The most widely accepted model, the , was first proposed in the 18th century by Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant, and Pierre-Simon Laplace. It suggests our solar system formed from a massive, rotating cloud of interstellar gas and dust—the solar nebula—that collapsed under its own gravity.
In the cooler outer regions of this disk, dust grains collided and stuck together, eventually growing into planetesimals and then full planets. Old Theories: Catastrophic Encounters The Formation of the Solar System: Theories Old...
Before the Nebular Hypothesis became the standard, other "catastrophic" theories were popular: History of Solar System formation and evolution hypotheses The most widely accepted model, the , was