Could asteroidal space cows have played a role in the evolution of our solar system? The answer will shock and bore you!
Could asteroids in fact be giant space cows? The answer is yes, at least according to one solar physicist. This assumes that you take his words wildly out of context, which of course is exactly what New Frontier News has done.
Dr. Ian O’Neill produces Discovery Space for the Discovery Channel. In a recent post, he put forward the concept that groups of asteroids can in fact be compared to a herd of cattle. In Dr. O’Neill’s own words: “I’d call them a herd. Asteroids kinda look like overweight cattle.”
From Discovery Space:
Our understanding about how the planets in the Solar System evolved has just taken a huge leap forward with a new paper published in the journal, Icarus.
According to current theories, the dusty proto-planetary disk surrounding the sun during Solar System evolution spawned the accretion of small rocky bodies that gradually clumped together to form larger and larger asteroids. These asteroids then gradually swept up debris from the disk, eventually forming planetary bodies.
But there’s a problem, the accreting asteroids would have dropped out of solar orbit due to drag caused by the dust and gas in the sun’s accretion disk. So how did the material that makes up the asteroids and planets in our Solar System avoid being eaten by the sun?
You can read the rest at the link below. New Frontier News highly recommends that you do so. It’s really interesting stuff about how the solar system evolved into its current state.
