earth science

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1. Nebular Hypothesis
In the 1700s Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant, and Pierre-Simon Laplace independently
thought of a rotating gaseous cloud that cools and contracts in the middle to form the sun and the
rest into a disc that become the planets. This nebular theory failed to account for the distribution of
angular momentum in the solar system.

2. Encounter Hypotheses
Buffon’s (1749) Sun-comet encounter that sent matter to form planet; James Jeans’ (1917) sun-
star encounter that would have drawn from the sun matter that would condense to planets, T.C.
Chamberlain and F. R. Moulton’s (1904) planetesimal hypothesis involving a star much bigger than the
Sun passing by the Sun and draws gaseous filaments from both out which planetisimals were formed.

3. Protoplanet Hypotheses - Current Hypothesis

About 4.6 billion years ago, in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy, a slowly-rotating gas and
dust cloud dominated by hydrogen and helium starts to contract due to gravity (fig. 7). 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 and solid matter begin sticking to each other to form larger and larger bodies from
meter to kilometer in size. These proto-planets are accretions of frozen water, ammonia, methane,
silicon, aluminum, 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