The Planets

About this book

A companion book to the critically acclaimed BBC series.

Jupiter: The Ruthless One – Mars: The Doomed One – Sun: The Fiery One – Saturn: The Beautiful One – Pluto: The Mysterious One

We're living through an extraordinary time of exploration. A fleet of space probes are continually beaming data from their sensors back to Earth. Hidden in this stream of code are startling new discoveries about the worlds we share with the Sun. We will piece together these remarkable and often surprising findings to tell the greatest science story of them all the life and times of the Solar System.

What emerges is a dramatic tale chronicling the adventures of eight planetary siblings. Born from violence, they grow up together, in time becoming living and breathing worlds, only to fade away one by one as they age. Along the way each world takes on its own unique character which we will come to know as we cross the vastness of space and time to visit them. We'll place our cameras on the surfaces of these worlds at moments of heightened drama. We'll give readers a glimpse of the most memorable moments in the evolution of our star system.

Along the way we will meet all eight of the major planets, plus a supporting cast of moons, asteroids and comets, and a mysterious as yet unseen world way out beyond the Kuiper belt

Customer Reviews

Biography

Professor Brian Cox, OBE is a particle physicist, a Royal Society research fellow, and a professor at the University of Manchester as well as researcher on one of the most ambitious experiments on Earth, the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He is best known to the public as a science broadcaster and presenter of the highly popular BBC2 series Wonders of the Solar System. He was also the keyboard player in the UK pop band D:Ream in the 1990s.