If you've ever looked at a model of the solar system You may have noticed that the
slot sun, planets, moons, and asteroids sit roughly on the same plane. But why is that?to answer this question We must travel to the beginning of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.back then The solar system is simply a massive cloud of dust and gas that revolves around it,
Nader Haghighipour, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa,
told Live Science. WordsideKick.com Massive clouds measure 12,000 astronomical units (AU). 1 AU is the average distance between the Earth and the sun, or about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). Even though it is filled with dust and gas molecules But the cloud itself begins to collapse and shrink under its own mass, Haghighipour said.
When the swirling clouds of dust and gas begin to collapse It's also flat. Imagine a pizza maker throwing a spun dough into the air. As it spins, the dough expands but becomes thinner and more flat. That's what happened to the early solar system. Meanwhile, in the center of this smooth cloud All the gas molecules are strongly squeezed together. They heat up, Haghighipour said, under enormous heat and pressure.
Hydrogen and helium atoms fuse and catalyze nuclear reactions for billions of years in the form of a minor star: the Sun. the sun is still growing collects gas and dust from the environment and causing intense heat waves and radiation The rising sun gradually Sweep the empty space around the donut.
when the sun rises The clouds continued to collapse,
forming a "circular disk around the star [which] became flatter. and expanding and expanding with the sun in the center,” Haghighipour said.Eventually, the clouds formed a flat structure. known as the protoplanetary disk which orbits a young star, Haghighipour says the disk extends hundreds of AU and is only one-tenth the thickness of that distance.
Tens of millions of years later The dust particles in the protoplanetary disk swirl lightly. and sometimes collide Some are even addicted. and over those millions of years Those particles then became millimeter-long pellets. And those seeds turned into pebbles that were centimeter long. And gravel still collide and stick together.