Eli5: why do planetary bodies rotates around axis?

253 views

Why do planetary bodies rotates around axis. Which force is causing this rotation and why. Also are the stars rotating as well and do planets orbit them because they are rotating or is there some other reason.

In: 55

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine a big magnet dangling from a thin strand of wire.

Surrounding by the dangling magnet is a crowd of people, where each person has a handful of paper clips. Everyone is throwing their paper clips one at a time at the magnet from all random directions, with varying levels of aim. Every paperclip that hits the magnet sticks to the magnet (or every paperclip that hits the growing wad of paperclips will stick to the wad).

If a paperclip strikes the magnet directly dead-on, it will simply stick to it and have no extra effect. But if the clip lands a glancing blow off to one side, it will stick to the magnet and cause it to start spinning that way slightly.

There is pretty much zero chance that every single paperclip hitting the manget will hit it dead-on in this chaotic setup. And there’s basically zero chance that all of the glancing blow paperclips will just happen to exactly cancel out all the rotation they cause. So in pretty much all cases, once the crowd of people run out of clips to throw, the resulting wad of paperclips stuck to the magnet will be spinning.

All objects in the universe formed in a manner similar to this, just instead of magnets it was (usually) gravity, and instead of paperclips it was… well, whatever random crap happened to be floating around.

In the real world, the dangling magnet will eventually slow down and stop spinning due to forces in the wire holding it up and friction with the air in the room. But in space, there is neither of those things, so things that have started spinning will more or less spin forever. There is no “force” needed to *keep* them spinning. The force of stuff crashing into them long, long ago *set* them spinning, and nothing has ever stopped them.

You are viewing 1 out of 6 answers, click here to view all answers.