Conversation

@kaikatsu nothing actually prevents this stuff, but after the like 4+billion years of spinning things are relatively stable because the likely collisions have mostly already happened. can see effects of stuff around still, though; mercury supposedly was pulled out of orbit by one of the gas giants or something and fell inwards and collided with something else, would explain it's being so close to the sun and having an iron core that's so huge relative to its total size. who knows what happened to the other bits, flew away or into the sun or something. and there's also the earth-moon collision thing, rock samples showing the two match up a little too neatly for coincidence, and earth also having more rare heavy elements near the surface, makes sense if post-giant-collision the mostly molten rocks allowed the heavy stuff to fall towards earthsolar system formed from like an accretion disk, which makes collisions more likely, things mostly all orbiting within the same planemost immediately dangerous are big asteroids etc on extreme elliptical orbits, since those can take long enough for an orbital period that the "would've crashed already" likelihood is a lot lower. nothing is ever actually stable, though, planets and things all pulling on one another and stealing from each others' momentum, so it all will come apart eventually, some stuff falling in some stuff flying out. moon is moving slowly away from earth still, stealing angular momentum

Public

Notices

Feeds