The Dust-Cloud Hypothesis The universe contains huge clouds made up of very large amounts of dustand gas. About 6,000,000,000 (billion) years ago, one of these clouds began to condense. Gravitation--the pull that all objects in the universe have for one another--pulled the gas and dust particles together. As the dust cloud condensed, it began to spin. It spun faster and faster and flattened as it spun. It became shaped like a pancake that is thick at the centre and thin at the edges. The slowly spinning centre condensed to make the sun. But the outer parts of the pancake, or disk, were spinning too