The Formation of Our Solar System

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Our solar system, the place we call home, lies about 26000 lightyears away from the centre of our galaxy the Milky Way, or 2/3rds of the way out. The story of how these huge planets came to be orbiting our average yellow star is 6 billion years long and it all started with a bang. (SLIDE 1) But firstly what is a Solar System? Well a Solar System is defined as collection of planets and their moons in orbit around a sun, together with smaller bodies such as asteroids, meteorites, and comets. (SLIDE 2) * The solar system is around 5 billion years old. It formed out of a huge cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula. Under gravity, the cloud collapsed and the material formed the Sun and a disc of matter in which the planets were born. * We know this because we can see similar fields of dust out in space today. They are called Nebulas. Nebulas are a cloud of interstellar gas and dust. Every nebula is different and in our case contained nitrogen and oxygen and iron and silicon and all the other stuff needed to build a world like ours. Then gravity started to pull it all back together and the heavy engineering that produces planets began. Vast spirals of dust began to form at the centre of one of these, a rocky planet called Earth started to take shape (SLIDE 3) Now there are stages within the solar system formation. 1. Solar nebula collapses to make a hot, dense mass (CHANGE SLIDE) 2. Spinning discs of matter forms around the sun (CHANGE SLIDE 3. Small lumps called planetesimals are created as gravity brings matter together (CHANGE SLIDE) 4. Planets form as planetesimals clump to make larger bodies (SLIDE 4) What is in our Solar System? (SLIDE #10) * The solar system is over 11 billion 265 million 408000 thousand kilometres across, home to 8 planets, 166 moons and billions of asteroids, comets and meteorites, * The suns gravity locks the

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