Our solar system’s origins

Planets of Our Solar System

The complicated origins of our species

Creation myth: In the ritual rooms of the Pueblo cultures in North America, a hole in the ground symbolically represents the passage of the tribes into this world. (Photo: Wikipedia.) The ritual rooms of the Pueblo culture in North America, known as kiva, typically contain a hole in the ground, the sípapu. It symbolically represents the origin of the tribe, the passage through which its people ...

Origins of Solar System Dust Beyond Jupiter

The measurements of cosmic interplanetary dust by the instruments on board the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft contain the dynamical signature of dust generated by Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt objects, as well as short period Oort Cloud comets and short period Jupiter family comets. While the dust concentration detected between Jupiter and Saturn is mainly due to the cometary components, the dust outside...

The Limits of Our Solar System

The heliosphere is the bubble the Sun carves out of the interstellar medium. The solar wind moves outward at supersonic speeds and carries with it the Sun’s magnetic field. The interstellar medium is also moving at supersonic speeds and carries with it the interstellar magnetic field. The boundary between the solar wind and the interstellar medium is called the heliopause. Before these plasmas ...

Understanding our Origins : Star Formation in H ii Region Environments

Recent analysis of the decay products of short-lived radiounclides (SLRs) in meteorites, in particular the confirmation of the presence of live Fe in the early Solar System, provides unambiguous evidence that the Sun and Solar System formed near a massive star. We consider the question of the formation of low-mass stars in the environments of massive stars, presenting a scenario for the evoluti...