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An excellent reply, far better than my idle musings warranted, however a point was missed. At some point in solar system formation the mass of the not quite yet
by somat 3y ago
An excellent reply, far better than my idle musings warranted, however a point was missed. At some point in solar system formation the mass of the not quite yet a sun was only 6% of the mass of the entire system. At some very early point I assume the distribution of mass in the proto solar dust cloud would be the same as the distribution of mass in the galaxy.
I hesitate to reinforce my idea because really, it is ill informed musings on how solar system formation is coalescing gas and dust clouds and would galaxy sized objects eventually coalesce into the same proportion of objects. ill-informed because it turns out we can look into the past and see what newer galaxies look like.
Anyway, thank you again for a great post.
- antonvs 3y ago> the mass of the not quite yet a sun was only 6% of the mass of the entire system. That seems like an arbitrary division of the mass of the system. More than 99% of the mass of the system was going to become a star, so on what basis are you identifying a small subset of that as being significant? Gravity involves the net effect of the forces between every particle in a system. > At some very early point I assume the distribution of mass in the proto solar dust cloud would be the same as the distribution of mass in the galaxy. [...] would galaxy sized objects eventually coalesce into the same proportion of objects. No and no, because of the inverse square law. Galaxies don't look like large solar systems because they're much bigger. The Sun has a big effect on all the planets in the solar system, but it doesn't have much of an effect on Alpha or Proxima Centauri, even though that's our nearest neighbor.