Exploratour - Evolution of the Solar System

This is an image of the Sun.
Click on image for full size
Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory

Throughout this time, the sun at the center of the forming solar system was not yet shining. A forming cloud of gas must be squeezed into a small space before it will begin to shine. Eventually the forming sun shrank into just such a small space and began to shine.

A star that is newly born like this is in a childhood phase called the T-Tauri phase. During its T-Tauri phase, when the Sun first started shining, it was not very bright. But it was very powerful, nevertheless, and spit out a stream of particles into space. The sun still spits out this stream of particles, today, in a much less powerful form. It is called the "solar wind".

But the force of T-Tauri "wind" was probably enough to take away of whatever atmosphere had been gathered from the solar nebula around Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

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Windows to the Universe, a project of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, is sponsored in part is sponsored in part through grants from federal agencies (NASA and NOAA), and partnerships with affiliated organizations, including the American Geophysical Union, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Earth System Information Partnership, the American Meteorological Society, the National Center for Science Education, and TERC. The American Geophysical Union and the American Geosciences Institute are Windows to the Universe Founding Partners. NESTA welcomes new Institutional Affiliates in support of our ongoing programs, as well as collaborations on new projects. Contact NESTA for more information. NASA ESIP NCSE HHMI AGU AGI AMS NOAA