Solar System Evolution, A New Perspective

"My next book is called Solar System Evolution, A New Perspective by Stuart Ross Taylor. This is a great book for anybody interested in our Solar System: how it formed, why it formed as it did and how we know these sorts of things. The first chapter looks at the historical views of how our Solar System formed, things like Copernican theory that the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System. Prior to that people thought the Earth was at the centre, so you often get references to pre-Copernican and post-Copernican. And then you’ve got Galileo. So you get a brief introduction to that, which is nice because I don’t know how much of that is taught nowadays. Then it goes into the structure of the universe and the Solar System’s place in the universe. Also, very importantly, it also talks about the stellar nucleosynthesis of elements. So all the elements that we are made of, the calcium in your teeth and the iron in your blood, are produced in stellar explosions. That material gets recycled and recycled and recycled in the cosmos, and some of it accumulates in the area of space where our Solar System formed, and that’s why we have the elements that we have. So he discusses that and explains how that works. It’s quite complicated. It’s all to do with stars behaving like nuclear reactors. You start off with hydrogen, which was ubiquitous and formed in the Big Bang, but everything heavier than hydrogen was formed in these stellar nuclear furnaces. So you get hydrogen – you know about nuclear fusion? Where you’re fusing atoms together rather than separating them? – you get hydrogen and you fuse those atoms together and get helium and you fuse more helium atoms together and you get elements like lithium, boron and beryllium. More reactions form elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen… See what I mean? It goes on and on and on and you get all the way up the periodic table to iron. To get elements heavier than iron you need these very large supernovae explosions or they can be formed in red giant stars. . Yes. You get hours of lectures on this and there are different processes that can happen – it’s all quite complicated and difficult to explain! Were made in the stars. Yes. Yes. I’m not going to get into that one way or the other, but it’s certainly a mind-bending concept. Not really. I’d best describe myself as a ‘submarine Catholic.’ We surface when we’re in trouble. It’s quite an amazing concept and a lot of people don’t realise this. When you think about it – all the stuff in my blood that makes it red comes from the stars."