If gravity precedes the formation of a solar system, where did the mass come from that caused the gravity? In my class we are studying objects in our solar system and this question seemed to just pop up. And since I cannot answer this, I've been really frustrated for quite a while now and would like some help on understanding this.
The start of it all is usually something called a Giant Molecular Cloud, a particular kind of nebula which is denser than usual and cooler than usual.  A GMC will typically be 10x to 1000x the mass of the Sun.

That mass is enough to cause the outer layers to fall in on the inner parts and the GMC starts to collapse and shrink. (Diffuse though it is, the mass exerts the same force on the outer edges as it would if the entire mass was concentrated at the center.)

The cloud collapses and frequently fragments into a bunch of smaller collapsing blobs centered on especially dense sections of the cloud. At this point it looks a lot like the Oriion Nebula. The young stars light up and blow away the remaining bits of the GMC, and in the end, you have a cluster of young stars with planetary disks looking something like the Pleiades. 

There never was a central mass -- none is needed.  The GMC collapses under its own self-attraction.