just watching this on BBC2 – they showed an image of the solar system & it suddenly struck me that all the planets orbit the sun on the same plane. Why is this? why don’t they orbit a bit more randomly?

Can anyone explain this to me without making my brain hurt too much?!

Sod that question – what about when neptune and pluto collide?

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=205

the theory is, when the solar system was just forming, it was a ‘disc’ of dust & gas that started to coalesce in the centre to form the sun and further out to form loads of rocks. many of those rocks crashed into each other & over time came to form the rocky inner planets, while the outer gas planets happened in a similar way to the sun; the more massive they got, the bigger they became, until they became the gas giants we know today.

They’re all on the same plane because that’s how they started out. Pluto is the odd one out but it is thought that it’s a stray object from the Oort cloud where the comets live

or something like that

I believe it is to do with the law of conservation of angular momentum.

I many be wrong but is it related to the gravity of the sun? Are they in the same plane as its rotation?

I’ll bet they orbit on different planes that would be a bugger to show on a 2D diagram.

Edit. Bet lost. Hmmmph.

Ok so contemplating the timescales & the scale of this will make my brain hurt.

Sod that. I want a high speed camera that can film 1,000,000 frames per second and a gun that can shoot a ball bearing at 5km/second.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_momentum#Conservation_of_angular_momentum

Ok so contemplating the timescales & the scale of this will make my brain hurt.

To be fair, to get your head around all this, you seem to need a big moustache and bushy eyebrows.

or to be Brian Cox

God made it that way so that it would be easier to draw.

what about when neptune and pluto collide?

apparently they won’t. wiki is your friend

No Uranus jokes yet, disappointing 😕

Give them enough time and they will collide – assuming that the sun doesnt super nova first.

They’re not all on the same plane silly.

Planes can’t go into space.

No Uranus jokes yet, disappointing

To be honest, I get a bit sick of crap Uranus jokes. I’d be glad if they just disappeared in to a big black hole somewhere.

assuming that the sun doesnt super nova first

more likely to go Red Giant before that. Probably won’t have any effect on the gas giants, but the rocky planets will be toast. well, more than toast, they’ll be inside the sun by then

Note that the planets don’t all spin on the same plane as they’ve been knocked about a bit. Someone told me a large asteroid or comet was going wallop Mars soon. True?

They are all mostly in the same plane. They formed out of a spinning cloud of crud. If you spin something like that it ends up as a disk, which forms a plane.

Small variations have come from being smacked about a bit yes. They all (with the exception of two I think) spin the same way too.

did anyone watch the channel 4 doc on beforehand

was pretty similar but in that it was stated that tunguska blast took out an area of trees the size of wales on horizon they said size of london

The proto-sun was a salad spinner.

On iplayer until Thursday

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01nj48v/Voyager_To_the_Final_Frontier/

“This is the story of the most extraordinary journey in human exploration, the Voyager space mission. In 1977 two unmanned spacecraft were launched by NASA, heading for distant worlds. It would be the first time any man-made object would ever visit the farthest planets of the solar system – Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. On the way the Voyagers would be bombarded by space dust, fried by radiation and discover many of the remarkable wonders of the solar system.

Now, at the end of 2012, 35 years and 11 billion miles later, they are leaving the area of the sun’s influence. As they journey out into the galaxy beyond they carry a message from Earth, a golden record bolted to the side of each craft describing our civilisation in case of discovery by another. This is the definitive account of the most intrepid explorers in Earth’s history. (R)”