Our early Earth was a heavy metal album cover: a molten ball covered in a global lava ocean, spewing lethal gases while being pelted by the flaming space-rocks of our Solar System’s violently chaotic afterbirth.

Over the next 4.5 billion years of hectic cosmo-geological time, it has settled down a bit, allowing humans, lemurs, and others to emerge.

A vision of this hellish ancient reality remains, (hopefully) never to be glimpsed by human eyes: our molten metallic core, blazing about as hotly as the surface of the Sun.