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  • Primordial Hydrogen
    Vast clouds of the simplest element hydrogen provide the basic subatomic building blocks of the universe.  Possessed of the four natural forces of matter--gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces--these clouds act by and apon themselves to condense into stars and family of stars and there to forge hydrogen's protons and electrons into heavier elements and bring into being a latent, waiting complexity.
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  • Small Exhausted Star
    Small stars can carry the physics of nucleogenesis only so far, slowly burning their lighter elements, perhaps having formed together with unique families of planets and then nurturing them for billions of years.  When small stars finally burn through their hydrogen and begin helium fusion, radiation pressure from now hotter cores presses out and then boils away their atmospheres.  This disintegration produces a powerful stellar wind together with expelled shards of stellar matter that engulf any orbiting planets and expand out to form a planetary nebula.
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  • Supernova Dispersal
    Big stars, in a relatively brief time, carry the physics of nucleogenesis to its conclusion, marching up the Periodic Table of heavier elements by ever hotter fusion reactions to produce ever-shrinking amounts of energy, until building huge cores of iron nuclei.  Fusion beyond iron does not produce energy--but instead requires it.  Big stars then reach an iron crisis--fusion in the core ends and with it, the radiation pressure that countered the star's enormous gravity.  The star implodes.  The unrestrained gravitational collapse infuses energy into additional heavy nuclei assembly, accompanied by unique high-density phenomona that then throw vast stores of new matter out into the galaxy.
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  • Shockwave Front

    A bubble of hot gas from an exploded star expands at some small fraction of the speed of light out across open space.  As it encounters dust and gas, it alters the interstellar environment:

    1) Enriching surrounding regions with new heavy elements

    2) Ionizing atoms it encounters, making them subject to magnetic forces

    3) Pressing clouds of dust and gas into transient densities that allow mutual gravitational collapse

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  • Collapsing Cloud
    Enriched wih new heavy elements and pressed apon by multiple supernova, a region of interstellar dust and gas reaches a density sufficient to cause a slow gathering by its own mutual gravitational attraction, the initial cloud perhaps many trillions of miles across.
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  • Evolution to Disc
    The gathering dust and gas condenses and begins to rotate and flatten into a disc.  A solar nebula forms.  In its deep interior, matter is closer together, its gravity field stronger, its rotation faster.  In the nebula's core, a protostar begins to form.  Ionized matter spiralling down within the nebula drags on the galaxy's weak, pervasive lines of magnetic force. Entrained with the remainder of the cloud's dust and gas, the ionized atoms slow the infall of matter, preventing a run-a-way collapse of the solar nebula.
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  • Solar Nebula
    The solar nebula is still many trillions of miles across, with a dense interior region forming an accretion disc where small grains of matter begin to clump together.  In its center, matter is pouring with ever greater fury apon the surface of a protostar and a region some billions miles across grows hot from friction of matter and the conduction of interior heat.  No light escapes the solar nebula, which might appear against distant star clouds as a vast, dark shape scarcely able to hold its outer clouds of cold dust, gas and ice.
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  • T-Tauri Stage
    The flow of matter spiraling down apon the protostar becomes so chaotic, that much of it is thrown back and ejected along paths of least resistance above the feeding plain.  It is focused into hot beams of gas confined by twisting magnetic fields generated by the protostar's rapid rotation.  A fountain of matter spews out above and below the solar nebula, its light escaping into the galaxy, revealing the growing power of a new star.  Much of the matter is ejected at escape velocities, while the rest arcs back to cool and fall as a molten metal rain upon outer regions of the accretion disc.  The escape of matter and kinetic energy acts as a safety valve, preventing the growing star from destroying itself.  This ejection of matter removes most of the solar nebula's original mass.
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  • Planetesimals
    Within a vast accretion disc rotating about the protostar, matter clumps and continues to grow together, all in darkness.  Closer to the protostar, a region stretching outward 100's of mllions of miles, the dust and gas is hot, too hot to retain volitiles and gases as they form into bodies called planetesimals.  Further out, planetesimals form in deep cold, rich in lighter gases and ices, including water.  The planetesmals grow to meters then miles in diameter and in countless numbers.  As they grow, their gravity effects the gathering of matter in the accretion disc.  Once stable orbits of dust, gas and grains of ice are disrupted as planetesimals pull on each other, resulting in distorted orbital paths and chaotic collisions.  Planetesimals are blasted and eroded away, while others rapidly pull in the new debris.
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  • Early Jupiter
    The gas giants may have been the first planets, forming within their own hot-cored accretion discs, gathering matter and gravity at a fast rate.  By their enormous gravity, they pulled in the abundant, cold gases in the outer regions of the solar nebula's accretion disc, some of it condensing and cooling into water-rich moons.  The gravity of the big planets then began to act on the remaining orbiting bodies far from the protostar.
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  • Ignition
    The protostar's growing mass eventually causes core temperatures and pressures to begin thermonuclear fusion of the the first available fusion fuel--deuterium, a rarer isotope of hydrogen, followed by more abundant hydrogen nuclei when core temperatures grow still greater.  No longer heated soley by gravitiational contraction and the kinetic energy of inrushing matter, the protostar becomes a true star, entering main sequence, fusion in the core releasing nuclear energy.  This energy migrates out from star's interior, creating a pressure balance with gravity and stabilizing the star's diameter before escaping as light, carrying with it shed particles.
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  • Clearing Dust
    Star light and a solar wind plow out as new, active forces within the young solar system. The remaining free gas and the tinest particles of dust are blown outward, while light pressure degrades the orbit of larger dust particles, causing them to spiral into the sun.  Sunlight begins to illuminate the entire planetary system, revealing millions of planteseimals orbiting and gathering in a clearing void, starving the gas giants of the last remaining gases and ending the slow inward spiral of larger orbiting bodies in the once thick dust of a solar nebula.
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  • Gathering Protoplanets
    The planetesimals gather into protoplanets, larger bodies 100's miles in diameter that form into spheres by their greater gravity.
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  • Assembling Earth
    Closer to the sun, huge rocky protoplanets coalesce, pulling in lesser bodies and debris, the rain of matter adding heat enough to melt the growing worlds.
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  • Moon Event
    Some 4.5 billion years ago, two early planets sharing similar orbits approach each other.  Their iron cores begin to merge within 20 minutes of their skewed collision, their vaporized surfaces thrown outward, some of it captured in a ring of molten matter, soon coalescing into Earth's satellite moon.
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  • Water
    Earth and its new, close-orbiting moon, battered by infalling debris, are approached by a cold, water-rich comet displaced from the outer solar system by the gravity of the gas giants.
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  • Jupiter Influence
    Gathering planetesimals too near Jupiter are starved of material and battered into fragments by the disrupting gravity of the large planet.  A once hot region vacant of volatlles where a planet might have formed is occupied by dry, dissassembled fragments of a failed protoplanet, forming the asteroid belt.
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  • Volcanics
    Mars also is starved of building material and gathers only a small iron core.  For a time, the new planet has active volcanism and out-gassing that builds an atmosphere--gases and water vapor sheltered from the solar wind by a magnetic field generated by a hot interior.
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  • Early Mars
    While Mars retains it interior heat, the planet is blanketed with a thick, warm atmosphere of sufficient weight and pressure to allow oceans of liquid water.  But the core of the planet is too small to generate and retain heat over time.  Eventually, after the first billion years, volcanism and outgassing slows, the magnetic field wanes, the solar wind erodes away the atmosphere, air pressure drops and the Martian surface cools.  Liquid water vaporizes away into the thin air and freezes in the subsurface. The planet becomes a cold, dry desert.
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  • Early Earth
    Earth, endowed with a large iron core, one rich in decaying uranium, can sustain its interior heat, with energy enough to constantly rework the planet's surface.  Volcanism, out-gassing and an early atmosphere sheltered by a strong magnetic field permit stable liquid oceans which can persist in one form or another long into the future.  By the first billion years, life finds a toehold, well before the age of bombardment comes to an end.
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  • Sweeping Debris
    The outer gas giants, by their powerful gravity and the wide, sweeping orbits of their moons, displace or gather up the remaining chunks of rock and ice orbiting far from the sun. 
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  • Lingering Bombardment
    In time, the bombardment upon all the planets lessens and nearly ends.  A new stability comes to the solar system, including to a small, water-rich planet where life can begin a long work of chemical engineering, both within and without.
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  • New World
    The surface of Earth takes on its character at an early age with oceans and storms, rivers, glaciers and all the physical and chemical processes of erosion, sedimentation, plutonic intrusion, volcanic resurfacing and tectonic reforming. 
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A Creation Story

 

A sketchy storyboard of simple pencil, ink and digital drawings representing the evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy's primordial hydrogen clouds and ancient stars into our solar system.  New images may be added from time to time.

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A Creation Story
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