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Bryson, Bill - The birth of our Solar system
Identifier
018643
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Bill Bryson's description covers possibly the largest form of agglomeration we know of and can, as it were, see the end result of. The birth of our solar system.
Bill gathered this information from scientists and I confess to having some doubts about including an observation that is essentially pure supposition – the scientists weren't there so cannot 'know'. But in the galaxy there is agglomeration of this form taking place now, which has been observed, as such I decided it did no harm to include the quote, unverified as it may be.
A description of the experience
Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything
About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space ….and began to aggregate.
Virtually all of it – 99.9% of the mass of the solar system - went to make the Sun.
Out of the floating material that was left over … colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called 'planetisnals'. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined.
In every encounter there was a winner and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they travelled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of kilometres across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years.
In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about.
At this point, about 4.4 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon.......... For the next 500 million years, the young Earth continued to be pelted relentlessly by comets, meteorites and other galactic debris.