- Accretion Disk around Beta Pictoris
Estimates based on the Hubble image place the disk's thickness as no more than one billion miles (600 million kilometers), or about 1/4 previous estimates from ground-based observations. The disk is tilted nearly edge-on to Earth.
http://www.worc.ac.uk/LTMain/Rowland/EIS2/lectures/lecture08/beta_pictoris.html
(Added: Sat Oct 26 2002)
- Evolution of the Solar System
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant speculated in the middle of the eighteenth century that the Solar System had been formed out of a huge rotating gaseous nebula slowly contracting and condensing. A nebula is a large cloud of gas, and possibly dust particles, held together by the mutual gravitational attraction of the particles composing it.
http://www.physics.gmu.edu/classinfo/astr103/CourseNotes/ECText/ch11_txt.htm
(Added: Tue Oct 29 2002)
- Planet Formation
The solar system was born about 4.5 billion years ago, when something disturbed and compressed a vast cloud of cold gas and dust -- the raw material of stars and planets. The disturbance may have been a collision with another cloud, or a shock wave from an exploding star.
http://stardate.org/resources/ssguide/planet_form.html
(Added: Tue Oct 29 2002)
- Planetary Formation and Our Solar System
Planetary astronomy is a young science, and until recently, was essentially devoted to the study of planetary bodies in our own Solar System. The discovery of non-stellar objects orbiting other stars has suddenly changed that and has opened a whole new realm of planetary science. But still, our own Solar System is by far the easiest to study, and there is still a great deal that is unknown.
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~akir/Seminar/seminar.html
(Added: Tue Oct 29 2002)
- Rings Around Beta Pictoris
An unusual dust disk surrounds nearby star Beta Pictoris. Discovered in 1983, astronomers are still learning just how unusual this disk is.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000208.html
(Added: Tue Oct 29 2002)
- Solar Nebular Hypothesis
The solar nebula hypothesis is in one form or another the most widely accepted theory of how our solar system formed. Although details may vary, the general theory is widely accepted since it can explain the properties of the solar system previously described.
http://www.cat.cc.md.us/courses/eas101/unit1/solneb.html
(Added: Sat Oct 26 2002)
- Solar Systems in the Making?
The nebular hypothesis for the origin of our Solar System has been bolstered by a variety of recent observations that look very much like star and planetary systems in various stages of formation.
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/solarsys/forming.html
(Added: Tue Oct 29 2002)
- The Origin of the Solar System
The Nebular Hypothesis in its original form was proposed by Kant and Laplace in the 18th century.
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/solarsys/nebular.html
(Added: Tue Oct 29 2002)
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