The role of the sun in the solar system and our lives
Birth of the Solar System
- Creation of the Solar System:.600 million years.
- Sun appearance: Inside a primitive nebula, after the collapse of a gas cloud
- Appearance of the planets: matter is organized around the sun, it is added and grows
- Solar system objects: sun, planets, satellites, asteroid belts, oort cloud
Our land exists in a place called Solar System. This means that our planet is part of a whole that orbits our unique star, the sun. So Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and all these other known planets revolve around the sun. The sun emits a very strong influence on this set of planets. All this is the solar system.
THE BIRTH OF THE STARS
In 1755, the philosopher Emmanuel Kant exposed his theory about the solar nebula, from which the entire solar system would have emerged. The Spitzer infrared space telescope validated this theory, two and a half centuries later!
Thanks to technology, our knowledge of the birth of stars allows us to establish very precise hypotheses about the formation of the solar system. What is very interesting is that scientists have observed that other stars certainly contributed to this creation.
The sun, the planets and their satellites, but also the asteroid belt and Kuiper’s belt form the solar system. It is located on an outer arm of the Milky Way, our galaxy.
It is in the nebulae where the stars appear. A nebula is mainly composed of gas and dust and can cover dozens or hundreds of light years. There are nebulous well -known by astronomers, such as Orion Nebula and Carina Nebula.
Solar system formation
Let’s give a great leap in time. We are about 4.600 million years before our era. Instead of the current solar system there is a gigantic nebula. Within this nebula, an incredible show is happening: an extremely dense cold cloud composed of hydrogen and helium, turns on itself. Each time faster. This extreme speed ends up its collapse and crushing under the effect of gravity. It sits more and more and its temperature begins to rise in an unimaginable way. The cloud attracts any close matter residue.
In the center of this cloud, an ultracompacta zone takes shape and ends up giving birth to a protoestrella, our future sun. This central area attracts more and more matter that accumulates there.
This process will last about fifty million years, until the temperature is so high (15 million degrees) that thermonuclear reactions are initiated, causing hydrogen fusion. These reactions produce a colossal release of energy. Our protoestrella has just come on for the first time in its existence!
Several hundred thousand years after this first ignition, our star was finally born. And since then, his hydrogen has not stopped burn. And it will continue to be burned for 5 billion years .
The size of the sun is such that it only represents 99.86% of the total mass of the solar system, including planets and asteroids, of course! That is, how gigantic it is. Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest bodies after the solar system, constitute 90% of the remaining mass. It is enough . But let’s go back to our young star. At this stage of its existence, it is still quite unstable and expels a large part of helium and hydrogen. At the moment it is alone, there is still no planet to accompany it.
Around the young sun, the matter revishes in a incessant ballet and begins to organize. Small grains of dust are found, collide and eventually grouped together. Later, matter is only gas, but all this gas is also added and begins to be grouped into larger and dense balls.
We’re. After the sun, it depends on the planets to put on its way. The solar system consists mainly of innumerable rock pieces that collide and intermingle with each other. The largest pieces attract more and more material towards them due to their increasingly strong attraction power. They begin to clean around them: rock blocks are less and less numerous.
But expect … we see a small planet closer dangerously to what will later be the earth, our cradle. Suddenly the inevitable happens. The two planets collide and begin to merge. Around it, a great flow of matter is expelled to space and begins to turn very quickly. In turn, this flow of matter is added in a somewhat smaller ball. We have just witnessed the birth of the moon!
We see that the rocky (telluric) planets are quite close to the sun, and that the gaseous planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) are far from it. How to explain this provision? Why don’t we have a gaseous planet near us?
Most scientists agree that the culprit is the sun. Or rather, the solar wind. When it was lit, the sun began to broad.
So this is the reason why gaseous planets formed in what is called the exterior solar system!
Other objects of the solar system
Now we are 100 million years after the birth of the Solar System. We can see that beyond our four small rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars), an entire cluster of asteroids, rocks and dust of all kinds has formed. This huge cluster has been captured by sun attraction. This is known as the ‘asteroid belt’, which orbits around the sun.
Behind the asteroid belt are our four gaseous giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And even more, we found Pluto, a rocky body that was once considered a planet, which is now a ‘dwarf planet’. Pluto was degraded in 2006 because it is a very small star that has not been able to clean around it (it is part of a huge asteroid current, Kuiper’s belt). Beyond the Kuiper belt, we find the Oort cloud, considered the cradle of the comets. This cloud is one year light from the sun.
For approximately one billion years, all the planets of the Solar System were relentlessly bombarded by asteroids and comets of all kinds. But the solar winds will make the best of all this dust and other gases by sending them away from the interplanetary space.
It is possible that our star was born thanks to the death of another star. In fact, many astrophysicians believe that the sun appeared after the explosion of another star, whose consequence is a supernova. This Supernova would have generated a shock wave that would have allowed to create a variation of density within the primitive cloud, a variation that would be at the origin of the cloud collapse on itself.
The sun is alone in half of his life. Earth will eventually grow and swallow, then explode and become a red giant. In a billion and a half years of years, man may have disappeared from the earth and other species more adapted to the climatic conditions of the time may have appeared. But by then, the man will surely have found a way to establish himself elsewhere!
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