PV Gap

Colleen Said:

Solar system?

We Answered:

i think you are getting the universe mixed up with our solar system

Marion Said:

What is the difference between our solar system and our galaxy?

We Answered:

what our solar system is called - Our solar system is nestled inside a very large galaxy of stars called the Milky Way.

what exactly is a galaxy - A galaxy is a cluster of stars, nebulae, dark matter, and other astronomical objects.

where is our place in it? - The galaxy in which we live is probably a typical spiral galaxy, although recent research shows it has a small bar across the center, making it a barred spiral. It is an island of tens of billions of stars together with gas and dust.
It is roughly the shape of a "flying saucer", with a bulge in the middle of a flat disc. Stars and dust are arranged into spirals within the disc, which measures about 100,000 light years across. Ancient globular star clusters form a halo around the Galaxy.
We live near a star (the Sun) roughly half way out along the disc. When we look at the night sky we can see a mass of distant stars in the disc, partly hidden by clouds of dust. These stars we call the Milky Way, and this is how our galaxy gets its name. It is sometimes just called the Galaxy.
The Milky Way is the second largest galaxy in the small cluster to which it belongs.

How many solar systems are there? - Several other stars have disk-shaped clouds around them that seem to be solar systems in formation. In 1983, an infrared telescope in space photographed such a disk around Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra. This discovery represented the first direct evidence of such material around any star except the sun. In 1984, astronomers photographed a similar disk around Beta Pictoris, a star in the southern constellation Pictor.
By the early 2000's, astronomers had discovered that more than 50 stars like our sun have planets orbiting them. In almost all cases, they found only one planet per star. All the planets found are probably gaseous with no solid surface.

Joseph Said:

How much space is between our solar system and the next closest one?

We Answered:

The nearest star from our own is Proxima Centauri, just over 4 lightyears away.

Space between stars varies, the universe isn't evenly distributed. How far is 4 lightyears? It's about 23,513,999,300,000 miles away (that's 23.5 trillion). As for planets, that's hard, because planets are extremely difficult to see from Earth. In fact, they're nearly impossible unless they cross in front of a star while it's being observed or it's large enough and bright enough that it couldn't possibly be life-sustaining (even though that wasn't your question). We only know of about a hundred or so planets outside our solar system. Most are gas giants, none are Earth-like, although we know that there must be countless planets we can't see.

Voyager 1 is about 10 billion miles away from the Sun right now but it's technically still within our solar system. When it passes beyond the boundary, I'm sure it'll make the news. As for getting to another solar system, yes it's possible, but not in our lifetime. It will continue to float through space forever, until something hits it and destroys it, or (highly unlikely) some force equal to its velocity outward will push inward and halt its motion entirely.

Interstellar travel and interstellar probes are impossible with today's technology. You can throw a baseball in outer space and rest assured that it will travel 4 lightyears, but there's no guarantee it will manage to hit Proxima Centauri, or any other solar system, at all.

Gladys Said:

How amenable is our own Solar System to radial velocity techniques from exoplanets?

We Answered:

Like others have stated, Jupiter would be the prime indicator. It would take several months to determine the radial movement, several months at least, and well over half an orbit to really suspect an orbiting body as a candidate. Two orbital periods of Jupiter would seem like a good enough time-frame to eliminate other possibilities of the Sun's apparent motion, although I bet after about 7 years, the theories of the Sun having at least one planet would have plenty of support.

But the problem lies with their distance, and the accuracy of their measurements. Farther away, the Sun would have a lessened wobble, if measured in fractions of an arc second, closer, the wobble would be grander. If the technology exists to measure up to tiny micro-fractions of an arc second of movement, and they had the patience to observe our Sun for a long enough time, it would be detectable.

It might be fun to ask a follow up question, in the physics forum, to see how much wobble the Sun has in arc seconds from various distances. They're pretty good at crunching the numbers in that category.

Jennifer Said:

solar system?

We Answered:

Layout and structure
The principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a main sequence G2 star that contains 99.86% of the system's known mass and dominates it gravitationally.[6] Jupiter and Saturn, the Sun's two largest orbiting bodies, account for more than 90% of the system's remaining mass.[b]

Most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earth's orbit, known as the ecliptic. The planets are very close to the ecliptic while comets and Kuiper belt objects are usually at significantly greater angles to it.


The orbits of the bodies in the Solar System to scale (clockwise from top left)All of the planets and most other objects also orbit with the Sun's rotation (counter-clockwise, as viewed from above the Sun's north pole). There are exceptions, such as Halley's Comet.

Objects travel around the Sun following Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Each object orbits along an approximate ellipse with the Sun at one focus of the ellipse. The closer an object is to the Sun, the faster it moves. The orbits of the planets are nearly circular, but many comets, asteroids and objects of the Kuiper belt follow highly elliptical orbits.

To cope with the vast distances involved, many representations of the Solar System show orbits the same distance apart. In reality, with a few exceptions, the farther a planet or belt is from the Sun, the larger the distance between it and the previous orbit. For example, Venus is approximately 0.33 AU farther out than Mercury, while Saturn is 4.3 AU out from Jupiter, and Neptune lies 10.5 AU out from Uranus. Attempts have been made to determine a correlation between these orbital distances (see Titius-Bode law), but no such theory has been accepted.


Formation and evolution
Main article: Formation and evolution of the Solar System

Hubble image of protoplanetary disks in the Orion Nebula, a light-years-wide "stellar nursery" likely very similar to the primordial nebula from which our Sun formed.The Solar System is believed to have formed according to the nebular hypothesis, which holds that it emerged from the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud 4.6 billion years ago. This initial cloud was likely several light-years across and probably birthed several stars.[7] Studies of ancient meteorites reveal traces of elements only formed in the hearts of very large exploding stars, indicating that the Sun formed within a star cluster, and in range of a number of nearby supernovae explosions. The shock wave from these supernovae may have triggered the formation of the Sun by creating regions of overdensity in the surrounding nebula, allowing gravitational forces to overcome internal gas pressures and cause collapse.[8]

Solar System's Most
Abundant Isotopes[9] Isotope Nuclei per
Million
Hydrogen-1 705,700
Hydrogen-2 23
Helium-4 275,200
Helium-3 35
Oxygen-16 5,920
Carbon-12 3,032
Carbon-13 37
Neon-20 1,548
Neon-22 208
Iron-56 1,169
Iron-54 72
Iron-57 28
Nitrogen-14 1,105
Silicon-28 653
Silicon-29 34
Silicon-30 23
Magnesium-24 513
Magnesium-26 79
Magnesium-25 69
Sulfur-32 396
Argon-36 77
Calcium-40 60
Aluminum-27 58
Nickel-58 49
Sodium-23 33
The region that would become the Solar System, known as the pre-solar nebula,[10] had a diameter of between 7000 and 20,000 AU[7][11] and a mass just over that of the Sun (by between 0.1 and 0.001 solar masses).[12] As the nebula collapsed, conservation of angular momentum made it rotate faster. As the material within the nebula condensed, the atoms within it began to collide with increasing frequency. The centre, where most of the mass collected, became increasingly hotter than the surrounding disc.[7] As gravity, gas pressure, magnetic fields, and rotation acted on the contracting nebula, it began to flatten into a spinning protoplanetary disc with a diameter of roughly 200 AU[7] and a hot, dense protostar at the centre.[13][14]

Studies of T Tauri stars, young, pre-fusing solar mass stars believed to be similar to the Sun at this point in its evolution, show that they are often accompanied by discs of pre-planetary matter.[12] These discs extend to several hundred AU and reach only a thousand kelvins at their hottest.[15]

After 100 million years, the pressure and density of hydrogen in the centre of the collapsing nebula became great enough for the protosun to begin thermonuclear fusion. This increased until hydrostatic equilibrium was achieved, with the thermal energy countering the force of gravitational contraction. At this point the Sun became a full-fledged star.[16]

From the remaining cloud of gas and dust (the "solar nebula"), the various planets formed. They are believed to have formed by accretion: the planets began as dust grains in orbit around the central protostar; then gathered by direct contact into clumps between one and ten metres in diameter; then collided to form larger bodies (planetesimals) of roughly 5 km in size; then gradually increased by further collisions at roughly 15 cm per year over the course of the next few million years.[17]

The inner Solar System was too warm for volatile molecules like water and methane to condense, and so the planetesimals which formed there were relatively small (comprising only 0.6% the mass of the disc)[7] and composed largely of compounds with high melting points, such as silicates and metals. These rocky bodies eventually became the terrestrial planets. Farther out, the gravitational effects of Jupiter made it impossible for the protoplanetary objects present to come together, leaving behind the asteroid belt.[18]

Farther out still, beyond the frost line, where more volatile icy compounds could remain solid, Jupiter and Saturn became the gas giants. Uranus and Neptune captured much less material and are known as ice giants because their cores are believed to be made mostly of ices (hydrogen compounds).[19][20]

Once the young Sun began producing energy, the solar wind (see below) blew the gas and dust in the protoplanetary disk into interstellar space and ended the growth of the planets. T Tauri stars have far stronger stellar winds than more stable, older stars.[21][22]


Artist's conception of the future evolution of our Sun. Left: main sequence; middle: red giant; right: white dwarfAstronomers estimate that the Solar System as we know it today will last until the Sun begins its journey off of the main sequence. As the Sun burns through its supply of hydrogen fuel, it gets hotter in order to be able to burn the remaining fuel, and so burns it even faster. As a result, the Sun is growing brighter at a rate of roughly ten percent every 1.1 billion years.[23]

Around 7.6 billion years from now, the Sun's core will become hot enough to cause hydrogen fusion to occur in its less dense upper layers. This will cause the Sun to expand to roughly up to 260 times its current diameter, and become a red giant.[24] At this point, the sun will have cooled and dulled, because of its vastly increased surface area.

Eventually, the Sun's outer layers will fall away, leaving a white dwarf, an extraordinarily dense object, half its original mass but only the size of the Earth.[25]
Gaseous cloud from which, in the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, the Sun and planets formed by condensation. In 1755 Immanuel Kant suggested that a nebula gradually pulled together by its own gravity developed into the Sun and planets. Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, in 1796 proposed a similar model, in which a rotating and contracting cloud of gas — the young Sun — shed concentric rings of matter that condensed into the planets. But James Clerk Maxwell showed that, if all the matter in the known planets had once been distributed this way, shearing forces would have prevented such condensation. Another objection was that the Sun has less angular momentum than the theory seems to require. In the early 20th century most astronomers preferred the collision theory: that the planets formed as a result of a close approach to the Sun by another star. Eventually, however, stronger objections were mounted to the collision theory than to the nebular hypothesis, and a modified version of the latter — in which a rotating disk of matter gave rise to the planets through successively larger agglomerations, from dust grains through planetesimals and protoplanets — became the prevailing theory of the solar system's origin.Young stars generally have material widely spread around them that organizes itself into a disk over time. Astronomers believe that this is where planets form. The new image, which is sensitive to the dust around the star but not starlight, shows a horseshoe-shaped structure orbiting AB Aurigae with two denser, brighter clumps of material in a ring around the star next to a darker area. This darker area, a structure relatively depleted of widespread material previously predicted in models of planet formation but never seen before, is thought to be the point at which material is coalescing into a planet or brown dwarf.

Further imaging of this area shows a barely visible spot dead center, a spot too bright to be light reflected off a formed planet but consistent with an object in the process of development that is accreting new material. The two brighter clumps, equidistant from the hole and presumably trailing and leading it in its orbit around the star, seem similar to the Trojan objects that orbit the Sun along with Jupiter. Such a structure has been predicted to form in disks where a planet is present, because of the gravitational interaction between the planet and the star it orbits.

“The deficit of material could be due to a planet forming and sucking material onto it, coalescing into a small point in the image and clearing material in the immediate surroundings. This would look like a h