In The Saskatchewan Meteor Strike and Its Aftermath, Professor Brian Cox meets Dr. Alan Hildebrand who leads a team of meteorite hunters to investigate the aftermath of a 10-ton asteroid that landed in Saskatchewan, Canada, in November 2008. Learn about the intense heat generated as the asteroid passed through Earth's atmosphere, leaving melted fragments on the surface. This video is excerpted from BBC's Wonders of the Solar System, a spellbinding documentary series that explores the most extreme locations on Earth to explain how the laws of physics carved natural wonders across the Solar System.
In Strange Creatures at 500 Meters Below, narrator David Attenborough explains how plankton retreats into the ocean depths as the Sun rises. To follow it, we descend in a submarine where pressure increases, and temperatures drop. At 500 meters (1,640 feet) below, strange creatures emerge. Organic particles, known as marine snow, drift down, serving as food for many animals like the sea spider, which uses feathered leg-like appendages to capture it. Meanwhile, the sawtooth eel waits motionless, ready to strike at silhouetted prey swimming near the faint glow from the surface. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Planet Earth, a breathtaking documentary series that highlights the natural wonders of our planet.
The article "9 Stargazing Tips to Enjoy the Night Sky From Home" from BBC's Science Focus offers advice for stargazing without a telescope. It includes tips on dressing warmly, preparing your site, adjusting your eyes, spotting stars, planets, and meteors, and using apps to enhance your experience.
The Mars Moons Exploration’s mission: grab a piece of one of Mars’s moons and bring it back to Earth. Talk about a big job! No wonder this is the first time anyone’s ever attempted this.
Our inner Solar System has only three moons: one for Earth and two for Mars. Mars may have two moons, but they’re both relatively small. The smaller moon, Deimos, is about 6 miles across. Phobos is around double that, but, at 12 miles across, its diameter is still closer to the distance to your local grocery store than the size of Earth’s Moon (which is over 2,000 miles across).
Scientists want to bring a sample from Phobos back to Earth, which should hopefully help answer the question: How exactly did these Mars moons form? One possibility is that a giant impact on early Mars blasted debris into space that later became the moons. Another is that Phobos and Deimos started as asteroids that were captured by Mars’s gravity.
Until now, the only pieces of Mars that scientists have been able to study fell to Earth as meteorites, but these types of samples become contaminated as they travel through our atmosphere. A piece taken directly from Phobos, however, would be pristine.
The plan is for the spacecraft to fly past Deimos, send a rover onto Phobos, and later land to collect a sample that is expected to return to Earth in 2031. After all this, researchers are expecting a whopping… 10 grams of material. That’s the same as about two nickels! But scientists say that is enough, especially because they would be able to do several studies on each grain of material.
In Unveiling the Secrets of Our Nearest Neighbors, Professor Brian Cox explores the unique atmospheres of Mercury and Venus. Mercury, lacking an atmosphere, is bombarded by meteorites that reach the surface intact and at full speed. Venus, on the other hand, suffers from a runaway greenhouse effect, which has caused extreme heat and thick sulfuric acid clouds. These atmospheric conditions influence the surface features and climate of each planet. This video is excerpted from BBC's Wonders of the Solar System, a spellbinding documentary series that explores the most extreme locations on Earth to explain how the laws of physics carved natural wonders across the Solar System.
In The Theory of a Supercontinent and the Cold War Discovery That Proved It, narrator Michael Mosley shares how German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed a radical new theory — that all of the continents had once fit together as one supercontinent that he called Pangaea. It wasn’t until the Cold War that the oceans were mapped, and scientists discovered the interlocking plates of the seafloor that could provide evidence for Wegener’s theory. This video is excerpted from BBC's The Story of Science, in which Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society's historical path.
In The Saskatchewan Meteor Strike and Its Aftermath, Professor Brian Cox meets Dr. Alan Hildebrand who leads a team of meteorite hunters to investigate the aftermath of a 10-ton asteroid that landed in Saskatchewan, Canada, in November 2008. Learn about the intense heat generated as the asteroid passed through Earth's atmosphere, leaving melted fragments on the surface. This video is excerpted from BBC's Wonders of the Solar System, a spellbinding documentary series that explores the most extreme locations on Earth to explain how the laws of physics carved natural wonders across the Solar System.
In Strange Creatures at 500 Meters Below, narrator David Attenborough explains how plankton retreats into the ocean depths as the Sun rises. To follow it, we descend in a submarine where pressure increases, and temperatures drop. At 500 meters (1,640 feet) below, strange creatures emerge. Organic particles, known as marine snow, drift down, serving as food for many animals like the sea spider, which uses feathered leg-like appendages to capture it. Meanwhile, the sawtooth eel waits motionless, ready to strike at silhouetted prey swimming near the faint glow from the surface. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Planet Earth, a breathtaking documentary series that highlights the natural wonders of our planet.
The article "9 Stargazing Tips to Enjoy the Night Sky From Home" from BBC's Science Focus offers advice for stargazing without a telescope. It includes tips on dressing warmly, preparing your site, adjusting your eyes, spotting stars, planets, and meteors, and using apps to enhance your experience.
The Mars Moons Exploration’s mission: grab a piece of one of Mars’s moons and bring it back to Earth. Talk about a big job! No wonder this is the first time anyone’s ever attempted this.
Our inner Solar System has only three moons: one for Earth and two for Mars. Mars may have two moons, but they’re both relatively small. The smaller moon, Deimos, is about 6 miles across. Phobos is around double that, but, at 12 miles across, its diameter is still closer to the distance to your local grocery store than the size of Earth’s Moon (which is over 2,000 miles across).
Scientists want to bring a sample from Phobos back to Earth, which should hopefully help answer the question: How exactly did these Mars moons form? One possibility is that a giant impact on early Mars blasted debris into space that later became the moons. Another is that Phobos and Deimos started as asteroids that were captured by Mars’s gravity.
Until now, the only pieces of Mars that scientists have been able to study fell to Earth as meteorites, but these types of samples become contaminated as they travel through our atmosphere. A piece taken directly from Phobos, however, would be pristine.
The plan is for the spacecraft to fly past Deimos, send a rover onto Phobos, and later land to collect a sample that is expected to return to Earth in 2031. After all this, researchers are expecting a whopping… 10 grams of material. That’s the same as about two nickels! But scientists say that is enough, especially because they would be able to do several studies on each grain of material.
In Unveiling the Secrets of Our Nearest Neighbors, Professor Brian Cox explores the unique atmospheres of Mercury and Venus. Mercury, lacking an atmosphere, is bombarded by meteorites that reach the surface intact and at full speed. Venus, on the other hand, suffers from a runaway greenhouse effect, which has caused extreme heat and thick sulfuric acid clouds. These atmospheric conditions influence the surface features and climate of each planet. This video is excerpted from BBC's Wonders of the Solar System, a spellbinding documentary series that explores the most extreme locations on Earth to explain how the laws of physics carved natural wonders across the Solar System.
In The Theory of a Supercontinent and the Cold War Discovery That Proved It, narrator Michael Mosley shares how German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed a radical new theory — that all of the continents had once fit together as one supercontinent that he called Pangaea. It wasn’t until the Cold War that the oceans were mapped, and scientists discovered the interlocking plates of the seafloor that could provide evidence for Wegener’s theory. This video is excerpted from BBC's The Story of Science, in which Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society's historical path.