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  1. #11
    a500lbgorilla's Avatar
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    himself fucker.
    Also, the Sun didn't catch the Earth. The Earth and Sun formed together. A whole cloud of stuff started rotating a long time ago and it evolved under a set of known-ish laws to form what you see today. One of those laws is the conservation of rotational momentum. Your rotational momentum is your velocity, by your mass, by how far you are from the center of mass in 3-space. The total rotational momentum of the cloud of stray stuff way back which formed our solar system is equal to the total rotation momentum of the solar system today. That includes all comets, asteroids, planets, etc which originated with us, even if some of it had been flung off. This includes all the momentum being used to move those Voyager spacecraft out of our solar system.

    So the Earth and Sun accreted from the same cloud of stuff already spinning, one seemingly around the other, each around their combined center of mass.
    Last edited by a500lbgorilla; 09-15-2012 at 12:21 AM.
    <a href=http://i.imgur.com/kWiMIMW.png target=_blank>http://i.imgur.com/kWiMIMW.png</a>

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