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Asked by 577merf22 to Angus, Catherine, Jenni, Melissa, Waqar on 17 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by KFC (Kung-Fu Callum).
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Catherine Ross answered on 17 Jun 2016:
Well some people might say God created the planets and some might say that an explosion of chemicals made the groups of materials come together and by spinning very fast made them into a giant ball.
Some planets are just made of gas and they are called the Giant Gas Planets they are the bigger planets, have a look on the Internet and see if you can find out which planets these are.
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Melissa Ladyman answered on 20 Jun 2016:
Scientists are still trying to understand exactly why and how planets form. Solar systems form out of giant clouds of gas and dust. The centre of the cloud starts to collapse on itself and swirl about. The dusts starts to clump together and as it gets bigger, gravity starts getting stronger and the cloud spins and clumps even more. Eventually the centre of the dust cloud is so closely packed that it heats up and this is what will eventually become a sun.
The rest of the cloud starts to spin in one big direction, and the spinning motion makes the gasses and dust spread out- like sand on a spinning plate. As the cloud flattens out it keeps spinning and bits of dust attract one another and make bigger clumps, the bigger clumps then start sticking together- their gravity makes them come together. Due to the spinning motion the dust tends to clump nearer the centre making the rocky central planets because a lot of the gasses near the centre will be burnt up by the growing sun. Gasses remain near the edges and form big gas giants.
It takes millions of years for a cloud of dust to transform into a solar system, which is why we don’t know exactly what happens: we cannot watch it from start to finish. We have to piece the bits together by looking at solar systems across our galaxy.
This website explains it much better than me:
http://hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries/discovering_planets_beyond/how-do-planets-form
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