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AN INTRODUCTION

SOLAR SYSTEM

PROFESSOR BRIAN COX

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.

The Milky Way in the night sky over Sliding Spring Observatory, New South Wales, Australia.

The Solar System is a system. The Sun and the eight major planets and countless billions of minor planets, moons, asteroids, comets and unclassified lumps of ice and rock were formed back in the mists of time and they continue to evolve as one. We rarely notice the dynamic, interconnected nature of our system, although asteroid strikes on our planet are not such a rare occurrence. The Chelyabinsk impact in February 2013 injured 1,500 people when a 12,000-tonne asteroid broke up as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere at 60 times the speed of sound, and the Tunguska airburst in Siberia in 1908 flattened 800 square miles of forest in an explosion comparable to that of the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever tested. The surface of the Moon bears testament to a record of violence and destruction from the skies that the Earth has also endured, but the relentless erasure of craters by weathering and our good fortune that no major impacts have occurred in recorded human history are the reason for our misplaced sense of isolation from the heavens.

The Tunguska airburst of 1908 is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history. It flattened 800 square miles of forest.

Meteor showers are not uncommon, but as most meteors are smaller than sand grains, they disintegrate before hitting the Earth’s surface.

The interdependent nature of the Solar System has become more evident as we have begun to understand its history. It is tempting to imagine that the physical layout of the planets is a fossilised remnant of primordial patterns in the collapsing dust cloud around the newly ignited Sun 4.6 billion years ago, but our exploration of the planets, coupled with increasingly powerful computer simulations of the evolution of the Solar System, has revealed that this is not the case. Planetary orbits are prone to instability; particularly so in the early, more chaotic years when our Solar System was young. The details of precisely how the planetary orbits have shifted are still uncertain, but we now suspect that Mercury, the innermost planet, began life much further out and was deflected inwards to its present-day seared orbit. Jupiter and Saturn may have drifted inwards shortly after their formation, before reversing their course and retreating, but not before affecting the distribution of material out of which Mars and Earth would later form. Around the time that life began on Earth, Neptune and Uranus may have been flung outwards, disrupting the orbits of billions of smaller objects far from the Sun. The record of this time of unprecedented violence, known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, is written across the scarred surface of the Moon, itself most likely formed in a glancing interplanetary collision between Earth and a Mars-sized planet 4.5 billion years ago. The planets are like snowflakes; the detail of their structure – their composition, size, spin and climate – are a frozen record of their past.

Two views of the Chelyabinsk meteor fireball caught on camera in 2013.

An understanding of the planets beyond Earth is therefore a prerequisite for understanding our home world, and that in turn is a prerequisite for understanding ourselves. Earth is unique in the Solar System because it is a planet with a complex ecosystem. The genesis and subsequent 4-billion-year evolution of life on Earth required planetary characteristics which are necessarily linked to the evolution of the system as a whole. There had to be liquid water on the surface, and much of this water was delivered after the Earth’s formation by icy, water-rich asteroids and comets, possibly deflected inwards from the outer Solar System by Jupiter. These rivers, seas and lakes of extra-terrestrial origin had to persist for the best part of 4 billion years, which required a stable atmosphere to maintain surface temperatures and pressures within a limited range. Four billion years is a long time – around a third of the age of the Universe. The Sun has brightened by 25 per cent since the Earth formed, which makes the stability of our environment all the more difficult to understand. In a chaotic system of planets around an evolving star, a planet with life-supporting properties and the remarkable stability enjoyed by Earth over billions of years may be extremely unusual. The study of our sister worlds, Mars and Venus, has proved instructive in understanding just how fortunate we may have been and how delicate our position today might be.

Satellite image of the Earth, centred on the Pacific Ocean. Water dominates this hemisphere of the Blue Planet.

The far side of the Moon bears the scars of the Late Heavy Bombardment. Photographed from Apollo 16 in 1972.

This colour-enhanced satellite photo of the Mississippi River Delta shows a lush, watery landscape.

Four billion years ago, as life began on Earth, Mars was also Earth-like.

Four billion years ago, as life began on Earth, Mars was also Earth-like. It had oceans and rivers and active geology and complex surface chemistry; the ingredients of life. One of the primary goals of the fleet of spacecraft currently in orbit around and exploring the surface of Mars is to search for evidence of past or even present life, and to understand why the red planet was transformed from a potential Eden at the dawn of the Solar System to the frigid desert world we observe today. The story is complex, but one of the most important differences between the two worlds is size. Mars is just one-tenth the mass of Earth; too small to hang on to its internal heat, its protective magnetic field and its atmosphere for much more than a billion years after its formation. Yet Mars formed in a similar region of the Solar System to Earth and Venus, so why is it so small? The answer may lie in the fast-changing orbits of Jupiter and Saturn early in the Solar System’s history. These surprising findings will be explored later in this book.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this photograph of Aram Chaos, an ancient impact crater that once held a lake.

The Apollo 11 mission in July 1969 changed human history, landing the first people on the surface of the Moon.

‘Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this Earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.’

H.G. Wells

The history of Venus is perhaps even more puzzling, in part because of the immense difficulty of exploring the planet. Venus is often described as a vision of hell; surface temperatures are high enough to melt lead, and the atmospheric pressure is 90 times that on Earth. Sulphuric acid raindrops fall from its clouds. And yet, long ago, Venus too may have been Earth-like. Perhaps there were once Venusians, before a runaway greenhouse effect took hold and began destroying Venus’s temperate climate around 2.5 billion years ago – although this date is highly uncertain.

Taken together, the stories of the three large terrestrial planets are salutary. If an alien astronomer observed our Solar System from afar, they would classify Mars, Earth and Venus as potentially living worlds, orbiting as they do inside the so-called habitable zone around the Sun – the region within which, if atmospheric conditions are right, liquid water can exist on the surface of the planets. All three worlds may have once been habitable, and all three worlds may have once harboured life, but now only Earth supports a complex ecosystem, let alone a civilisation.

Understanding why Mars and Venus diverged so significantly from Earth over the last 4 billion years will provide great insight into the fragility of worlds and perhaps suggest whether our own good fortune is near-impossible to comprehend or merely outrageous. Planets change. Ours could change at any moment. A stray comet from the frozen Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune could put an end to our story. We could also put an end to ourselves. The study of Venus might help us avoid one of the ways by which we could destroy our civilisation, because it shows us what greenhouse gases can do to a world. I think one of the reasons why anthropogenic climate change is so difficult for a certain type of person to accept is that atmospheres seem ethereal and tenuous and incapable of trapping enough heat to modify the temperatures on a planet significantly. For such people I suggest a trip to Venus, where they will be squashed and boiled and dissolved on the surface of Earth’s twin.

The exploration of the planets, then, 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. Understanding our history is important because it places our existence in context. The more we learn about the events that led to the emergence of humans on this planet only a few hundred thousand years ago, the more we are forced to marvel at the sheer unlikeliness of it all. We needed Jupiter and the comets and asteroids and countless collisions and mergers and near-catastrophes stretching back 4.6 billion years. There are valid objections to this way of thinking; it is an objective fact that we are here, and our future should be our primary concern. That may be so, but I argue that a deeper understanding of the evolution of the planets is essential for our continued prosperity and existence on this one. The threat of catastrophic climate change is an obvious example, but there are many other reasons why knowledge is important. There is feedback in human affairs; our collective state of mind affects the decisions we make. To confine our imaginations to the surface of the Earth is to ignore both our immense good fortune and the fragility of our position. A wider knowledge of both will, I believe, help secure a safer and more prosperous future.

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