# Metal distribution in our solar system

The sun dominates in our solar system.
I wonder whether in every aspect the sun plays the most important role in our system.

For example, all kinds of metals are mainly located in the sun instead of the rest combined together in our system?

Is there any complementary relation between the sun and its children (all the planets, asteroids etc..)?
I mean: for one kind of metal, if the sun has more, her children should have less.

According to Abundance in the Sun of the elements, at least Li and Tb abundance of the sun are very low ($\approx1e-8$). Furthermore, these abundances are from the solar atmosphere which is near the surface of the sun.

• The sun dominates our solar system by mass. For the z-component of angular momentum for example, this is not true. – AtmosphericPrisonEscape Dec 31 '17 at 15:44

1. The metal content of the Solar system is completely dominated by the Sun. The Sun contains $\sim1\%$ of 'metals' (in astronomical language anything but hydrogen and helium is a 'metal'), but all the other bodies of the Solar system combined have less mass than that. So even if they were only made of metals (but the outer planets are mostly made of H and He) the Sun would still dominate the metal budget.

2. The Sun does not dominate the angular momentum of the Solar system, which is dominated by the orbital angular momentum of Jupiter. The angular momentum due to the spin of the Sun is rather modest. This is easy to estimate: the orbital angular momentum of a planet is $\sim m\sqrt{GM_\odot a}$ which increases with semi-major axis $a$, while the spin of the Sun contributes $\beta \omega M_\odot R_\odot^2$ with $\omega$ the Solar spin frequency, $R_\odot$ the Solar radius, and $\beta\sim0.1$ a factor depending on the inner structure of the Sun. The ratio of the latter to the former is $$\beta \frac{M_\odot}{m} \frac{R_\odot^2}{a^2} \frac{\omega}{\Omega} \sim0.01$$ For Jupiter, the first factor is $\sim10^3$, the second $\sim10^{-6}$, and the third $\sim180$ is the ratio of the Solar spin frequency (once in 25 days) to the orbital frequency $\Omega=\sqrt{GM_\odot/a^3}$ of Jupiter (once in 12 years).

• could you please give a reference about the first question? – questionhang Sep 12 '14 at 10:10
• The Sun's angular momentum about the solar system barycenter is also a lot smaller. While it's mass is ~1000x larger than that of Jupiter's, both it's velocity and distance are each ~1000x smaller than that of Jupiter's, resulting in an orbital angular momentum that's roughly 1E-03 that of Jupiter, although it varies a lot depending mostly on the positions of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. – uhoh Dec 31 '17 at 9:24

The Sun currently accounts for more than 99.86% of the mass of the Solar System. Based on spectrographic estimates of the composition of the sun and it's centrifugal position and the mass of metals, you can deduce it also contains the most of all kinds of metals.

Here is an example to illustrate:

• The milky way contains roughly 0.00011% of $\mathrm{Fe}$ (1.1ppm).
• The sun contains roughly 0.1% of $\mathrm{Fe}$, it contains about 333 earth masses of $\mathrm{Fe}$.
• The planets combined weigh about 500 earth masses.
• The sun contains only about 3% of our planet's weight of gold.
• The sun contains about 30% of our planet's weight of platinum.
• If you have time to do the maths, I think you will find here the same is true for other metals.

The best thing to do is probably to compare graphs of elemental abundance of the earth, and of the sun, and multiply by weight, as the earth contains alot of heavy elements compared to further away planets.

It is estimated that the mass of average new born star is between 1 and 10% of baryonic elements held in a surrounding dust cloud that later forms an accretion disc.

It's my understanding that 90+ percent of the accretion disk falls into the star, depending on the star's mass compared to that of the cloud, and the rest of the metals and other elements have time to condensate into ice and asteroids and planets. I am told that about 1 percent of our solar system's composition was originally held in the dust cloud, and 99% was in the sun.

Currently, the elements in our solar system measure no more than 500 earth masses in all the planets and the Oort cloud. And the sun is 330 000 earth masses.

This means that less than 0.15 of the solar system currently lies outside of the sun. The other 85 or 850% of the original accretion disk with all it's metals must have fallen into the sun, if we follow the rule that, 1 to 10% of a new born star is found in it's surrounding dust cloud.

Here is a list of elemental abundance for our galaxy and our solar system that is fairly interesting, I didn't find more precise figures.

• For every kind of element, the sun dominates in the solar system? – questionhang Oct 3 '15 at 10:47
• I'd say that is certainly true, every element is most present in the sun by mass, because the sun is 99.8 percent of the mass of the system and contains all the heaviest and lightest elements. by percentage, other planets contain higher abundances than the sun of of elements depending on theid distance from sun. everything heavy is at the centre, and 90 percent of the light stuff also is in the sun at least, if a planet contained 50 pc copper and the sun contained .1 percent, the sun would still contain more than the planet. – aliential Apr 2 '16 at 4:29
• @comprehensible Well it depends on how pedantic you want to be. For example, about three times in 2006, for a few milliseconds each, our 1 atom of ununoctium probably dominated the solar system's ununoctium content, if not most of the observable universe's. – Jason C Sep 29 '16 at 0:54
• @questionhang It's possible that the sun's internal gamma rays and heat aren't very-heavy-element friendly due to photodisintegration. I'm not 100% sure if that's so, but for elements heavier than lead the sun might be quite low in them. I asked that question here: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/188748/… Working out the answer is a bit over my pay-grade. – userLTK Dec 30 '17 at 22:02

The metals that are forming in the sun come from nuclear fusion. Everything that now exists in the sun's body came from hydrogen, which due to high temperatures is being fused into helium and helium to lithium and so on. Once hydrogen is over, that means the start of the sun's death, where the sun will shrink (meaning temperature increase) and will start expanding again and the helium will continue to be used as a fuel and there is gonna be a point were all hydrogen and helium from the core will go, due to fusion, and the sun is gonna be cool so no further fusion will occur. Eventually what will be left is a planetary nebula with a white dwarf.