Re: mars and venus

[Stephen Murray <murray8@LLNL.GOV>]

...
> I think the early spinning gases and dust were revolving collectively
> with similar angular velocities rather than similar angular momenta.
> Hence the inner stuff had less angular momentum than the outer stuff
> (L = mr^2w, w=omega=angular velocity).
...
> Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.              Phone/voice-mail:       419-358-3270

In the standard picture of the formation of the Solar System, most of the
mass is concentrated into the center, in the proto-Sun, while most of the
angular momentum is contained in a low-mass disk of material around it.
Initially, the disk consists of gas and dust, and later of protoplanets and
remnant icy/rocky debris.  Because most of the mass is in the proto-Sun,
the material in the disk follows Keplerian orbits, for which the angular
velocity, w, decreases with increasing orbital radius as w~1/R^(3/2) (~ is
my best ASCII approximation to "proportional to").  The specific orbital
angular momentum (the orbital angular momentum per unit mass, which avoids
confusion between comparing objects of different masses, and so gets more
quickly to orbital speeds), which I'll call l to avoid confusion with your
upper case L, is l~sqrt(R).  So, although both the orbital speeds and
angular velocities of objects further from the proto-Sun decreases towards
larger orbital radii, the specific orbital angular momentum does increase,
only not as rapidly as you thought.

===============================================
  Stephen D. Murray
  Physicist, A Division
  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
  phone: (925) 423-9382   FAX:    (925) 423-0925
  email: sdmurray@llnl.gov
  web page: http://members.home.com/murraysj/
===============================================