Get Rapid Planet Formation

The currently accepted method by which the planets formed is accretion, in which the planets began as dust grains in orbit around the central protostar.

Rocky planets like Earth develop over millions of years, followed by gas giants like Jupiter, which build upon rocky cores. But new evidence from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggests that some gas giants may sprout in less than one million years, more like planetary wildflowers than trees.

ing to our current knowledge, planets are formed around a new star by condensing in a disc of molecular gas and dust, embedded within a larger molecular cloud. Condensation increases until they become giant planets, which are heated, then cleanse their orbits in the disc and possibly bend it.

ing to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word planet goes back to the ancient Greek word planēt, and it means "wanderer." The International Astronomical Union (IAU) – the group of astronomers that names objects in our solar system – planets originally were defined as objects that moved in the night sky with ...

The standard scenario of terrestrial planet formation consists of three stages: (1) dust to planetesimals, (2) planetesimals to protoplanets, and (3) protoplanets to planets.

Jupiter and Saturn are thought to have formed first and quickly within the first 10 million years of the solar system. In the warmer parts of the disk, closer to the star, rocky planets begin to form. After the icy giants form there's not a lot of gas left for the terrestrial planets to accrete.

It is convenient to divide the process up into distinct stages in which different physical processes are dominant. Planetesimal formation. Terrestrial planet formation. Giant planet formation. Gas disk migration. Planetesimal-driven migration. Planet-planet scattering.

Scientists believe that Earth, like the other inner planets, came to its current state in three different stages. The first stage, described above, is known as accretion, or the formation of a planet from the existing particles within the solar system as they collided with each other to form larger and larger bodies.