How do astronomers study the birth of our solar system – the sun and planets near us in space?
We can say, okay, we’re going to build a computer model, and in that model we’re going to have the computer act on a system just like the universe would.
That’s Hal Levison, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute of Boulder, Colorado. He told us that astronomers who want to understand the history of our solar system look first at what’s in the solar system today – not just the planets, but also comets, asteroids, and so on. Then they plug objects like these into their computer model. He said”
You calculate all the forces between all the different objects. And then you move them as if they were moving in the solar system in orbit, for a little while. And then you stop and calculate all of the forces again, and do this over, and over, and over again.
Levison said astronomers try to imagine what the early solar system might have been like.
What we do then is say, ‘Hmm, I wonder what the initial conditions could have looked like?’ So we set up a solar system that looked like what we thought it may have, and then evolve it, through time, and see if we end up with something that looks like what we see.
Levison said he was especially interested in the formation of the Kuiper Belt, which is a region of the solar system extending from the orbit of Neptune to beyond the orbit of Pluto. Like the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt contains small bodies leftover from the birth of the solar system. He said”
What we expected to see when we looked at that was small objects in very quiescent orbits around the sun. And what we see instead is that it looks like somebody picked up the solar system and shook it real hard. It really looks like a train wreck out there. You have things on very eccentric orbits, things on highly inclined orbits, there are clumps in distributions that we don’t understand, and what’s so exciting about that is that these are all clues to what happened early on. Because the planets that we see today could not have sculpted the structure that we see out there, and therefore the planets moved around. And that’s why this is such a cool problem.
Levison said the Kuiper belt consists of a huge number – probably billions – of objects in orbit around the sun. He said these objects resemble comets: half rock and half ice.
Thanks today to Research Corporation, a foundation for the advancement of science.
Our thanks to:
Hal Levison
Southwest Research Institute
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