Meteoritic Hypothesis

a cosmogonical hypothesis which postulates that the planets and their natural satellites were formed from solid bodies (such bodies in the past were called meteorites irrespective of whether they had fallen to the earth’s surface or not). The term “meteoritic hypothesis” also came to denote hypotheses which conjectured that the planets were formed from solid dust particles. In the meteoritic hypothesis an important role is attributed to inelastic collisions of solid bodies, leading to a decrease in their relative velocities and facilitating their agglomeration into larger bodies. The Kant hypothesis and the Shmidt hypothesis are considered to be meteoritic hypo-theses. However, the term “meteoritic hypothesis” is usually not applied to any modern hypotheses.