SPRING WISRD MAGAZINE, VOL 6, ISSUE 2

From Dust Till Dawn: The Origins of the Solar System

By Ian Norfolk

The Solar System is humanity?s home in the universe. We are blessed with a bount iful star system, including asteroids, comets, gas giants, moons, and most important ly Earth. But how did it all get here and what are the or igins of the Solar System?This is a complicated quest ion that humankind has struggled to answer for centur ies. But if you look in its name you can find a big clue: Solar.

and helium eventually coalesce, due to gravity, into large balls of gas. Which once a certain mass is reached, will collapse into a true, nuclear-fusion-powered, star.

Depiction of Solar System Today The history of the Sun is closely knit with the Solar System?s history. So let 's look back to where it all began roughly, 13.8 billion years ago, at the Big Bang. This event populated the universe with mat ter that eventually formed into stars. Over the next 9 billion years, the universe would go through the lives of count less stars. Some of which exploded into supernovae and filled the universe with more and new types of mat ter and clouds of gas and dust . These clouds are called molecular clouds but often in popular science are referred to as a ?star nursery.?These ?nurser ies?are able to form stars because the large amounts of hydrogen

Molecular Clouds in the Eagle Nebula Five billion years ago, where the Solar System is today, there was one of these clouds.With a lit t le help from t ime and gravity, 400 million years later, the Sun formed from a collapsed port ion of this cloud. The newly formed star had a plethora of dust orbit ing it and due to the conservat ion of angular momentum, this rotat ion sped up when the star collapsed and formed. This formed what scient ists call a proto-planetary disk, a large plane of dust rotat ing a star (think of a Solar-System-sized asteroid belt that 's filled with much more mater ial). This dust is the or iginal mater ial that formed our solar system. Eventually as dust

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