Throughout the Milky Way, there are clouds of cold gas and dust, just sitting there, doing nothing. At some point in the distant past, this cloud was disturbed; either through the collision of another galaxy, or the explosion of a massive star. The explosion would have sent waves through space that squeezed the gas and dust together. The clumping material was able to attract more material with its gravity, and started to collect into the solar nebula. Just like a dancer that spins faster as she pulls in her arms, the cloud began to spin as it collapsed. The mutual movement of all the atoms in the cloud gave the solar nebula a direction to spin.
Eventually, the cloud grew hotter and denser in the center, with a disk of gas and dust surrounding it that was hot in the center but cool at the edges. The Sun formed out of this largest collection of mass at the center of the solar nebula which continued to fall in, the center eventually got so hot that it became a star. As the disk got thinner and thinner, particles began to stick together and form clumps. Some clumps got bigger, as particles and small clumps stuck to them, eventually forming planets or moons .
The planets started out as tiny specks of dust that clumped together. As they continued to gather together, they became pebbles, rocks, boulders and eventually planetoids. These planetoids violently collided together to become the planets we know today.
By studying the decay of radioactive elements in meteorites,which are thought to be left over from this early phase of the solar system, astronomers have been able to determine that the Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago.
When astronomers look out into the Universe, they see other Solar Systems forming at different stages. Some are large clouds of cold dust, others are starting to collapse. Others have accretion disks, and some might even have planets clearing out paths in the dust of the disk. We can’t see the formation of our own Solar System, but we can see it happening everywhere we look, so we assume our Solar System formed in the same way......!!!
The planets started out as tiny specks of dust that clumped together. As they continued to gather together, they became pebbles, rocks, boulders and eventually planetoids. These planetoids violently collided together to become the planets we know today.By studying the decay of radioactive elements in meteorites,which are thought to be left over from this early phase of the solar system, astronomers have been able to determine that the Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago.
When astronomers look out into the Universe, they see other Solar Systems forming at different stages. Some are large clouds of cold dust, others are starting to collapse. Others have accretion disks, and some might even have planets clearing out paths in the dust of the disk. We can’t see the formation of our own Solar System, but we can see it happening everywhere we look, so we assume our Solar System formed in the same way......!!!
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