The Solar System is the name we give to our
local cosmic backyard. A better way to think of it is all the stuff held sway by the Sun’s
gravity: The Sun itself, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, dust, and very thin gas. If you took a step back — well, a few trillion
steps back — and looked at it from the outside, you might define the solar system as: the
Sun. That’s because the Sun comprises more than 98% of the mass of the entire solar system.
The next most massive object, Jupiter, is only 1/10th the diameter and less than 1%
the mass of the Sun. But that’s a little unfair. Our solar system
is a pretty amazing place, and you can figure out a lot of what’s going on in it just
by looking at it. For thousands of years we had to explore
the solar system stuck on this spinning, revolving ball — the Earth. The problem
was, for a long time we didn’t know it was a spinning, revolving ball. Well, the ancient
Greeks knew it was a ball — they had even measured its size to a fair degree of accuracy
— but most thought it was motionless. When a few folks pointed out that this might not
be the case — like the ancient Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos — they got ignored.
The idea that the sky spins around the Earth seems obvious when you look up, and when great
minds like those of the astronomer Ptolemy and philosopher Aristotle supported that idea,
well, people like Aristarchus got left behind. The basic thinking was that the Moon, Sun,
and stars were affixed to crystal spheres that spun around the Earth at different rates.
While it kinda sorta worked to predict the motions of objects in the sky, in detail it
was really unwieldy, and failed to accurately predict how the planets should move. Still, Ptolemy’s idea of a geocentric Universe
stuck around for well over a thousand years. It was the year 1543 when Nicolaus Copernicus
finally published his work proposing a Sun-centered model, much like the one Aristarchus had dreamed
up 2000 years previously. Unfortunately, Copernicus’s model was also pretty top-heavy, and had a
hard time predicting planetary motions. The last nail in geocentrism’s coffin came
a few years later, when astronomer Johannes Kepler made a brilliant mental leap: Based
on observations by his mentor Tycho Brahe, Kepler realized the planets moved around the
Sun in ellipses, not circles as Copernicus had assumed. This fixed everything, including
those aggravating planetary motions. It still took a while, but heliocentrism won the day.
And the night, too. This paved the way for Newton to apply physics
and his newly-created math of calculus to determine how gravity worked, which in turn
led to our modern understanding of how the solar system truly operates. The Sun, being the most massive object in
the solar system by far, has the strongest gravity, and it basically runs the solar system.
In fact, the term “solar” comes from the word “sol,” for Sun. We named the whole
shebang after the Sun, so there you go. The planets are smaller, but still pretty
huge compared to us tiny humans. At the big end we have giant Jupiter, 11 times wider
than the Earth and a thousand times its volume. At the smaller end, we have…well…there
is no actual smaller “end”. We just kinda draw a line and say, “Planets are bigger
than this.” That’s a bit unsatisfactory, I’ll admit, but it does bring up an interesting
point. I’ve been using the term “planet,” but
I haven’t defined it. That’s no accident: I don’t think you can. A lot of people have
tried, but definitions have always come up short. You might say something is a planet
if it’s big enough to be round, but a lot of moons are round, and so are some asteroids. Maybe a planet has to have moons. Nope; Mercury
and Venus don’t, and many asteroids do. Planets are big, right? Well, yeah. But Jupiter’s
moon Ganymede is bigger than Mercury. Should Mercury be stripped of its planetary status? I could go on, but no matter what definition
you come up with, you find there are lots of exceptions. That’s a pretty strong indication
that trying to make a rigid definition is a mistake; it’ll get you into more trouble
than it’ll help. “Planet” can’t be defined; it’s a
concept, like continent. We don’t have a definition for continent, and people don’t
seem to mind. Australia is a continent, but Greenland isn’t. OK by me. So that’s what I tell people if they ask
me if Pluto is a planet. I say, “Tell me what a planet is first, and then we can discuss
Pluto.” Pluto is what it is: A fascinating and intriguing world, one of thousands, perhaps
millions more orbiting the Sun out past Neptune. I think that makes it cool enough. All the orbits of the planets lie in a relatively
flat disk. That is, they aren’t buzzing around the Sun in all directions like bees
around a hive; the orbit of Mercury, for example, lies in pretty much the same plane as that
of Jupiter. That’s actually pretty interesting. Whenever
you see a trend in a bunch of objects, nature is trying to tell you something. In fact,
there are other trends that are pretty obvious when you take a step back and look at the
whole solar system. For example, the inner planets — Mercury,
Venus, Earth, and Mars — are all relatively small and rocky. The next four — Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — are much larger, and have tremendously thick atmospheres. In
between Mars and Jupiter is the asteroid belt, comprised of billions of rocks. There are
lots more asteroids scattered around the solar system, but most are in the main belt. Then, out beyond the orbit of Neptune is a
collection of rocky ice balls, called Kuiper Belt Objects. The biggest are over a thousand
miles across, but most are far smaller. They tend to follow the plane of the planets too.
But if you go even farther out, starting tens of billions of kilometers from the Sun, that
disk of Kuiper Belt Objects merges into a vast spherical cloud of these ice balls called
the Oort Cloud. They don’t follow the plane of the inner solar system, but orbit every
which way. So what do all these facts tell us about the
solar system? We think they’re showing us hints of how the solar system formed. 4.6 billion years or so ago, a cloud floated
in space. It was in balance: its gravity trying to collapse it was counteracted by the meager
internal heat that buoyed it up. But then something happened: Perhaps the shockwave
from a nearby exploding star slammed into it, or maybe another cloud lumbered by and
rammed it. Either way, the cloud got compressed, upsetting
the balance, and gravity took over. It started to collapse. As it did, angular momentum became
important. That’s a lot like regular momentum, when an object in motion tends to stay in
motion. But in this case it’s a momentum of spin, which depends on the object’s size
and how rapidly it’s rotating. Decrease the size, and the rotation rate goes up. The
usual analogy is an ice skater starting a spin, then drawing their arms in. Their spin
is amplified hugely. The same thing happened in the cloud. Any
small amount of spin it had got ramped up as it collapsed. It flattened into a disk,
much like spinning raw pizza dough in the air will flatten it out. As it collapsed, material fell to the center,
getting very dense and hot. Farther out in the disk, where it was cooler, material started
to clump together as little grains of dust and other matter randomly bumped into other
little bits. As these clumps grew, their gravity increased, and eventually started drawing
more material in. These little blobs are called planetesimals — wee baby planets. As they grew, so did the center of the disk.
The object forming there was a protostar — or, spoiler alert, the protosun. Eventually its
center got so hot that hydrogen fused into helium, with makes a lot of energy. A lot of energy. A star was born. The new Sun blasted out fierce
light and heat that, over millions of years, blew away the leftover disk material that
hadn’t yet been assimilated into planets. The solar system was born. Closer to the Sun it was warmer. Hydrogen
and helium are very light gases, and the warm baby planets there couldn’t hold on to them.
Farther out, there was more material in the disk, and the planets were bigger. Since it
was cooler, too, they could hold on to those lighter gases, and their atmospheres grew
tremendously, eventually outmassing the solid material in their cores. They became gas giants. There was also a lot of water out there, far
from the Sun, in the form of ice. Smaller icy objects formed past Neptune, but space
was too big and random encounters too rare. They didn’t get very big, maybe a few hundred
kilometers across. A lot of them — billions, perhaps trillions of them — got too close to the big
planets, and were flung hither and yon. Closer in, material between Mars and Jupiter
couldn’t get its act together to form a planet either; Jupiter’s gravity kept agitating
it, and impacts between two bodies tended to break them up, not aggregate them together. And there you have it. Our solar system, formed
from a disk, sculpted by gravity. Echoes of that disk live on today, seen in the flatness
of the solar system. This isn’t guesswork: the math and physics
bear this out. And not only that, we see it happening, now, today. When we look at gas
clouds in space, we see stars forming, we see protoplanetary disks around them, we see
the planets themselves getting their start. We may think of ourselves as the solar system,
but we’re really just a solar system. The scenario that happened here so long ago plays
itself out daily in the galaxy. We’re one of billions of such systems. And remember: Every atom in your body, and
everything you see around you — every tree, every cloud, every human, every computer,
everything on Earth, even the Earth itself — was once part of that dense cloud. We are, quite literally, star stuff. Today you learned that the solar system is
one star, many planets, a lot more asteroids, and even more icy comet-like objects. It formed
from a collapsing cloud, which flattened into a disk, and that’s why the solar system
is flat. Rocky planets formed closer to the Sun, and larger gas giants farther out. Icy objects
formed beyond Neptune in a disk as well, and a lot of them were flung out to form a
spherical shell around the Sun. We see this same thing happening out in the galaxy, too.
The motions of the objects in this system caused a lot of confusion to ancient astronomers,
but we eventually figured out what’s what. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.
The latest version of their platform, Squarespace Seven, has a completely redesigned interface,
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Cover Pages. Try Squarespace at Squarespace.com, and enter the code Crash Course at checkout for a
special offer. Squarespace. Start Here. Go Anywhere. Crash Course Astronomy is produced in association
with PBS Digital Studios. Seriously, you should go over to their channel because they have
a lot more awesome videos there. This episode was written by me, Phil Plait. The script
was edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant is Dr. Michelle Thaller. It was co-directed
by Nicholas Jenkins and Michael Aranda, edited by Nicole Sweeney, and the graphics team is
Thought Café.
