Solar System Creation In a 10 Minute Read.

Wouldn’t it be good to know how you got here? Well unfortunately the answer to that is unknown. It has been thought about for a long, long time and one day we will probably know the answer. What we do have good idea about though is how the solar system formed.

Throughout the galaxy gigantic clouds of dust and gas exist known as a nebula. It is within these nebulas that the Sun and planets were formed. Something such as the shock from a supernova explosion could have started the gas cloud rotating.

The particles attracted each other having large mutual gravitational attraction. As the gas and dust got pulled in the cloud of dust and gas sped up. If you can think of an ice skater with her arms out and then slowly bringing them down to both sides she speeds up (I hope you are into ice skating). Around the sun, the gas and dust cloud starts to speed up in the same way. This eventually causes a flat disk circling around the sun at the centre. This process, if you are interested, is called a protoplanetary disk or solar nebula. The protoplanetary disk has been seen around other stars by the Hubble space telescope.

Planetary Nebula

The dust cloud that we have been talking about is actually made out of mostly hydrogen. This hydrogen and some dust (ices, Carbon, metallic and silicate substances) formed the sun. Nuclear reactions in the sun caused the sun to shine producing heat (quite a lot of heat!). The dust remaining in the solar nebula was vaporised due to the heat of the sun.

The solar nebula started to cool, as they do, and the dust grains condensed into different types of dust grains. It merely means grains and particles of Rocky and icy material stuck together quite nicely and obviously this made it grow larger. This process took some time but when you think that the universe has been around for 14.6 billion years the mere 10,000 years that it took to create 10mm particles isn’t so long after all.

Each 10 mm particle mainly consisted of silicon materials and these clumps formed in the orbits of the planets of the solar system today. But, as we know, the accretion process didn’t stop there and bigger and bigger clumps were formed. The clumps increased to about 10 m in size.

Helix nebula

The process continued and planetesimals were formed after about 100,000 years. Planetesimals are the name given to tiny planets which are about 0.1 to 10 km across. Gravitational focusing started to occur when their bodies got bigger and all the particles were attracted to the particles with a larger gravitational force. Unfortunately this meant curtains for the smaller clumps as they joined the larger clumps and made the planetesimals. This crashing together of the larger particles all into one caused heat, if you want to be technical the kinetic energy turned into potential energy. Their heating and collisions caused different types of minerals to be formed in the resulting planetesimals.

Planetary embryos were now formed because of the planetesimals colliding together and forming larger bodies. These larger bodies were a few thousand kilometres in diameter. After a while these planetary embryos would have used most of the remaining smaller planetesimals but some were left over creating satellites and asteroids etc.

Orion Nebula

Now, planetary creation would have slowed because of the fewer fragments to collide with. Some planetary embryos may have collided together causing massive collisions and so much heat that the body could have formed a molten mantle called a magma ocean. As the surface began to cool a thin crust would have been born. The debris formed from the initial collision of the two planetary embryos would have formed debris and the debris would have formed impact collisions on the surface of the remaining planetary embryo. Other factors such as convection currents would have changed any solidified areas.

Giant, massive impacts would have continued to occur until the terrestrial planets were half their size today. This would have taken about 10 million years and then they would have reached full size full size at about 100 million years. The moon probably exists today because of a massive impact between two planetary bodies leaving a ring of debris around the Earth. Accumulation of debris produced the moon by continual impacts over the years.

Certain elements of the dust cloud would not exist closest to the sun because of the sun’s heat but they did exist further out. This is why we have gas giants further out and the rocky terrestrial planets further in toward the sun (Mercury, Venus Earth and Mars).

This is the best guess that we have today and it’s widely accepted. If anyone does manage to find a time machine and go back and have a look at how the solar system was formed then please let me know.

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Part 2:Half a Cup of Coffee and a Continuation of the Tour around the Solar System

After flying around the solar system in my bubble I have landed on Mars and am very close to Olympus Mons.

Olympus Mons is about 90,000 feet above the surface of Mars. This is about three times the height of Everest. It is about 480 km across at its base and at its top is a massive caldera full of nested craters about 80 km across and 3 km deep.

Everything is hard to take in because as I climb out of the bubble and look up at where I think the top is, it is absolutely massive, the top of Olympus Mons is actually over the horizon. Our puny brains have trouble taking in this sort of scale I remind myself. I think again and climb back into the bubble. Wimping out I set up a program and strap myself into my seat and decide to go for a tour round Olympus Mons in my warm and safe reliable spaceship bubble.

Olympus Mons from above

I took some pictures on the way up but the best ones are of the scarp and the one from above as I pull away. I leave Mars’s moons, Phobos and Deimos, and head for Jupiter. It is wise to be careful on the way to Jupiter because of the asteroid belt so I reduce speed from 0.9 lightspeed to 0.8 lightspeed and pull out the latest astronomy magazine (what you can’t see can’t hurt you).

Asteroids are Rocky metallic objects all sizes that are just too small to be called planets. Tens of thousands of these exist between Jupiter and Mars in a massive doughnut shaped ring even Homer would be proud of if it were made of dough. Sometimes these asteroids pass close to Earth and are then called a near Earth objects (NEO’s for short).

As I approach the largest planet in the solar system it starts filling the screen from way out. Jupiter is 10 times the radius of Earth and 300 times the mass but this only makes it a quarter of the density of Earth. It has almost the same rotation of the Earth at 9.9 hours although the rotation is different at the polls compared to the equator. This has a remarkable effect of producing high winds at the equator.

Jupiter

The Large red spot is very noticeable rotating anticlockwise and having been there for about 200 years which isn’t really that long when you look at the universe’s timescale. Unfortunately landing wouldn’t be such a good idea as there may not be a solid core but it is supposed that a solid core may exist due to the very high pressure at the centre. This solid core can be made out of ice-Rock which would be about the size of Earth. Even getting to the centre would be hard because as the pressure and temperature increases about a third of the way down the hydrogen becomes metallic and electrically conducting. Further away from the centre the pressure and temperature would compress the hydrogen gas into a liquid.

Jupiter is certainly a lovely planet to look at even if it is not very hospitable. Jupiter has a total moon count of 50 officially named moons (23 new moons were discovered in 2003 alone) which have all sorts of atmospheres and make-ups. Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system its volcanoes spewing out lava due to the effect Jupiter has on its orbit which produces tidal heating. Europa is a moon that deserves some attention due to its potential underneath a 100 km ice surface to harbour life.

Saturn comes up next and is mostly made up of hydrogen and helium just like Jupiter. This paints an even better picture than Jupiter due to its ring system which makes it very memorable. Saturn is about 15% smaller than Jupiter and very similar. The big difference is the ring system which is thought to be made up of a planet that disintegrated when it had a collision nearby or with Saturn. It is a very thin ring and has gaps in the ring due to the different gravity effects on the particles. It is not a well-known fact but the other giant planets have ring systems as well but they are not quite as distinct.

saturn

At least 30 satellites are in orbit around Saturn. Titan is the largest satellite and it is a little under half the size of Earth. It has a nitrogen atmosphere of about 82 to 99% blue traces of ammonia, argon and ethane. It is expected that due to its atmosphere there could be lakes of methane and ethane. Another place to look for life.

Having run out of coffee and food I decide to carry on to Uranus. Uranus is about 15 times the mass of Earth. People used to give Uranus the cold shoulder but it’s one of the brighter worlds with some of the brightest clouds in the outer solar system and has 11 rings. It is bluish and a nice settling planet to look at. I start to drift away into sleep but immediately get slapped in the face by the face slapper and I wake up fully and almost fall out of my seat nearly knocking the self-destruct button. Not such a well-designed bubble!

Uranus

A swift jump to Neptune (for a lightspeed ship anyway) and I’m staring at the eighth planet away from the sun. Neptune orbits the sun in every 165 years and it’s the furthest planet from the Sun for a period of 20 years out of every 248 Earth years. The atmosphere gives an electric blue look but a great dark spot that was seen a few years ago has disappeared. Spots and like Jupiter don’t last that long. Neptune has at least eight satellites.

Neptune

Pluto which is and isn’t a planet appears next. It has been classified as a dwarf planet as it is almost a moon size. Charon was discovered recently and acts as a twin planet in synchronisation with Pluto. There’s not much out here and if I go further there will be the Kuiper Belt which is full of objects such as asteroids. Beyond that is the Oort cloud, a region full of comets. At its most distant Pluto is 4.5 3,000,000,000 miles from Earth

real shot of Pluto from Earth

This makes me feel a little bit lonely. I press the button and off I go to Earth, in a flash the big blue Marble appears and I touch down next to my neighbour’s pile of rubble, luckily he’s not in!