2015-02-20 BBC:星光七纪元-10（在线收听）

At this time people very much believed that God had created a template for the heavens and he'd used pretty much the same template to create the society as well, and so with this as above so below belief, any change in the heavens immediately had huge cultural implications, by 1611 Copernicanism was sufficiently known that poet John Don says the new philosophy calls all in doubt, all in pieces, all coherence gone.

Our view of our relationship with the Sun had completely changed, what Copernicus didn't know but what scientists have now worked out is that the Sun isn't just at the centre of our solar system, it's the creator of it, the birth of a star leads to the birth of any planets that surround it.

Planets are the natural consequences of star formation, planets are the left over debris of the gas and dust forming a star, they are like the afterbirth if you like.

As the new star is born, the orbiting remnants of the cloud from which it is formed start creating a disc, and over millions of years in this disc the dust grains start to stick together, blank out the light of a young star in the northern constellation of P and you can see white dots which the planets are forming in the disc of dust that surrounds the star, eventually the star is encircled by its children.