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Essay Archive - The Dust-Cloud Hypothesis
The Dust-Cloud Hypothesis
The universe contains huge clouds made up of very large amounts of dustand
gas. About 6,000,000,000 (billion) years ago, one of these clouds began to
condense. Gravitation--the pull that all objects in the universe have for
one another--pulled the gas and dust particles together. As the dust cloud
condensed, it began to spin. It spun faster and faster and flattened as it
spun. It became shaped like a pancake that is thick at the centre and thin
at the edges.
The slowly spinning centre condensed to make the sun. But the outer parts
of the pancake, or disk, were spinning too fast to ....
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