Solar Flares Kept Young Earth in Orbit |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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Thursday, 19 May 2005 21:30 |
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Solar flares may have kept a newly formed Earth from spiraling into the sun, according to a team working on the Chandra Orion Ultradeep project. Using the Chandra Orbiting X-ray observatory, the team studied the Orion Nebula cluster and found 14 embryonic stars, between one million and ten million years old, similar in size to the Sun, which may have planet-forming disks around them. About once a week, each of these stars lets loose a solar flare that reaches up to ten times the stars radius. When the Solar System was being formed, and our now-4.6-billion-year-old-Sun was much younger, such flares could have helped counteract the inward migration of planetary cores by generating turbulence in the protoplanetary disk.
It is currently believed that planets form when dust particles in the protoplanetary disk around a young star clump together to form rocks, which then stick together to form planetary cores. This model does not explain how the cores can keep from falling toward the host star because of gravitational attraction once they reach a certain mass.
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