Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
There is evidence that the formation of the Solar System began about 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. [1] Most of the collapsing mass collected in the center, forming the Sun , while the rest flattened into a protoplanetary disk out of which the planets , moons , asteroids , and ...
The formation of planetesimals is the biggest unsolved problem in the nebular disk model. How 1 cm sized particles coalesce into 1 km planetesimals is a mystery. This mechanism appears to be the key to the question as to why some stars have planets, while others have nothing around them, not even dust belts. [28]
A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is generally required to be in orbit around a star, stellar remnant, or brown dwarf, and is not one itself. [1] The Solar System has eight planets by the most restrictive definition of the term: the terrestrial planets Mercury , Venus , Earth , and Mars , and the giant planets Jupiter , Saturn ...
According to evidence from radiometric dating and other sources, Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago. [7] [8] [9] The current dominant theory of planet formation suggests that planets such as Earth form in about 50 to 100 million years but more recently proposed alternative processes and timescales have stimulated ongoing debate in the planetary science community. [10]
French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was the first to propose a model for the origin of the Solar System in his book The World, written from 1629 to 1633.. In his view, the universe was filled with vortices of swirling particles, and both the Sun and planets had condensed from a large vortex that had contracted, which he thought could explain the circular motion of the plane
The disk eventually disappears due to accretion onto the central star, planet formation, ejection by jets, and photoevaporation by ultraviolet radiation from the central star and nearby stars. [18] As a result, the young star becomes a weakly lined T Tauri star , which, over hundreds of millions of years, evolves into an ordinary Sun-like star ...
It is a strongly interdisciplinary field, which originally grew from astronomy and Earth science, [1] and now incorporates many disciplines, including planetary geology, cosmochemistry, atmospheric science, physics, oceanography, hydrology, theoretical planetary science, glaciology, and exoplanetology. [1]
Most of the material orbits and rotates in one direction. This uniformity of motion is due to the collapse of a gas cloud. [1] The nature of the collapse is explained by conservation of angular momentum. In 2010 the discovery of several hot Jupiters with backward orbits called into question the theories about the formation of planetary systems. [2]