The Sun and the Origins of the Solar System

The Sun and the Origins of the Solar System — page 1
The Sun far outweighs all other components of the solar system combined In fact the Sun contains more than 99 percent of the mass of the entire solar system Nevertheless the Sun is a fairly average-sized star From Earth it looks so much larger and brighter than other stars only because it is so much nearer to Earth than any other star If the Sun were much farther away it would look much like many other stars in the night sky But if this were so life as we know it could not exist on Earth The Sun provides nearly all the heat light and other forms of energy necessary for life on Earth In fact the Sun provides the great majority majority of the energy of the solar system Astronomers believe that the solar system formed as a by-product of the formation of the Sun itself some 4.6 billion years ago According to the prevailing theory the Sun and its many satellites satellites condensed out of the solar nebula a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust The solar system began forming when the gravity of this interstellar interstellar cloud caused the cloud to start contracting and slowly spinning This could have been caused by random fluctuations in the density of the cloud or by an external disturbance such as the shock wave from an exploding star INTRODUCTION 6