How did our cosmic home—the solar system— fashion itself? This is a tale of billions of years. Put another way, begin with a ...

a shock wave from a nearby star going supernova initiated the collapse of our solar nebula. When the nearby giant star exploded, high-energy particles blasted the nebula, causing pockets of matter ...

triggered the collapse of the solar nebula. According to this theory, the explosion sent shock waves through space, and those shock waves pushed parts of the nebula closer together, leading to ...

These "fingers" injected short-lived radioactive isotopes from the supernova into the nebula. Less than 100,000 years later, the cloud collapsed, triggering the birth of our solar system.

Gravitational attraction within the fragments led to their collapse into denser "cores" just 0.01–0.1 parsecs (2,000–20,000 AU) wide. The presolar nebula that would one day become the solar ...

Helium inherited from the solar nebula likely became locked in Earth ... This story has been updated to reflect the solar system formed from a collapsed dust cloud that had resulted from a ...

Before it was moulded into a neat set of planets, every scrap of matter in the solar system was part of a gigantic nebula – a floating interstellar cloud. This giant cloud was made up of dust, ...

The nuclear energy that at one point pushed back against the force of gravity will sputter and die, and our Sun will collapse ... our Solar System will make a planetary nebula as picturesque ...

It holds the solar system together ... when a cloud of dust and gas called a nebula collapsed under its own gravity. As it did, the cloud spun and flattened into a disk, with our sun forming ...