Look up Newton's Laws of Motion, for starters, get your basics down and move on from there. Eventually you'll get around to understanding energy.
BTW, check out wikipedia's page for these, it's a great source to get started on with its compilation of information.
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Anonymous2008-06-02 18:47
When a spinning nebula collapses under its own gravity (and most nebula are spinning at least a bit), it will tend to do so in a disk shape due to the preservation of angular momentum.
It will also tend to spin faster as it collapses, for the same reason, which in turn will encourage further flattening out.
People just saying ``gravity'' are missing the important bit.
Ok, >>10 has some points. Ever been on a tire swing? You wind yourself up and let yourself go and you spin at an inertial velocity. But what happens when you pull your legs in? Any relavence to this issue, >>10?
in·er·tia Audio Help /ɪnˈɜrʃə, ɪˈnɜr-/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[in-ur-shuh, i-nur-] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun 1. inertness, esp. with regard to effort, motion, action, and the like; inactivity; sluggishness.
2. Physics. a. the property of matter by which it retains its state of rest or its velocity along a straight line so long as it is not acted upon by an external force.
b. an analogous property of a force: electric inertia.
No, dick cheese, it's accretion. A specific phenomena by which sufficiently characteristic groups of matter are attracted to a field that can be described as a function of sufficiently strong gravitational attraction.