HEATING: The temperature of the solar nebula increases as it collapses. As the cloud shrinks, its gravitational potential energy is converted to the kinetic energy of individual gas particles falling inward. … This flattening is a natural consequence of collisions between particles in a spinning cloud. Why does a college education matter? why is college education important.

What happens as a rotating cloud collapses?

And remember that angular momentum is conserved. So if a rotating cloud collapses (r gets smaller) than it must spin faster (v gets bigger). … So as the cloud collapses, material along the spin axis can collapse onto the star, but material in the spin plane has collapse halted by centripetal force. A disk is formed!

What force causes the cloud to flatten out as it spins around the sun?

About 4.5 billion years ago, waves of energy traveling through space pressed clouds of such particles closer together, and gravity caused them to collapse in on themselves and then start to spin, the first steps of how the solar system formed. The spin caused the cloud to flatten into a disk like a pancake.