Thursday, March 22, 2012

Where'd you come from?

Samantha posted a video with the question to an astrophysicist about what was the most mindboggling thought to him and the answer was "we are all made of stars".

Well, I guess another question we can ask is where'd planets come from and in which order?
So the Stardust program returned some results with capture from coma of dust that surrounds a solid comet nucleus.
Jupiter, as the study suggests, was the first-born of planets but did it build up slowly or in a single gravitational swoosh just like a small star? Did it form further from the Sun and move in closer as the anomalously high levels of heavy elements suggest?
Another oddity of our solar system is that the asteroid belt formed before Mars which formed before Earth. This means that the planet formation swept inward. How about Venus? Well, there's not much data to speculate because of hostile environment inside Venus' atmosphere. However, there's a plan to have a hot air balloon to land for just a brief moment, which would be enough to collect some sample data and get back in orbit. Since Venus sits on the inside edge of habitable zone and Mars sits on the outside with Earth in the middle, there are some answers to be found by studying these planets on origins of life as well as where we came from and how we formed in more detail.

This is very interesting to have answers to such answers with hard samples rather than just theories and simulations.


No comments:

Post a Comment