There is always talk of the solar system and the universe made up of planets, satellites and stars. However, many people wonder how planets are formed and what is the process by which they take shape and acquire the characteristics they currently have.
For this reason, we are going to dedicate this article to telling you how planets are formed, what their characteristics are, and what is the process they go through.
How planets are formed
Several planets are believed to have formed from the "solar nebula," the cloud of gas and dust created when the sun formed. This process occurs through the gradual accumulation of matter in space: grains of dust and gas begin to clump together and, under mutual gravitational attraction, merge into larger and larger fragments. Skip a few million years and this buildup leads to three things: stars are supposed to form in dense clouds of massive hydrogen. After that, a disk of gas forms around the star from which rocky planets can form through chaotic collisions of massively accumulated chunks of matter.
When the planets formed, those with orbits closer to the sun developed markedly differently than those with orbits farther from the sun. The composition of the inner planets is very different from that of the outer planets. What are exoplanets? When the planets formed, those with orbits closer to the sun developed markedly differently than those with orbits farther from the sun. The dense metals that make up the rocks of the inner planets, like iron and other heavy materials, they were left behind. This difference in training can be compared to the composition of rocky planets which are closer to the sun.
How rocky planets are formed
Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system and the closest to the sun. It's also the fastest among its neighbors, orbiting the Sun at nearly 48 kilometers per second. Gravity concentrated matter in the cloud, which after collapsing created the Sun. The particles left over from the cloud's collapse, from the outermost layer to the central portion, created the gas planet. The particles closest to the center form the rocky planets.
According to some members of the scientific community, the planets and the stars may have formed from dusty remnants of the sun about 4,6 million years ago. Other star clusters were compressed into larger gas clumps that gave rise to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. This is important for understanding the formation and evolution of asteroids in the solar system.
How are stars born?
Stars are born in nebulae, which are giant clouds of gas made mostly of hydrogen and helium, the most common elements in the universe. There may be regions of higher gas concentrations in the nebula. In these regions, the gravitational pull is stronger, causing it to start shrinking.
The many existing celestial bodies mainly include: asteroids, comets, stars, meteorites, planets and satellites. Celestial objects are all the stars found in outer space. Comets are composed primarily of ice and rock, while some of these asteroids originate in the asteroid belt which is located between Mars and Jupiter.
Theories of formation of the Solar System
The solar nebula theory (the currently accepted theory) proposes that the solar system formed about 4,6 million years ago when interstellar matter in the spiral arms of the Milky Way condensed and collapsed under gravitational forces, and the matter condensed into a moving disk.
The planets in our solar system are divided into inner and outer planets. The inner planets closest to the Sun are solid, rocky spheres and include Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, which display distinct characteristics that differentiate them from the outer planets. These include the Orgueil meteorite. containing high concentrations of 54Cr (chrome 54). The scientists hypothesized that this concentration could be related to complex reactions in stars that existed before the sun, that is, before the formation of the solar system, including our planet.
Latest research on how planets are formed
Planets form from disks of gas and dust that orbit young stars. Once a planet's "seed" forms, a small clump of dust gradually adds material and creates an orbit-shaped groove in the disk. Carlos Carrasco González, a researcher at the Radio Astronomy Institute, said: "The interpretation of the HL Tau images obtained by ALMA raises many doubts, because HL Tau is too young a star to form planets and the search for these planets has not been successful." .
A new series of images obtained using the Very Large Array (VLA) in more detail than is currently available reveals never-before-seen features in protoplanetary disks and points to a solution: one of the rings of material surrounding stellar dust. with concentrations of three to eight times the mass of the Earth they could constitute planetary embryos. This research is crucial to better understand the process of planet formation In the universe.
the question of time
The estimated age of HL Tau is about 1 million years or less, compared to the Sun's age of about 4.500 billion years, and the fact that it is a young star that has not yet started burning hydrogen at its core determines their trajectory to adulthood.
When the star reaches this stage, radiant energy dissipates the disk, so planets don't form if they haven't formed yet. The dust clumps found in the HL Tau disk could demonstrate the existence of a faster planet formation mechanism, through the first fragmentation of the disk into rings and the formation of large clumps in these rings, whose development would be faster than that of the homogeneous ones.
The VLA study of HL Tau at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) was carried out by an international collaboration led by Carlos Carrasco González from IRyA-UNAM and Thomas Henning from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), with UNAM (Mexico), Astronomers from the MPIA (Germany), NRAO (USA) and CSIC (Spain) participated.
I hope that with this information you can learn more about how planets are formed and their characteristics.