The universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists,[1] including all physicalmatter and energy, the

planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space,[2] [3] although this usage may differ with the context (see definitions, below). The term universe may be used in slightly different contextual senses, denoting such concepts as the cosmos, the world, ornature. Observations of earlier stages in the development of the universe, which can be seen at great distances, suggest that the universe has been governed by the same physical laws and constants throughout most of its extent and history.

History
Throughout recorded history, several cosmologies and cosmogonies have been proposed to account for observations of the universe. The earliest quantitative geocentric models were developed by the ancient Greeks, who proposed that the universe possesses infinite space and has existed eternally, but contains a single set of concentric spheres of finite size corresponding to the fixed stars, the Sun and variousplanets rotating about a spherical but unmoving Earth. Over the centuries, more precise observations and improved theories of gravity led toCopernicus's heliocentric model and the Newtonian model of the Solar System, respectively. Further improvements in astronomy led to the realization that the Solar System is embedded in a galaxy composed of billions of stars, the Milky Way, and that other galaxies exist outside it, as far as astronomical instruments can reach. Careful studies of the distribution of these galaxies and their spectral lines have led to much of modern cosmology. Discovery of the red shift and cosmic microwave background radiation revealed that the universe is expanding and apparently had a beginning.

This high-resolution image of the Hubble ultra deep fieldshows a diverse range of galaxies, each consisting of billions of stars. The equivalent area of sky that the picture occupies is shown in the lower left corner. The smallest,

reddest galaxies, about 100, are some of the most distant galaxies to have been imaged by an optical telescope, existing at the time shortly after the Big Bang.

According to the prevailing scientific model of the universe, known as the Big Bang, the universe expanded from an extremely hot, dense phase called the Planck epoch, in which all the matter and energy of the observable universe was concentrated. Since the Planck epoch, the universe has been expanding to its present form, possibly with a brief period (less than 1032 seconds) of cosmic inflation. Several independent experimental measurements support this theoretical expansion and, more generally, the Big Bang theory. Recent observations indicate that this expansion is accelerating because of dark energy, and that most of the matter in the universe may be in a form which cannot be detected by present instruments, and so is not accounted for in the present models of the universe; this has been named dark matter. The imprecision of current observations has hindered predictions of the ultimate fate of the universe. Current interpretations of astronomical observations indicate that the age of the universe is 13.75 0.17 billion years,[4] and that the diameter of the observable universe is at least 93 billion light years or 8.801026 metres.[5] According to general relativity, space can expand faster than the speed of light, although we can view only a small portion of the universe due to the limitation imposed by light speed. Since we cannot observe space beyond the limitations of light (or any electromagnetic radiation), it is uncertain whether the size of the universe is finite or infinite.

Components of the universe

PLANETARY SYSTEMS
Although it is commonly believed that planetary systems are plentiful in the universe, the only example known with certainty is the solar system. The solar system is conventionally taken to contain the Sun, the nine planets and their satellites, asteroids, comets, interplanetary dust, and interplanetary particles and fields largely associated with the solar wind. Humanity's knowledge of these objects has expanded greatly owing to space exploration. Combined with centuries of intense astronomical

observation and theoretical calculation, data transmitted by spacecraft have shed considerable light on the relation between the solar system and the rest of the universe, the problem of the origin of the Earth and the other planets, and the question of the likelihood of comparable planetary systems around other stars.

The Sun.
At the centre of the solar system lies the Sun. Energetically and dynamically, it is the dominant influence in the solar system. The mass of the Sun can be measured from its gravitational pull on the planets and equals 2 1033 g (grams), 1,000 times more massive than Jupiter and 330,000 times more massive than the Earth. As a fraction of its mass, the atmospheric composition of the Sun is probably 72 percent hydrogen, 26 percent helium, and 2 percent elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Because there is little mixing between the atmosphere and the deep interior (where nuclear reactions occur), this composition is believed to be the one that the Sun was born with. A gas with approximately the solar mix of elements is said to have cosmic abundances because a similar composition is found for most other stars as well as for the medium between the stars. The observed rate of release of radiant energy by the Sun equals 3.86 1033 erg/sec (ergs per second). The particles of radiation (photons) stream more or less freely from a layer called the photosphere, which in the Sun is at a temperature of about 5,800 K (kelvins; 5,500 C or 10,000 F). The distribution of wavelengths is characteristic of a thermal body radiating at such a temperature; therefore, in accordance with Planck's law, it peaks in the yellow part of the visible spectrum. The solar luminosity is enormous, but it is much less than it would be if the photons in the hot interior of the Sun could also stream freely. However, the high opacity of the material regulates the actual outward progress of the photons to a slow stately diffusion. Indeed, the blockage of diffusive heat is so severe in the envelope of the Sun that its layers are unstable to the development of convection currents, which gives the atmosphere of the Sun a granular appearance. The observed radius of the Sun equals 6.95 1010 cm and is understood to be the result of a balance of forces between the Sun's self-gravity and the pressure of its hot gases, which exist

in a nearly fully ionized state (a plasma of positive ions and free electrons) in the deep interior. The plasma in the core of the Sun is compressed to temperatures (about 1.5 107 K) that are sufficient to provide a rate of thermonuclear reactions that just offsets the slow diffusive loss of radiative heat. Thus, the Sun constitutes a controlled fusion reactor capable of sustaining its present steady loss of radiant energy for a full 9 109 years before all of its initial supply of hydrogen fuel in the core has been converted into helium. From the radioactive dating of meteorites, it has been estimated that the solar system is 4.6 109 years old. If this is the age of the Sun, then it is roughly midway through the phase of stable core hydrogen fusion--i.e., the "main-sequence" phase of stellar evolution. The Sun is too opaque to electromagnetic radiation to allow a direct look at the nuclear reactions inferred to take place in its interior. Weakly interacting particles called neutrinos offer a better probe of such reactions because they fly relatively freely from the centre of the Sun. Attempts to measure solar neutrinos by means of radioactive chlorine techniques have found levels that are only about one-third the best theoretical predictions. One possible explanation supposes that neutrinos possess mass and can be converted to (oscillating) forms undetectable by conventional schemes during their passage through the dense solar plasma. Unfortunately, experiments using purified water or large amounts of gallium as the detecting medium have contributed conflicting data with respect to this interpretation. An indirect line of evidence suggests that the source of the discrepancy may lie more with unknown neutrino physics than with uncertain solar models. Precise measurements of the small oscillations of the solar surface induced presumably by motions in the convection zone allow astronomers to study the properties of waves propagating through the Sun's interior in an analogous fashion to how earthquakes allow geologists to study the properties of the Earth's interior. These investigations reveal that the Sun behaves similarly, though not exactly, as the best theoretical solar models predict. They also show the Sun's radiative core to rotate at about the same angular speed as the mid-latitudes of the solar surface, too slow to have any of the anomalous mechanical or thermal effects that have

sometimes been hypothesized for it. The outermost layer of the Sun turns once every 25 days at the equator, once every 35 days at the poles. This differential rotation may couple with the Sun's convection zone to produce a dynamo action that amplifies magnetic fields. The basic idea is that magnetic fields carried upward (or downward) by convection currents are twisted and amplified by the differential rotation. "Ropes" of high field strength buoy to the surface where they pop out as loops into the corona of the Sun. The corona is an extended region containing very rarefied gas that lies above the photosphere and a transition region called the chromosphere; the temperature of the corona is about 2 106 K. The anchor points of the ropes of high magnetic flux in the photosphere correspond to sunspots, regions where the gas is cooler than the average photospheric temperature of 5,800 K. Thus, these spots appear relatively dark against the bright yellow background of the general photosphere. Sunspots appear, migrate about the solar surface, and disappear as the plasma to which they are anchored moves under the influence of rotation and convection. The average number of sunspots increases and decreases more or less regularly in an 11-year cycle; however, there have been prolonged minima in history. It has been proposed that these prolonged minima correlate with changing climate conditions on the Earth, although the precise mechanisms for effecting such changes remain unclear. Other manifestations of magnetic activity arise because of the motion of the flux ropes. It is believed that flares occur on those occasions when two flux ropes of opposite polarity are pressed against each other, and the opposing magnetic fields annihilate in a catastrophic event of magnetic reconnection. The energy stored in the field is thought to go into accelerating fast particles (solar cosmic rays) and into heating the ambient gas, which, being rarefied, has very little heat capacity. Magnetic activity of this type may be what maintains the corona at much higher temperatures than the photosphere. Pictures of the solar corona taken during the U.S.-manned Skylab missions (1973) showed that hot coronal gas trapped in closed loops of field lines becomes dense enough to emit

appreciable amounts of X rays. In contrast, coronal holes lacking X-ray emission correspond to regions where the magnetic field is too weak to keep the gas trapped and the hot gas has burst open the magnetic-field configuration, expanding away from the surface of the Sun as part of a general solar wind. The presence of a solar wind blowing through interplanetary space was first deduced from observations made during the 1950s of the ion tails of comets. With the advent of Earthorbiting satellites, the particles and fields carried by the solar wind could be measured directly. When the wind blows past the Earth, it contains on average about five particles per cubic centimetre (mostly protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms) moving at about 500 km/sec (kilometres per second), but these numbers fluctuate greatly depending on the phase of the solar magnetic cycle and the presence or absence of recent flare activity.

Planets and their satellites.

Clues as to how the planets were formed lie in the regularities of their orbital motions, their satellite systems, and their chemical compositions. Compared to their sizes, the separations of planets from each other are enormous; and, apart from a diffuse solar wind and minor debris, interplanetary space is remarkably empty. Thus, as a general rule, the planets have been well isolated dynamically and chemically since their birth, and the present configuration of the solar system provides hints of the initial conditions, in spite of the more than 4 109 years of subsequent evolution. With the exception of Mercury and Pluto, the orbits of the planets are all nearly circular; they lie within a few degrees of the same plane; and they have the same direct sense of revolution as the rotation of the Sun. Since these facts were first noted, they have suggested to philosophers and scientists such as Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace of France that the planets of the solar system must have originally formed from a flat nebular disk that revolved about the primitive Sun. The exceptions, Mercury and Pluto, are not troublesome; they both suffer strong resonant interactions with other bodies that may

have considerably modified their original orbital characteristics. In the inner planetary system where the terrestrial planets-Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars--reside, the distance between successive planets is relatively small in comparison with the outer planetary system where the Jovian planets--Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune--reside. Moreover, the terrestrial planets are small and rocky or ironlike, while the Jovian planets (also called the giant planets) are large and gaseous or icy. Neither the terrestrial nor the Jovian planets exhibit the chemical elements in their cosmic proportions, but the latter, particularly Jupiter and Saturn, approach these proportions to a much closer degree. This implies that the process of planet building, unlike the mechanism of star formation, probably involves forces other than just gravity, for gravitation is universal and does not distinguish between different elements if they are in a gaseous form. Condensation (i.e., the separation of solid phases of matter from gaseous phases if the temperature drops to sufficiently low values) suggests itself as an important process.

From this point of view, the terrestrial planets have managed only to gather into their bodies mostly materials containing elements heavier than hydrogen and helium--materials such as silicate rocks and metallic iron or nickel, which can condense as solids from a gaseous phase even at relatively high temperatures (between 1,200 and 2,000 K). In contrast, Uranus and Neptune have not only accumulated rocky and metallic compounds but also ices of water, ammonia, and methane, which can condense from nebular gas only at much lower temperatures (between 100 and 200 K). Jupiter and Saturn succeeded additionally in capturing substantial amounts of hydrogen and helium (in their envelopes). Since hydrogen and helium at plausible nebular pressures do not solidify unless the temperature is lower than even in the coldest regions of interstellar space, this suggests that in the two largest planets of the solar system gravitation did play a role in the direct acquisition of massive amounts of these gases. Pluto, which is small and icy and orbits farthest from the Sun, is not readily classifiable in the scheme outlined above. The

discrepancy is not disruptive, however, because Pluto, discovered in 1930, and its moon, Charon, discovered in 1978, are relatively minor bodies similar in composition to the comets. The terrestrial and Jovian planets possess other systematic differences: the former generally have no rings or satellites, while the latter each have a set of rings and many satellites. Here, Earth and Mars are exceptions to the rule. Earth has of course one satellite, the Moon; Mars has two, Phobos and Deimos. Of these exceptions, the more difficult case to explain has long remained the Moon because it is an unusually large object for a satellite. Indeed, the Moon is only somewhat smaller than the largest and most massive satellites in the solar system: Jupiter's Ganymede, Saturn's Titan, and Neptune's Triton. In comparison, Phobos and Deimos are tiny objects that may well have been captured after Mars had already formed. The satellite and ring systems of the giant planets, particularly those of Jupiter and Saturn, resemble miniature planetary systems. As an analogy, one may say that moons and rings are to the giant planets what the planets and the asteroid belt are to the Sun. The moons of the giant planets can be classified as either regular or irregular. The regular satellites have nearly circular orbits lying in the same plane as the equator of the parent planet and revolve in the same direction as its rotation. The irregular satellites violate one or more of the above rules. In addition, they generally tend to be small bodies and to lie at large distances from the central planet. The regular satellites may have formed from protoplanetary disks that encircled the planet in the same manner as a protostellar disk encircled the Sun in the nebular hypothesis. The most likely explanation for the irregular satellites is that they are captured bodies. The thin flat rings that encircle Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are composed of innumerable small solid bodies. Each piece of the ring is in a nearly perfect circular orbit about the central planet. Theory suggests that noncircular motions are damped by mutual inelastic collisions of the particulate matter to very small values. These collisions would have led to gradual agglomeration into larger bodies had the rings not lain in such close proximity to the planet (i.e., within the Roche limit). The

strong tidal forces that exist inside the Roche limit of a planet are believed to be capable of tearing apart loosely bound aggregates of particulate matter and thereby preventing their agglomeration into moons. It is unclear, however, whether planetary rings are the natural debris left over from an earlier period of satellite formation in a protoplanetary disk that extended almost to the planet's surface or whether they arose from the more recent breakup and erosion (by continual collisions and by micrometeoroid bombardment) of some larger parent body. There does exist some evidence from dynamic studies of the gravitational interactions of the rings and satellites of Saturn that the rings may be appreciably younger than the solar system in general.

Asteroids, meteoroids, comets, and interplanetary dust.

In addition to the Sun and its wind and the nine planets and their satellites, the solar system contains a large number of minor bodies. The most conspicuous of these are the asteroids and comets. Smaller bodies also exist--meteoroids, micrometeoroids, and interplanetary dust--but these probably are fragments of the larger asteroids and comets. Indeed, there is a continuous distribution of minor bodies in the solar system, from dust particles with radii of only a fraction of a micrometre to asteroids (or minor planets) with radii of several hundred kilometres. Asteroids are rocky or iron-bearing bodies found orbiting the Sun in great numbers in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Nearly all of the total mass of the asteroids, about 10-3 that of the Earth, is contained in the largest examples such as Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta, but the largest numbers have radii of one to 10 kilometres (the lower limit being more a matter of nomenclature than of measurement). A few bodies, as, for example, Chiron, lie outside the belt between Mars and Jupiter. The exceptions, however, are relatively rare. The theoretical understanding of this observational result lies in computer simulations that show that an asteroid placed almost anywhere else in the solar system besides the known asteroid belt would be unstable owing to gravitational perturbations by the planets. If the early solar system were littered with asteroid-sized

bodies, then the emergence of the planets would have swept interplanetary space relatively clean except for the debris that happened to have orbits fit for survival. Meteoroids are chunks of asteroids or comets that have Earthcrossing orbits. One theory for the production of meteoroids has them originating from the shattering of two asteroids that collide violently in space. Some of the pieces may subsequently suffer resonant interactions with Jupiter, which throw them in 10,000 to 100,000 years into elongated Earth-crossing orbits. A meteoroid entering the Earth's atmosphere will heat up during the passage and become a meteor, a fiery "shooting star." If the mass of the meteor exceeds one kilogram, it can survive the flight and land on the ground as a meteorite. Meteorites come in three basic compositions: stones, stony irons, and irons. Radioactive dating of meteorites establishes that they have a narrow range of ages. The time since their parent bodies first solidified equals about 4.6 109 years, which yields the conventional estimate for the age of the entire solar system. The cratering records on the airless (and therefore erosionfree) Moon and Mercury are consistent with a very heavy period of meteoritic impacts during the first several hundred million years of the history of the solar system, with the bombardment tailing off dramatically about 4 109 years ago. This picture suggests that primitive asteroids and meteoroids may have been the building blocks ("planetesimals") of the terrestrial planets (and perhaps also the cores of the giant planets) and that the present-day asteroids failed to be gathered into another full-fledged planet because their noncircular velocities are so high (probably owing to the past near-resonant action of Jupiter's gravitational perturbations) as to cause them generally to shatter rather than to agglomerate when they collide. Comets also are cosmic debris, probably planetesimals that originally resided in the vicinity of the orbits of Uranus and Neptune rather than in the warmer regions of the asteroid belt. Thus, the nuclei of comets are icy balls of frozen water, methane, and ammonia, mixed with small pieces of rock and dust, rather than the largely volatile-free stones and irons that typify asteroids. In the most popular theory, icy planetesimals

in the primitive solar nebula that wandered close to Uranus or Neptune but not close enough to be captured by them were flung to great distances from the Sun, some to be lost from the solar system while others populated what was to become a great cloud of cometary bodies, perhaps 10 trillion in number. Such a cloud was first hypothesized by the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort. In the original version of the theory, the Oort cloud extended tens of thousands of times farther from the Sun than the Earth, a significant fraction of the way to the nearest stars. Random encounters with passing stars would periodically throw some of the comets into new orbits, plunging them back toward the heart of the solar system. As a comet nears the Sun, the ices begin to evaporate, loosening the trapped dust and forming a large coma that completely surrounds the small nucleus, which is the ultimate source of all the material. The solar wind blows back the evaporating gas into an ion tail, and radiation pressure pushes back the small particulate solids into a dust tail. Each solid particle is now an independently orbiting satellite of the Sun, and the accumulation of countless such passages by many comets contributes to the total quantity of dust particles and micrometeoroids found in interplanetary space. The total mass contained in all the comets is highly uncertain. Modern estimates range from 1 to 100 Earth masses. Part of the uncertainty concerns the reality of a hypothesized massive "inner Oort cloud" -- or "Kuiper belt" (if the distribution is flattened)--of comets that would exist at distances from the Sun 40 to 10,000 times that of the orbit of the Earth. At such locations, the comets would not be much perturbed by typical passing stars nor by the gravity of the planets of the solar system, and the comets could reside in the inner cloud or belt for long periods of time without detection. It has been speculated, however, that a rare close passage by another star (possibly an undetected companion of the Sun) may send a shower of such comets streaming toward the inner solar system. If enough large cometary nuclei in such showers happen to strike the Earth, the clouds of dust and ash that they would raise might be sufficient to trigger mass biological extinctions. An event of this kind appears especially promising for explaining the relatively sudden disappearance of the

dinosaurs from the Earth.

Origin of the solar system.

Modern versions of the nebular hypothesis all begin with the collapse of a rotating interstellar cloud that is destined to form the solar system. The tendency to conserve angular momentum causes the falling gas to spin faster and flatten, eventually forming a central concentration (protosun) surrounded by a rotating disk of matter. Detailed calculations show that there may be a prolonged phase of infall that continues to build up a disk of increasing mass and size. There also may be some accretion of the material in the disk onto the star, the process transferring mass inward and angular momentum outward, which helps to explain why the Sun presently contains 99.9 percent of the total mass of the solar system but only 2 percent of the total angular momentum. Because the chemical compositions of the planets as a function of increasing radial distance from the Sun follow a pattern that corresponds to sequential condensation from a gaseous state, cosmochemists originally postulated, for simplicity, that the solar nebula began in a hot and purely gaseous state. Small pieces of solids were then imagined to have condensed from the gas in the disk as the latter slowly cooled from high temperatures, with the coolest final temperatures being reached at the greatest distance from the centre. The process is akin to soot forming out of a smoking candle flame. Astronomical observations, however, show that dust grains of approximately the correct composition already exist in the interstellar medium, and theoretical calculations indicate that the refractory cores of the grains would survive introduction into most of the primitive solar nebula. The icy mantles that coat the grain cores would, however, be evaporated away in the inner solar system. It is probable, therefore, that the systematics of the observed planetary compositions reflect not a condensation sequence but rather an evaporation sequence. In any case, whether the dust particles form by chemical condensation from the nebular gas or exist from the start, there seems little doubt that they would grow rapidly by various agglomeration processes and dissipatively settle into a thin layer of particulate matter in the midplane of the disk. Planetesimals of the sizes of asteroids and the nuclei of comets

accumulate in this thin layer and further grow by gravitational processes into full-sized planets. The formation of the planets under these dissipative circumstances would explain why their orbits are nearly coplanar and circular. Insofar as the planets first grow by the accumulation of solids, it is interesting to note that observations indicate all four Jovian planets to have rocky and icy cores containing 15-25 Earth masses. In addition to such cores, Jupiter and Saturn have hydrogen and helium envelopes amounting to about 300 and 70 Earth masses, respectively. This suggests, as theoretical calculations bear out, that 15-25 Earth masses represents a critical mass above which a growing planet in the solar nebula will begin to gravitationally gather nebular gas faster than it will accumulate solids. Indeed, once a protoplanet becomes massive enough, it can efficiently eject solid bodies as well as capture them. (The ones catapulted out by Jupiter and Saturn are likely to escape the system altogether.) In this way did Jupiter and Saturn become large and grow to occupy large areas. Why Uranus and Neptune did not also gather massive gaseous envelopes is somewhat of a mystery. One possible theory is that, at the distances of Uranus and Neptune in the solar nebula, energetic radiation from the young Sun can dissociate hydrogen molecules and ionize the resultant atoms, heating the surface layers strongly enough (to about 10,000 K) to disperse the nebular gas over a period of about 107 years. The full accumulation of the planetary cores of Uranus and Neptune probably took longer, and therefore their formation occurred in a relatively gas-free environment. The growth of Pluto through the aggregation of many millions of cometlike bodies may have been limited by having to occur at the outermost fringes of the primitive solar nebula. Its moon, Charon, may have resulted either through fission of a rapidly rotating common parent body or through a late encounter and capture. Icy planetesimals that had close but noncolliding encounters with Uranus and Neptune either were thrown into the Sun (or into other planets) or now populate the Oort cloud of comets. Interior to Jupiter the planets are all small. A plausible

explanation follows from the observation that the solar nebula inside Jupiter's orbit may have been too hot to allow methane, ammonia, and water to exist in solid form. Computer simulations by the American geophysicist George Wetherill show that, restricted to the accumulation of only the rarer rocks and irons, the rapid runaway growth of planetesimals to embryos in the inner solar system stalls at masses comparable to the Moon's. Once a few hundred embryos of Moon-like masses have accumulated most of the solid matter in their immediate "feeding" zones, it takes them more than 108 years gravitationally to pump up each other's eccentricities and aggregate through orbit crossings into four terrestrial planets. A long duration for the formation of the terrestrial planets (supported by crater counts that indicate a prolonged period of bombardment extending over some 5 108 years) suggests that Jupiter may have finished forming before the terrestrial planets did. A massive body at Jupiter's orbit may have then so stirred up the orbits of the planetesimals in the asteroid belt as to have prevented them from accumulating into a large body (see above). A fully formed Jupiter also may have stunted the growth of nearby Mars, explaining why Mars is so much smaller a terrestrial planet than either Venus or Earth. The giant planets may also have sent fairly large bodies careening through the early solar system. In one version of the event, by the American astrophysicist Alastair G.W. Cameron and coworkers, a Mars-sized body crashed obliquely into the primitive Earth. The molten core of the intruder sank to the centre of the molten proto-Earth, but mantle material from both bodies went into orbit and eventually reaccreted into the Moon. The formation of the Moon from rocky substances would then explain why the lunar landings found the Moon to be much poorer in iron than the Earth. A similar scenario purports to explain a compositional peculiarity in Mercury. A massive body from the asteroid belt sent close to the Sun would acquire such large velocities that on collision with Mercury it would splash off not only its own rocky mantle but much of Mercury's as well. An event of this kind might explain why Mercury has such a small rocky envelope in relation to its iron-nickel core when compared with

the same features in Venus, Earth, and Mars. Giant impacts would also add a chaotic element to the acquisition of planetary spins. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that, while most of the equators of the planets lie in roughly the same plane as their orbits about the Sun, Venus spins in a retrograde sense, whereas Uranus' spin axis is tilted over on its side. In reconstructing the details of the formation of the solar system, astronomers work under the handicap of not knowing whether certain special features arise as a general rule or as an exceptional circumstance r system. The solar system is conventionally taken to contain the Sun, the nine planets and their satellites, asteroids, comets, interplanetary dust, and interplanetary particles and fields largely associated with the solar wind. Humanity's knowledge of these objects has expanded greatly owing to space exploration. Combined with centuries of intense astronomical observation and theoretical calculation, data transmitted by spacecraft have shed considerable light on the relation between the solar system and the rest of the universe, the problem of the origin of the Earth and the other planets, and the question of the likelihood of comparable planetary systems around other stars.

The Sun.
At the centre of the solar system lies the Sun. Energetically and dynamically, it is the dominant influence in the solar system. The mass of the Sun can be measured from its gravitational pull on the planets and equals 2 1033 g (grams), 1,000 times more massive than Jupiter and 330,000 times more massive than the Earth. As a fraction of its mass, the atmospheric composition of the Sun is probably 72 percent hydrogen, 26 percent helium, and 2 percent elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Because there is little mixing between the atmosphere and the deep interior (where nuclear reactions occur), this composition is believed to be the one that the Sun was born with. A gas with approximately the solar mix of elements is said to have cosmic abundances because a similar composition is found for most other stars as well as for the medium between the stars. The observed rate of release of radiant energy by the Sun equals 3.86 1033 erg/sec (ergs per second). The particles of radiation (photons) stream more or less freely from a layer called the photosphere, which in the Sun is at a temperature of about 5,800

K (kelvins; 5,500 C or 10,000 F). The distribution of wavelengths is characteristic of a thermal body radiating at such a temperature; therefore, in accordance with Planck's law, it peaks in the yellow part of the visible spectrum. The solar luminosity is enormous, but it is much less than it would be if the photons in the hot interior of the Sun could also stream freely. However, the high opacity of the material regulates the actual outward progress of the photons to a slow stately diffusion. Indeed, the blockage of diffusive heat is so severe in the envelope of the Sun that its layers are unstable to the development of convection currents, which gives the atmosphere of the Sun a granular appearance. The observed radius of the Sun equals 6.95 1010 cm and is understood to be the result of a balance of forces between the Sun's self-gravity and the pressure of its hot gases, which exist in a nearly fully ionized state (a plasma of positive ions and free electrons) in the deep interior. The plasma in the core of the Sun is compressed to temperatures (about 1.5 107 K) that are sufficient to provide a rate of thermonuclear reactions that just offsets the slow diffusive loss of radiative heat. Thus, the Sun constitutes a controlled fusion reactor capable of sustaining its present steady loss of radiant energy for a full 9 109 years before all of its initial supply of hydrogen fuel in the core has been converted into helium. From the radioactive dating of meteorites, it has been estimated that the solar system is 4.6 109 years old. If this is the age of the Sun, then it is roughly midway through the phase of stable core hydrogen fusion--i.e., the "main-sequence" phase of stellar evolution. The Sun is too opaque to electromagnetic radiation to allow a direct look at the nuclear reactions inferred to take place in its interior. Weakly interacting particles called neutrinos offer a better probe of such reactions because they fly relatively freely from the centre of the Sun. Attempts to measure solar neutrinos by means of radioactive chlorine techniques have found levels that are only about one-third the best theoretical predictions. One possible explanation supposes that neutrinos possess mass and can be converted to (oscillating) forms undetectable by conventional schemes during their passage through the dense solar plasma. Unfortunately, experiments using purified water or large amounts of gallium as the detecting medium have contributed conflicting data with respect to this interpretation.

An indirect line of evidence suggests that the source of the discrepancy may lie more with unknown neutrino physics than with uncertain solar models. Precise measurements of the small oscillations of the solar surface induced presumably by motions in the convection zone allow astronomers to study the properties of waves propagating through the Sun's interior in an analogous fashion to how earthquakes allow geologists to study the properties of the Earth's interior. These investigations reveal that the Sun behaves similarly, though not exactly, as the best theoretical solar models predict. They also show the Sun's radiative core to rotate at about the same angular speed as the mid-latitudes of the solar surface, too slow to have any of the anomalous mechanical or thermal effects that have sometimes been hypothesized for it. The outermost layer of the Sun turns once every 25 days at the equator, once every 35 days at the poles. This differential rotation may couple with the Sun's convection zone to produce a dynamo action that amplifies magnetic fields. The basic idea is that magnetic fields carried upward (or downward) by convection currents are twisted and amplified by the differential rotation. "Ropes" of high field strength buoy to the surface where they pop out as loops into the corona of the Sun. The corona is an extended region containing very rarefied gas that lies above the photosphere and a transition region called the chromosphere; the temperature of the corona is about 2 106 K. The anchor points of the ropes of high magnetic flux in the photosphere correspond to sunspots, regions where the gas is cooler than the average photospheric temperature of 5,800 K. Thus, these spots appear relatively dark against the bright yellow background of the general photosphere. Sunspots appear, migrate about the solar surface, and disappear as the plasma to which they are anchored moves under the influence of rotation and convection. The average number of sunspots increases and decreases more or less regularly in an 11year cycle; however, there have been prolonged minima in history. It has been proposed that these prolonged minima correlate with changing climate conditions on the Earth, although the precise mechanisms for effecting such changes remain unclear. Other manifestations of magnetic activity arise because of the motion of the flux ropes. It is believed that flares occur on those occasions when two flux ropes of opposite polarity are pressed against each other, and the opposing magnetic fields annihilate in

a catastrophic event of magnetic reconnection. The energy stored in the field is thought to go into accelerating fast particles (solar cosmic rays) and into heating the ambient gas, which, being rarefied, has very little heat capacity. Magnetic activity of this type may be what maintains the corona at much higher temperatures than the photosphere. Pictures of the solar corona taken during the U.S.-manned Skylab missions (1973) showed that hot coronal gas trapped in closed loops of field lines becomes dense enough to emit appreciable amounts of X rays. In contrast, coronal holes lacking X-ray emission correspond to regions where the magnetic field is too weak to keep the gas trapped and the hot gas has burst open the magnetic-field configuration, expanding away from the surface of the Sun as part of a general solar wind. The presence of a solar wind blowing through interplanetary space was first deduced from observations made during the 1950s of the ion tails of comets. With the advent of Earth-orbiting satellites, the particles and fields carried by the solar wind could be measured directly. When the wind blows past the Earth, it contains on average about five particles per cubic centimetre (mostly protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms) moving at about 500 km/sec (kilometres per second), but these numbers fluctuate greatly depending on the phase of the solar magnetic cycle and the presence or absence of recent flare activity.

Planets and their satellites.

Clues as to how the planets were formed lie in the regularities of their orbital motions, their satellite systems, and their chemical compositions. Compared to their sizes, the separations of planets from each other are enormous; and, apart from a diffuse solar wind and minor debris, interplanetary space is remarkably empty. Thus, as a general rule, the planets have been well isolated dynamically and chemically since their birth, and the present configuration of the solar system provides hints of the initial conditions, in spite of the more than 4 109 years of subsequent evolution. With the exception of Mercury and Pluto, the orbits of the planets are all nearly circular; they lie within a few degrees of the same

plane; and they have the same direct sense of revolution as the rotation of the Sun. Since these facts were first noted, they have suggested to philosophers and scientists such as Kant and PierreSimon Laplace of France that the planets of the solar system must have originally formed from a flat nebular disk that revolved about the primitive Sun. The exceptions, Mercury and Pluto, are not troublesome; they both suffer strong resonant interactions with other bodies that may have considerably modified their original orbital characteristics. In the inner planetary system where the terrestrial planets-Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars--reside, the distance between successive planets is relatively small in comparison with the outer planetary system where the Jovian planets--Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune--reside. Moreover, the terrestrial planets are small and rocky or ironlike, while the Jovian planets (also called the giant planets) are large and gaseous or icy. Neither the terrestrial nor the Jovian planets exhibit the chemical elements in their cosmic proportions, but the latter, particularly Jupiter and Saturn, approach these proportions to a much closer degree. This implies that the process of planet building, unlike the mechanism of star formation, probably involves forces other than just gravity, for gravitation is universal and does not distinguish between different elements if they are in a gaseous form. Condensation (i.e., the separation of solid phases of matter from gaseous phases if the temperature drops to sufficiently low values) suggests itself as an important process.

From this point of view, the terrestrial planets have managed only to gather into their bodies mostly materials containing elements heavier than hydrogen and helium--materials such as silicate rocks and metallic iron or nickel, which can condense as solids from a gaseous phase even at relatively high temperatures (between 1,200 and 2,000 K). In contrast, Uranus and Neptune have not only accumulated rocky and metallic compounds but also ices of water, ammonia, and methane, which can condense from nebular gas only at much lower temperatures (between 100 and 200 K). Jupiter and Saturn succeeded additionally in capturing substantial amounts of hydrogen and helium (in their envelopes). Since hydrogen and helium at plausible nebular pressures do not solidify unless the temperature is lower than even in the coldest regions of

interstellar space, this suggests that in the two largest planets of the solar system gravitation did play a role in the direct acquisition of massive amounts of these gases. Pluto, which is small and icy and orbits farthest from the Sun, is not readily classifiable in the scheme outlined above. The discrepancy is not disruptive, however, because Pluto, discovered in 1930, and its moon, Charon, discovered in 1978, are relatively minor bodies similar in composition to the comets. The terrestrial and Jovian planets possess other systematic differences: the former generally have no rings or satellites, while the latter each have a set of rings and many satellites. Here, Earth and Mars are exceptions to the rule. Earth has of course one satellite, the Moon; Mars has two, Phobos and Deimos. Of these exceptions, the more difficult case to explain has long remained the Moon because it is an unusually large object for a satellite. Indeed, the Moon is only somewhat smaller than the largest and most massive satellites in the solar system: Jupiter's Ganymede, Saturn's Titan, and Neptune's Triton. In comparison, Phobos and Deimos are tiny objects that may well have been captured after Mars had already formed. The satellite and ring systems of the giant planets, particularly those of Jupiter and Saturn, resemble miniature planetary systems. As an analogy, one may say that moons and rings are to the giant planets what the planets and the asteroid belt are to the Sun. The moons of the giant planets can be classified as either regular or irregular. The regular satellites have nearly circular orbits lying in the same plane as the equator of the parent planet and revolve in the same direction as its rotation. The irregular satellites violate one or more of the above rules. In addition, they generally tend to be small bodies and to lie at large distances from the central planet. The regular satellites may have formed from protoplanetary disks that encircled the planet in the same manner as a protostellar disk encircled the Sun in the nebular hypothesis. The most likely explanation for the irregular satellites is that they are captured bodies. The thin flat rings that encircle Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are composed of innumerable small solid bodies. Each piece of the ring is in a nearly perfect circular orbit about the central planet. Theory suggests that noncircular motions are

damped by mutual inelastic collisions of the particulate matter to very small values. These collisions would have led to gradual agglomeration into larger bodies had the rings not lain in such close proximity to the planet (i.e., within the Roche limit). The strong tidal forces that exist inside the Roche limit of a planet are believed to be capable of tearing apart loosely bound aggregates of particulate matter and thereby preventing their agglomeration into moons. It is unclear, however, whether planetary rings are the natural debris left over from an earlier period of satellite formation in a protoplanetary disk that extended almost to the planet's surface or whether they arose from the more recent breakup and erosion (by continual collisions and by micrometeoroid bombardment) of some larger parent body. There does exist some evidence from dynamic studies of the gravitational interactions of the rings and satellites of Saturn that the rings may be appreciably younger than the solar system in general.

Asteroids, meteoroids, comets, and interplanetary dust.

In addition to the Sun and its wind and the nine planets and their satellites, the solar system contains a large number of minor bodies. The most conspicuous of these are the asteroids and comets. Smaller bodies also exist--meteoroids, micrometeoroids, and interplanetary dust--but these probably are fragments of the larger asteroids and comets. Indeed, there is a continuous distribution of minor bodies in the solar system, from dust particles with radii of only a fraction of a micrometre to asteroids (or minor planets) with radii of several hundred kilometres. Asteroids are rocky or iron-bearing bodies found orbiting the Sun in great numbers in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Nearly all of the total mass of the asteroids, about 10-3 that of the Earth, is contained in the largest examples such as Ceres, Pallas, and Vesta, but the largest numbers have radii of one to 10 kilometres (the lower limit being more a matter of nomenclature than of measurement). A few bodies, as, for example, Chiron, lie outside the belt between Mars and Jupiter. The exceptions, however, are relatively rare. The theoretical understanding of this observational result lies in computer simulations that show that an asteroid placed almost anywhere else in the solar system besides the known asteroid belt would be unstable owing to gravitational

perturbations by the planets. If the early solar system were littered with asteroid-sized bodies, then the emergence of the planets would have swept interplanetary space relatively clean except for the debris that happened to have orbits fit for survival. Meteoroids are chunks of asteroids or comets that have Earthcrossing orbits. One theory for the production of meteoroids has them originating from the shattering of two asteroids that collide violently in space. Some of the pieces may subsequently suffer resonant interactions with Jupiter, which throw them in 10,000 to 100,000 years into elongated Earth-crossing orbits. A meteoroid entering the Earth's atmosphere will heat up during the passage and become a meteor, a fiery "shooting star." If the mass of the meteor exceeds one kilogram, it can survive the flight and land on the ground as a meteorite. Meteorites come in three basic compositions: stones, stony irons, and irons. Radioactive dating of meteorites establishes that they have a narrow range of ages. The time since their parent bodies first solidified equals about 4.6 109 years, which yields the conventional estimate for the age of the entire solar system. The cratering records on the airless (and therefore erosion-free) Moon and Mercury are consistent with a very heavy period of meteoritic impacts during the first several hundred million years of the history of the solar system, with the bombardment tailing off dramatically about 4 109 years ago. This picture suggests that primitive asteroids and meteoroids may have been the building blocks ("planetesimals") of the terrestrial planets (and perhaps also the cores of the giant planets) and that the present-day asteroids failed to be gathered into another full-fledged planet because their noncircular velocities are so high (probably owing to the past near-resonant action of Jupiter's gravitational perturbations) as to cause them generally to shatter rather than to agglomerate when they collide. Comets also are cosmic debris, probably planetesimals that originally resided in the vicinity of the orbits of Uranus and Neptune rather than in the warmer regions of the asteroid belt. Thus, the nuclei of comets are icy balls of frozen water, methane, and ammonia, mixed with small pieces of rock and dust, rather than the largely volatile-free stones and irons that typify asteroids. In the most popular theory, icy planetesimals in the primitive solar nebula that wandered close to Uranus or Neptune but not close

enough to be captured by them were flung to great distances from the Sun, some to be lost from the solar system while others populated what was to become a great cloud of cometary bodies, perhaps 10 trillion in number. Such a cloud was first hypothesized by the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort. In the original version of the theory, the Oort cloud extended tens of thousands of times farther from the Sun than the Earth, a significant fraction of the way to the nearest stars. Random encounters with passing stars would periodically throw some of the comets into new orbits, plunging them back toward the heart of the solar system. As a comet nears the Sun, the ices begin to evaporate, loosening the trapped dust and forming a large coma that completely surrounds the small nucleus, which is the ultimate source of all the material. The solar wind blows back the evaporating gas into an ion tail, and radiation pressure pushes back the small particulate solids into a dust tail. Each solid particle is now an independently orbiting satellite of the Sun, and the accumulation of countless such passages by many comets contributes to the total quantity of dust particles and micrometeoroids found in interplanetary space. The total mass contained in all the comets is highly uncertain. Modern estimates range from 1 to 100 Earth masses. Part of the uncertainty concerns the reality of a hypothesized massive "inner Oort cloud" -- or "Kuiper belt" (if the distribution is flattened)--of comets that would exist at distances from the Sun 40 to 10,000 times that of the orbit of the Earth. At such locations, the comets would not be much perturbed by typical passing stars nor by the gravity of the planets of the solar system, and the comets could reside in the inner cloud or belt for long periods of time without detection. It has been speculated, however, that a rare close passage by another star (possibly an undetected companion of the Sun) may send a shower of such comets streaming toward the inner solar system. If enough large cometary nuclei in such showers happen to strike the Earth, the clouds of dust and ash that they would raise might be sufficient to trigger mass biological extinctions. An event of this kind appears especially promising for explaining the relatively sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs from the Earth.

Origin of the solar system.

Modern versions of the nebular hypothesis all begin with the

collapse of a rotating interstellar cloud that is destined to form the solar system. The tendency to conserve angular momentum causes the falling gas to spin faster and flatten, eventually forming a central concentration (protosun) surrounded by a rotating disk of matter. Detailed calculations show that there may be a prolonged phase of infall that continues to build up a disk of increasing mass and size. There also may be some accretion of the material in the disk onto the star, the process transferring mass inward and angular momentum outward, which helps to explain why the Sun presently contains 99.9 percent of the total mass of the solar system but only 2 percent of the total angular momentum. Because the chemical compositions of the planets as a function of increasing radial distance from the Sun follow a pattern that corresponds to sequential condensation from a gaseous state, cosmochemists originally postulated, for simplicity, that the solar nebula began in a hot and purely gaseous state. Small pieces of solids were then imagined to have condensed from the gas in the disk as the latter slowly cooled from high temperatures, with the coolest final temperatures being reached at the greatest distance from the centre. The process is akin to soot forming out of a smoking candle flame. Astronomical observations, however, show that dust grains of approximately the correct composition already exist in the interstellar medium, and theoretical calculations indicate that the refractory cores of the grains would survive introduction into most of the primitive solar nebula. The icy mantles that coat the grain cores would, however, be evaporated away in the inner solar system. It is probable, therefore, that the systematics of the observed planetary compositions reflect not a condensation sequence but rather an evaporation sequence. In any case, whether the dust particles form by chemical condensation from the nebular gas or exist from the start, there seems little doubt that they would grow rapidly by various agglomeration processes and dissipatively settle into a thin layer of particulate matter in the midplane of the disk. Planetesimals of the sizes of asteroids and the nuclei of comets accumulate in this thin layer and further grow by gravitational processes into full-sized planets. The formation of the planets under these dissipative circumstances would explain why their orbits are nearly coplanar and circular. Insofar as the planets first grow by the accumulation of solids, it is interesting to note that observations indicate all four Jovian planets

to have rocky and icy cores containing 15-25 Earth masses. In addition to such cores, Jupiter and Saturn have hydrogen and helium envelopes amounting to about 300 and 70 Earth masses, respectively. This suggests, as theoretical calculations bear out, that 15-25 Earth masses represents a critical mass above which a growing planet in the solar nebula will begin to gravitationally gather nebular gas faster than it will accumulate solids. Indeed, once a protoplanet becomes massive enough, it can efficiently eject solid bodies as well as capture them. (The ones catapulted out by Jupiter and Saturn are likely to escape the system altogether.) In this way did Jupiter and Saturn become large and grow to occupy large areas. Why Uranus and Neptune did not also gather massive gaseous envelopes is somewhat of a mystery. One possible theory is that, at the distances of Uranus and Neptune in the solar nebula, energetic radiation from the young Sun can dissociate hydrogen molecules and ionize the resultant atoms, heating the surface layers strongly enough (to about 10,000 K) to disperse the nebular gas over a period of about 107 years. The full accumulation of the planetary cores of Uranus and Neptune probably took longer, and therefore their formation occurred in a relatively gas-free environment. The growth of Pluto through the aggregation of many millions of cometlike bodies may have been limited by having to occur at the outermost fringes of the primitive solar nebula. Its moon, Charon, may have resulted either through fission of a rapidly rotating common parent body or through a late encounter and capture. Icy planetesimals that had close but noncolliding encounters with Uranus and Neptune either were thrown into the Sun (or into other planets) or now populate the Oort cloud of comets. Interior to Jupiter the planets are all small. A plausible explanation follows from the observation that the solar nebula inside Jupiter's orbit may have been too hot to allow methane, ammonia, and water to exist in solid form. Computer simulations by the American geophysicist George Wetherill show that, restricted to the accumulation of only the rarer rocks and irons, the rapid runaway growth of planetesimals to embryos in the inner solar system stalls at masses comparable to the Moon's. Once a few hundred embryos of Moon-like masses have accumulated most of the solid matter in their immediate "feeding" zones, it takes them more than

108 years gravitationally to pump up each other's eccentricities and aggregate through orbit crossings into four terrestrial planets. A long duration for the formation of the terrestrial planets (supported by crater counts that indicate a prolonged period of bombardment extending over some 5 108 years) suggests that Jupiter may have finished forming before the terrestrial planets did. A massive body at Jupiter's orbit may have then so stirred up the orbits of the planetesimals in the asteroid belt as to have prevented them from accumulating into a large body (see above). A fully formed Jupiter also may have stunted the growth of nearby Mars, explaining why Mars is so much smaller a terrestrial planet than either Venus or Earth. The giant planets may also have sent fairly large bodies careening through the early solar system. In one version of the event, by the American astrophysicist Alastair G.W. Cameron and coworkers, a Mars-sized body crashed obliquely into the primitive Earth. The molten core of the intruder sank to the centre of the molten protoEarth, but mantle material from both bodies went into orbit and eventually reaccreted into the Moon. The formation of the Moon from rocky substances would then explain why the lunar landings found the Moon to be much poorer in iron than the Earth. A similar scenario purports to explain a compositional peculiarity in Mercury. A massive body from the asteroid belt sent close to the Sun would acquire such large velocities that on collision with Mercury it would splash off not only its own rocky mantle but much of Mercury's as well. An event of this kind might explain why Mercury has such a small rocky envelope in relation to its ironnickel core when compared with the same features in Venus, Earth, and Mars. Giant impacts would also add a chaotic element to the acquisition of planetary spins. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that, while most of the equators of the planets lie in roughly the same plane as their orbits about the Sun, Venus spins in a retrograde sense, whereas Uranus' spin axis is tilted over on its side. In reconstructing the details of the formation of the solar system, astronomers work under the handicap of not knowing whether certain special features arise as a general rule or as an exceptional circumstance