7.4 Origin of the solar system

Learning objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the characteristics of planets that are used to create formation models of the solar system
• Describe how the characteristics of extrasolar systems help us to model our own solar system
• Explain the importance of collisions in the formation of the solar system

Much of astronomy is motivated by a desire to understand the origin of things: to find at least partial answers to age-old questions of where the universe, the Sun, Earth, and we ourselves came from. Each planet and moon is a fascinating place that may stimulate our imagination as we try to picture what it would be like to visit. Taken together, the members of the solar system preserve patterns that can tell us about the formation of the entire system. As we begin our exploration of the planets, we want to introduce our modern picture of how the solar system formed.

The recent discovery of hundreds of planets in orbit around other stars has shown astronomers that many exoplanetary systems can be quite different from our own solar system. For example, it is common for these systems to include planets intermediate in size between our terrestrial and giant planets. These are often called superearths . Some exoplanet systems even have giant planets close to the star, reversing the order we see in our system. In The Birth of Stars and the Discovery of Planets outside the Solar System , we will look at these exoplanet systems. But for now, let us focus on theories of how our own particular system has formed and evolved.

Looking for patterns

One way to approach our question of origin is to look for regularities among the planets. We found, for example, that all the planets lie in nearly the same plane and revolve in the same direction around the Sun. The Sun also spins in the same direction about its own axis. Astronomers interpret this pattern as evidence that the Sun and planets formed together from a spinning cloud of gas and dust that we call the solar nebula    ( [link] ).

Solar nebula.

The composition of the planets gives another clue about origins. Spectroscopic analysis allows us to determine which elements are present in the Sun and the planets. The Sun has the same hydrogen-dominated composition as Jupiter and Saturn, and therefore appears to have been formed from the same reservoir of material. In comparison, the terrestrial planets and our Moon are relatively deficient in the light gases and the various ices that form from the common elements oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. Instead, on Earth and its neighbors, we see mostly the rarer heavy elements such as iron and silicon. This pattern suggests that the processes that led to planet formation in the inner solar system must somehow have excluded much of the lighter materials that are common elsewhere. These lighter materials must have escaped, leaving a residue of heavy stuff.