In ‘Jupiter’, we journey half a billion miles from the earth’s surface to a mini solar system of over 60 moons rotating around a powerful planet of gas. Its flowing colours and spots hold strange beauty, but contain violent storms and jet streams.Could this big, bright ball of turbulent weather have been the star of Bethlehem? Could one of its moons harbour life beneath its icy crust? Jupiter, t
This is the profile of an extraterrestrial mass murderer: one whose existence was denied by scientific orthodoxy for nearly two decades, but has now been tracked down. 65 million years ago a 15km wide asteroid hit the Earth. In 1978 Walter Alvarez, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, and his son Luis, first proposed the outrageous idea that a meteorite strike blasted the dinosaurs into extinction, ta
250 million years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the land and oceans teemed with life. This was the Permian, a golden era of biodiversity that was about to come to a crashing end. Within just a few thousand years, 95% of the lifeforms on the planet would be wiped out, in the biggest mass extinction Earth has ever known. What natural disaster could kill on such a massive scale? It is