# Formation and evolution of the Solar System <!-- SOLSIM:BEGIN g31 — Solar System explorer state (hand-built on wt-core, specs/solar/); do not hand-edit inside --> **Microsim — three.js (Wikitube framework):** *Rock inside, gas and ice outside (Solar System explorer)* <div class="wt-sim" data-src="https://wikitube-3d-microsims.netlify.app/solar/Solar_System.html?view=composition&embed=1" data-title="Rock inside, gas and ice outside (Solar System explorer)"></div> *The Solar System explorer locked on this article's state (`?view=composition`); every object and population of the [[PORTAL_Solar_System|Solar System portal]] has its own state in the same scene.* <!-- SOLSIM:END --> *Try: press o to hide the orbit lines and read the division in the planets' colours alone, four rocky worlds close in and four giants beyond them; drag the scene to an edge-on angle to see how nearly all eight share one plane, the flattened remains of the disc they grew from; then set the speed to 100 years/s and watch the arrangement persist while the year slider runs toward 2050.* The **formation and evolution of the Solar System** is the history of the [[Sun]] and the bodies that orbit it, from the collapse of a cold gas cloud about 4.6 billion years ago to a far future in which passing stars have stripped the dead Sun of its planets.[^bouvier2010][^dyson1979] In the accepted account, the nebular hypothesis, a dense fragment of a molecular cloud contracted under its own [[Gravity|gravity]]; most of its mass became the Sun, and the rest settled into a rotating [[Protoplanetary_disk|protoplanetary disk]] where dust grew into planetesimals and then into planets, moons, [[Asteroid|asteroids]] and [[Comet|comets]].[^montmerle2006] Giant impacts, the migration of the giant planets and the slow brightening of the Sun have reshaped the system since.[^tsiganis2005][^schroder2008] The explorer at the top of this page opens on the composition view, which shows the outcome: [[Terrestrial_planet|rocky planets]] inside the [[Frost_line_(astrophysics)|frost line]], [[Gas_giant|gas giants]] and [[Ice_giant|ice giants]] outside it, with [[Jupiter]] and [[Saturn]] holding more than 90% of the mass that orbits the Sun. ## History For most of recorded history there was no "Solar System" to explain, because the Earth was taken to be the centre of the cosmos. The idea became possible only after heliocentrism, which Nicolaus Copernicus set out in 1543; the phrase "solar system" is first recorded in English in 1704.[^mw2008] The nebular hypothesis goes back to the 18th century and to Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace, who proposed that the [[Sun]] and planets condensed from a single rotating cloud.[^woolfson1984] The hypothesis was repeatedly abandoned. Its chief difficulty was the distribution of [[Angular_momentum|angular momentum]]: the Sun carries almost all of the system's mass but rotates slowly, so most of the angular momentum resides in the planets' orbits, the reverse of what a simple collapsing cloud would give.[^woolfson1984] The model returned to favour from the early 1980s, when young stars were found to be surrounded by cool discs of dust and gas, as the hypothesis requires.[^henbest1991] The long-term history of the Sun depended on a separate question, the source of its energy. Arthur Eddington identified it as the fusion of [[Hydrogen|hydrogen]] into [[Helium|helium]] in the solar core.[^whitehouse2005] In 1935 he proposed that heavier elements might also be made inside stars, and Fred Hoyle developed the idea: red giants build heavier elements in their cores and then shed their outer layers, returning those elements to the gas from which later stars and planetary systems form.[^mitton2005] The Solar System's own iron, silicon and oxygen are products of that recycling. ## Formation ### Presolar nebula The Sun formed from one collapsing fragment of a giant molecular cloud, possibly within the shell of a bubble blown by a massive Wolf–Rayet star.[^dwarkadas2017] Such a cloud is supported by its internal pressure, so the collapse probably needed a push, from the outflows of young stars or the shock of a supernova.[^montmerle2006] The parent cloud was of order 20 parsecs across, and the dense cores that finally collapsed were 0.01–0.1 pc, roughly 2,000–20,000 [[Astronomical_unit|AU]].[^zabludoff2003][^montmerle2006] The presolar nebula had a little more than the Sun's mass and about the Sun's composition: roughly 98% hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang and 2% heavier elements made by earlier stars.[^zeilik1998][^lineweaver2001] Meteorites date the start. Their oldest components, calcium–aluminium-rich inclusions thought to be the first solids to condense, have a lead–lead age of 4,568.2 million years, one working definition of the age of the Solar System.[^bouvier2010] Meteorites also carry the decay products of short-lived radioactive [[Isotope|isotopes]] such as iron-60, which is made in massive stars; they suggest that a supernova went off nearby, perhaps triggering the collapse, and the isotope's even distribution indicates it was mixed in before the dust gathered into larger bodies.[^cameron1977][^williams2010][^dauphas2008] As the core collapsed it spun faster, because angular momentum is conserved while the radius shrinks, and it heated as gravitational energy was released. Over about 100,000 years it flattened into a disc about 200 AU across around a hot, dense protostar.[^montmerle2006][^zabludoff2003][^greaves2005] The young Sun was a T Tauri star.[^caffee1987] Discs around such stars extend to several hundred AU, and the Hubble Space Telescope has imaged some about 1,000 AU across; even their warmest surfaces reach only about 1,000 K.[^padgett1999][^kuker2003] Within about 50 million years the Sun's core was hot and dense enough to sustain hydrogen fusion, and the Sun joined the main sequence.[^yi2001] ### Solar System birth environment Most stars form in groups, and the Sun is thought to have been no exception.[^adams2010] The sharp fall in mass beyond [[Neptune]], the elongated orbit of [[Sedna_(dwarf_planet)|Sedna]] and, more controversially, the short-lived isotopes iron-60 and aluminium-26 have all been read as traces of that birth.[^adams2010] The kind of cluster matters. Near the centre of a rich cluster like the one in the Orion Nebula, ultraviolet light from massive stars would have trimmed the Sun's disc to about 50 AU; because bodies such as Sedna orbit far beyond that, the Sun probably formed in a sparser group or at a rich cluster's edge.[^montmerle2006] Estimates place the birth cluster at 1,000 to 10,000 stars within a region 6.5 to 19.5 light-years across.[^portegieszwart2009] Simulations of stellar flybys in the first 100 million years reproduce some of the unusual distant orbits seen today, and a 2024 study proposes a single flyby that accounts for several outer populations at once.[^kaib2008][^pfalzner2024] ### Formation of the planets The planets grew by accretion. Dust grains collided and stuck, building clumps up to about 200 m across and then planetesimals of roughly 10 km.[^goldreich1973] Composition was set by temperature. Inside about 4 AU the disc was too warm for water and methane to freeze, so solids were limited to metals and silicate rock, only about 0.6% of the nebula's mass.[^zabludoff2003] Inner embryos stopped growing at about 0.05 Earth masses, and the [[Terrestrial_planet|terrestrial planets]] were completed later by collisions between them.[^lin2008] Beyond the frost line ices joined the solids, so there was far more to build with. A core of about ten Earth masses could form there in a few million years and begin to draw in gas; once the envelope matched the core in mass, accretion ran away, and [[Jupiter]] could reach about 150 Earth masses within about 100,000 years.[^ayliffe2009][^lissauer2009] Saturn may be smaller because it formed a few million years later, when less gas was left.[^lin2008] [[Uranus]] and [[Neptune]] gathered little hydrogen and helium, and at their present distances their cores would have grown too slowly, one reason to think they formed nearer Jupiter and Saturn.[^thommes2002] After three to ten million years the gas was gone and gas-giant growth ended.[^lin2008] ## Subsequent evolution The planets were long assumed to have formed where they now orbit. Dynamical models since the 1990s describe instead a young system that was more crowded and compact, with giant planets packed closer together and a Kuiper belt nearer the Sun.[^levison2008] ### Terrestrial planets When the gas had gone, the inner Solar System held some 50 to 100 embryos between the Moon and [[Mars]] in size.[^kominami2002][^petit2001] They perturbed one another until they collided and merged, a stage that lasted less than 100 million years; one late collision is thought to have made the [[Moon]], and another to have stripped much of [[Mercury_(planet)|Mercury]]'s mantle.[^lin2008][^solomon2003] Collisions need crossing, eccentric orbits, yet the survivors move on nearly circular ones. Drag from leftover gas could have damped the eccentricities, or dynamical friction could have done it: a large body moving through a swarm of small ones gathers a gravitational wake whose pull calms its orbit.[^kominami2002][^goldreich2004] ### Asteroid belt The [[Asteroid_belt|asteroid belt]], between about 2 and 4 AU, once held enough material for two or three Earths and formed 20–30 embryos of lunar to Martian size.[^bottke2005] Jupiter's formation, about 3 million years after the Sun's, changed that: its resonances, where an asteroid's period is a simple fraction of Jupiter's, excited orbits until encounters shattered bodies instead of merging them.[^petit2001][^edgar2004] Resonances and embryos together removed most of the mass, leaving less than 1% of an Earth mass, still ten to twenty times today's belt.[^obrien2007] The stirring may also have supplied [[Earth]]'s water, carried by bodies thrown inward from the outer belt; comets from the distant reservoirs appear to have added only a small share.[^raymond2007][^morbidelli2000] ### Planetary migration At the distances of Uranus and Neptune the nebula was thin and orbits are slow, so ice giants are hard to grow there; they probably formed nearer Jupiter and Saturn and migrated outward.[^taylor2001][^thommes2002] Today the [[Kuiper_belt|Kuiper belt]] spans about 30–55 AU, the [[Scattered_disc|scattered disc]] reaches beyond 100 AU and the [[Oort_cloud|Oort cloud]] begins near 50,000 AU; originally the planetesimal belt was denser and ended near 30 AU, just outside giant planets orbiting at perhaps 15–20 AU.[^levison2008][^morbidelli2005] The [[Nice_model|Nice model]] describes the reshuffling. The giants slowly traded energy with the remaining planetesimals until, 500–600 million years after formation, Jupiter and Saturn crossed their 2:1 [[Resonance|resonance]], two Jupiter orbits for each of Saturn's.[^levison2008] Their present period ratio is 29.42 / 11.86 ≈ 2.48 (derived).[^nasa-fs] The crossing made the ice giants' orbits eccentric and drove Neptune into the belt.[^tsiganis2005][^gomes2005] Each planet scattered small bodies inward and moved outward in return until the bodies reached Jupiter, which threw them onto elongated orbits or out of the system and moved slightly inward: ejecting material costs Jupiter orbital energy.[^levison2008] Strongly scattered bodies built the Oort cloud, weakly scattered ones the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, and some, [[Pluto]] among them, were caught in resonance with Neptune.[^levison2008][^malhotra1995] Why [[Mars]] is so small is a separate question. The [[Grand_tack_hypothesis|grand tack hypothesis]] (2011) has Jupiter migrate inward to about 1.5 AU before Saturn catches it in a 3:2 resonance and both move back out, removing much of the material that would have fed Mars.[^walsh2011] Whether a disc allows such a reversal is disputed, and other explanations exist.[^dangelo2012][^chambers2013][^izidoro2014] ### Late Heavy Bombardment and after The giant-planet instability would have sent many asteroids and comets inward, and it has been proposed as the cause of the [[Late_Heavy_Bombardment|Late Heavy Bombardment]] about 4 billion years ago, which if real left the cratered surfaces of the Moon and Mercury.[^gomes2005][^veverka1984] A 2017 review of the lunar evidence argues instead for a declining impact rate without a late spike.[^zellner2017] Evidence for life on Earth reaches back about 3.8 billion years.[^ucla2006] Impacts continue at a low rate, as the fragments of comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 showed on striking Jupiter in 1994.[^chapman1996] The Oort cloud peaked in mass after about 800 million years and has since been eroded by galactic tides and passing stars, which send comets inward.[^morbidelli2005] In the asteroid belt collisions took over: small bodies cannot hold the debris of a violent impact, so many were shattered and some reassembled.[^bottke2004] ## Moons Moons arise in three ways: they form in a disc around a planet, they gather from the debris of an impact, or they are captured. The large regular moons of the giants, such as Jupiter's [[Galilean_moons|Galilean moons]] and Saturn's [[Titan_(moon)|Titan]], are big and orbit close in, which capture cannot produce; they probably formed in circumplanetary discs, a small-scale copy of planet formation around the Sun.[^canup2009][^dangelo2015] The giants' outer moons are small, distant, on eccentric and steeply inclined orbits, often retrograde, the signature of capture.[^jewitt2004] The largest, Neptune's [[Triton_(moon)|Triton]], is thought to be a captured Kuiper belt object.[^agnor2006] The two small [[Moons_of_Mars|moons of Mars]] have long been interpreted as captured asteroids.[^zeilik1998] The Moon is thought to be debris from a collision between the proto-Earth and a body of about Mars's mass late in the giant-impact stage; mantle material thrown into orbit gathered into the Moon.[^canup2001] One proposal has the impactor forming at an Earth–Sun Lagrange point, L4 or L5.[^taylor1998] Impacts also explain [[Pluto]] and [[Charon_(moon)|Charon]], and [[Orcus_(dwarf_planet)|Orcus]] and its moon Vanth.[^canup2005][^brown2010] These pairs and the Earth–Moon pair are unusual in that the satellite has at least 1% of the primary's mass; the Moon has 0.0123 Earth masses.[^nasa-fs] ## Future Little should change until the Sun exhausts the hydrogen in its core. It will then swell into a red giant large enough to engulf Mercury, Venus and possibly [[Earth]], shed much of its mass, and end as a white dwarf orbited by the surviving outer planets.[^sackmann1993] A Jupiter-like planet found in 2021 orbiting a white dwarf, MOA-2010-BLG-477Lb, resembles that end state.[^blackman2021] ### Long-term stability Planetary orbits are chaotic over millions to billions of years.[^laskar1994] In a chaotic system small uncertainties grow exponentially, so a body's position along its orbit cannot be predicted beyond a few Lyapunov times ([[Chaos_theory|chaos theory]]). Pluto's resonance with Neptune is stable, but Pluto's position becomes unpredictable beyond 10–20 million years; the outer planets have Lyapunov times of 2–230 million years.[^sussman1988][^hayes2007] Chaos shows mainly as slow drifts in eccentricity. No planet is likely to collide or be ejected in the next few billion years, but within about five billion years Mars's eccentricity may reach about 0.2, onto an Earth-crossing orbit, and Mercury's orbit could destabilise within about a billion years in some simulations.[^laskar1994][^batygin2008] ### Moon–ring systems Tides drive the evolution of moons. A moon raises a bulge on its planet; if the planet spins faster than the moon orbits, the bulge runs ahead and pulls the moon forward, so the moon spirals outward while the planet's spin slows, as the Moon and Earth are doing now. If a moon orbits faster than its planet spins, or orbits backwards, the bulge lags and the moon spirals inward until it breaks into a ring or strikes the planet; Mars's Phobos is expected to meet that end within 30–50 million years.[^bills2005] When both bodies are locked face to face, as [[Pluto]] and Charon are, the orbit no longer changes.[^buie2006] The age of the [[Rings_of_Saturn|rings of Saturn]] is unresolved: models favoured an early origin, while Cassini's ring-mass measurement points to a young one.[^tiscareno2013][^iess2019] The largest changes will come from the Sun, which brightens by about 10% every 1.1 billion years; in about 3.5 billion years Earth's surface will resemble Venus's today.[^hecht1994] In about 5.4 billion years fusion will move into a shell around the core and the Sun will expand, reaching about 1.2 AU, 256 times its present radius, with a surface near 2,600 K, a luminosity up to about 2,700 times today's, and the loss of about a third of its mass.[^schroder2008] Mercury and Venus will be swallowed.[^rybicki2001] Earth's fate is a balance between the Sun's mass loss, which widens the orbits, and tides in the Sun's envelope, which drag the planet inward; a 2008 model found Earth engulfed, a 2026 study finds that it probably survives.[^schroder2008][^esseldeurs2026] ## Galactic interaction The Solar System circles the centre of the [[Milky_Way|Milky Way]] about 30,000 light-years out at about 220 km/s, taking 220–250 million years per circuit, the [[Galactic_year|galactic year]].[^leong2002] Dividing the Solar System's age by that period gives about 18–21 circuits (derived). One hypothesis ties mass extinctions to the Sun's vertical oscillation: each passage through the galactic disc, every 20–25 million years, strengthens the tide on the Oort cloud and in models raises the flux of comets about fourfold.[^szpir] Critics point out that the Sun is near the plane now without a matching extinction, and favour passages through spiral arms, with their molecular clouds and short-lived massive stars.[^leitch1998] ### Galactic collision and planetary disruption The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching, and in about 4 billion years it and the Milky Way are expected to collide and then, over another two billion years, merge.[^nasa2012] Early estimates gave a 12% chance that the Solar System would be drawn into a tidal tail and a 3% chance that it would end up bound to Andromeda.[^cain2007] Stars are so far apart that the merger is very unlikely to disturb the planets directly.[^nasa2012] Over far longer times, however, close stellar encounters accumulate, and passing stars should strip the dead Sun of its planets within about 10¹⁵ years, the effective end of the Solar System.[^dyson1979] ## Chronology The chronology rests on [[Radioactive_decay|radioactive decay]]: a parent isotope decays to a stable daughter at a known rate, so their ratio in a mineral records when the mineral formed. Meteorites, which condensed from the nebula and have changed little since, give ages of 4.567–4.568 billion years.[^connelly2012][^amelin2010][^bouvier2010] The oldest mineral grains from Earth, zircons from Western Australia, are about 4.4 billion years old.[^wilde2001] Discs around other stars set the timescale of planet building: stars one to three million years old have gas-rich discs, while those older than ten million years have almost no gas.[^lin2008] ### Timeline of Solar System evolution All dates are approximate, orders of magnitude only. | Time since the Sun formed | Event | |---|---| | 0–100,000 years | Presolar nebula collapses; the Sun begins to form[^lin2008] | | up to 10 million years | Disc gas cleared; giant planets essentially complete[^lin2008] | | 10–100 million years | Terrestrial planets assemble; the Moon-forming impact[^gomes2005] | | about 50 million years | Sun joins the main sequence[^yi2001] | | about 200 million years | Oldest known terrestrial zircons[^wilde2001] | | 500–600 million years | Giant-planet instability; proposed Late Heavy Bombardment[^gomes2005] | | about 800 million years | Oldest evidence of life on Earth[^ucla2006] | | 10–12 billion years | Sun becomes a red giant; Mercury and Venus engulfed[^schroder2008] | | about 10¹⁵ years | Passing stars have removed the planets[^dyson1979] | ## See also - [[Protoplanetary_disk]] - [[Frost_line_(astrophysics)]] - [[Nice_model]] · [[Grand_tack_hypothesis]] · [[Late_Heavy_Bombardment]] - [[Planetary_system]] - [[Discovery_and_exploration_of_the_Solar_System]] - Solar apex ## Notes Derived numbers: the present period ratio of Saturn to Jupiter is 29.42 / 11.86 ≈ 2.48, from the NASA fact sheet orbital periods (10,747 and 4,331 days); the Sun's red-giant radius of 1.2 AU divided by 256 gives 0.0047 AU ≈ 700,000 km, the present solar radius; 4.57 billion years divided by galactic years of 250 and 220 million years gives about 18 and 21 circuits; 0.1 pc × 206,265 AU/pc ≈ 20,600 AU. 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"Solar System formation and early evolution: the first 100 million years". *Earth, Moon, and Planets* 98: 39–95. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11038-006-9087-5 ## External links - NASA Science: Solar System overview. https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/ - JPL Solar System Dynamics. https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/ - NASA Hubble: Milky Way–Andromeda collision (2012). https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-shows-milky-way-is-destined-for-head-on-collision/ ## Wikipedia : Wikitube **Strict pair:** [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System) : [Wikitube](https://en.wikitube.io/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System) · pinned revision [1370829700](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1370829700) · 2026-09-18 ## Previous hub tags Hubs: `Life_Physics`. 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