A crux of astrophysics is answering the question: How did the universe form? Dr. Statia Cook, an astrophysicist and current Columbia professor, offers a closer look at the latest research in her spotlight series lecture. 

How did we get here? How did the universe even form? 

The answer, it seems, largely depends on the information researchers can collect from the impacts between the giant balls of dust and gas floating around in outer space. Think bumper cars, but massive, space edition, and coincidently, also the reason we’re all here on Earth. Dr. Statia Cook—an astrophysicist and professor at Columbia— discussed the origins of our solar system and the formation of planets in her science spotlight lecture, stressing the importance of investigating impacts between space matter and the creation of the solar system. 

How Things Form: 

She began her presentation with stunning pictures of our galaxy and close-up images of space phenomena like other planets, asteroids, and comets. Planets and stars, she explained, form from spinning disks of dust and gas that were brought closer and closer together and merged, due to nuclear fusion at their center. 

One of the main focuses of Dr. Cook’s talk was comets. Comets are essentially rocks flying at such high speeds that a fiery, icy-hot tail follows in a streak behind them. Comets, she explained, are the remnants of this process “frozen in time” after initial planet formation. They are also remnants frozen in time after each planet’s formation. If you study comets over the years, you can also study planet impacts over time. 

Impacts: 

These impacts are essentially huge collisions or explosions of space matter due to things like surrounding planets and gravity. An especially notable impact was Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, a comet that collided into Jupiter in 1994 and was fragmented by the sheer strength of Jupiter’s gravity. Dr. Cook offered an analogy to imagine the collision: a massive dry snowball falling apart, except with TNT-like energy. 

Studying the chemical aftermath of impacts in space points to clues to formation. As the impacts stir up the inner layers, they give researchers a way to research the inner composition of Jupiter. This information gives insight into how the planet was formed and the internal currents of the gas giant. 

Astronomers can study impacts to try and differentiate between the two big ways that planets can form from those spinning clumps of gas and dust: dynamic instability (think: clumps just whoosh into each other) and core accretion (think: clumps slowly gather more matter and get bigger over time). Impacts like these likely created our moon, not to mention lead to the craters that decorate the surface of it today. The importance of these impacts, which exert much more energy than any man-made TNT explosion here on Earth, can help answer some of our most pressing questions about how the universe was formed. 

Jupiter via Bwarchives