This short film examines the chief process thought to lead to the formation of planetary ring systems....

Here, I show the early Solar System – well, not necessarily our solar system. Gas and dust has lumped together to form asteroid-sized planetesimals, and these will then come together to form the larger bodies astronomers call planetoids. Soon, the ...

Witness the formation of the Moon. The young Earth (right) is still surrounded by a ring of debris from which the Moon (left) has recently formed. The debris is the result of the Earth having been hit by a large protoplanet. This image appeared in Ea...

This shows a view towards the Sun in the days when the terrestrial planets were forming from the protoplanetary disc, about 4500 million years ago. It shows an advanced stage in the process of planet formation....

An illustration showing a primitive terrestrial planet, more properly called a protoplanet, in the process of formation. The planet grows as its gravity sucks in more and more rocky debris. The whole process takes hundreds of millions of years....

This one is similar to Chaos and Order. Both show the formation of the Moon. The young Earth (left) is still surrounded by a ring of debris from which the Moon (right) has recently formed. The debris is the result of the Earth having been hit by a la...

An illustration showing a primitive terrestrial planet, more properly called a protoplanet, in the process of formation. We view the newborn world from its troubled surface, and a whole host of similar worlds is visible in the sky before us. This ima...

Astronomical artwork of a protogalaxy, or a primeval galaxy. These were very early, giant clouds of gas which were forming into the first galaxies. It is believed that the rate of star formation during this period of galactic evolution will determine...

This image is very similar to Fiery Birth andEmergence of the Terrestrials, showing a primitive terrestrial planet, or protoplanet, in the process of formation, 4500 million years ago....

This is a conceptual representation of the Big Bang that theoretically created space and time 13.7 billion years ago. The image is inaccurate in that the Big Bang was an 'explosion' of space, not in space, so it would not have been possible to regard...