How Planets are Formed

By Ryan Koeberl

Generalization

• Large groups of gasses, debris, old stardust, and other miscellaneous things come together in space.

• In the center a star forms, the debris revolves and soon forms planets and other celestial objects.

• The ball of gases, and debris collapse from its own gravitational pull.

• What was a ball now forms into a huge disk of dust and ice with a central star.

• As the disk picks up rotational speed it’s diameter gets smaller and more dense.

Planet formation

• As all the ice, dust and various debris is orbiting the central star, the stuff starts crashing into each other, and starts combining together.

• Soon the small dust particles turn into large pieces of rock and ice, and keep growing.

• As they get bigger and bigger, they keep colliding until they form into huge masses of rock.

• “The dust bunnies under your bed grow in a similar way”(Scott Kenyon)

• There are two different type’s of gaseous planets. There are hydrogen based Jovian's, and compound gas planets.

• Hydrogen based gas planets are simply failed sun’s, in our solar system there are two; Jupiter and Saturn.

• The compound gas planets form the same way as terrestrial planets except with gases.

Jovian planet formation• Gaseous planets form in a similar way to terrestrial planets.• The Gases gather around a large asteroid in space by gravity

and slowly start to grow more dense.• The rock becomes the center of the planet as the gases keep

surrounding it.• As the planet grows bigger, its gravitational pull increases,

dragging in more gasses.• Since Gaseous planets are farther away from their central

star compared to terrestrial planets for the most part, the gases take longer for the radiation to disperse, explaining why they may grow larger then rocky planets.

Hydrogen Planet’s.

• Saturn and Jupiter are both failed sun’s. This means they’re made up of Hydrogen.

• The most likely reason that these two planets aren’t sun’s is because they are too small to ignite.

Sources

• http://www.psi.edu/projects/planets/planets.html

• http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/spitzer_planets_041018.html

• http://msnucleus.org/membership/html/k-6/uc/earth/5/uce5_1a.html

• http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/A-Whole-New-Planet/