Why are the planets of the solar system all on the same plane, rather than scattered?

Mondo Science Updated on 2024-02-29

The universe is three-dimensional, and it stands to reason that all the celestial bodies in the universe should be scattered, but why are the eight planets in the solar system all distributed on the same plane? Is this phenomenon a coincidence or an inevitability?

In the vast universe, with countless stars, the sun, which looks huge to human beings, is just a speck of dust in the vast universe, not even dust.

The eight planets that orbit the Sun are even less than two thousandths of the Sun's mass.

As small as they may be, they are enough for scientists to study for hundreds of years. For now, human scientists' knowledge of the solar system and the eight planets is only scratching the surface, and they only know the general location, size and mass of the eight planets, as well as the fact that they roughly orbit in the same plane.

As for why they orbit in the same plane, scientists can only explain this phenomenon through theoretical analysis through existing knowledge of cosmology and physics.

It is thought that before the Sun was formed, 4.6 billion years ago, the region of the solar system was a thin and vast cloud of gas and dust. A few years later, a supernova** near this dust cloud disturbed its stable state, causing it to collapse and rotate under the influence of gravity.

Similar to the butterfly effect, as the collapse and rotation intensify, the dust cloud becomes more and more flattened under the action of centrifugal force, like a flattening pie, slowly taking on a disk-like structure, the primitive stellar disk.

Simultaneously with this process, there is also the birth of the sun. The collapse causes extreme heat and pressure in the center of the dust cloud, which prompts the combination of hydrogen and helium atoms. As the fusion reaction continues, a giant fireball is born, the sun.

After the formation of the sun, there are still a large number of dust particles in the huge stellar disk, which are also in a slow rotation, occasionally colliding with each other and becoming one, like a snowball, getting bigger and bigger, and gradually forming eight planets.

These planets were all formed on the platform of the primordial stellar disk, so although they are of different sizes and orbits, they are basically all distributed in the same plane.

Of course, there are scientists who give different explanations, but regardless of the reason, human scientists have observed a universal cosmic law, that is, except for the solar system, all other star systems in the universe, almost all the planets orbiting around them are distributed in the same plane, a phenomenon that scientists call "planetary coplanarity".

The universal law of "planetary coplanarity" tells us that the solar system is nothing more than an ordinary star system in the universe, and there is nothing special about it.

However, scientists also tell us that the solar system is the most special existence in the universe, because this star system gave birth to the earth's civilization.

Not only that, but the solar system is also one of the few star systems in the universe with eight planets. Astronomers have discovered that most stars in the universe are accompanied by only one or two planets, with each star having an average of only 16 planets.

Therefore, the sun with eight planets is already considered a very luxurious.

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