The Sun captured dust and gas as it travelled through space, slowly building planets over time
Protoplanet Theory
Our solar system formed from a giant cloud of interstellar dust and gas that collapsed, causing lumps to form which eventually became protoplanets and then planets
Capture Theory
The Sun stole material from a passing, puffy star through gravitational pull, which then clumped together to form the planets and solar system
Modern Laplacian Theory
Our solar system formed from a collapsing, rotating cloud where the central mass (future sun) slowed down as dust created drag, allowing the rest of the cloud to spin faster and become the planets
Modern Nebular Theory
A giant dusty cloud collapsed under its own gravity, spinning faster and flattening into a disk, with the densest region at the center becoming the Sun, and dust clumping to form rocky protoplanets closer to the Sun and gas giants further out, which then collided and merged to become the planets we see today
The Modern Nebular Theory is the leading explanation for our solar system's birth
In 1992, the Hubble Space Telescope obtained the first images of proto-planetary disks in the Orion nebula, which lends strong support to the Modern Nebular Theory
