Earth

 a giant mass of rock and water flying through space.

 It’s different from the other planets because it supports life and it’s the only safe haven
we have in the universe.
 This is where humans can survive. Earth supplies us with water to drink, food to eat,
and air to breathe.
 It did not exist 5 billion years ago.
 Where the Earth now sits in the outer reaches of the Milky Way galaxy, there was just a
large cloud of gas and dust. This is the astonishing story of what transformed that cloud
of dust into the planet we know today.
Tom Fleming – is an astronomer who understands what it takes to build a planet.

 Using telescopes like these at Kitt Peak in Southern Arizona, astronomers have pieced
together how the Earth was born.
Molecular Clouds- is what scientists call these regions of dust and gas but they are not like the
clouds that we see on Earth.

 Molecular clouds are vast.

 They cover hundreds of light years in size.
 The clouds are made up of the debris of hundreds of dead stars.
 When stars from the early years of the universe burned up their fuel, they exploded and
showered the surrounding space with their ashes.
 Supernova- is what we call when the first generation of stars died, either gently or
explosively in an event.
 Over the next 10 million years, the molecular clouds slowly contract under the force of
its own gravity.
 The large molecular cloud had a small rotation. When it shrank, this rotation speed this
up as the cloud contracts the energy of the material flying in from space causing its
center to heat up.
In March 2003, a light-hearted experiment onboard the International Space Station led to a
significant discovery. Astronaut Don Pettit was curious to see the effects of weightlessness on
different substances. In a series of simple experiments, he filmed bubbles, indigestion tablets,
and swirls of colored water, then filled the plastic bag with salt. This last experiment turned
out to be a scientific revelation.
The person who worked out what it meant was fellow astronaut Stan Lee Love. When he saw
a video of the experiment, love realized that he was witnessing a significant discovery. In zero-
gravity, the crystals behave completely differently from the way they behaved on earth. Love
recognized what was making them stick together. When two different materials rub together,
you can have a few electrons get traded off from one material to another.