What was it like when planet Earth first formed?
<p>A little over 4.5 billion years ago, the seeds for planet Earth were put in place, right as the earliest parts of our Solar System began to form. Somewhere in the Milky Way, a large cloud of gas collapsed, giving rise to thousands of new stars and star systems, each one unique from all the others. Some stars were much more massive than our Sun; most were much smaller and lower in mass. About half came with multiple stars in their systems; about half the stars formed all by their lonesome, like ours did. As these proto-stars collapsed and cooled, the temperatures and densities rose in their cores. After crossing the threshold for nuclear fusion to ignite, <a href="https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/when-sun-born/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">our parent star, the Sun, was officially “born” as a living star</a>.</p>
<p>But these newborn stars weren’t alone. Around practically every one of them, a large amount of matter had coalesced into a disk. Known as protoplanetary disks, these would be the starting points for each and every one of the planets that would eventually, stably form around these stars. With the advances in telescope technology that’s accompanied the past few decades, </p>
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