How The Solar System Formed

For hundreds of years, scientists have debated and gone into extensive research in order to determine how the Solar System was formed. Although a definite conclusion was never reached, many potential hypotheses were created on how it could have occurred. Despite having flaws, these hypotheses, the three most prominent being the nebular, protoplanet, and planetesimal hypotheses, remain the closest thing scientists have to knowing exactly how the Solar System in which humans live came to exist. In 1796, French scholar Pierre-Simon de Laplace formulated the nebular hypothesis for the formation of the Solar System. According to Laplace and his idea of how it would have occurred, the System began as a cloud of gas, which spun slowly until it began to cool. The cooling forced the gas into a compact sphere, which, due to the law of conservation of angular momentum, allowed it to spin much quicker. The faster motion caused centrifugal forces to take action, flinging some of the matter housed with the cloud’s

In their idea, a spinning cloud of dust either shrank under its own pull of gravity or collapsed under the explosion of a nearby star. Whether it shrank from gravity or collapsed upon itself, most material in the aftermath gathered around the center, and the cloud began to spin faster. The material compressed, causing temperatures to rise dramatically and the chemical process of hydrogen fusion to take place, thus allowing the sun to form. Much of the material combined to form a large disk surrounding the sun, but friction within the disk caused mass “whirlpools” to break away, which shrank into compact protoplanets. These protoplanets joined together to form the eight planets and their moons, and all uncollected material left over from the disk formed comets, meteoroids, and