Imagine a pizza maker throwing a spinning slab of dough into the air. As it spins, the dough expands but becomes increasingly thin and flat. That's what happened to the very early solar system. 👌👩🍳🍕
If you've ever gazed at a model of the solar system, you've likely noticed that the sun, planets, moons and asteroids sit roughly on the same plane. But why is that?
Back then, the solar system was just a massive, spinning cloud of dust and gas, Nader Haghighipour, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told Live Science. That massive cloud measured 12,000 astronomical units across; 1 AU is the average distance between Earth and the sun, or about 93 million miles . That cloud became so big, that even though it was just filled with dust and gas molecules, the cloud itself started to collapse and shrink under its own mass, Haghighipour said.
As the sun grew, the cloud continued to collapse, forming"a disk around the star [that] becomes flatter and flatter and expands and expands with the sun at the center," Haghighipour said. For tens of millions of years thereafter, the dust particles in the protoplanetary disk gently swirled around, occasionally knocking into each other. Some even stuck together. And over those millions of years, those particles became millimeter-long grains, and those grains became centimeter-long pebbles, and the pebbles continued to collide and stick together.
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