Birth of the Solar System
Scientists are getting continually closer to answering the great question: how did our solar system form?
Our Solar System is a strange and wonderful place. It is home to an assortment of astronomical bodies whose scale and variety is truly awesome. Orbiting closest to their host star, the Sun, are four rocky worlds, one of which, our own Earth, exists in exactly the right conditions for life to flourish. Further out the gas giants many times as massive as their terrestrial neighbors, with dozens of moons, rule the system.
In addition to the eight planets are billions of smaller objects – dwarf planets, comets and asteroids – that share our space. For centuries astronomers have gazed at the sky and attempted to explain how this strange assortment of bodies came into being. There are still mysteries that have not been solved but scientists are getting continually closer to answering the great question: how did our solar system form?
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About Video
There are certain things that we, as humans, often take for granted, and the existence of the solar system is one of those things. We’re taught from an early age that the Earth and its seven neighbouring planets all orbit the Sun in an orderly motion, accompanied by dozens of moons and many millions of other astronomical objects, such as asteroids and comets. We know that the four inner planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – are small and rocky, and that the four outer planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – are giant and gaseous. What many people never question, however, is how all this came about.
Scientists have been proposing theories on the origins of the solar system for centuries but it wasn’t until the advent of space flight fifty years ago and the introduction of space-based telescopes at the end of the last century that we really started to learn what sort of events led to the formation of our solar system as it exists today. We meet the scientists who are at the forefront of the quest to make sense of our origins. Employing various methods, ranging from sending spacecraft to collect dust samples from comets, infrared telescope technology, meteorite analysis, and lunar rock testing, they are uncovering mystery after mystery and learning one important thing – the birth of our solar system was a violent and chaotic event that we’re lucky to have emerged from in one piece.
It all began 4.6 billion years ago, with a vast cloud of dust and gas, called a nebula, floating through space. This gargantuan mass of interstellar material, possibly disturbed by the explosion of a nearby star, began to collapse on itself. The cloud condensed and formed a disk, which began to spin around and grow hotter and hotter. In the middle of this disk our sun formed and from the remaining dust and gas our planets and all the other objects in our solar system were born. It all sounds straightforward but recent research shows that the early phase of our solar system’s evolution was far from simple.
The early solar system was a violent place with young planets or ‘planetesimals’ careening around in highly irregular orbits and often colliding into other, with dramatic effect. Unbelievable though it seems we examine the possibility that the debris caused by one such traumatic collision between the Earth and another Mars-sized planetary object formed our own Moon. Even once the planets that we’re familiar with today had beaten off all the other planetesimal contenders the chaos was not yet over. When Jupiter and Saturn disturbed each other’s orbits they sent nearby Uranus and Neptune trundling off into the outer reaches of the solar system, scattering asteroids as they went. These asteroids flew into the inner solar system, where they bombarded the terrestrial planets and the Moon with a barrage of debris. We investigate these and many other such remarkable stories in Birth of the Solar System.
