Answer 1:
It depends what you mean by growing. In our solar
system, there isn't enough matter around anymore
that can fall on planets to make them get
noticably larger, but there is stuff raining down
on us all the time, mostly dust I guess. So in a
sense, I think the earth is very, very slowly
getting larger. Do you consider this "growing?" |
Answer 2:
The short practical answer is, yes.
A more
complete answer follows: Imagine that we could
watch a star+planetary system form. (This
normally takes hundreds of millions of
years.)
It is generally believed that
planets and their associated star (like our Sun)
form during the same time from a very large cloud
of gas and dust.Each part of the cloud has mass,
so attracts every other part of the cloud by
gravity. Some parts of the cloud are denser than
others, so have greater gravitational pull. These
denser parts are the seeds around which the
remaining matter collects to form the planets and
the star. The central denser clump will be the
star, and the ones farther from the center will be
the planets. The cloud usually has a very
slight tendancy to rotate or spin. As the smaller
clumps are pulled closer to the big clump, the
cloud's spin becomes the revolution of the smaller
clumps around the bigger clump (the planet's
orbit), and the clumps themselves rotate (the
planet's rotation). Once a clump has settled into
a well defined body (the planet or star), it's
material doesn't have enough velocity to leave the
body, so the body stays about the same
size. When the star becomes dense enough to
star shining, it will slowly throw off its
material as a hot gas, but this takes many
billions of years. The planets may absorb some of
this gas, or some stray material from the original
cloud or the region of space around the star
system, but the amount of this additional material
is extremely small. Heat from the star may cause
some material from the inner planets to boil off
of the planet, but this is also a very small
amount. So, practically speaking, the planets
stop growing when their material has settled into
the neat spheres that you are familiar with.
Some star systems have more than one star. How
would you use the above explanation to describe
the formation of a binary (two) star system?
(Hint: The difference between a planet and a star
is in their mass.)
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