Why does space have so many planets?

So the first question we have is from Chandler.

How did the planets in our solar system get made?

My name is Ray.

I'm from Encinitas, California, and I'm six years old.

How do planets form?

Hi.

My name is Marin.

I'm nine years old.

I'm from Westfield, Massachusetts.

Where do planets come from?

Yeah.

Chandler asks, and, and, and the other folks are asking a really, really fun, fantastic question.

And part of the reason why it's fun and fantastic is we kinda know the answer, but we don't completely know the answer.

And part of the reason why we don't completely know the answer is because this happened billions of years ago when the solar system formed.

So the, the best model that we have, the best theory that we have is that the sun and the planets formed out of what we call a nebula.

A nebula is just a term for a bunch of gas and stuff.

And about five billion years ago, that nebula for some reason started to collapse.

It was just kind of sitting there, and then parts of it started to collapse.

And then gravity started to take over and stuff got closer and closer and closer, and most of the stuff became the sun.

About 99% of the stuff became the sun.

But some of the other stuff formed a disk around the sun, mostly of rock and ice and dust and gas, and that stuff started to form into the planets a few hundred million years after the sun started to form.

And that disk of stuff, which had millions and millions and millions of chunks in it, billions, tens of billions of chunks, eventually gravity started to pull those pieces together.

Stuff started banging into each other.

And over hundreds of millions of years, the planets in our solar system formed.

But we didn't see this happen.