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In roughly 5 billion years, the Sun will cool and expand outward to many times its current diameter (becoming a red giant), before casting off its outer layers as a planetary nebula and leaving behind a stellar remnant known as a white dwarf. In the distant future, the gravity of passing stars will gradually reduce the Sun's retinue of planets.
Our solar system began as a collapsing cloud of gas and dust over 4.6 billion years ago. Over the next 600 million years, called by geologists the Hadean Era, the sun and the planets were formed, and Earth’s oceans were probably created by cometary impacts. Comets are very rich in water ice.
The first and most widely accepted theory is the core accretion model, which works well to explain the formation of terrestrial planets like Earth but doesn't fully account for giant planets.
4.59 billion years ago: The giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune form around the protosun. At least Uranus and Neptune form closer to the Sun than where they are today. One or more ice giants may have also formed that were later ejected from the solar system.
Here we are, 4.5 billion years into the lifetime of our sun, with an array of planets and smaller objects orbiting around it. How did all the planets form, and why did they end up in the...
The Big Bang brought the Universe into existence 13.8 billion years ago. Our solar system formed much later, about 4.6 billion years ago. It began as a gigantic cloud of dust and gas created by leftover supernova debris—the death of other stars created our own.
About 4.6 billion years ago, this gigantic cloud was transformed into our Sun. The processes that followed gave rise to the solar system, complete with eight planets, 181 moons, and countless asteroids. Researcher Tim Gregory explains how it burst into being.
Some 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun was born from a cloud of interstellar gas and dust. It came from a giant molecular cloud — a collection of gas up to 600 light-years in diameter with the...
It’s got all kinds of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets zipping around our Sun. But how did this busy stellar neighborhood come to be? Our story starts about 4.6 billion years ago, with a wispy cloud of stellar dust.
SOLAR SYSTEM FORMATION — 5 BILLION YEARS AGO Our Solar System sits in the outside region of the Milky Way Galaxy and consists of the Sun (our star) at the center of eight orbiting planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. 5 billion years ago our solar system began forming from the residue of an exploded star.