A solar system model shows that the planets, sun, moon, and asteroids are circling roughly on the same plane, reports recently said.
To identify the reason for this, Live Science reported, there is a need to travel to the very start of the solar system, approximately 4.5 million years ago.
Around that time, the solar system was only huge, spinning dust of gas and dust, said astronomer Nader Haghighipour, from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.
The said massive, gigantic cloud had 12,000 astronomical units or AU across for a measurement; 1 AU is the distance, on average, between the sun and Earth, or roughly 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.
That cloud turned huge, said the astronomer that although it was only filled with gas and dust molecules, "the could itself" began to collapse and shrink beneath its mass.
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The 'Spinning Cloud'
A similar NewsDesk report said, as the spinning dust and gas cloud began to collapse, it flattened, as well. This report describes the scenario of a pizza maker who's throwing a spinning slab of dough into the air.
As the dough spins, it expands, although it turns increasingly thin and flat. That's what occurred in the very early solar system, as described on the NASA Science website.
Meanwhile, Haghighipour explained, in this ever-flattening cloud's center, all of the said gas molecules got squeezed together so much, "heated up."
Under the enormous pressure and heat, hydrogen and helium atoms stuck, kick-started a billions-of-years-long nuclear response in a baby-star form, also known as the sun.
Over the next five decades, the sun kept on growing, collecting dust and gas from its surroundings and burping out waves of strong radiation and heat.
As the report describes, little by little, the growing sun cleared out a doughnut of space surrounding it. And as the sun grew, elaborated Haghighipour, the cloud continued collapsing, as it formed a disk around the star that turns flatter and flatter, not to mention expands and expands with the sun in the middle.
Protoplanetary Disk
Eventually, the cloud turned out to be a flat structure known as a protoplanetary disk that orbits the young star. The disk stretched hundreds of AU across and was only one-tenth of that distance thick, explained Haghighipour.
Subsequently, the dust particles in this said disk swirled around gently, occasionally knocking into each other for tens of millions of years.
Some of them, this report specified, even stuck together. More so, over those millions of years, those particles turned millimeter-long grains, and those said grains turned centimeter-long pebbles. The pebbles then continued colliding and sticking together.
Ultimately, the majority of the material in the protoplanetary disk stuck together to form large objects. Those materials grew so huge that gravity formed them into spherical planets, dwarf planets, and moons. Other objects, on the other hand, turned irregularly shaped like comets, asteroids some tiny moons.
Despite the different sizes of the objects, they remained more or less on the same plane, where their building materials first came from.
That is why even at present, the eight planets of the solar system, as described in The Planets, and the other celestial bodies are orbiting roughly on the same level.
Related information about the planets orbiting on the same plane is shown on Mind Full's YouTube video below:
Check out more news and information on Planets on Science Times.
