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Contents. Formation and evolution of the Solar System. There is evidence that the formation of the Solar System began about 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. [ 1 ] Most of the collapsing mass collected in the center, forming the Sun, while the rest flattened into a protoplanetary ...
There is also a small chance of the Solar System being ejected. [95] [108] The planets of the Solar System will almost certainly not be disturbed by these events. [109] [110] [111] 5.4 billion The Sun, having now exhausted its hydrogen supply, leaves the main sequence and begins evolving into a red giant. [112] 6.5 billion
The Sun will experience more rapid mass loss, with about 33% of its total mass shed with the solar wind. The loss of mass will mean that the orbits of the planets will expand. The orbital distance of Earth will increase to at most 150% of its current value (that is, 1.5 AU (220 million km; 140 million mi)).
The history of scientific thought about the formation and evolution of the Solar System began with the Copernican Revolution. The first recorded use of the term "Solar System" dates from 1704. [1][2] Since the seventeenth century, philosophers and scientists have been forming hypotheses concerning the origins of our Solar System and the Moon ...
Orbital period. ~230 million years [ 10 ] The Solar System[ d ] is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. [ 11 ] It was formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc.
Radiometric dating of these rocks shows that the Moon is 4.53 ± 0.01 billion years old, [46] formed at least 30 million years after the Solar System. [47] New evidence suggests the Moon formed even later, 4.48 ± 0.02 Ga, or 70–110 million years after the start of the Solar System. [48]
The Rare Earth hypothesis argues that planets with complex life, like Earth, are exceptionally rare.. In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity, such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth, and subsequently human intelligence, required an improbable combination of astrophysical ...
A total of five planets are going retrograde between May and September: Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. "Retrograde" is a term used to describe when a planet's orbit appears to slow ...