Jeffrey J Wolynski said:
we must remember that the stars (Earth, Venus, Moon, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Mars, etc.) did not always revolve around the Sun.

I find the idea of the Sun "capturing" the other members of the solar system to be intriguing.

 

I used to think that it was absolutely impossible. The reason was that in the gravitational model, a stable orbit lasting more than just a handful of revolutions requires a near-perfect balance of centripetal and centrifugal forces. So something coming in from outside of the solar system would then need some sort of braking force, to alter its path, leaving it in a perfect orbit. First, what could provide that force? It's possible that a collision could do this, like the strategy in the sport of curling, where you try to get your stone to knock their stone out of the way, leaving yours right there in the bull's-eye. But I'm of the opinion that collisions at interstellar speeds pretty much disintegrate everything involved. Second, even if a collision provides the braking force, the chance of a collision is slight anyway, and then the chance of a perfect collision is too slight to consider. Possible? Yes. Reasonable? No.

 

But then I kept working through it, and I realized that the objects in a stellar system are like Debye cells, which distribute themselves at specific distances. When you have a charged body and an oppositely charged atmosphere, the whole thing is net neutral, and tends not to interact electrically with its environment. (This is why Langmuir called it plasma — it wraps itself around the foreign body, or oppositely charged body in our case, and insulates it from the surrounding matter.) But Feynman and later Pollack found that there IS a little bit of an interaction, called the "like-likes-like" effect. If the body is negatively charged, and the surrounding plasma is positively charged, the two together are net neutral. But between two of these neutral cells, there will be a concentration of positive plasma, attracted to the combined negative field in-between the two bodies. The equal-but-opposite force will be the attraction of the negative bodies to that concentration of positive plasma. Thus the negative bodies will appear to be attracted to each other (when really, they're attracted to the shared positive charge.) Feynman believed that this is the force that binds atoms together into molecules, where neutral atoms "shouldn't" interact electrically with anything else, but the mutual attraction to shared electrons forms a structure. Pollack went on to find structures in organic chemistry, where ionized or polarized molecules set up regions of opposite charges.

 

I then applied the same principle to larger structures, asserting that a body force between Debye cells out in space is responsible for the collapse of a dusty plasma into stars. (No CDM required!)

 

Then, the same principle can be applied at the next higher level, to set distances between the members of a stellar system. Celestial bodies are negatively charged, surrounded by positive plasma. So there is a net force attracting such negative bodies to their shared positive interplanetary medium. But note that the "like-likes-like" effect is attractive only up to a point. If the negative bodies get too close together, and all of the intervening positive plasma is squeezed out, the net force is repulsive. This is why the "like-likes-like" effect doesn't cause atoms to fuse together into heavier atoms. When they get too close together, the electron shells fail, and there is only the repulsion of like-charged nuclei, and the Coulomb barrier prevents fusion. At the scale of the solar system, this means that the bodies will seek regular separations between each other. The implication is that the orbits don't have to be perfect in order to stabilize — they could be a little bit off, and the "like-likes-like" effect could take hold, pulling things together if they're too far apart, and pushing them apart is they're too close.

 

(Another implication is that a subtle electrostatic force, in this kind of configuration, would act exactly like gravity, though there might be discrepancies due to varying degrees of ionization, which Newtonian mechanics will never explain.)

 

Still, I think that the "like-likes-like" effect will be subtle at the celestial scale, and the chance of this being a strong enough force to be able to capture a rogue body is slight. So for the time being, I'm going with the basic idea that everything in the solar system collapsed from the same dusty plasma, in more-or-less the same event. Stuff that didn't have enough angular momentum fell into the Sun — stuff that had too much got flung out into the Kuiper Belt — and the very small amount of stuff that had a nearly perfect degree of momentum fell into stable orbits, with the help of the "like-likes-like" effect.