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Asked by crouchingmurloc to Ben, Dave, Ed, Sam, Susana on 17 Jun 2013.
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Sam Horrell answered on 17 Jun 2013:
Just as we are all made of star stuff so are all planets. When a star explodes it sends out gasses and dust which just hang around in space until some starts to clump together. Once these get big enough they get their own gravity which compacts the material more. Throw in a couple of collisions with other boulders floating about in space and some more rearranging by gravity and you end up with a planet. At that stage the planet will still be heating up due to the gravitational forces but eventually a molten core forms and the rest of the planet starts to cool down and there you go. Shiny new planet.
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David Briggs answered on 17 Jun 2013:
In order to explain this, we need to look at why stars form.
Stars forms from interstellar dust clouds, that collapse over millions years under their own gravity to a point where they heat up in the centre – when the centre gets hot enough, nuclear fusion starts and a star is born.
The left-over dust from the star birth starts to orbit around the sun and forms a disc around the new star. Over time, the biggest bits of dust capture more and more smaller dust particles and over millions of years more and more dust joints to tiny new planets until all the dust is removed from the planet’s orbit around the star.
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