SOLAR SYSTEM: OVERVIEW

 The SOLAR SYSTEM is located in the MILKY WAY GALAXY

o MILKY WAY GALAXY – a huge disc and spiral shaped aggregation of about at least
100 billion stars and other bodies
 Its spiral arms rotate around a globular cluster or bulge of stars at the
center which lies a supper massive black hole.
 This galaxy is about 100 million light years across ( 1 light year= 9.4607 x
1012 kilometers).
 It is a part of the so-called Local group of galaxies which in turn is part of
the Virgo Supercluster of Galaxies.
 The Solar System revolves around the galactic center once in every 240 million years.
 The Solar System comprises the Sun, 8 planets, dwarf planets such as Pluto, satellites,
asteroids, comets, other minor bodies such as those in the Kuiper Belt and
interplanetary dust.
 The Asteroid Belt lies between Mars and Jupiter.
o Meteoroids are smaller asteroids. They are thought of as remnants of a “failed
planet” –one that did not form due to disturbance from Jupiter’s gravity.
 The Kuiper Belt lies beyond Neptune (30 to 50 AU, 1 AU = Sun-Earth distance = 150
million km) and comprise numerous rocky or icy bodies a few meters to hundreds of
kilometres in size.
 The Oort Cloud marks the outer boundary of the Solar System and is compose MOSTLY
of icy objects.

2 KINDS OF PLANETS
1. TERRESTRIAL (EARTH-LIKE) PLANETS:
 Mercury
 Venus
 Earth
 Mars
o Relatively small in size and mass
o Earth is the largest and most massive
o Has a rocky surface
o The surface of Venus cannot be seen directly from Earth because of its dense cloud
cover.
2. JOVIAN ( JUPITER) PLANETS
 Jupiter
 Saturn
 Uranus
 Neptune
o Much lower average density
o Mostly gas
o No solid surface
SPACE DEBRIS
In addition to the planets, small bodies orbit the Sun:
Asteroids, Comets, Meteoroids
  COMETS
- Icy nucleus which evaporates and gets blown into space by solar wind pressure
- Mostly objects in highly elliptical orbits, occasionally coming close to the sun.
 METEOROIDS
- Small (micrometer-millimeter sized) dust grains through out the solar system
- If they collide with Earth, they evaporate in the atmosphere.
 CRATERS ON THE PLANET’S SURFACES
- Craters ( like on our Moon’s surface) are common throughout our Solar System.
- Not seen on Jovian Planets because they don’t have solid surface.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN METEORS, METEORITES, AND METEOROIDS:

Most of us probably have seen meteors or shooting stars. A meteor is the flash of light that we
see in the night sky when a small chunk of interplanetary debris burns up as it passes through
our atmosphere. "Meteor" refers to the flash of light caused by the debris, not the debris itself.
The debris is called a meteoroid. A meteoroid is a piece of interplanetary matter that is smaller
than a kilometer and frequently only millimeters in size. Most meteoroids that enter the Earth's
atmosphere are so small that they vaporize completely and never reach the planet's surface.
If any part of a meteoroid survives the fall through the atmosphere and lands on Earth, it is
called a meteorite. Although the vast majority of meteorites are very small, their size can range
from about a fraction of a gram (the size of a pebble) to 100 kilograms (220 lbs) or more (the
size of a huge, life-destroying boulder).
Asteroids are generally larger chunks of rock that come from the asteroid belt located between
the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Comets are asteroid-like objects covered with ice, methane, ammonia, and other compounds
that develop a fuzzy, cloud-like shell called a coma and sometimes a visible tail whenever they
orbit close to the Sun.

SMALL SCALE AND LARGE SCALE FEATURES OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

LARGE SCALE FEATURES:
1. Much of the mass of the Solar System is concentrated at the center (99.85%) while
angular momentum is held by the outer planets.
2. Orbits of the planets are elliptical and are on the same plane (coplanar).
3. All planets revolve around the Sun (prograde).
4. The periods of revolution of the planets increasing distance from the Sun.
5. The innermost planets moves fastest, the outermost moves the slowest.
6. All planets are located at regular intervals from the Sun.
SMALL SCALE:
1. Most planets rotate prograde (relevant to the north pole).
2. Inner terrestrial planets are made of materials with high
melting points such as silicates, iron, and nickel.
3. They rotate slower, have thin or no atmosphere, higher
Densities, and lower contents of volatiles – hydrogen,
helium, and noble gases.
4. The outer four planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and
Neptune are called “gas giants” because of the dominance of gases and their larger size.
5. They rotate faster, have thick atmosphere, lower densities, and fluid interiors rich in
hydrogen, helium, and ices (water, ammonia, methane).
PLANETARY ORBITS:

 All planets are in almost circular (elliptical) orbits around the Sun, in approximately the
same plane (ecliptic).
 Sense of revolution: Counter clockwise
 Sense of rotation: counter-clockwise (with exception of Venus, Uranus, and Pluto)
 Orbits are generally inclined by no more than 3.4 degrees [except Mercury (7 degrees)
and Pluto (17.2 degrees)]

ELEMENTS ABUNDANT ON EARTH, METEORITES, AND UNIVERSE

Except for hydrogen, helium, inert gases, and volatiles; The universe and the Earth have
similar abundance especially for rock and metal elements
HYPOTHESES ABOUT THE FORMATION OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
1. NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS
Proponents: Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant, and Pierre-Simon Laplace
- In the 1700s the proponents of this hypothesis independently thought of a rotating
gaseous cloud that cools and contracts in the middle to form a Sun and the rest into
a disc that became the planets.
- This nebular theory failed to account for the distribution of angular momentum in
the solar system.
- It presupposes that around 4.5 billion years ago, a star system was formed from a
rotating cloud of gas, or nebula of extremely hot gas.
- When the gas cooled, the nebula began to shrink, and as it became smaller, it
rotated faster, casting of rings of gas and forming a disk-like shape.
- The centrifugal force from the nebula’s rotation and the gravitational force from the
mass of the nebula formed the rings of gas from the outside.
- As the nebula continued to shrink, these rings condensed into various densities of
planets and their satellites.
- The remaining part of the nebula which has the most mass, formed the Sun.
- While this theory incorporates more basic physics, there are several unsolved
problems. For example, a majority of the angular momentum in the Solar System is
held by the outer planets. For comparison, 99% of the Solar System's mass is in the
Sun, but 99% of its angular momentum is in the planets. Another flaw is the
mechanism from which the disk turns into individual planets.
2. ENCOUNTER HYPOTHESIS
- Comte de Buffon’s (1749) Sun-comet encounter that sent matter to form planets.
- James Jeans’ (1917) sun-star encounter that would have drawn from the sun matter
that would condense to planets
- Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin (T.C. Chamberlain) and Forest Ray Moulton’s (F.R.
Moulton’s) planetesimal hypothesis involving a star much bigger than the Sun
passing by the Sun and draws gaseous filament from both out which planetesimals
were formed.
- Ray Lyttleton’s (1940) sun;s companion star colliding with another to form a proto-
planet that breaks up to form Jupiter and Saturn.
- Otto Schmidt’s accretion theory proposed that the Sun passed through a dense
interstellar cloud and emerged with a dusty, gaseous envelope that eventually
became the planets.
o However it cannot explain how the planets and satellites were formed. The
time required to form the planets exceeds the age of the solar system.
- Nobel Prize winner, Harold Urey’s compositional studies on meteorites on the 1950s
and other scientists’ work on these objects led to the conclusion that meteorite
constituents have changed very little since the solar system’s early history and can
give clues about their formation.
o The currently accepted theory on the origin of the solar system relies much
on information from meteorites.
 One of the earliest theories for the formation of the planets was called the encounter
hypothesis. In this scenario, a rogue star passes close to the Sun about 5 billion years
ago.
 Material, in the form of hot gas, is tidally stripped from the Sun and the rogue star. This material fragments into
smaller lumps which form the planets. This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining why the planets all revolve in
the same direction (from the encounter geometry) and also provides an explanation for why the inner worlds are
denser than the outer worlds.
 3. PROTOPLANET HYPOTHESIS – Current Hypothesis
Proponents: Carl von Weizsacker and Gerard Kuiper
- About 4.6 billion years ago, in the Orion arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, a slowly
rotating gas.
- Dust cloud dominated by hydrogen and helium starts to contract due to gravity
- As most of the mass move to the center to eventually become a proto-Sun, the
remaining materials form a disc that will eventually become the planets and
momentum is transferred outwards.
- Due to collisions, fragments of dust ad solid matter begin sticking to each other to
form larger and larger bodies from meter to kilometre in size.
- These proto-planets are accretions of frozen water, ammonia, methane, silicon,
aluminium, iron, and other metals in rock and mineral grains enveloped in hydrogen
and helium.
- High-speed collisions with large objects destroys much of the mantle of Mercury,
puts Venus in retrograde rotation
- Collision of the Earth with large object produces the moon. This is supported by the
composition of the moon very similar to the Earth’s mantle.
- When the proto-Sun I established as a star, its solar wind blasts hydrogen, helium,
and volatiles from the inner planets to beyond Mars to form the gas giants leaving
behind a system we know today.

ENCOUNTER HYPOTHESIS
NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS

PROTOPLANET HYPOTHESIS