Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: UNAWE Space Scoop – What did our Solar System look like as a baby?
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : http://365daysofastronomy.org/ ; https://spacescoop.org/en/scoops/2504/teenage-galaxy-found-hiding-in-a-cosmic-nursery/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Planets don’t just pop out of nowhere, fully formed and ready for astronomers to study. But question pop up: What did our Solar System look like as a baby?
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Transcript:
Planets don’t just pop out of nowhere, fully formed and ready for astronomers to study.
First, they begin as tiny little specks of dust, forming inside the clouds of gas around baby stars, which are known as protoplanetary discs.
These dusty specks condense from the hottest parts of the cloud, kinda like the way raindrops form inside rainclouds.
Over time, the specks of dust collide and stick together, forming rocky pebbles.
When enough of these pebbles clump together, they can collapse under their own weight to form asteroid-sized rocks.
These new-born asteroids gravitationally attract the material around them until they’ve grown into full-sized planets.
This is just how the Earth – and all the other planets in our Solar System – started out, back when the Sun was much, much younger.
While astronomers know how planets form, it’s still a bit of a mystery as to when exactly the process begins.
To see the absolute beginning of a young planet’s life, astronomers needed to hunt around young stars.
Until now, when they’ve looked at protostars, astronomers have only seen a few brand-new planets, which have already grown large and have eaten their share of gas and dust.
Do a Google Images search for HL Tauri and you’ll see what I mean!
It’s an image that took my breath away when I first saw it.
But now, for the first time ever, a team of researchers have caught sight of those first tiny specks of dust condensing in the hottest parts of a cloud.
Before they’ve formed planets.
They found signs that the first solid material was only just beginning to form around a young star called HOPS-315, around 1,300 light years away from us in the constellation Orion.
They even managed to capture some, uh, stellar baby photos!
Do a Google Images search on HOPS-315 and you’ll see!
Kinda looks like a bug!
The astronomers believe that HOPS looks a lot like our Sun did back when it was around the same age.
By using both ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array radio telescope in Chile, and the James Webb Space Telescope up in space, they’ve managed to catch a glimpse of what our baby Solar System may well have looked like.
Over 4 and half billion years ago!
With these new baby pictures of a solar system, astronomers can start to research the conditions that Earth might have grown up in.
By studying the gas around this young star and watching carefully as the tiny dust grains grow over time, they hope to learn much more about when and where new planets form!
Hey, here’s a cool fact!
In our Solar System, some of the very first rocks that ever formed are still trapped inside of ancient meteors – which sometimes come crashing down to Earth!
By studying the material inside these cosmic visitors, scientists have found exactly how old the Solar System really is.
4 billion, 540 million years!
I have a 2.5 kg iron & nickel Campo del Cielo meteorite that I’ve taken to many astronomy outreach events.
It likely comes from the core of an asteroid that had to be big enough to have strong enough gravity pressure to melt the tiny metal grains that came from the cloud that formed our Sun.
The parent asteroid was probably as big as Connecticut, and that asteroid got hit by another similar sized one and broke into bits.
Then around 2,500 BC a big house-sized chunk landed in northern Argentina!
I call it my SPAAAAAACE ROCK!
Ahem…
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post production by me, Richard Drumm, project management by Avivah Yamani, and hosting donated by libsyn.com. This content is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free.
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As we wrap up today’s episode, we are looking forward to unravel more stories from the Universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.
Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity!