get in their way, so those developing and spinning winds keep going round and round, there is nothing to slow them down, there is no friction with the surface and the extreme cold here makes the atmosphere be less viscous, creating supersonic winds that exceed The most surprising thing seen on Jupiter or Saturn is Mercury, the least explored of the rocky planets due to the difficulty of entering orbit around a planet so close to the Sun five four three main engine start two ones and zeros and take off from the messenger on NASA's mission to Mercury, not to the planetary Enigma in our inner solar system, crossing the sound barrier and following a direct route to Mercury would not be practical.

A spaceship would reach such a high speed that it would needcarrying a prohibitive amount of heavy fuel to slow it down enough. We just had a spaceship separation, so Messenger controls his speed by going from one planet to another using his gravity to slow himself down, yet Messenger still approaches Mercury moving so fast that he is forced to fly past planet three. times, slowing down with each step until after almost seven years of impeccable navigation, it arrives safely in orbit and can finally begin its mission mapping the surface of Mercury. That first image ever acquired from orbit around Mercury was amazing when it finally arrived, it looked perfect.

It looked exactly how we expected it to be. For me, that was the real moment when I realized that we had made it into orbit and that everything was working. This pioneering journey has led me to a completely new idea of ​​how Mercury may have formed. Mercury is the most cratered planet in the solar system, with many puzzling features that hint at a violent past. Mercury has a very unusual orbit. If you were on the surface of the planet, you would have to orbit the Sun twice to get a full Mercury solar day, too. The disproportionately large core of the planet is very unusual. all metal surrounded like a little piece of rock, how do you end up with a planet that has so much metal inside and almost nothing on its surface?

It was a big mystery and the main question is why is it like this when the rest It was discovered that some of the planets have no idea to understand these strange characteristics in the chemistry of Mercury, very soon after entering orbit we began to receive chemical data from surface and we immediately got some surprises: the small probe detects volatile chemical elements in concentrations that no one had thought possible so close to the Sun. These are elements. that form in rocks but are evaporated by relatively low temperatures immediately told us that some of the oldest ideas about how Mercury formed could not be correct what the messenger discovered about Mercury could suggest a new turn in the history of the solar system Just a few million years after its formation, the young Mercury is boiling with the heat of its violent birth, slowly passing through forms rich in volatile elements.

If it had been close to the Sun, these elements would have evaporated before the rock hardened, then? What could explain why they are so abundant on Mercury today, the planets' orbits and their current locations have changed throughout the history of the solar system, so where things are today doesn't necessarily mean they are. where they were formed. They could have, and probably did, move from different locations to where they are now. The possibility is that Mercury would not have formed where it is today if we are much closer to the other planets, perhaps even outside of Venus or Earth or somewhere in between if Mercury had formed close to Earth and remained at a distance. more comfortable distance from The Fate of the Sun could have been very different, but it was not.

Which made it the strange sun-scorched world we see today. We don't know the full story. What we have now are theories and, as we have new ones. observations we are trying to change everything to fit those observations. Evidence from volatiles on Mercury's surface and the unusual size of its core suggests an interesting new theory. Yes, it is possible that Mercury began its life 160 million kilometers further from the Sun than it is. Today, in the region of space where the young Earth is also forming a region with dozens of planetary embryos, all fighting for their position in the chaos, something big may push Mercury out of its orbit and toward the Sun.

Strange Mercury brushes against another planetary embryo that is watching. blow removing much of its crust and mental now little more than a metallic planetary core Mercury continues towards the Sun ending in the peculiar elliptical orbit that we see today before we sent the messenger mission to Mercury. I think we had a very simplistic idea of ​​what it was going to be and Mercury turns out to be a more complex place with a more interesting and complex history than we had previously imagined but of course everything has to come to an end and once We ran out of fuel and we couldn't burn.

Our engines to avoid colliding with Mercury and the sequencers after four years of observations. The Messengers' fuel finally runs out and the spacecraft adds another crater to this small world where any prospect of life was burned when it was thrown too close to the Sun. Thank you. The sun's outer corona burns at a scorching million degrees, releasing a barrage of charged particles that travel at around 400 kilometers per second. of charged particles leaving the Sun and the Earth, which has a powerful magnetic field, when those charged particles begin to approach the Earth, they are deflected around the Earth through interactions with that magnetic field, whose protection keeps the solar wind away and other ionizing radiation. from the surface, so on Earth, where we have this really big magnetic field, we are safe and sound within the layer protected from all that radiation, the Earth's magnetic field effectively forms a protective bubble around the atmosphere of the Earth and when the sun sinks below the horizon there are times when the Earth's protective force field is visible.

Oh, the Aurora is a stunning display of the Earth's magnetic field in action. It looks best at the ballot box, but across the Earth it protects our atmosphere and all life on our planet. Your vital protective shield is generated. At the core of how a magnetic field is generated within a planet is when there is convective motion in a fluid that is capable of conducting electricity and on Earth, that electrically conductive fluid is liquid iron and the molten portion of the The Earth's core is a place where these movements take place and can establish a magnetic field like that of the Earth.

Mars once had a molten metallic core that generated a magnetic field around the planet. Auroras danced over the poles of Mars protecting its atmosphere and the seas below, but the field did not last into the earliest times. rocks on Mars you see evidence of a once powerful magnetic field, you get to the youngest rocks, rocks that are three billion 2 billion billion years old, there is no evidence of a magnetic field at all and no There is no intrinsic magnetic field on Mars today 500 million years after it formed, Mars's magnetic field is extinguished, the bright auroras over its poles slowly fading as the shield protecting the planet goes out once and for all.

When it stops, what happens is that all the atmospheric components, such as hydrogen and oxygen, form water. They are removed because you no longer have the magnetic shield, so the high energy particles coming from the Sun and outer space begin to remove the components that make up the water without its magnetic field to protect it. The atmosphere and then the water escape into space. So why did Mars lose its protective shield? What happened deep beneath its surface that prevented Mars from developing like Earth. The answer is found at the beginning of the history of Mars, at its creation 4.6 billion years ago, when the planets were forming from the dust clouds that surround the Sun.

The first differences between Mars and Earth place the planets young people on very different paths Mars forms further from the Sun, where crucially there is less rock material to build a planet Mars is different because it is not only further away, but is actually much smaller if a planet simply becomes too small freezes through Mars is only half the diameter of Earth, which means its core cooled more quickly and so lost the heat that powered the dynamo that generated its protective shield. The small size of Mars dooms the planet that died millions of years ago. Saturn has an extra Moon perhaps 400 kilometers in diameter and made almost entirely of ice, but this Moon is doomed, it is orbiting too close to resist the immense forces of gravity. of Saturn.

The Rings probably formed from an object that got too close to Saturn, this is an invisible boundary around Saturn called the Roche limit and that is the limit, depending on what you're made of, where Saturn's gravity is strong enough strong enough to separate you and that the gravity on the side closest to Saturn is strong enough to Compared to the gravity on the other side that will literally tear them apart, they don't have enough self-gravity to stay together. One leading theory suggests that just beyond Saturn's atmosphere, an icy Moon is approaching or even just inside its Roche limit.

The immense gravitational force of Saturn separates it, the moon begins to break catastrophically, a world torn apart by its proximity, for foreigners to enjoy it, billions of tons of ice break in orbit around Saturn and thanks to the speeds at which this material travels, it is likely that In just a few days it extends to surround the great giant Saturn, the iconic ring is now in place, but when Cassini turns its instruments towards it it sees a single transformed ring. The images we returned were phenomenal, they had such a resolution factor. 20 times better than anything we had.

It had before Cassini revealed how Saturn's giant rings have evolved. This debris now forms a disk wider than Jupiter, although on average it is only 10 meters thick inside moon-sized chunks of ice that orbit the structure clearing large voids turning one ring into many, but this is how Cassini captures images . With the sun directly over the equator, the most striking feature of the rings emerges. We knew this would be a time to investigate the third dimension, something that can't be seen when you just look at the image of Saturn's rings. and what we found was something amazing just as we left the door we saw vertical structures.

I can't express how surprised we were to see this. It's just that the spectacle was unexpected. I just imagined flying on a ferry. through the ring right near the ring, so from my perspective it would be almost like it was an endless sheet of shiny debris and I'm flying and flying and flying and suddenly I come across a wall of debris and that's two miles. high, I mean, is that so cool or what I've really said over and over again should they put that in a movie? This small world of rock and ice that has once seen the most dramatic transformations is today the largest jewel of the Solar System for more than a century. decade in orbit Cassini has forever deepened our understanding of Saturn, but its mission is far from over as young Jupiter orbits the Sun, clearing a path through the cloud of gas enveloping the early solar system, but that process causes it to start doing something alarming. spiral inward through the region of space that would become the asteroid belt when young Jupiter moves through the primordial asteroid belt things scatter around things gravitationally deflect and as a consequence of all this gravitational interaction more than 99 % of the original mass that there was has now basically disappeared by the movement of the giant planets and this has acted to throw material from the asteroid belt out of the asteroid belt and into the outer solar system.

These protoplanetary cores like Ceres were never able to graduate into full planets. Because there simply wasn't enough material in the orbital neighborhood when Jupiter passed through the primordial asteroid belt, its series of starved material stopped its growth and the dwarf planet was doomed to live its life as a cold Barren Rock, but the series is not The only one. World in our solar system whose development was interrupted Mars would suffer a similar fate at the hands of Jupiter after wandering through what would become the asteroid belt. Jupiter enters the region of space where Mars is forming and continues its spiral journey toward the Sun as Jupiter rampages.

Inwards, its immense gravity disperses material in all directions, some is sent towards the sun and another part is thrown into interstellar space. Due to the gravitational clearing of this neighborhood by Jupiter, Mars was unable to grow to more than 10 percent the size of Earth (that's why Mars is small and by removing material from the inner solar system, the giant planet may also have It prevented the formation of the super Earths we see in other systems, and if it had continued to move inward, our planet might also never have formed. but then, just when it looks like Jupiter will sweep everything away, the giant planet stops because in the shadows of the outer solar system another planet is forming the Solar System's second gas giant, Saturn, and itsarrival changes everything as Jupiter moved inward.

Saturn was moving. inward and reached Jupiter's orbit when this happened, the two became locked in a special configuration known as immune resonance. This is where the planets begin to interact gravitationally in a very coherent manner and now locked together as a unit, the two reversed their migration course and moved backwards. Saturn caused Jupiter to retreat, leaving behind enough material from which the inner planets could form Mercury. Venus and our home Earth aren't exactly the right place to provide the environment for life to develop, so if Jupiter had moved even further, who knows maybe. Life would never have developed in the solar system as we know it, and as its journey through the solar system comes to an end, Jupiter helps provide our living world with its most precious ingredient.

Today, two-thirds of our planet's surface is covered by oceans. More than 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water in each drop are associated with life. One of the big questions about the evolution of our solar system is how we got water here on this planet, so we think the inner planets didn't form naturally with a lot of water. Water is mostly found in the outer solar system, but if you end up having Jupiter and Saturn moving outward, then that can suddenly send more water into the inner solar system and the gravitational dance with Saturn Jupiter moves back through the asteroid belt and, As it does so, the water-rich material is thrown inward, where it is incorporated into the growing terrestrial worlds, so the movement of the giant planets has played an important role in supplying water to Our solar system, in a sense, is the outward movement of Jupiter through the asteroid. belt to which we must thank for the supply of water to the surface of the Earth the Earth would be a completely different planet if it were not for the primordial dance of Jupiter about 100 million years ago an asteroid 10 kilometers in diameter was ejected from the asteroid belt Dislodged from its orbit around Jupiter it is now on a collision course with Earth when it hits the impact generates a fireball so hot that anything within a 1,000 kilometer radius dies instantly the impact spews out some 300 billion tons of sulfur into the atmosphere and during nuclear winter This follows that 75 percent of plant and animal species are white from the face of the Earth, including the largest creatures that have ever walked on its surface, driving the dinosaurs to extinction .

Jupiter cleared the way for us to inherit Earth and although it still occasionally throws up asteroids. They are far away Jupiter also protects us from objects that are heading towards Earth from the confines of the solar system the giant planets the immense gravity acts as a shield about a hundred years ago a piece of rock and ice four kilometers in diameter rushes inward of the solar system but Jupiter stands in its way and the takeoff of Atlantis and the Galileo spacecraft Destined for Jupiter 70 years later, a mission is launched that will witness how effective a shield like Jupiter can be on board the space shuttle Atlantis the Galileo Orbiter Three years after Galileo launches Comet Shoemaker, nine have been captured by Jupiter's gravity and now trapped in the giant planet's deadly embrace.

Tidal forces begin to tear the comet apart. Their journey into the inner solar system disrupts what happens next and presents Galileo scientists with a unique opportunity. Then everyone was watching it and realized two things: one is that it had just passed very close to Jupiter and had probably been torn apart by Jupiter's tides and the other was that it was going to crash into Jupiter two years later, the discovery of that a comet was about to collide with Jupiter was a big surprise and very exciting after crossing the inner solar system Galileo approaches the place where he will witness the final moments of the comet we knew that Galileo could see the flashes directly we knew that The impacts were going to occur would occur on the night side and that Galileo was going to be able to see it on July 16 Galileo sees the first fragments of the comet enter the southern hemisphere of Jupiter at 60 kilometers per second the fragments actually heated the atmosphere almost red hot to the temperatures of the sun and the pieces hit the planet one after another pieces of comet Shoemaker Levy 9. hit Jupiter over the course of six days they looked like big flashes on Jupiter the images of the impact were fantastic these little points of light captured from 240 A million kilometers away is the only time a comet impact has been witnessed.

The entire most destructive impact releases energy equivalent to 6 million megatons of TNT, leaving behind a giant dark cloud twelve thousand kilometers in diameter as it captures objects in its orbit and incinerates them on impact. Jupiter protects us from bodies that might otherwise collide with Earth