What causes nebula to rotate?

As the nebula shrank, gravity increased, causing collapse. As the nebula collapses, clumps of gas collide & merge. • Their random velocities average out into the nebula’s direction of rotation.

Why does a collapsing protostar tend to rotate and flatten?

This increase in rotation rate represents conservation of angular momentum. The rotation of the cloud may have been imperceptibly slow before its collapse began, but the cloud’s shrinkage makes fast rotation inevitable. This flattening is a natural consequence of collisions between particles in a spinning cloud.

Why do molecular clouds spin?

All clouds rotate, at least a little, due to gravitational shearing in the galaxy’s disk. And if a cloud rotates, it has angular momentum: And remember that angular momentum is conserved. So if a rotating cloud collapses (r gets smaller) than it must spin faster (v gets bigger).

What causes Star rotation?

Stars are believed to form as the result of a collapse of a low-temperature cloud of gas and dust. As the cloud collapses, conservation of angular momentum causes any small net rotation of the cloud to increase, forcing the material into a rotating disk.

Why did the spin rate of the solar nebula increase?

Contraction of insterstellar cloud. Solar system formed about 4.6 billion year ago, when gravity pulled together low-density cloud of interstellar gas and dust (called a nebula)(movie). As collapse proceeded, the rotation speed of the cloud was gradually increasing due to conservation of angular momentum.

What direction did the nebula start spinning in?

The Sun formed from material that condensed in the center of the spinning disk. The nebula also began to spin counterclockwise, as it conserved the angular momentum of the material drawn toward the center. This spinning made the material around the center of the condensing nebula flatten out into a disk-like shape.

Why did the nebula spin faster as they shrink or collapse?

As a ball of dust and gas contracts under its own gravity, it begins to shrink and its core begins collapsing faster and faster. This causes the core to heat up and to rotate.

When a nebula collapses inward which processes occur?

4. As the nebula “falls” inward, gravitational potential energy is converted to heat. In the absence of a net torque, the total angular momentum of a system remains constant. As the nebula collapses, clumps of gas collide & merge.

What’s the difference between a molecular cloud and a nebula?

A molecular cloud is an accumulation of interstellar gas and dust. A dark nebula (or dark cloud) is a very dense part of a bigger molecular cloud; the light extinction is caused by the high density and the presence of interstellar dust in these clouds.

What happens when a nebula begins to contract?

As the nebula contracts, whatever initial tumbling/rotational motion is increased to conserve angular momentum (just like when a spinning figure skater brings in their arms). The nebula flattens into a disk. Gravitational contraction also causes the pressure to increase which causes the cloud to heat up.

What happens to the shape of a nebula as it contracts and spins faster?

What happens to the shape of a nebula as it contracts and spins faster? As a nebular contracts and spins faster it flattens out into a disc.