Carnegie: Solar System Formation Don't Mean a Thing w/o Spin

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Carnegie: Solar System Formation Don't Mean a Thing w/o Spin

Post by bystander » Tue Aug 18, 2015 4:59 pm

Solar System Formation Don't Mean a Thing Without That Spin
Carnegie Institution for Science | 2015 Aug 18
[img3="These images show the central plane of a rotating disk orbiting a newly formed protostar (dark dot) formed in a three-dimensional model of the shock-triggered collapse of a molecular cloud of gas and dust. Density is shown on the left, while the x velocity plot on the right shows how the shock (outer edge) has injected fingers with motions that are responsible for producing the spin of the disk around the central protostar. (Credit: Alan Boss)"]https://carnegiescience.edu/sites/carne ... igger2.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
New work from Carnegie's Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser provides surprising new details about the trigger that may have started the earliest phases of planet formation in our solar system. It is published by The Astrophysical Journal.

For decades, it's been hypothesized that our Solar System's genesis was initiated by a shock wave from a supernova. According to this theory, the wall of pressure formed by a shock wave from the exploding star smacked into a cloud of dust and gas, causing it to collapse and contract into the core of a new proto-star—our Sun. This young Sun was surrounded by a rotating disk of dust and gas that eventually aggregated to form the planets of our Solar System.

Boss and Keiser have explored this theory of cloud collapse—as opposed to a previous theory of shock wave-caused cloud shredding—using advanced 2-D and 3-D modeling for several years and have published a series of papers supporting it.

A crucial aspect of this line of research is the distribution of certain products of the explosion, called short-lived radioisotopes. Isotopes are versions of elements that contain the same number of protons, but different number of neutrons. Specific isotopes were formed during the supernova's explosion and distributed throughout the region that would eventually become our Solar System, before the isotopes had a chance to undergo radioactive decay. Their daughter products can be found today in samples of primitive meteorites. ...

Triggering Collapse of the Presolar Dense Cloud Core and Injecting Short-Lived Radioisotopes
with a Shock Wave. IV. Effects of Rotational Axis Orientation
- Alan P. Boss, Sandra A. Keiser
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