In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

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See the entry "Biomedia" in Critical Terms for Media Studies, eds. W.J.T. Mitchell & Mark Hansen (University of Chicago Press, 2010). The heat and pressure eventually became so high that hydrogen atoms began to combine to form helium. The nuclear reactions released vast amounts of energy and our sun was formed.

Past the Kuiper Belt is the very edge of the solar system, the heliosphere, a vast, teardrop-shaped region of space containing electrically charged particles given off by the sun. Many astronomers think that the limit of the heliosphere, known as the heliopause, is about 9 billion miles (15 billion km) from the sun. Moons have come to exist around most planets and many other Solar System bodies. These natural satellites originated by one of three possible mechanisms: Between Mars and Jupiter lies the asteroid belt. Asteroids are minor planets, and according to NASA there are approximately between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids in the main asteroid belt larger than 0.6 miles (1 km) in diameter and millions more smaller asteroids. It has been further hypothesized that the Mars-sized object may have formed at one of the stable Earth–Sun Lagrangian points (either L 4 or L 5) and drifted from its position. [93] The moons of trans-Neptunian objects Pluto ( Charon) and Orcus ( Vanth) may also have formed by means of a large collision: the Pluto–Charon, Orcus–Vanth and Earth–Moon systems are unusual in the Solar System in that the satellite's mass is at least 1% that of the larger body. [94] [95] Future [ edit ]It is smaller than Earth's moon; its orbit is highly elliptical, falling inside Neptune's orbit at some points and far beyond it at others; and Pluto's orbit doesn't fall on the same plane as all the other planets —instead, it orbits 17.1 degrees above or below. Like most stars, the Sun likely formed not in isolation but as part of a young star cluster. [32] There are several indications that hint at the cluster environment having had some influence of the young still forming solar system. For example, the decline in mass beyond Neptune and the extreme eccentric-orbit of Sedna have been interpreted as a signature of the solar system having been influenced by its birth environment. Whether the presence of the isotopes iron-60 and aluminium-26 can be interpreted as a sign of a birth cluster containing massive stars is still under debate. If the Sun was part of a star cluster, it might have been influenced by close flybys of other stars, the strong radiation of nearby massive stars and ejecta from supernovae occurring close by. Impacts are thought to be a regular (if currently infrequent) part of the evolution of the Solar System. That they continue to happen is evidenced by the collision of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994, the 2009 Jupiter impact event, the Tunguska event, the Chelyabinsk meteor and the impact that created Meteor Crater in Arizona. The process of accretion, therefore, is not complete, and may still pose a threat to life on Earth. [79] [80] According to the Nice model, after the formation of the Solar System, the orbits of all the giant planets continued to change slowly, influenced by their interaction with the large number of remaining planetesimals. After 500–600million years (about 4billion years ago) Jupiter and Saturn fell into a 2:1 resonance: Saturn orbited the Sun once for every two Jupiter orbits. [44] This resonance created a gravitational push against the outer planets, possibly causing Neptune to surge past Uranus and plough into the ancient Kuiper belt. [66] Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual, co-authored with Natalie Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting. Locus+, 2004. ISBN 978-1899377220.

Radiolab - In The Dust Of This Planet", original broadcast Monday September 8, 2014. The story was also covered by NPR's On The Media. The Earth's Moon is thought to have formed as a result of a single, large head-on collision. [91] [92] And on the cool edges, the gas and ice giants were born: Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus. The asteroid belt The nebular hypothesis says that the Solar System formed from the gravitational collapse of a fragment of a giant molecular cloud, [9] most likely at the edge of a Wolf-Rayet bubble. [10] The cloud was about 20 parsecs (65 light years) across, [9] while the fragments were roughly 1parsec (three and a quarter light-years) across. [11] The further collapse of the fragments led to the formation of dense cores 0.01–0.1parsec (2,000–20,000 AU) in size. [a] [9] [12] One of these collapsing fragments (known as the presolar nebula) formed what became the Solar System. [13] The composition of this region with a mass just over that of the Sun ( M ☉) was about the same as that of the Sun today, with hydrogen, along with helium and trace amounts of lithium produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, forming about 98% of its mass. The remaining 2% of the mass consisted of heavier elements that were created by nucleosynthesis in earlier generations of stars. [14] Late in the life of these stars, they ejected heavier elements into the interstellar medium. [15] Some scientists have given the name Coatlicue to a hypothetical star that went supernova and created the presolar nebula.The Repeater Book of the Occult, co-edited with Tariq Goddard. Repeater Books, 2021. ISBN 978-1913462079. Astronomers believe an object twice the size of Earth collided with Uranus roughly 4 billion years ago, causing Uranus to tilt. That tilt causes extreme seasons that last 20-plus years, and the sun beats down on one pole or the other for 84 Earth-years at a time. One unresolved issue with this model is that it cannot explain how the initial orbits of the proto-terrestrial planets, which would have needed to be highly eccentric to collide, produced the remarkably stable and nearly circular orbits they have today. [49] One hypothesis for this "eccentricity dumping" is that terrestrials formed in a disc of gas still not expelled by the Sun. The " gravitational drag" of this residual gas would have eventually lowered the planets' energy, smoothing out their orbits. [50] However, such gas, if it existed, would have prevented the terrestrial planets' orbits from becoming so eccentric in the first place. [35] Another hypothesis is that gravitational drag occurred not between the planets and residual gas but between the planets and the remaining small bodies. As the large bodies moved through the crowd of smaller objects, the smaller objects, attracted by the larger planets' gravity, formed a region of higher density, a "gravitational wake", in the larger objects' path. As they did so, the increased gravity of the wake slowed the larger objects down into more regular orbits. [52] Asteroid belt [ edit ] That is the 1 million Euro question. We are currently just exploring what processes drive the formation and evolution of other solar systems, and what we can learn from this about our own solar systems (and Earth’s!) history. We think that many other stars have exoplanets around them but probably not all of them. In average, studies found there to be about 1 to 2 exoplanet per star — but that is an average! Some stars may have 8, others may have none. What is (and isn't) a planet?

In all cases, this means that the position of a planet along its orbit ultimately becomes impossible to predict with any certainty (so, for example, the timing of winter and summer becomes uncertain). Still, in some cases, the orbits themselves may change dramatically. Such chaos manifests most strongly as changes in eccentricity, with some planets' orbits becoming significantly more—or less— elliptical. [103]

Gravitational collapse

Related: 15 stunning places on Earth that look like they're from another planet Types of planets in the solar system

The planets scattered the majority of the small icy bodies inwards, while themselves moving outwards. These planetesimals then scattered off the next planet they encountered in a similar manner, moving the planets' orbits outwards while they moved inwards. [44] This process continued until the planetesimals interacted with Jupiter, whose immense gravity sent them into highly elliptical orbits or even ejected them outright from the Solar System. This caused Jupiter to move slightly inward. [c] Those objects scattered by Jupiter into highly elliptical orbits formed the Oort cloud; [44] those objects scattered to a lesser degree by the migrating Neptune formed the current Kuiper belt and scattered disc. [44] This scenario explains the Kuiper belt's and scattered disc's present low mass. Some of the scattered objects, including Pluto, became gravitationally tied to Neptune's orbit, forcing them into mean-motion resonances. [67] Eventually, friction within the planetesimal disc made the orbits of Uranus and Neptune near-circular again. [44] [68] The outer planets' orbits are chaotic over longer timescales, with a Lyapunov time in the range of 2–230million years. [102]The Patron Saints of Pessimism - A Writer's Pantheon, excerpt from Infinite Resignation @ LitHub (2018) Yes, so many! If you had asked anyone just 30 years ago, the answer would have been "we don’t know". But since then we have discovered already more than 5,000 planets orbiting stars other than our sun (so-called exoplanets). And since often we find multiple of them orbiting the same star, we can count about 4,000 other solar systems. Do solar systems move? In a sense, the world-without-us allows us to think the world-in-itself, without getting caught up in a vicious circle of logical paradox. The world-in-itself may co-exist with the world-for-us – indeed the human being is defined by its impressive capacity for not recognizing this distinction. By contrast, the world-without-us cannot co-exist with the human world-for-us; the world-without-us is the subtraction of the human from the world. To say that the world-without-us is antagonistic to the human is to attempt to put things in human terms, in the terms of the world-for-us. To say that the world-without-us is neutral with respect to the human, is to attempt to put things in the terms of the world-in-itself. The world-without-us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific. The world-without-us is as much a cultural concept as it is a scientific one, and, as this book attempts to show, it is in the genres of supernatural horror and science fiction that we most frequently find attempts to think about, and to confront the difficult thought of, the world-without-us.