History of Solar System formation and evolution hypotheses

Ideas concerning the origin and fate of the world date from the earliest known writings; however, for almost all of that time, there was no attempt to link such theories to the existence of a "Solar System", simply because almost no one knew or believed that the Solar System, in the sense we now understand it, existed. The first step towards a theory of Solar System formation was the general acceptance of heliocentrism, the model which placed the Sun at the centre of the system and the Earth in orbit around it. This conception had been gestating for thousands of years, but was only widely accepted by the end of the 17th century. The first recorded use of the term "Solar System" dates from 1704.

The most widely accepted theory of planetary formation, known as the nebular hypothesis, maintains that 4.6 billion years ago, the Solar System formed from the gravitational collapse of a giant molecular cloud which was light years across. Several stars, including the Sun, formed within the collapsing cloud. The gas that formed the Solar System was slightly more massive than the Sun itself. Most of the mass collected in the centre, forming the Sun; the rest of the mass flattened into a protoplanetary disc, out of which the planets and other bodies in the Solar System formed.

Just as the Sun and planets were born, so they will eventually die. As the Sun begins to age, it will cool and bloat outward to many times its current diameter, becoming a red giant, before casting off its outer layers (forming what is misleadingly called a planetary nebula) and becoming a stellar corpse known as a white dwarf. The planets will follow the Sun's course; some will be destroyed, others will be ejected into interstellar space, but ultimately, given enough time, the Sun's retinue will disappear.

There are, however, arguments against this hypothesis.

French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was the first to propose a model for the origin of the Solar System in his Le Monde (ou Traité de lumière) which he wrote in 1632 and 1633 and for which he delayed publication because of the Inquisition and it was published only after his death in 1664. In his view, the Universe was filled with vortices of swirling particles and the Sun and planets had condensed from a particularly large vortex that had somehow contracted, which explained the circular motion of the planets and was on the right track with condensation and contraction. However, this was before Newton's theory of gravity and we now know matter does not behave in this fashion.

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