how was the earth created?

Question: how was the earth created?
- Keywords:
  begin,
  create,
  earth,
  world
Asked by embmay to Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley, Sara on 23 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by jordant, maranna1997.
- Drew Rae answered on 20 Jun 2011:
  
  The earth wasn’t actually created as such. Originally the solar system was just a cloud of particles, clustered due to the gravity between all the particles. Those particles pulled together into clumps, and the whole thing started spinning because the distance between the particles wasn’t perfectly balanced. As things started clumping more, the spinning sped up (like when you are spinning and pull your arms in). The earth was one of the clumps.
- Julia Griffen answered on 20 Jun 2011:
  
  Not so much created as Drew says… but the earth has come into exsistence and evolved its own eco systems and environement.. We could go along the theory of the big bang.. there has been loads of questions on here.. worth a read through! 🙂
- Sara Imari Walker answered on 23 Jun 2011:
  
  Hello embmay, jordant, and maranna!! This is a really cool story =)
  
  The first and really important thing is that Earth couldn’t have formed in the very early in the history of the universe. All of the heavy elements (anything with higher atomic number than Hydrogen and Helium) are made in the interior of stars!!! So, a few generations of stellar birth and death had to go by before there were sufficient heavier elements, like carbon, iron, oxygen etc. to make planets like Earth!
  
  When a star explodes it ejects all of this good stuff into space, contributing to massive clouds of dust and gas in interstellar space. These clouds can collapse from their own gravity to form new stars and eventually planets! The formation process is exactly as Drew described – small clumps formed first and then they got bigger and bigger!! The Earth formed along with all the other planets, as our Sun was forming from such a cloud. The early solar system was a very turbulent place as this all worked itself out. In fact our moon formed by a giant impact of a Mars sized rock with the proto-Earth. A huge amount of material was ejected and formed the Moon!! If you can watch it, this is a really great video of the whole story I just described on the formation of the Earth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mcC8kFacrk