HH
HH
The
Solar System
Dust
Cloud
Summary of the Solar System
Animation of Inner Planets
Asteroid
Belt
The
Oort Cloud I
Comet
Hyakutake
a poem by Leslie C. McKinney, Ph.D
You physicists have become annoying
You can't seem to make up your minds
Did everything come from nothing
Or was nothing all there was to find?
What was that first singularity
And what made it start to inflate?
You say a vacuum is not really empty
As long as energy potentiates?
At time zero there was zero space
But fluctuation took care of that
Now there's space of an ill-defined shape
That's full of live/dead cats.
Continuing on you tell us
That we're here cause CP ain't conserved
I never thought of myself as a leftover
This is becoming absurd.
But the universe is here now
At least part of it, I guess,
How is it you can't find the dark matter
To account for the missing mass?
Permeating like a fog?
Einstein was shamed by his fudge factor
But you've brought it back in vogue.
The news from Canada is distressing
There are too few neutrinos from the sun
But physicists aren't constrained by facts
They'll make three neutrinos from one.
So the Standard Model is in danger
It's time for a paradigm shift,
Well paradigm shift, shmaradigm pfffft,
Will you guys please get over it.
Any idea how the story will end?
Big crunch, cold death, lost souls?
Or a slipper slide to a new universe
Through a slimy little worm hole?
Which confirms my general suspicion
That reality is just theory for this bunch
Waves are particles, particles are strings,
And the universe is the ultimate free lunch.
Leslie C. McKinney, Ph.D.
Neurobiologist
copyright 2001
4.56 to 4.0 Billion Years Ago
thanks to; Tokyo Harbor
During Hadean time, the Earth and Solar System formed by coagulation and gravitation contraction from a large cloud of gas and dust around the sun, called an accretion disc. The sun formed the nucleus, shrinking in on itself by gravitational compaction until it reached a stage where it ignited with nuclear fusion and gave off light and heat. The surrounding particles within this cloud coalesced into planetesimals which then aggregated to form microplanets (rather like modern asteroids). The energy of the collisions between the larger microplanets, as well as radioactive and gravitational heating, generated a huge amount of heat. The Earth and other planets would have been initially molten. The Earth and Moon formed from a collision between two previous planets - a mars-sized planetoid and a slightly larger planet.
During this period the heavier molten iron sank down to become the core, whilst the lighter rocks rose to the surface, the lightest of all becoming the crust as a sort of "scum" on the surface. There was also an outgassing of volatile molecules such as water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. An initial steam atmosphere was made of water from comets and hydrated minerals. Rain fell into proto-ocean 4.3 to 4.4 billion years ago.
Once most of the planetesimals were gone the planetary bombardment stopped and a stable rocky crust formed on the Earth. This is the age of the oldest rocks on earth and also of moon-rocks. Atmospheric water condensed into oceans and proto-life formed in the soup of primordial organic molecules, either in the early oceans or in clay or rocks within the crust itself.
text
content © M. Alan Kazlev 1998-2002
Rothschild and Lister
-- from www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/precambrian/hadean.html
