Breaking Free from the Solar System Prison: How Stars and Planetary Systems Are Born
Today, I would like to start with a very impressive quote I heard from an architect. He said:
“Without signs and symbols, there is no space. Perhaps the universe has never existed until now.”
What does this seemingly cryptic sentence mean? In fact, we have imagined and drawn the universe in many different ways over time. But can you say that the universe you picture in your head and heart truly represents the ‘real universe’?
- The Fake Solar System We Thought We Knew
Let me ask you for a quick favor. Close your eyes and think about the solar system for just 5 seconds. Try to picture what it looks like in your mind.
Chances are, you imagined the typical solar system we easily find when we Google it. It’s a very common scene. A reasonably sized sun sits right in the middle, and the planets are neatly skewered along white orbital lines like cute little Tanghulu (candied fruit skewers).
However, this image of the solar system we commonly think of is just a ‘fake picture,’ completely different from reality and based on our distorted memories and experiences. Strictly speaking, the sizes of the sun and planets shown in such pictures don’t reflect the actual proportions at all.
Moreover, the orbital distances of each planet from the sun also fail to reflect real values. The solar system is an incredibly massive world. If we tried to draw all the celestial bodies of the solar system on a single piece of paper, matching all their exact size and distance ratios, it would be a vast, mostly empty space—making it virtually impossible to draw accurately.
Like this, even the solar system, which we thought we knew so well, is remembered in a strange, highly distorted way. That is why the architect said, “The universe we thought we knew in our heads is actually just a picture reflecting our symbols and signs, different from the real universe.”
- The Prison of Perception Called a Paradigm
Therefore, through this journey across the solar system starting today, I want to help you break free from this prison called a ‘paradigm.’ I want to take you on a trip with the purpose of looking at our home, the solar system, with a different set of eyes—from a more objective, or roughly speaking, ’non-human’ perspective.
I once had a conversation with a professor and heard a very interesting explanation. We usually call the worldview or cosmology that dominates an era a ‘paradigm.’ But if we take a step back, maybe we can explain it like this:
A paradigm is actually “a kind of lie that everyone continues to believe simply because it hasn’t been caught for hundreds of years.” Eventually, when a long time passes, our current paradigm and perception of the universe and this solar system will change drastically again.
In that sense, starting today, even if we cannot completely escape it yet, how about we consider this paradigm as a sort of ‘prison of perception’ that humanity must tear down and move beyond someday?
- Looking at the Universe as a ‘Planetary System’ instead of a ‘Solar System’
As we all know, the solar system is a small world where eight major celestial bodies—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—revolve around the Sun. And we live on this beautiful planet called ‘Earth,’ comfortably situated at the third position.
Until just 20 years ago, humanity thought that our Sun was the only star harboring such planets. But the truth was completely different. In just the past two decades, we have learned that countless stars besides the Sun are embracing their own unique worlds. The number of discovered or inferred exoplanet candidates has easily surpassed ten thousand.
Now that we understand the concept of an exoplanet, we no longer need to view our solar system as a ‘Special One.’ The solar system is, in fact, just one of the countless stars and planetary systems filling the universe—merely ‘one of them.’
So from today on, I ask you to temporarily erase the keyword ‘solar system’ from your mind and look at the universe through a more universal term: ‘Planetary System.’
- How the Stars of the Universe Are Born
Then, through what process are the countless stars and planetary systems in the universe, including our solar system, created? Currently, astronomers have a somewhat clear answer to that secret.
When we look into space, we can see massive, dense clouds of gas and dust clumped together on an enormous scale. We call these gas clouds made of molecules ‘Molecular Clouds.’
![Stars being born inside a massive molecular cloud](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1462331940025-496dfbfc7564?q=80&w=1024&h=512&auto=format&fit=crop