Solar Systems

4 Pages 889 Words

Origin of the solar system for more than 300 years there has been serious scientific discussion of the processes and events that led to the formation of the solar system. For most of this time lack of knowledge about the physical conditions in the solar system prevented a rigorous approach to the problem. Explanations were especially sought for the regularity in the directions of rotation and orbit of objects in the solar system, the slow rotation of the Sun, and the Titius-Bode law, which states that the radii of the planetary orbits increase in a regular fashion throughout the solar system.
In a similar fashion, the radii of the orbits of the regular satellites of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus increase in a regular manner. In modern times the slow rotation of the Sun has been explained as resulting from the deceleration of its angular motion through its magnetic interaction with the out flowing solar wind, so that this feature should not have been considered a constraint on theories of the origin of the solar system. The many theories concerning the origin of the solar system that have been advanced during the last three centuries can be classified as either dualistic or monistic.
A common feature of dualistic theories is that another star once passed close to the Sun, and tidal perturbations between the two stars drew out filaments of gas from which the planets condensed. Theories of this type encounter enormous difficulties in trying to account for modern information about the solar system, and they have generally been discarded. By contrast, monistic theories envisage a disk of gas and dust, called the primitive solar nebula that formed around the Sun. Many of these theories speculate that the Sun and the planets formed together from the primeval solar nebula.
A photograph taken in 1984 of a nearby star, Beta Pictoris, appears to show a solar system forming in this way from a disk of surrounding material. The large amount of ac...