Why are the planets orbiting the Sun in a flat disk, instead of in all different orientations like the popular depiction of an atom?
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True ELI5:
So, before the solar system was here there was a big cloud of little bits of stuff. This cloud got thicker and more compact in the center, starting to turn a bit while more stuff “fell” into it. As it got more and more dense and bigger, it stared bending the fabric of space more so that the rest of the cloud began spinning around it, and overall spinning in the same direction.
When the cloud starts spinning like that everything wants to settle together in the same overall plane around the center of the large spinning object. This can be easily seen with 2 objects in our solar system in the middle of an early formation: Saturn and Uranus. Both have ring systems that are across the equator of their individual spins. In the case of Uranus, that spin is closer to a 90° from the sun’s spin/Solar plane; so the rings are also 90(ish)° to solar.
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