In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

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But that restrictive definition helped isolate what should and should not be considered a planet — a problem that arose as astronomers discovered more and more planet-like objects in the solar system. Pluto was among the bodies that didn't make the cut and was re-classified as a dwarf planet. See also “Nekros; or, the Poetics of Biopolitics” in Zombie Theory: A Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); “Necrologies: The Death of the Body Politic” in Beyond Biopolitics (Duke University Press, 2011). Around 5.4billion years from now, the core of the Sun will become hot enough to trigger hydrogen fusion in its surrounding shell. [115] This will cause the outer layers of the star to expand greatly, and the star will enter a phase of its life in which it is called a red giant. [118] [119] Within 7.5billion years, the Sun will have expanded to a radius of 1.2AU (180 × 10 Networks, Swarms, Multitudes" Part 1, Part 2, Ctheory (2004), "Biophilosophy for the 21st Century", Ctheory (2005). In a sense, the world-without-us allows us to think the world-in-itself, without getting caught up in a vicious circle of logical paradox. The world-in-itself may co-exist with the world-for-us – indeed the human being is defined by its impressive capacity for not recognizing this distinction. By contrast, the world-without-us cannot co-exist with the human world-for-us; the world-without-us is the subtraction of the human from the world. To say that the world-without-us is antagonistic to the human is to attempt to put things in human terms, in the terms of the world-for-us. To say that the world-without-us is neutral with respect to the human, is to attempt to put things in the terms of the world-in-itself. The world-without-us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific. The world-without-us is as much a cultural concept as it is a scientific one, and, as this book attempts to show, it is in the genres of supernatural horror and science fiction that we most frequently find attempts to think about, and to confront the difficult thought of, the world-without-us.

Because they didn't melt, they’re pristine samples of the original solids that formed in the cooling protoplanetary disc. For scientists they’re some of the most valuable leftover materials we have.

Over the course of the Solar System's evolution, comets were ejected out of the inner Solar System by the gravity of the giant planets and sent thousands of AU outward to form the Oort cloud, a spherical outer swarm of cometary nuclei at the farthest extent of the Sun's gravitational pull. Eventually, after about 800 million years, the gravitational disruption caused by galactic tides, passing stars and giant molecular clouds began to deplete the cloud, sending comets into the inner Solar System. [81] The evolution of the outer Solar System also appears to have been influenced by space weathering from the solar wind, micrometeorites, and the neutral components of the interstellar medium. [82]

The images reveal a particular phenomenon on Mars. They show that the martian dust storms are made up of regularly spaced smaller cloud cells, arranged like grains or pebbles. The texture is also seen in clouds in Earth’s atmosphere.

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Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual, co-authored with Natalie Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting. Locus+, 2004. ISBN 978-1899377220. At the end of the planetary formation epoch, the inner Solar System was populated by 50–100 Moon-to- Mars-sized protoplanets. [49] [50] Further growth was possible only because these bodies collided and merged, which took less than 100million years. These objects would have gravitationally interacted with one another, tugging at each other's orbits until they collided, growing larger until the four terrestrial planets we know today took shape. [35] One such giant collision is thought to have formed the Moon (see Moons below), while another removed the outer envelope of the young Mercury. [51] An Ideal for Living: An Anti-Novel (20th Anniversary Edition). Schism Press, 2020. ISBN 979-8682903832.

Ultimately, the Solar System is stable in that none of the planets are likely to collide with each other or be ejected from the system in the next few billion years. [102] Beyond this, within fivebillion years or so, Mars's eccentricity may grow to around 0.2, such that it lies on an Earth-crossing orbit, leading to a potential collision. In the same timescale, Mercury's eccentricity may grow even further, and a close encounter with Venus could theoretically eject it from the Solar System altogether [99] or send it on a collision course with Venus or Earth. [104] This could happen within a billion years, according to numerical simulations in which Mercury's orbit is perturbed. [105] Moon–ring systems [ edit ] Prialnik, Dina K., Antonella Barucci, and Leslie Young, eds. The Trans-Neptunian Solar System. Elsevier, 2019.The nebular hypothesis says that the Solar System formed from the gravitational collapse of a fragment of a giant molecular cloud, [9] most likely at the edge of a Wolf-Rayet bubble. [10] The cloud was about 20 parsecs (65 light years) across, [9] while the fragments were roughly 1parsec (three and a quarter light-years) across. [11] The further collapse of the fragments led to the formation of dense cores 0.01–0.1parsec (2,000–20,000 AU) in size. [a] [9] [12] One of these collapsing fragments (known as the presolar nebula) formed what became the Solar System. [13] The composition of this region with a mass just over that of the Sun ( M ☉) was about the same as that of the Sun today, with hydrogen, along with helium and trace amounts of lithium produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, forming about 98% of its mass. The remaining 2% of the mass consisted of heavier elements that were created by nucleosynthesis in earlier generations of stars. [14] Late in the life of these stars, they ejected heavier elements into the interstellar medium. [15] Some scientists have given the name Coatlicue to a hypothetical star that went supernova and created the presolar nebula. The sun accumulated about 99% of the available matter and the remaining material further from the sun formed smaller clumps inside the spinning disk. Some of these clumps gained enough mass that their gravity shaped them into spheres, becoming planets, dwarf planets and moons. Other leftover pieces became asteroids, comets and smaller moons that make up our solar system. In all cases, this means that the position of a planet along its orbit ultimately becomes impossible to predict with any certainty (so, for example, the timing of winter and summer becomes uncertain). Still, in some cases, the orbits themselves may change dramatically. Such chaos manifests most strongly as changes in eccentricity, with some planets' orbits becoming significantly more—or less— elliptical. [103] As the early Solar System continued to evolve, it eventually drifted away from its siblings in the stellar nursery, and continued orbiting the Milky Way's center on its own. The Sun likely drifted from its original orbital distance from the center of the galaxy. The chemical history of the Sun suggests it may have formed as much as 3kpc closer to the galaxy core. [31] Solar system birth environment [ edit ] After between three and ten million years, [35] the young Sun's solar wind would have cleared away all the gas and dust in the protoplanetary disc, blowing it into interstellar space, thus ending the growth of the planets. [46] [47] Subsequent evolution [ edit ]

This is still 10–20 times more than the current mass in the main belt, which is now about 0.0005 M Earth. [59] A secondary depletion period that brought the asteroid belt down close to its present mass is thought to have followed when Jupiter and Saturn entered a temporary 2:1 orbital resonance (see below). When terrestrial planets were forming, they remained immersed in a disk of gas and dust. Pressure partially supported the gas and so did not orbit the Sun as rapidly as the planets. The resulting drag and, more importantly, gravitational interactions with the surrounding material caused a transfer of angular momentum, and as a result the planets gradually migrated to new orbits. Models show that density and temperature variations in the disk governed this rate of migration, [36] [37] but the net trend was for the inner planets to migrate inward as the disk dissipated, leaving the planets in their current orbits. [38]At this point in its evolution, the Sun is thought to have been a T Tauri star. [25] Studies of T Tauri stars show that they are often accompanied by discs of pre-planetary matter with masses of 0.001–0.1 M ☉. [26] These discs extend to several hundred AU—the Hubble Space Telescope has observed protoplanetary discs of up to 1000AU in diameter in star-forming regions such as the Orion Nebula [27]—and are rather cool, reaching a surface temperature of only about 1,000K (730°C; 1,340°F) at their hottest. [28] For millennia, astronomers have followed points of light that seemed to move among the stars. The ancient Greeks named them planets, meaning "wanderers." Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were known in antiquity, and the invention of the telescope added the Asteroid Belt, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and many of these worlds' moons. The dawn of the space age saw dozens of probes launched to explore our system, an adventure that continues today. Moons of solid Solar System bodies have been created by both collisions and capture. Mars's two small moons, Deimos and Phobos, are thought to be captured asteroids. [90] Formation of the Solar System after gas and dust accretion to a protoplanetary disk. The vast majority of this material was created from the primal supernova