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
They don’t.
They orbit in roughly the same plane because they started as a cloud of dust and gas and then spent billions of years bumping (gravitationally) into one another.
In three dimensional space, clouds of gas and dust always have an average angular momentum that rotates around one axes, so having it bump into itself for long enough will form a disk.
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