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Old March 9th, 2001, 11:41 PM
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Default Re: How many people set their OWN planet type to ICE??

quote:
If a star system is formed by a catastrophic event, wouldn't you say that the size of the chunks would be random?

quote:
Also, in a given star system, at inception, wouldn't you say that the smaller chunks were the ones most likely to be sucked back into the sun?

Ok, astronomy lesson:
The current view of how things probably happen (from seeing many in various stages):
Start with a nebula. something happens, such as a nearby supernova, and the gas is compressed.
With the gas more compact, the force of gravity has more effect. (since it decreases with distance)
Everything starts to fall inwards.
Wait many millions of years.
The gas is gathering in the center, but there is a slight rotation in the cloud. Think of a merry-go-round, spinning slowly. When everybody climbs in towards the center, it starts spinning faster to conserve angular momentum.
With the gas spinning rapidly, it forms a disk, with a bulge in the middle.
Now, the disk starts to clump up, due to gravity. Heavy elements gather, and smash into other, sometimes sticking together. Eventually you get bigger and bigger clumps, and the biggest ones, at the right distance from the star, gather gas too, becoming large faster.
When the star gets to it's main stage,and starts pumping out lots of energy, it blows away the remaining gas from the disk, leaving only the heavy dust, rocks & planets.


quote:
Now, I'm not really an astronomer or a physicist (which is painfully evident to those who are ) but only working from a point of logic, and, thusly, it seems to me that the tiny planets would be fewer than the medium ones....I invite counter-views

Consider that as planets get tinier, they start to be seen as moons, and there are tons of 'em in our solar system. Asteroids are even smaller, and there's many thousands of them out there.

We have:
Giant: Jupiter, Saturn
Large: Uranus, neptune
Medium: Earth, Venus, Mars
Small: Mercury, Earth's moon, larger moons of jupiter& saturn
Tiny: Pluto, any other moons, some large asteroids.
Asteroids: Oodles. I'm not gonna count them in my lifetime.

See the trend? Zillions of tiny stuff, not as many small, bunch of medium, couple of large or huge.
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