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Old 12-14-2006, 04:32 PM
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QuantumJo QuantumJo is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Buffalo NY USA
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Re: Sciences on Moon

Thanks for your reply jtmckinley.

All day I was looking for an answer and this is what I came up with.

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question...my/q0247.shtml said
Astronomers estimate that the nebular cloud from which our solar system formed contained about two to three times the mass of the Sun and was about 100 astronomical units (AU) across. An astronomical unit is defined as the average distance between the Sun and Earth, or about 93 million miles (150 million km). This massive loosely-bound cloud of dust, ice particles, and gases (primarily hydrogen and helium) had some small rate of rotation due to the method in which it was formed. Over time, this nebular cloud began to collapse inward. The collapse may have itself been triggered by a supernova that sent shockwaves through the cloud causing it to compress. As the cloud compressed on itself, the gravitational attraction of the matter within increased and pulled the material in even further. The nebula continued to contract under the influence of gravity causing it to spin faster. The more the cloud contracted, the faster it rotated due to the conservation of angular momentum. The rate of contraction was greatest near the center of the cloud where a dense central core began to form. As the rate of rotation of the nebula continued to increase, centrifugal effects caused the spinning cloud to flatten into a disk with a bulge at its center.

http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_star.html said
Conservation of angular momentum says that any spinning of the dust cloud that formed the solar system will remain, and since most of the matter in the solar system is in the Sun, the Sun will be spinning. It will even be spinning faster than the original dust cloud for the same reason that a skater spins faster by bringing in his/her arms. The lower the "moment of inertia", the faster the spin rate.

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives...8532.As.r.html said
The direction of rotation for a star is set by the cloud of gas from which it formed. These clouds of gas are large objects, thousands of times larger than our solar system, but they are just barely rotating when they start to collapse to form a star. Only a small change is necessary during the initial collapse for the cloud to rotate one direction or the other.

And finaly an answer to my question

http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/c...solarsys.shtml said
When any great number of objects (be them molecules or stars) self-gravitate to make a new body in the Universe (be it a protoplanetary disk of a protogalaxy, they have leftover angular momentum. An analogy would be to imagine all the skaters in Rockefeller Center suddenly clasping hands of others around them. (Imagine them starting from a random pattern of skating.) The linked crowd would have some excess angular momentum and the whole mass would find itself in a slow group spin. If they all tugged closer, the spin would increase. (You know this from watching figure skaters bring in their arms.) This is what happens to the central protoplanetary dust disk.

An alternative analogy is a flight of birds suddenly being tied together with strings. They will start spinning as a group. The Sun carries the lion's share of the angular momentum in the SS. The proto-planets, moons, etc. may get some spin kick back from the Sun by the magnetic fields it drags through space. When the planets formed, again chunks of gas from a larger chunk, the parcels spun with the original spin join together to replicate this spin. The outer parts clumped with the inner parts. Although orbiting slower, the outer parts carry more angular momentum and spin the cloudlets in the same group convention so the SSW spin is maintained. This is a somewhat random process, not necessarily strictly followed, and an exception may be Venus.
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Last edited by QuantumJo : 12-14-2006 at 06:18 PM.
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