Posts tagged with "Planets":

Kepler Compendium

Today on Fizzix Phriday, it's time for some physics phistory (the p is silent). Let's take a jaunt back in time to the year 1571. Nicolaus Copernicus (born Mikolaj Kopernik) had published his revolutionary work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (in English: On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) just 23 years ago, where he described, mathematically, a universe where the Earth was not the center, and all the planets revolved around the Sun, rather than the Earth. While this was a revolutionary idea, it was largely seen as incorrect or ignored, due in no small part to Copernicus's death around the time of its publication, and being therefore unable to defend his work from criticisms that arose from going against the established ideas in science and religion. Even worse, a note was prepended to his work before publication that basically said "everything in here about the Earth revolving around the sun and not the other way around is just a neat mathematical exercise..."

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All These Other Planets

For a long time (well, relatively) astronomers believed they had this whole "solar system" thing figured out. They had this theory which governed its formation, called the "core-accretion theory," which described stellar and planetary formation. Basically, as all the dust and gasses that make up a star star coalescing into a star, they also begin spinning. As they spin faster, the gasses condense into a kind of spinning disk which is thicker at the center (like spinning our a blob of pizza dough, but a lot more complicated). Finally, this central mass gets hot and dense enough to trigger fusion, and the proto-star becomes a real star. Around this time, as the star is finishing its formation, the heavier elements in the spinning disk start clumping together, with the denser elements forming the smaller, rocky planets we see as the "inner planets" in our solar system, and lighter elements and compounds forming gas giants further out.

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