The first indication that maybe we were onto something was in the mid 1700s, like the literal exact mid 1700s. Two people independently Laplace, a mathematician, and the philosopher Immanuel Kant came up with what today we call the nebular hypothesis. What they were imagining was that if you had a gas cloud, because there's gas all over the galaxy, how might that happen? So if a gas is kind of rarefied and thin, so you got to sort of collapse it so that it can become solid stuff.
What if the solar system had two suns? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice give a sneak peek into our patron-only Q&As with questions about the three body problem, galaxy formation, the alpha centauri system, and more.
NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/moonmoons-gravitons-and-more/
Thanks to our Patrons Donald Jones, Mohammed Taha Faridi, Jon Barnett, Harmon Dhaliwal, and Sean Griffen for supporting us this week.
Photo Credit: Elmi1966, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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