What's Hidden Inside Planets?

A guided journey to the inner workings of Earth—and the cloaked mysteries of other planets in our solar system and beyond.

We live on the surface of Earth, but rarely consider the fascinating world beneath our feet. The daily machinations of Earth's deep interior have crucial impacts on our lives and make the planet a habitable, and yet treacherous, place to live. In What's Hidden Inside Planets? planetary scientist Dr. Sabine Stanley takes us beneath the surface to delve into the very heart of a planet to discover what lies within.

Considering the planets in our own solar system and beyond, Stanley connects the wonders we see at a planet's surface to the intricate workings of its interior. Earthquakes (and marsquakes, and venusquakes), volcanoes (both the fiery and the icy varieties), and the geomagnetic field that both protects us from fierce solar winds and makes the aurora borealis's beauty possible are all the result of these interior processes. Stanley explores the extreme environments found inside planets, which can be hotter than the surface of the Sun, pummeled by diamond rain, full of metallic hydrogen, and straining under the pressure of millions of atmospheres.

Information about planetary births and their interiors comes from a range of sources. Samples of the building blocks of planets retrieved from meteorites provide clues for how Earth and other planets formed and what they're composed of. Scientists combine that information with studies of seismic waves, rotation, and the gravitational and magnetic fields of planets, as well as extreme experiments and computational models, to simulate the deep interiors of planets and learn how they work. Stanley's planetary "cookbook" describes the ingredients from which planets are created, the processes that bring them together, and what happens when the crumbs decay. Join this exciting journey to the center of the Earth and many other interstellar locations to learn what lies beneath our feet and why it's the best real estate in our solar system.