National geographic biography earth science

We live on Earth’s hard, rocky surface, breathe the air that surrounds the planet, drink the water that falls from the sky, and eat the food that grows in the soil.

But Earth did not always exist within this expansive universe, and it was not always a hospitable haven for life.

Billions of years ago, Earth, along with the rest of our solar system, was entirely unrecognizable, existing only as an enormous cloud of dust and gas.

Eventually, a mysterious occurrence—one that even the world’s foremost scientists have yet been unable to determine—created a disturbance in that dust cloud, setting forth a string of events that would lead to the formation of life as we know it.

National geographic biography earth science

One common belief among scientists is that a distant star collapsed, creating a supernova explosion, which disrupted the dust cloud and caused it to pull together. This formed a spinning disc of gas and dust, known as a solar nebula.

The faster the cloud spun, the more the dust and gas became con