PrintThe Great Pizzaiolo in the Sky
New York Times science reporter Kenneth Chang answers reader questions about his recent story "Pluto's Exotic Playmates":
Q: The article on the Kuiper Belt objects mentioned the solar system’s ecliptic plane, to which most planetary orbits seem to conform. I have seldom found any explanation as to why the essentially two-dimensional structure prevails in three-dimensional space. The influence of gas giants on the orbit of other objects in the system, as mentioned in your article, hints at a possible answer, especially if their orbits did, in fact, expand from a more compact form. It does not, however, explain why these massive planets share the same orbital plane to start with. Could you shed some light on this subject? — M. ViegasA: Think pizza dough. A pizza maker shapes the dough by tossing it and spinning it, and the spinning creates a flat round shape. The ball of gas and dust that collapsed into the solar system started with a certain amount of spinning. As it collapsed, the spinning became faster (conservation of angular momentum), and the result was the Sun and a pizza dough-like disk of leftover dust and gas orbiting around the Sun. The dust and gas then coalesced into planets, and these were largely in the same plane as the original disk.
Questions About the Kuiper Belt [New York Times]
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1 Comment:
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Slice jithu at 9:37AM on 09/18/06