How Solar Systems Really Form
This was a comment I posted in response to a video on The Royal Institution YouTube account (https://youtu.be/1grXMbvZOi0). Felt it was best to give it a place of it’s own.
OK. I’m gonna stop you @ 1:06 to say that this “mostly random” idea is wrong. It’s a highly dynamic system on a grand scale. We don’t say that cloud formations are mostly random. Difficult for us to model, but there are no unknown actions taking place. And this outward pressure you speak of… it’s a dense cloud of material in a vacuum, which means there is an external suction. At the scale of atoms and molecules, gravity is a weaker force then that of a static charge. It’s a lot like how the automotive industry paints our cars (electrostatic coating). Oh, and this idea that gravity just keeps pulling everything together… if you think that thru, then the end result is one big ball (a new star) with no extra matter around it.
And your coin toss example sucks. You should be talking about billions and billions of coins being tossed at the same time, and the distribution of heads or tails. But even then, it’s a big leap toward the angular momentum argument.
Gravity is related to the relative velocity of an object. Lets imagine a tiny flake of iron moving at half the speed of light thru a dense cloud of molecules. It creates the same kind of gravitational depression in space-time that we often demonstrate the sun as having, with the planets in orbit also having, but to a lesser degree. It also creates a bow shock in the direction of travel (and yes, mathematically, we should think of space as a fluid, but that’s for another rant). Take a moment to look at images of a bullet or jet plane, and the side view of the bow shock it creates. Now look at the images/videos of a small mass placed on an stretched elastic surface. The bow shock from our flack of iron is the early stage of a solar system.
Going back to cloud formations, we need to understand that the dark band of clouds that form when a cold front moves over an area are NOT the leading edge of the front. The water vapor (condensed by the cooler air) forms in the lower pressure area just behind the front. So, the space behind our flakes bow shock exhibits the same phenomenon, allowing near-by molecules to collect in this depressed area of space-time.
With this image in our minds of a tiny flake of iron, moving at half the speed of light, collecting an ever growing, ever denser cloud of molecules in it’s local space-time distortion, we can finally add our angular momentum. For the sake of space, I refer you to the wiki page on the Coriolis force, but if you have ever flushed a toilet, you have already seen an example of the concept (told you it was best to think of space as a fluid).
With time, our flake of iron will be a very massive object in it’s own right, and the relative plane (perpendicular to the direction of travel) could extend from just under, to many light years across. And in that, there is also the mass of all the material collected along our journey. As an inverse to our tiny flake, at high speed, having mass; we have to examine our massive circus of protoplanets dragging us down. Our new system is likely only moving at 0.5% the speed of light (down from 50%). Once free from our initial cloud, we continue along our not so random path thru the galaxy (NOW gravity is the primary force being exerted on the solar system as a whole).
And yes, we should be able to plot our Sun’s direction of travel based on orientation and rotation of our solar system. For those wanting to know how earlier stars formed when there was nothing of mass traveling at speed thru the clouds, I point you back to the start of this post, where I stated that a dense cloud, based on static charge, would collect into a single mass (no plane, no angular velocity, no other objects in orbit around it).
*sigh* only 4 1/2 minutes in… solar wind. When star formation reaches the point of “ignition,” it effectively stops the accretion of new material. Clumps of space dust and minerals and rocky objects can still collide with one another, but solar wind will push any remaining molecules out to a boundary point where the strength of the star’s wind no longer has influence of the literal space around it (this may or may not be the same point of influence for a stars distortion of space-time, but they seem relatable).
I’d like to end with one final conspiracy theory, I mean, observation: This wonderful explanation of how our planets form is correct, or total BS. The orbits of objects change as the mass of the protplanets changes, and it’s a very chaotic system. If one orbit shrinks in size, it perturbs the orbits of every other protoplanet. This is how we can have wild orbital paths that don’t conform to our nice flat plane. But here’s the rub: Exoplanets. Hundreds of exoplanets have been “detected,” but unlike our system, all of them are calculated to have massive jupiter sized planets in such close orbit with their parent star, that we can’t explain how they got THAT close without being consumed (or how they can maintain an atmosphere). Our system looks like a total fluke if we hold observable data as truth. And if we go back to the example of bow shock and space-time distortion, it means that hundreds of systems, in every direction we look, are moving exactly perpendicular to whatever angle we view them at. It would be like every galaxy we look at being a perfectly flat plane, rather than the different orientations we actually observe.
… and don’t even get me started on gravity wave detection! (Actually, I posted my thoughts on it last year https://medium.com/@sd_marlow/the-gravitational-dilemma-57c8b51b5977)
