Why spherical planetary nebula flattens as it spins and ends up to a disk shaped planetary system (like our solar system)?

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Correction: Why spherical giant molecular clouds ~~planetary nebula~~ flattens as it spins and ends up to a disk shaped planetary system (like our solar system)?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Assuming you’ve learned vectors. You know how you can add up vectors together and get 1 output vector? A vector of length 1 pointing north + vector pointing east will give you a vector pointing 45 degrees, even though the vectors are totally different directions.

Now imagine the vectors were rotational (not literally, it’s hard to visualize that). If you add up all the rotational momentum of the particles (assuming the particles have a lot of time to interact with each other and homogenize their momentum), you get 1 rotation aka the disk.

(Edit: assuming you haven’t learned vectors. Imagine walking 1 block north, then 1 block east. If you draw a line between your start point and end point, this is considered adding all of your movements. This line is 45 degrees and length square root of 2 or whatever Pythagorean theorem says.

So adding all the particles’ momentums together means drawing one rotational line from start to end, and this line is the disk you see)

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