How did the solar system form?

By Nola Taylor Tillman

 published December 13, 2021

Solar system formation began about 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists have
developed three models of how it happened.
 

Solar system formation began approximately 4.5 billion years ago, when gravity pulled a
cloud of dust and gas together to form our solar system.

Scientists can't directly study how our own solar system formed, but combining
observations of young stellar systems in a range of wavelengths with computer
simulations has led to models of what could have happened so many years ago.

An artist's depiction of gas and dust surrounding a young star. (Image credit: NASA)
The solar system is anchored by our sun.

Before the solar system existed, a massive concentration of interstellar gas and dust
created a molecular cloud that would form the sun's birthplace. Cold temperatures
caused the gas to clump together, growing steadily denser. The densest parts of the
cloud began to collapse under their own gravity, perhaps with a nudge from a nearby
stellar explosion, forming a wealth of young stellar objects known as protostars.
Gravity continued to collapse the material onto the infant solar system, creating a star
and a disk of material from which the planets would form. Eventually, the newborn sun
encompassed more than 99% of the solar system's mass, according to NASA(opens in
new tab). When pressure inside the star grew so powerful that fusion kicked in, turning
hydrogen to helium, the star began to blast a stellar wind that helped clear out the
debris and stopped it from falling inward.
Although gas and dust shroud young stars in visible wavelengths, infrared telescopes
have probed many clouds in the Milky Way galaxy to study the environment of other
newborn stars. Scientists have applied what they've seen in other systems to our own
star.
The planets, moons, asteroids and everything else in the solar system formed from the
small fraction of material in the region that wasn't incorporated in the young sun. This
material formed a massive disk around the baby star, which surrounded it for about 100
million years — an eyeblink in astronomical terms.
During that time, planets and moons formed out of the disk. Among the planets, Jupiter
likely formed first, perhaps as soon as a million years into the solar system's
life, scientists have argued(opens in new tab).
Scientists have developed three different models to explain how planets in and out of
the solar system may have formed. The first and most widely accepted model, core
accretion, works well with the formation of the rocky terrestrial planets but has problems
with giant planets. The second, pebble accretion, could allow planets to quickly form
from the tiniest materials. The third, the disk instability method, may account for the
creation of giant planets. 

The core accretion model

Approximately 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was a cloud of dust and gas
known as a solar nebula. Gravity collapsed the material in on itself as it began to spin,
forming the sun in the center of the nebula.

With the rise of the sun, the remaining material began to clump together. Small particles
drew together, bound by the force of gravity, into larger particles, according to the core
accretion model. The solar wind swept away lighter elements, such as hydrogen and
helium, from the closer regions, leaving only heavy, rocky materials to create terrestrial
worlds. But farther away, the solar winds had less impact on lighter elements, allowing
them to coalesce into gas giants. In this way, asteroids, comets, planets and moons were
created.
Some exoplanet observations seem to confirm core accretion as the dominant formation
process. Stars with more "metals" — a term astronomers use for elements other than
hydrogen and helium — in their cores have more giant planets than their metal-poor
cousins. According to NASA(opens in new tab), core accretion suggests that small, rocky
worlds should be more common than the large gas giants.
The 2005 discovery of a giant planet with a massive core orbiting the sun-like star HD
149026 is an example of an exoplanet that helped strengthen the case for core
accretion. The planet's core is about 70 times more massive than Earth, scientists
found; they believe that is too large to have formed from a collapsing cloud, according to
a NASA statement about the research(opens in new tab).

Pebble accretion
The biggest challenge to core accretion is time — building massive gas giants fast
enough to grab the lighter components of their atmosphere. Research published in 2015
probed how smaller, pebble-size objects fused together to build giant planets up to
1,000 times faster than earlier studies.

"This is the first model that we know about that you start out with a pretty simple
structure for the solar nebula from which planets form, and end up with the giant-planet
system that we see," study lead author Harold Levison, an astronomer at SwRI, told
Space.com at the time.
In 2012, researchers Michiel Lambrechts and Anders Johansen of Lund University in
Sweden proposed that tiny rubble, once written off, held the key to rapidly building giant
planets. "They showed that the leftover pebbles from this formation process, which
previously were thought to be unimportant, could actually be a huge solution to the
planet-forming problem," Levison said.

In simulations that Levison and his team developed, larger objects acted like bullies,
snatching away pebbles from the mid-size masses to grow at a far faster rate. "The
bigger guy basically bullies the smaller one so they can eat all the pebbles themselves,
and they can continue to grow up to form the cores of the giant planets," study co-
author Katherine Kretke, also from SwRI, told Space.com.

The disk instability model

Other models struggle to explain the formation of the gas giants. According to core
accretion models, the process would take several million years, longer than the light
gases were available in the early solar system.

"Giant planets form really fast, in a few million years," Kevin Walsh, a researcher at the
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com. "That
creates a time limit because the gas disk around the sun only lasts 4 to 5 million years."

A relatively new theory called disk instability addresses this challenge. In the disk
instability model of planet formation, clumps of dust and gas are bound together early in
the life of the solar system. Over time, these clumps slowly compact into a giant planet.

Planets can form in this way in as little as 1,000 years, the models suggest, allowing
them to trap the rapidly vanishing lighter gases. They also quickly reach an orbit-
stabilizing mass that keeps them from death-marching into the sun.

As scientists continue to study planets inside of the solar system, as well as around
other stars, they will better understand how gas giants formed.
Originally, scientists thought that planets formed in their current locations in the solar
system. But the discovery of exoplanets shook things up, revealing that at least some of
the most massive worlds could migrate through their neighborhoods.

In 2005, a trio of papers published in the journal Nature(opens in new tab) outlined an idea

the researchers called the Nice model(opens in new tab), after the city in France where
they first discussed it. This model proposes that in the early days of the solar system,
the giant planets were bound in near-circular orbits much more compact than they are
today. A large disk of rocks and ices surrounded them, stretching out to about 35 times
the Earth-sun distance, just beyond Neptune's present orbit.
As the planets interacted with smaller bodies, they scattered most of these objects
toward the sun. The process caused the massive planets to trade energy with the
smaller objects, sending the Saturn, Neptune and Uranus farther out into the solar system.
Eventually the small objects reached Jupiter, which sent them flying to the edge of the
solar system or completely out of it. 
Movement between Jupiter and Saturn drove Uranus and Neptune into even more
eccentric orbits, sending the pair through the remaining disk of ices. Some of the
material was flung inward, where it crashed into the terrestrial planets during the Late
Heavy Bombardment. Other material was hurled outward, creating the Kuiper Belt. 
As they moved slowly outward, Neptune and Uranus traded places. Eventually,
interactions with the remaining debris caused the pair to settle into more circular paths
as they reached their current distance from the sun.

Along the way, our solar system may have lost members: It's possible that one or even
two other giant planets were kicked out(opens in new tab) of the neighborhood by all this
movement. Astronomer David Nesvorny of SwRI has modeled the early solar system in
search of clues that could lead toward understanding its early history.
"In the early days, the solar system was very different, with many more planets, perhaps
as massive as Neptune, forming and being scattered to different places," Nesvorny told
Space.com 

Even after the planets had formed, the solar system itself wasn't quite
recognizable. Earth stands out from the planets because of its high water content, which
many scientists suspect contributed to the evolution of life.
But the planet's current location was too warm for it to collect water in the early solar
system, suggesting that the life-giving liquid may have been delivered after Earth
formed.

Just one hitch: scientists still don't know where that water might have come from.
Originally, researchers suspected comets carried it to Earth, but several missions,
including six that flew by Halley’s comet in the 1980s and the European Space Agency's
more recent Rosetta spacecraft, revealed that the composition of the icy material from the
outskirts of the solar system didn't quite match Earth's.
The asteroid belt is another potential source of water. Several meteorites have shown
evidence of alteration, changes made early in their lifetimes that hint that water in some
form interacted with their surface. Impacts from meteorites could be another source of
water for the planet.
Recently, some scientists have even challenged the notion that the early Earth was too
hot to collect water. They argue that, if the planet formed fast enough, it could have
collected the necessary water from icy grains before they evaporated.
Whatever process brought water to Earth likely did so to Venus and Mars as well. But
rising temperatures on Venus and a thinning atmosphere on Mars kept these worlds
from retaining their water, resulting in the dry planets we know today.