The Planets

BBC Two Northern Ireland

4:15 PM to 5:15 PM

Thursday 30 January

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Professor Brian Cox examines Saturn, a planet raised in the freezing outer reaches of the solar system that began life as a strange combination of rock and ice. Born outside the snow line, with an abundance of building materials, it soon grew to dwarf Earth, drawing in colossal amounts of the hydrogen and helium that permeated the early solar system. As Nasa's Cassini probe has discovered, the planet remained ring-less most of its life, until a fateful encounter changed everything. Less than a hundred million years ago, one of Saturn's ice moons was drawn too close to the planet. In a truly cataclysmic event, the entire moon was destroyed and the rings were born