Found on Dr. Ethan Sharp’s Starts With A Bang blog
I’d love to show you a whole bunch of videos that show planetary formation! Some showcase certain parts of formation better than others but they all are pretty awesome.
- Beginning of Solar System formation (from gas cloud to disk) from ESA (0:39)
- Why is the Solar System Flat? from Minute Physics (3:12)
- Planetary Formation – by NASA for the James Webb Space Telescope, uses data from computer models (3:21)
- Planet Formation – narration by Harrison Ford, I like that it has some timescale information in it, part of a larger series (3:13)
- Short animation from the NASA Deep Impact spacecraft – it especially shows comet formation but watch for: a) gravitational forces bringing smaller things to bigger things in orbits (bound and unbound), and b) those conglomerating rocks/metals getting a layer of ices (0:55)
- A computer model: Planetary System Formation Simulation (200 AU View) (0:45)
- Two renderings (i.e. computer simulations) of protoplanetary disk gravitational instabilities (i.e. planet formation), one is face on (0:44) and one is an oblique angle (0:44)
- The California Academy of Sciences has a really nice former planetarium show segment about Simulating Solar System Formation (and it explains why the Kuiper Belt (and Oort Cloud) look the way they do) (4:22)
- blocked on copyright grounds
From “Space with Sam Neill” Episode: “Star Stuff”, I really like how this one is done (I started it at 1:27) –here - The “Formation of the Moon” video that I commented does happen to be one of my favorites despite the speeding up of some events that they did (3:37)
- More Moon formation – this is from a supercomputer simulation and it has the weirdest music! It’s also a bit old and you don’t need to watch until the end… (4:05)
Below is an image of the Orion Nebula (we can see it during our observations this semester 😉 ) from the Hubble Space Telescope showing some of the protoplanetary disks that have been found in this nebula. Look!!! New baby planetary systems! 🙂
