ASTR 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Lithosphere, Methane Clathrate, Copernican Revolution
Document Summary
Explore the solar system: thanks to understanding of gravity, progress of technology. Planets: mercury, venus, earth (and its moon), mars, jupiter and saturn: ancient astronomers did not know about uranus and neptune. protoplanets steadily accreted mass till they reached the sizes we see today: pattern zero: almost all of the matter in the solar system 99. 8% of it is in the. Red regions: low density of gas and dust. Why are the jovian planets so much larger than terrestrial planets: accretion process steadily build, farther away from the sun, much more common hydrogen compounds were able to condense freeze into solid, planet-building material. Io: stays molten internally because of tidal heating, significantly more elliptical orbit than most of jupiter"s large moons. Io sometimes closer and farther about from jupiter: jupiter squeezes io, tidal heating provides enough heat to keep tectonic processes active on.
