The Dust-Cloud Hypothesis

The universe contains huge clouds made up of very large amounts of

dust and gas. About 6,000,000,000 (billion) years ago, one of these
clouds began to condense. Gravitation--the pull that all objects in
the universe have for one another--pulled the gas and dust particles
together. As the dust cloud condensed, it began to spin. It spun
faster and faster and flattened as it spun. It became shaped like a
pancake; that is thick at the center and thin at the edges.

The slowly spinning center condensed to make the sun. But the outer
parts of the pancake, or disk, were spinning too fast to condense in
one piece. They broke up into smaller swirls, or eddies, which
condensed separately to make the planets. The forming sun and
planets were made up mostly of gas. They contained much more gas
than dust. The earth was far bigger than it is now and probably
weighed 500 times as much. The large body of dust and gas forming
the sun collapsed rapidly to a much smaller size. The pressure that
resulted from the collapse caused the sun to become very hot and to
glow brightly. The newly born sun began to heat up the swirling eddy
of gas and dust that was to become the earth. The gas expanded, and
some of it flowed away into space. The dust that remained behind
then collected together because of gravity.

Although the shrinking earth generated a lot of heat, most of this

heat was lost into space. Therefore, the original earth was most
likely solid, not molten. This hypothesis was developed by a
scientist, Harold C. Urey in 1952. It is also known as the Urey's
hypothesis. He showed that methane, ammonia, and water are the
stable forms of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen if an excess of
hydrogen is present. Cosmic dust clouds, from which the earth
formed, contained a great excess of hydrogen.