1 / 8

Part 2: Solar System Formation

Part 2: Solar System Formation. Our Milky Way Galaxy is filled with cold, dark clouds of gas and dust. These clouds are mostly hydrogen and helium with dust containing mostly iron, rock, and ice.

ilyssa
Download Presentation

Part 2: Solar System Formation

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Part 2: Solar System Formation • Our Milky Way Galaxy is filled with cold, dark clouds of gas and dust. • These clouds are mostly hydrogen and helium with dust containing mostly iron, rock, and ice. • The Solar System is thought to have formed from a huge, slowly rotating cloud about 4.5 billion years ago • A nearby passing star or stellar explosion may have caused the cloud to collapse

  2. Collapsing Gas Clouds • As the cloud collapsed the original slow spin began to speed up. This caused the cloud to flatten into a disk shape. • The gravitational pull of the cloud caused it to shrink further and caused most of the material to fall towards the core forming a large bulge.

  3. Collapsing Gas Clouds? • In the Great Nebula of the constellation Orion are huge clouds of gas and dust. • Among these clouds the Hubble Space Telescope observed lumps and knots that appear to be new stars and planets being formed.

  4. Planets in Formation? • Around the star Beta Pictoris a large disk of dust and gas has been observed. • The light from the star is much brighter than the disk so it had to be blocked for the disk to appear clearly. • Disks have been seen around other stars too including Vega.

  5. Birth of the Sun • As material falls into towards the disk it collides with other material and heats up and melts. • The increasing mass of the core also increases the gravitational pull and causes more material to be pulled in. • When the mass is large enough and temperatures high enough nuclear fusion reactions begin in the core and a star is born!

  6. Heating and Condensation of the Solar Nebula • The heat from the Sun prevents ices from reforming on the dust grains in the region near the Sun. • Ices condensed only in the outer parts of the Solar nebula. • In the inner portion of the disk only materials like iron and silicates (rock) can condense into solids. Slowly they form clumps of material. • In the outer portion of the disk much more material can condense as solids including ice. This extra material allows clumps to grow larger and faster.

  7. Gravity does the job • Within the disk, material is constantly colliding with one another. If the collisions are not too violent material may stick together. • In the outer parts of the Solar Nebula the planets become large enough to have a significant gravitational pull and collect gas around them. • Planets in the inner nebula can not grow enough to collect much gas. • Eventually most but not all of the material was swept up by the planets.

  8. The Last of the Planetesimals The remaining material exists today as • comets which were flung out to a region far beyond Pluto called the Oort cloud and • asteroids mostly between Mars and Jupiter (the Asteroid Belt) and beyond Pluto (the Kuiper Belt)

More Related