How Did the Solar System Form?
What takes up most of the Solar System? What objects make up the Solar System? How many planets have we sent probes to, to study? How the Solar System was Formed About 4 and 1/2 billion Years ago a large cloud of dust in space called a Nebula started to spin and come together. From this nebula our Sun formed. As the sun was forming smaller areas in the nebula began to also spin. These smaller areas swept up matter in the nebula and became the planets and their satellites (moons). The remaining matter and gasses formed the Comets, asteroids, and meteoroids. Most of the lighter gasses we blown away by solar winds, as the Sun became a main sequence star. The Solar System is Made of: The Sun Planets Asteroids Meteoroids Comets Satellites Gasses Dwarf Planets The Sun Our Sun is one of billions of stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy, and is located about 70,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy. The Sun is a main sequence star and is about 4.6 billion years old. The Sun makes up
There are particles in space. These particles are protons (mostly). The protons are ionized hydrogen. All of this hydrogen is floating in space. There is a gravitational force acting on them as there is a gravitational force acting between everything. The force that this bean bag feels from another bean bag is there, but it is very small compared to the force on the Earth on the bean bag; so, the bean bag will fall essentially towards the earth. Similarly, these protons feel a very small gravitational force between them. Since the force is small, they move very slowly, and it takes them a long time (an astronomical amount of time) to fall towards each other. Eventually, these protons start running into each other. When the cloud is condensed enough, they protons collide fairly violently and stick together, giving off light and forming helium in this process. A star is born. The process continues and the star shines. Eventually, the hydrogen collides with the helium atoms to form lithiu
The planets, asteroids, and comets in the solar system are loose particles left over from the formation of the Sun. Originally the gas and dust that would become the Sun was the core of a cloud much larger than the solar system, probably several light-years across One light-year is approximately 10 trillion (10,000,000,000,000) km, or 6 trillion miles. The core was slowly rotating at first, but as the cloud collapsed it spun faster, like a spinning ice skater pulling in his arms. The rotation prevented the material at the core’s equator from collapsing as fast as the material at the poles, so the core became a spinning disk. Gas and dust in the disk spiraled gradually in to the center, where it accumulated to form the Sun. But because dust is denser than gas, some of the dust settled to the mid-plane of the disk. These dust particles stuck together to make clumps, then clumps stuck together to make rocks, then rocks collided to make planets. In the case of the “gas giant” planets (Jupi
By Joseph Lazio
The solar system formed from a condensed region in a local dust cloud. Nearby supernovae explosions perturbed the equilibrium of the dust cloud over five billion years ago, creating a nugget of density at the center of which our Sun formed. We can observe these clouds today in other regions of the galaxy — they are called Bok globules. Because they are relatively dense dust clouds, Bok globules block out light from objects within and behind them, being a subcategory of dark nebulae. This makes it impossible to directly observe the formation of new stars, although the simulations of astrophysicists give us a good idea of how it works. Starting out as an irregular cloud, once a center of gravity was established, many of the dust particles in the cloud making up the early solar system would have begun to move into more regular orbits, circling the newborn star as a protoplanetary disc. Within the cloud, large chunks of rock condensed into the planets, which proceeded to sweep their orbits
