Why are the planets orbiting the Sun in a flat disk, instead of in all different orientations like the popular depiction of an atom?
In: 15
Because of conservation of angular momentum.
Conservation of angular momentum basically says that, if something is spinning in a direction, it will keep doing so.
When the solar system was a big cloud of gas and dust everything was spinning in all different directions. However, **on average** across all that gas and dust there was a particular direction things were spinning. That is, if you cancel out all the spin of all the objects spinning in opposing directions, you end up with a single direction of spin.
That “cancelling out” was exactly what happened as all that gas and dust collided as the solar system condensed. What we’re left with are several large and many small objects that are, by and large, all spinning in the direction of that overall average spin of the early solar system.
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