Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
If you were to look at the solar system from afar so you could see the orbits of the planets, for the most part the all orbit kind of on the same plain. I think Pluto, while not a planet, was a bit off but for the most part they are close. How come we dont have any planets that go over the top of the sun or at a major angle different than the rest? Is it the suns gravity?
It's because of how the solar system formed. At one point, the "solar system" was just a giant disc of gas and dust orbiting the sun. As it coalesced, the planets were formed.
It's because of how the solar system formed. At one point, the "solar system" was just a giant disc of gas and dust orbiting the sun. As it coalesced, the planets were formed.
Now sorry if im coming off a dumb here but I am interested in this and would like to learn as much as I can.
So essentially when the planets and everything were forming the sun's gravity took hold of the planets in the orbits we see today and anything else just didn't take?
It all became the planets and other objects found in the solar system. There were no planets until enough of this matter started to clump together due its own gravity. The bigger the clumps got, the more stuff was attracted. Eventually, it all became the system we're familiar with today.
If you search for "accretion disc" on your favorite engine, you should be able to find all kinds of stuff.
The fact that the planets are observed to orbit in more or less the same plane is a powerful clue to how the Solar System formed. That simple observation drives us to accretion-disk models (which naturally produce such flat systems) over other possibilities. So the observation is an input that causes us to choose the type of theory we have for explaining the origin of the Solar System. If we observed something else, then we would necessarily have to have a different theory.
One of the things that falls out of the mathematics of Newton's laws of motion and gravitation -- stuff you get in college physics classes -- is that it is very difficult to change the orbital plane of a planet, moon, or satellite. Other characteristics of the orbit change first ... for instance, not the amount of tilt of the orbit with respect to the rest of the system, but the direction in which that tilt is.
When you start messing with an orbit, that "messing with an orbit" has to be done by other bodies, NOT the thing around which the planet is orbiting. If all there was in the system was the Sun and one planet, then (in Newtonian physics) the orbit would be unchanged forever (or until one or both objects lost mass).
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
