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ANDREW COHEN
WITH
PROFESSOR BRIAN COX
THE PLANETS
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William Collins
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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2019
Text © Brian Cox & Andrew Cohen 2019
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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
COPYRIGHT
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INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AN INTRODUCTION
SOLAR SYSTEM
PROFESSOR BRIAN COX
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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.