The Patron Saints of Pessimism - A Writer's Pantheon, excerpt from Infinite Resignation @ LitHub (2018) The nebular hypothesis says that the Solar System formed from the gravitational collapse of a fragment of a giant molecular cloud, [9] most likely at the edge of a Wolf-Rayet bubble. [10] The cloud was about 20 parsecs (65 light years) across, [9] while the fragments were roughly 1parsec (three and a quarter light-years) across. [11] The further collapse of the fragments led to the formation of dense cores 0.01–0.1parsec (2,000–20,000 AU) in size. [a] [9] [12] One of these collapsing fragments (known as the presolar nebula) formed what became the Solar System. [13] The composition of this region with a mass just over that of the Sun ( M ☉) was about the same as that of the Sun today, with hydrogen, along with helium and trace amounts of lithium produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, forming about 98% of its mass. The remaining 2% of the mass consisted of heavier elements that were created by nucleosynthesis in earlier generations of stars. [14] Late in the life of these stars, they ejected heavier elements into the interstellar medium. [15] Some scientists have given the name Coatlicue to a hypothetical star that went supernova and created the presolar nebula.

To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live - a central motif of the horror genre. In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. Because of the conservation of angular momentum, the nebula spun faster as it collapsed. As the material within the nebula condensed, the atoms within it began to collide with increasing frequency, converting their kinetic energy into heat. The center, where most of the mass collected, became increasingly hotter than the surrounding disc. [11] Over about 100,000 years, [9] the competing forces of gravity, gas pressure, magnetic fields, and rotation caused the contracting nebula to flatten into a spinning protoplanetary disc with a diameter of about 200AU [11] and form a hot, dense protostar (a star in which hydrogen fusion has not yet begun) at the centre. [24] And on the cool edges, the gas and ice giants were born: Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus. The asteroid belt

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Like most stars, the Sun likely formed not in isolation but as part of a young star cluster. [32] There are several indications that hint at the cluster environment having had some influence of the young still forming solar system. For example, the decline in mass beyond Neptune and the extreme eccentric-orbit of Sedna have been interpreted as a signature of the solar system having been influenced by its birth environment. Whether the presence of the isotopes iron-60 and aluminium-26 can be interpreted as a sign of a birth cluster containing massive stars is still under debate. If the Sun was part of a star cluster, it might have been influenced by close flybys of other stars, the strong radiation of nearby massive stars and ejecta from supernovae occurring close by.

The heat and pressure eventually became so high that hydrogen atoms began to combine to form helium. The nuclear reactions released vast amounts of energy and our sun was formed. An Ideal for Living: An Anti-Novel (20th Anniversary Edition). Schism Press, 2020. ISBN 979-8682903832. Moons have come to exist around most planets and many other Solar System bodies. These natural satellites originated by one of three possible mechanisms: One unresolved issue with this model is that it cannot explain how the initial orbits of the proto-terrestrial planets, which would have needed to be highly eccentric to collide, produced the remarkably stable and nearly circular orbits they have today. [49] One hypothesis for this "eccentricity dumping" is that terrestrials formed in a disc of gas still not expelled by the Sun. The " gravitational drag" of this residual gas would have eventually lowered the planets' energy, smoothing out their orbits. [50] However, such gas, if it existed, would have prevented the terrestrial planets' orbits from becoming so eccentric in the first place. [35] Another hypothesis is that gravitational drag occurred not between the planets and residual gas but between the planets and the remaining small bodies. As the large bodies moved through the crowd of smaller objects, the smaller objects, attracted by the larger planets' gravity, formed a region of higher density, a "gravitational wake", in the larger objects' path. As they did so, the increased gravity of the wake slowed the larger objects down into more regular orbits. [52] Asteroid belt [ edit ] Main article: History of Solar System formation and evolution hypotheses Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the originators of the nebular hypothesisAt this point in its evolution, the Sun is thought to have been a T Tauri star. [25] Studies of T Tauri stars show that they are often accompanied by discs of pre-planetary matter with masses of 0.001–0.1 M ☉. [26] These discs extend to several hundred AU—the Hubble Space Telescope has observed protoplanetary discs of up to 1000AU in diameter in star-forming regions such as the Orion Nebula [27]—and are rather cool, reaching a surface temperature of only about 1,000K (730°C; 1,340°F) at their hottest. [28] Radiolab - In The Dust Of This Planet", original broadcast Monday September 8, 2014. The story was also covered by NPR's On The Media. It has been further hypothesized that the Mars-sized object may have formed at one of the stable Earth–Sun Lagrangian points (either L 4 or L 5) and drifted from its position. [93] The moons of trans-Neptunian objects Pluto ( Charon) and Orcus ( Vanth) may also have formed by means of a large collision: the Pluto–Charon, Orcus–Vanth and Earth–Moon systems are unusual in the Solar System in that the satellite's mass is at least 1% that of the larger body. [94] [95] Future [ edit ] If it occurred, this period of heavy bombardment lasted several hundred million years and is evident in the cratering still visible on geologically dead bodies of the inner Solar System such as the Moon and Mercury. [2] [77] The oldest known evidence for life on Earth dates to 3.8billion years ago—almost immediately after the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment. [78] Networks, Swarms, Multitudes" Part 1, Part 2, Ctheory (2004), "Biophilosophy for the 21st Century", Ctheory (2005).

The planets were originally thought to have formed in or near their current orbits. This has been questioned during the last 20 years. Currently, many planetary scientists think that the Solar System might have looked very different after its initial formation: several objects at least as massive as Mercury may have been present in the inner Solar System, the outer Solar System may have been much more compact than it is now, and the Kuiper belt may have been much closer to the Sun. [48] Terrestrial planets [ edit ]Gregory says, 'Near to the Sun, the temperature was very high, so minerals and metals formed. And on the edge of the disc, far away from the heat of the Sun, less volatile solids like ice and ammonia formed. Approximately 4.5 billion years ago a dark cloud of gas and dust began to collapse. As it shrank, the cloud flattened into a swirling disk known as a solar nebula, according to NASA Science. Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer," Parrhesia no. 12 (2011), p. 3. The evolution of moon systems is driven by tidal forces. A moon will raise a tidal bulge in the object it orbits (the primary) due to the differential gravitational force across diameter of the primary. If a moon is revolving in the same direction as the planet's rotation and the planet is rotating faster than the orbital period of the moon, the bulge will constantly be pulled ahead of the moon. In this situation, angular momentum is transferred from the rotation of the primary to the revolution of the satellite. The moon gains energy and gradually spirals outward, while the primary rotates more slowly over time. About 99.9% of the material fell into the middle of the cloud and became the Sun. Once the centre became hot and dense enough it triggered nuclear fusion. Then visible light flooded the solar system for the first time.

In all cases, this means that the position of a planet along its orbit ultimately becomes impossible to predict with any certainty (so, for example, the timing of winter and summer becomes uncertain). Still, in some cases, the orbits themselves may change dramatically. Such chaos manifests most strongly as changes in eccentricity, with some planets' orbits becoming significantly more—or less— elliptical. [103] In The Dust Of This Planet has been translated into several languages, including Spanish (Materia Oscura, 2015), Italian (Nero Editions 2018), Russian (Hyle Press, 2017), and German (Mathes & Seitz, 2019).Moons of solid Solar System bodies have been created by both collisions and capture. Mars's two small moons, Deimos and Phobos, are thought to be captured asteroids. [90]