00:00Why is our solar system flat?
00:02Because I know that it started as a giant cloud of gas and dust,
00:05and then gravity caused the dust to form together into our planets.
00:09But then why don't they orbit the sun like this?
00:12Turns out that the key is that the giant cloud of dust was spinning.
00:15So even though all the individual particles could move any which way,
00:18they still had an overall rotation.
00:21And as the particles moved, they'd bump into each other,
00:23canceling out the up and down motion and clumping together into these larger masses.
00:27But the laws of physics say that angular momentum is conserved,
00:29so this clump had to keep rotating.
00:32So over time, our solar system continues to clump, forming planets,
00:35and flattening out into this disk shape, which is what we see today.
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