What is the History of the Solar System?
The solar system, which includes the Sun and all the planets which orbit it, originated approximately 4.6 billion years ago. This figure was derived from radiocarbon dating of meteorites, such as the Canyon Diablo meteorite, which is approximately 4.6 billion years old. Scientists believe the Sun and the rest of the solar system were formed at about the same time, when a giant molecular cloud — which would have been several light years across — gravitationally collapsed into a condensed mass, forming several stars besides our Sun. This is called the nebular theory, and while not perfect, it does explain most of the current structure of our solar system. When densities within the collapsing cloud reached a certain extreme level, nuclear fusion would have been initiated, and the Sun was born. Orbiting the Sun would be a debris disc which eventually condensed into spheres which make up the planets. Also called a protoplanetary disc, several of these have been observed in far-away nebulae
Main article: History of Solar System formation and evolution hypotheses Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the originators of the nebular hypothesisIdeas concerning the origin and fate of the world date from the earliest known writings; however, for almost all of that time, there was no attempt to link such theories to the existence of a “Solar System”, simply because it was not generally believed that the Solar System, in the sense we now understand it, existed. The first step toward a theory of Solar System formation and evolution was the general acceptance of heliocentrism, the model which placed the Sun at the centre of the system and the Earth in orbit around it. This conception had been gestating for millennia, but was widely accepted only by the end of the 17th century. The first recorded use of the term “Solar System” dates from 1704.[3] The current standard theory for Solar System formation, the nebular hypothesis, has fallen into and out of favour since its formulation by Emanuel
