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After 500–600 million years (about 4 billion years ago) Jupiter and Saturn fell into a 2:1 resonance: Saturn orbited the Sun once for every two Jupiter orbits. [47] This resonance created a gravitational push against the outer planets, possibly causing Neptune to surge past Uranus and plough into the ancient Kuiper belt. [69]
Neptune's moon Triton falls through the planet's Roche limit, potentially disintegrating into a planetary ring system similar to Saturn's. [107] 4.5 billion Mars reaches the same solar flux the Earth did when it first formed, 4.5 billion years ago from today. [92] < 5 billion
One side supports that they are ancient, and were created simultaneously with Saturn from the original nebular material (around 4.6 billion years ago), [124] or shortly after the LHB (around 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago). [125] [126] The other side supports that they are much younger, created around 100 million years ago.
This model posits that, 4.6 billion years ago, the Solar System was formed by the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud spanning several light-years. Many stars, including the Sun, were formed within this collapsing cloud. The gas that formed the Solar System was slightly more massive than the Sun itself.
Earth may have had a ring made up of a broken asteroid over 400 million years ago, a study finds. The Saturn-like feature could explain a climate shift at the time.
Theia (/ ˈ θ iː ə /) is a hypothesized ancient planet in the early Solar System which, according to the giant-impact hypothesis, collided with the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, with some of the resulting ejected debris coalescing to form the Moon.
Earth formed in this manner about 4.54 billion years ago (with an uncertainty of 1%) [25] [26] [4] and was largely completed within 10–20 million years. [27] In June 2023, scientists reported evidence that the planet Earth may have formed in just three million years, much faster than the 10−100 million years thought earlier.
Timescale Artist's impression of the Moon during the Late Heavy Bombardment (above) and today (below). The Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB), or lunar cataclysm, is a hypothesized astronomical event thought to have occurred approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years (Ga) ago, [1] at a time corresponding to the Neohadean and Eoarchean eras on Earth.