'The Planet' summary
Today I learned about a documentary by the BBC called "The Planet," which is a fascinating feast of facts. Here are some interesting things I admire:
- The Sun, which is the controller of everything, controls the fate of the Earth and other planets in the solar system, thus facilitating liquid water on the surface.
- In billions of years, the Sun will become hotter and grow larger in size, eventually devouring everything in its way, including the Earth. Neptune, an icy giant far away from the Sun, gets its heat source in a different way. Its surface has earth-sized storms that look like dark swirls. Underneath, the pressure build-up is unbelievable, so it converts methane in its atmosphere to carbon, which falls as diamonds that also dissolve, leaving heat energy.
- How Saturn got rings: Long back, Saturn had an extra moon around its orbit, which was icy and rocky. Once it reached Saturn's Roche limit due to Saturn's great gravitational force, the icy moon ruptured into pieces. Due to its high-speed rotation, the pieces encircle the planet.
- Jupiter's primordial dance: Once before the planets were born, Jupiter was moving toward the Sun, throwing away everything in its way due to its measurable gravitational force, which broke the asteroid belts. This may have also made Mars small. If Jupiter had moved further, our Earth would have also come to a ball. But it stopped. This happened because of the birth of Saturn. Saturn, having the same tendency, creates a Mean Motion Resonance and locks Jupiter as a unit.
- Now, Jupiter becomes Earth's savior by taking the asteroids towards it coming from outer space. Also, a theory says that an asteroid thrown by Jupiter once hit the Earth, causing the extinction of the creatures called dinosaurs.