The follow-up to last episode, this one deals with Tom Van Flandern’s idea that Mars was a moon of an exploded planet that formed the asteroid belt 65 million years ago. So, last episode was basic science, this one gets back to some of those wacky and wonky ideas. Oh yeah … and lots of Coast to Coast clips!
I also spend around 10 minutes discussing feedback from the last episode.
Stuart, you didn’t address my questions from Part 1 pertaining to mass calculations. If a planet exploded, how much would remain as identifiable debris, how much would have left the solar system, how much would have completely disintegrated, what about all the irregular satellites of Saturn?
In an effort to rap up another episode of Stuart debunks stupid theories – your conclusions that the matter of the asteroid belt not being the remains of an exploded planet are incomplete and premature.
Comment by Juice — April 9, 2012 @ 3:18 am |
All of the corroborating evidence that Stuart reviewed points to no existence of any exploded planet. Essentially, you’re asking him to calculate a fictional value.
The burden of proof is on those claiming the “exploded planet” hypothesis to demonstrate that Saturn’s smaller moons and other such debris were once part of a single body. Furthermore, the burden is on them to calculate the mass of this planet.
Seeing how recent observational data is showing that the universe is replete with planetary systems, it seems odd that, throughout the history of astronomy, not one exploding planet has been observed. Surely such explosions would produce enough heat or light to be detected against the dark of space. Even if the odds of a planet exploding were one in a million, that would be sufficient odds for exploding planets to be regularly observed.
Comment by 1000 Needles — April 9, 2012 @ 1:19 pm |
Regarding your first two paragraphs: The burden of proof is on Stuart as he chose this topic to debunk the possibility of the asteroid belt being the remains of an exploded planet. And in fact in the comments section of Part I, he wrote to my above questions: “I will address this in the next episode.”
Yet he did not address this, as promised. He did mass calculations in Part 1, yet he left out all the 38 irregular satellites of Saturn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Saturn
“The remaining thirty-eight, all small except one, are irregular satellites, whose orbits are much farther from Saturn, have high inclinations, and are mixed between prograde and retrograde. These moons are probably captured minor planets, or debris from the breakup of such bodies after they were captured, creating collisional families”
Perhaps he got tired or perhaps the truth would interfere with his premature & therefore unscientific conclusion that the asteroid belt originated from …… uh, I see, he does not know how the asteroid belt originated but he somehow knows, based on incomplete, aka erroneous mass calculations, that the asteroid belt was not at one time, a planet.
Regarding no exploding planets have been observed to date: The ‘theory’ behind the planet in our solar sytem having blown up is related to activities of war, not a planet imploding due to natural causes, unless one includes man’s greed for power as part of nature.
Comment by Juice — April 9, 2012 @ 6:03 pm
Juice/Bruce, I did address what you asked. The mass of the irregular satellites barely equals the mass of one regular one, let alone 20 Earth masses. In your comment to the last episode, you did not ask anything about fractions that would be disintegrated or left the solar system. And, dynamically, debris from an explosion would be very difficult to get into a captured orbit, even one that the irregular satellites follow.
And you are incorrect, or you are using someone else’s ideas of exploding planets. Van Flandern had a specific reason that had nothing to do with wars. I’m guessing you’re referring to Meier’s writings on “Malona,” instead.
Comment by Stuart Robbins — April 9, 2012 @ 6:15 pm
fwiw – wordpress is a pain in the ass with signing in & losing signins all the time
Stuart, I don’t see where you answered but if you did, I apologize.
My previous question was – “Stuart, in your mass/volume calculation you haven’t included Saturns adonids or irregular satellites as possible captured debris, nor have you done any work on percentages of remaining solid matter/material after explosions.”
You wrote – “debris from an explosion would be very difficult to get into a captured orbit, even one that the irregular satellites follow” …. if that is true, how much of the debris would leave the solar system & how much would be trapped in an orbit around the sun?
Also, what is the cause/origin of the asteroid belt if not an explosion/implosion of a planetary body or some collision between 2 or more bodies?
Comment by Juice — April 11, 2012 @ 9:16 am |
Stuart,
Regarding your reasoning – “Why It’s Not an Exploded Planet: Mass” – that the asteroid belt could not have been an exploded planet because the mass is too small:
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge133/reading/asteroids.pdf
“Computer simulations suggest that the original asteroid belt may have contained mass equivalent to the Earth. Primarily because of gravitational perturbations, most of the material was ejected from the belt within about a million years of formation, leaving behind less than 0.1% of the original mass.”
Comment by Juice — April 27, 2012 @ 2:44 am |
Bruce, I thought that I addressed this point, but maybe I missed it. I think you have a misunderstanding of the difference between how much mass needed to be in a position of the solar nebula versus the amount of mass that can be turned into a planet. There’s also a disconnect there between your would-be planet and what’s claimed by Van Flandern.
To put it succinctly, not all the mass in a “feeding zone” is turned into a planet, and a planet’s feeding zone does not extend throughout the entire range of the asteroid belt. Similarly, if a lot of planetesimals form throughout a region, those also will not all aggregate into a single planet, especially in a region so vast as the original asteroid belt, which may have extended between 1.5 and 5.2 A.Us. Barring gravitational influences from other things, that range is large enough to easily have produced several terrestrial-type planets that would be perfectly happy coexisting (just look at Mercury through Mars within a range of only 1.2 A.U.).
Even given that, though, we’re still not talking about nearly enough material to form a gas giant-sized planet with a mass several 10s that of Earth, of which Mars could have been a moon.
Comment by Stuart Robbins — April 28, 2012 @ 8:15 pm |
Stuart,
I am not talking about origination of the asteroid belt, assuming it formed from the primordial solar nebula. The point being that if the asteroid belt was an exploded planet, per that link http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge133/reading/asteroids.pdf it could/would have originally contained a mass equivalent to Earth.
Assuming the asteroid belt was an exploded planet, I don’t know the percentages of mass that would remain conglomerated as the rock material found in the asteroid belt as asteroids. Certainly a certain percentage of the mass, say water, sand, loose soil, etc., would be ejected and essentially lost forever. Do you have any idea how much mass would be retained as planetary rock bodies and how much would essentially be turned to dust & basically lost in space?
Sorry for the 101 scientific phrasing but thus is the nature of your blog, to speak with and educate those of us not well versed in science or scientific lingo & thought, as well as those more versed in such matters..
Comment by Juice — April 29, 2012 @ 5:02 am
There’s really no way to tell, as it depends fully upon how the explosion happened and the mechanics of it as it progressed. If it were an explosion like you’d see in Star Trek where everything is “vaporized,” then you wouldn’t have any large objects left. If it were like the Death Star’s aftermath, then apparently you’d get a rocky debris field. If it were like the Xindi superweapon in a Star Trek series-that-shall-not-be-named, then you would be left with very large chunks of material, though you’d still have the differentiation issue.
Meanwhile, if it were a “very” powerful internal explosion like Van Flandern was saying, then he literally was saying that the debris would be blasted across the solar system so there’s no way you’d have a sizable asteroid belt left from an Earth-like original mass. You also would probably be hard-pressed to get any of the debris on a stable, circular orbit where the original planet was — the dynamics don’t really work out for that.
Comment by Stuart Robbins — April 29, 2012 @ 12:27 pm
Great episode, very interesting. I’d not heard of Tom Van Flandern before, but by some strange co-incidence while hunting for pre ‘Face-on-Mars’ articles by Richard Hoagland that had appeared in Analog magazine I stumbled across an article entitled “And Then There Were Nine” by Trudy Bell in the June 1977 issue of Analog which covered an early version of the Van Flandern hypothesis.
Two specific claims in it (And I do not believe them for a second) are, that all comets were created by the explosion and that their orbits could be calculated (By what seems like cherry-picking) to converge at 2.8 au and secondly that the lunar rilles were created by water after the Moon was blasted with polar ice from the exploded planet!
Comment by Graham — June 9, 2012 @ 2:18 am |