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Spiral arms cradle baby terrestrial planets


Waspie_Dwarf

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Spiral arms cradle baby terrestrial planets

Washington, DC-New work from Carnegie’s Alan Boss offers a potential solution to a longstanding problem in the prevailing theory of how rocky planets formed in our own Solar System, as well as in others. The snag he’s untangling: how dust grains in the matter orbiting a young protostar avoid getting dragged into the star before they accumulate into bodies large enough that their own gravity allows them to rapidly attract enough material to grow into planets. The study is published by The Astrophysical Journal.

In the early stages of their formation, stars are surrounded by rotating disks of gas and dust. The dust grains in the disk collide and aggregate to form pebbles, which grow into boulders, and so on increasing in size through planetesimals, planetary embryos, and finally rocky terrestrial planets. But there are some difficult outstanding questions raised by this theory. One of these is that the pressure gradient of the gas in the disk would create a headwind that would spiral the pebbles and boulders inward toward the young protostar, where they would be destroyed.

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  • Waspie_Dwarf

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  • Nnicolette

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Its really interesting to me how the planets forming can be a similar shape to a galaxy and an atom. How many levels of formation do you think there are?

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Its really interesting to me how the planets forming can be a similar shape to a galaxy and an atom.

I don't really want to take this off topic, however:

They are nothing at all like the shape of an atom.

The image people have of electrons orbiting around a nucleus like planets around a star is a very, VERY simplified version of what actually happens. The truth is much, MUCH more complex.

Take a look at the chart on THIS WEB PAGE to get some idea of how electrons really orbit an atomic nucleus.

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Thank you for filling me in on that i have no idea whats going on in the orbits on that chart but i still see a sort of resemblance in the variations between the four armed ones and the circular ones even if remote and designed by a different process.

The resemblance of what they are describing to a larger scale common spiral armed galaxy situated around a black hole is what i would assume is if not the same process then the same laws of physics eliciting the same reactions. Maybe we can learn something about star and galaxy formation by examining the process on a smaller faster level.

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