The formation and evolution of the Solar System

Abstract

Astronomers have built the main components of a scenario for the formation of the Solar System. Small planetary bodies accreted others by collisions within a rotating protoplanetary disk that formed at the same time as the Sun. While terrestrial planets near the warming Sun could accumulate only solid metallic and silicate material, the giant planets formed from ice and gas at lower temperatures. Each planet and satellite then followed its own specific evolution, depending upon the properties of its atmosphere and/or surface. Information about the origin and evolution of the Solar System is also provided by the comets, which can be considered as frozen fossils of the Solar System's early stages. On the borders of the outer Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune, the newly discovered Edgeworth–Kuiper belt is probably the reservoir where short-period comets are formed.