The earliest accounts of how the Sun, the Earth and the rest of the
Solar System were formed are to be found in early
myths, legends and religious texts. None of these can be considered
a serious scientific account.
The earliest scientific attempts to explain the origin of the solar
system invoked collisions or condensations from a gas
cloud. The discovery of `island universes', which we now know to be
galaxies, was thought to confirm this latter theory.
During this century Jeans proposed the idea that material had been dragged
out of the Sun by a passing star and that
this material had then condensed to form the planets. There are serious
flaws to this explanation but recent
developments have been made suggesting that a filament was drawn out
of a passing protostar at a time when the
Sun was a member of a loose cluster of stars but the most favoured
theories still involve the gravitational collapse of a
gas and dust cloud.
1. The Sun spins slowly and only has 1 percent of the angular momentum of the Solar System but 99.9 percent of its mass. The planets carry the rest of the angular momentum.
2. The formation of the terrestrial planets with solid cores.
3. The formation of the gaseous giant planets.
4. The formation of planetary satellites.
5. An explanation of Bode's law which states that the distances of
the planets from the Sun follow a simple arithmetic
progression.
(Bode's `law' takes the form of a series in which the first term is
0, the second is 3 and each term is then double the
previous one, to each term add 4 and divide the result by 10. This
yields the series of numbers,
0.4, 0.7, 1.0, 1.6, 2.8, 5.2, 10.0, 19.6, 38.8;
which may be compared to the mean distances of the planets from the Sun in AU,
0.39, 0.72, 1.0, 1.52, 5.2, 9.52, 19.26, 30.1, 39.8.
The agreement for all but Neptune and Pluto is remarkable. The lack
of a planet at 2.8 led to the discovery of the
asteroids.)
There are 5 theories which are still considered to be `reasonable' in
that they explain many (but not all) of the
phenomena exhibited by the solar system.
The problem which remains is that of getting the cloud to form the planets.
The terrestrial planets can form in a
reasonable time but the gaseous planets take far too long to form.
The theory does not explain satellites or Bode's law
and must be considered the weakest of those described here.
Thus many of the problem areas are covered but it is not clear how the
planets came to be confined to a plane or why
their rotations are in the same sense.
The modern version assumes that the central condensation contains solid
dust grains which create drag in the gas
as the centre condenses. Eventually, after the core has been slowed
its temperature rises and the dust is evaporated.
The slowly rotating core becomes the Sun. The planets form from the
faster rotating cloud.
We do believe, however, that we understand the overall mechanism which
is that the Sun and the planets formed from
the contraction of part of a gas/dust cloud under its own gravitational
pull and that the small net rotation of the cloud
was responsible for the formation of a disk around the central condensation.
The central condensation eventually formed the Sun while small condensations
in the disk formed the planets and
their satellites. The energy from the young Sun blew away the remaining
gas and dust leaving the solar system as we
see it today.
Produced by the Information Services Department of the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
PJA Thu Apr 18 10:43:06 GMT 1996
webman@mail.ast.cam.ac.uk
- What is the Earth? How do we know this?
- Observe
- Compare
- Create testable models
- Discuss the following and give a statement of what each implies
- Data
- Result
- Interpretation
- Geometric Model
- Kinematic Model
- Mechanical Model
- What is the evidence for the Earth? Give examples of:
- Data
- Results
- Interpretation
- Cartoon
- Types of Models
- Is our (planet, solar system, galaxay, ....) in steady state or does it evolve?
- How do we know, specifically, that the system evolves?
- Application of physical laws to observations
- Inferences based on observations
- Development of models