Empire of the Sun • episode "S1E1" • Wonders of the Solar System

Category: Astronomy

Professor Brian Cox explores the powerhouse of them all, the sun. In India he witnesses a total solar eclipse and in Norway, he watches the battle between the sun's wind and Earth, as the night sky glows with the northern lights. Beyond earth, the solar wind continues, creating dazzling aurora on other planets.

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Wonders of the Solar System • 5 episodes •

Empire of the Sun

Empire of the Sun

Professor Brian Cox explores the powerhouse of them all, the sun. In India he witnesses a total solar eclipse and in Norway, he watches the battle between the sun's wind and Earth, as the night sky glows with the northern lights. Beyond earth, the solar wind continues, creating dazzling aurora on other planets.

Order Out of Chaos

Order Out of Chaos

Discover how beauty and order in Earth's cosmic backyard was formed from nothing more than a chaotic cloud of gas. Chasing tornados in Oklahoma, Professor Brian Cox explains how the same physics that creates these spinning storms shaped the young solar system. Out of this celestial maelstrom emerged the jewel in the crown, Brian's second wonder - the magnificent rings of Saturn.

The Thin Blue Line

The Thin Blue Line

Professor Brian Cox takes a flight to the top of earth's atmosphere, where he sees the darkness of space above and the thin blue line of our atmosphere below. Against the stunning backdrop of the glaciers of Alaska, Brian reveals his fourth wonder: Saturn's moon Titan, shrouded by a murky, thick atmosphere.

Dead or Alive

The worlds that surround our planet are all made of rock, but there the similarity ends. Some have a beating geological heart, others are frozen in time. Professor Brian Cox travels to the tallest mountain on Earth, the volcano Mauna Kea on Hawaii, to show how something as basic as a planet's size can make the difference between life and death.

Aliens

All life on Earth needs water so the search for aliens in the solar system has followed the search for water. We examine the patterns in the ice on Jupiter's moon Europa, which reveal an ocean far below with more potentially life-giving water than all the oceans on Earth. But of all the wonders of the solar system forged by the laws of nature, Brian reveals the greatest wonder of them all.

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Strange Worlds

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Heaven and Hell

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Sagan discusses comets and asteroids as planetary impactors, giving recent examples of the Tunguska event and a lunar impact described by Canterbury monks in 1178. It moves to a description of the environment of Venus, from the previous fantastic theories of people such as Immanuel Velikovsky to the information gained by the Venera landers and its implications for Earth's greenhouse effect. The Cosmos Update highlights the connection to global warming.

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Apollo: The Forgotten Films

In July 1969, history was made as 600 million people watched Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind on the surface of the moon. But behind these iconic images is an untold story. Now, 50 years later, Discovery and Science Channel celebrate the Apollo 11 moon landing with a two-hour television event, APOLLO: THE FORGOTTEN FILMS, that tells the complete story of this most audacious of missions. Featuring forgotten and never-before-seen footage from events surrounding the landmark mission, the documentary by Duncan Copp traces the decade's worth of effort involving half a million scientists that was required to enable that "one giant leap for mankind". The archives reveal the incredible lengths an army of engineers, scientists and astronauts went to, to achieve America's greatest technological feat.

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First Second of the Big Bang

First Second of the Big Bang

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Sisters of the Sun

Sisters of the Sun

Explores the violent cosmic phenomenon of supernovas, which on average occur once per galaxy per century or one billion times per year in the observable universe.

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