In how much time did the solar system form itself?
Question:
Answer:
Half a billion years, more or less.
And it took only about 250 million years after that for life to start on Earth. That was about four and a half billion years ago.
Best current estimate is over a period of about 500 million years.
Massive stars in the vicinity of the outer parts of one of the Milky Ways spiral arms compress the surrounding interstellar gas into a Giant Molecular Cloud. As the GMC collapses the conservation of angular momentum forms a Solar Nebula (a disk) and eventually a T Tauri star is born (our Sun). Grains of silicate, ice, organics and gas start to grow to milimiter size in a Protoplanetary Disk. In a span of around 5 to 15 million years these differentiate into asteroidal sized bodies. Eventually planetary embryos accrete enough mass in around 100 million years. In this interval giant collisions seed the protoplanet with water and organic molecules. Then 4,567.2 +- 0.6 million years ago the young Earth is formed (E.D. Young et al, 2005). Around 100 million years later the Earth's crust differentiates and solidifies into the first protocontinents, by 4.4 billion years ago. Sometime after this, the Earth enters into a collision course with the planet Theia and a giant collision generates our present Moon. The Late Heavy Asteroid Bombardment ceases around 3.9 billion years ago. 100 to 200 million years later life emerges.
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