The Mystery of Planet Formation

Until the 1950s, ideas about planet formation were mosly dismissed as fanciful and few astronomers took the question seriously. (Image credit: Andrzej Wojcicki/Getty Images)



We've only got to grips with how the planets in our solar system formed in the last 100 years. In the extract below from "What's Gotten Into You" (HarperCollins, 2023), Dan Levitt looks at the Soviet mathematician who spent a decade working on a problem that most astronomers had given up on, and — when he finally solved it — was met with disinterest and skepticism.

Over 4.8 billion years ago, the atoms that would create us sailed in great clouds of gas and dust, toward… well, nothing. There was no solar system, no planets, no Earth. In fact, for a long time, scientists could not explain how our solid planet, not to mention one so hospitable to life, appeared at all. 

How was our now-rocky planet conjured, like magic, out of an ethereal cloud of gas and dust? How and when did Earth become so welcoming to life? And what travails were our molecules forced to brave until life could evolve?

Scientists would learn that our atoms could finally create life only after they endured wrenching collisions, meltdowns, and bombardments — catastrophes that beggar any destruction ever witnessed by humankind.  READ MORE...