The night has a 1000 eyes and the day but one.
F. W. Bourdillon
The Night Has a 1000 Eyes
Sizing Up the Planets
Note: an unwanted line of unknown origin has inserted itself in front of some of the headings, underlining sometimes occurs where it is not supposed to be, links to the sections do not work, and gaps appear in some of the text which are technical problems unable to be fixed at least for now.
Introduction
Planets: a History
Long List
Short List
Cosmogony
Planetary Classification
Minor Bodies-Moons-Stats
Stelloids
Conclusion
References
Vote for Definitions
Extra Essays on Related Topics
Author Profile
Summary
A comprehensive, systematic, and analytical examination of the possible and viable scientific definitions for planet is presented. A brief history of the word planet is also presented. A long list of meanings for planets is included which is then reduced to a short list and grouped into 5 circumscriptions with points for and against discussed. These groups are A, any directly circumsolar body, B, based on a decimal system starting at 1 meter, Ca, one having gravity support and control, Cb, one having hydrostatic equilibrium, D, having central pressure causing higher density in compressed over uncompressed materials, and E, the equivalent of major planet in C, with C and E being the most important ones. In the C group the lower limit is probably around 1 km.(.6 mi.) diam. and E (exponent) 12 kilos mass and major and minor planets are recognized in it, with 2 subgrades in the former, giants and subgiants, and 2 in the latter, dwarfs and subdwarfs. In the E group the lower limit is about 3000 kms., mass around E22. Pluto, Eris, and EL61 are minor planets in C and are planetoids in E, and planetoids include both asteroids and TNOs (Trans-Neptunian Objects). Comets are not separate from asteroids or TNOs because they are a special and temporary type of these. As satellite means a smaller body orbiting a larger one, recognized here are 4 types: primary (certain companion stars), secondary (planets, planetoids, and meteoroids), tertiary (moons and submoons), and quaternary (submoons around moons, as in the rings of Rhea). The Titius-Bode progression is considered an artifact and an original 12 planets are postulated, having fissioned from the sun in pairs, with 2 being in what is now the Main Belt and 2 in what is now the Kuiper Belt, and 2 others missing and having been twinned with Jupiter and Saturn, with Mars and Mercury as former moons. A classification for planets and celestial bodies in general, a definition and classification for moon, meteoroid sizes and masses, and a definition for star are also presented and a new name, stelloids, designating stars, neutron dwarfs, grey dwarfs, white dwarfs, planetary and SNR (supernova remnant) nebulas, and black holes, is introduced, and brown dwarfs are considered to be stars.
Sommaire
Un examen compréhensif, systématique, et analytique des définitions scientifiques possibles et viables de "planète" est présenté. Un bref historique du mot "planète"est aussi présenté. Une longue liste de la vingtaine des significations de planète est incluse en premier, qui est par après réduite à une brève liste et regroupée en définitions majeures avec les points pour et contre discutés. Ces groupes sont A, un corps directement circumsolaire, B, basé sur un système décimal commençant avec le mètre, Ca, un avec support et controle gravitationnel, Cb, un qui possède l'équilibre hydrostatique, D, qui possède une pression centrale causant une plus grande densité des matériaux comprimés que non-comprimés, et E, l'équivalent de planète majeure dans C, C et E étant les plus importants. Les points prinicipaux sont: dans C la limite inférieure est de 1 km. de diam (.6 miles) et les planètes majeures et mineures sont reconnues, avec 2 sous-grades dans le premier grade, géants et sous-géants, et 2 dans le deuxième, naines et sous-naines; Pluton, Sedna, et Eris ne sont pas des planètes majeures dans C et sont des planetoides dans E; les comètes ne sont pas apart des astéroides et des OTN (objets trans-neptuniens) car ils sont une catégorie spéciale et temporaire de ceux-là. Les satellites étant des corps qui orbitent des corps de masse supérieure sont répartis en 4 catégories: primaire (certaines étoiles partenaires), secondaire (planètes et metéoroides), tertiaire (lunes et sous-lunes), et quaternaire (les anneaux autour de lunes, comme chez Rhea). La progression Titius-Bode est considerée comme artificielle et un système de 12 planètes originales est postulé, ayant fissionées du soleil, avec 2 jumelées dans ce qui est maintenant la Ceinture de Kuiper et 2 dans la Ceinture Principale et 2 autres manquantes qui étaient jumelées à Jupiter et Saturne avec Mars et Mercure étant des ex-lunes, les autres jumeaux étant Venus-Terre et Uranus-Neptune. Une définition et classification pour lune, une classification pour les grandeurs et masses des metéoroides, une classification pour les planètes et corps célestes en général, et une définition pour "étoile" sont aussi présentées. Un nouveau mot est introduit, qui est stelloides, désignant les étoiles, nains à neutrons, nains gris et blancs, nébuleuses planétaires et de vestiges de supernovas, et trous noirs. Les naines brunes sont ici considerées commes des étoiles.
Sommario
Un esame comprensivo, sistematico, e analitico delle definizioni possibili e viabli scientifiche di “pianeta” é presentato. Una historia breve di la parole “pianeta” e presentata anche. Una lunga lista delle significazioni di pianeta è inclusa, che è poi reduta a una lista breve e ragrupparati in 5 definizioni con punti per e contra discutiti. Questi gruppi sono: A, un corpo direttamente circosolare, B, basato su un sistema decimale partendo con il metro, Ca, un con appoggio gravitazionale, Cb, un che ha il equilibrio hidrostatico, D, che ha un pressione centrale causando una piu gran densità dei materiali compressi che non-compressi, et E, il equivalente di pianeta maggiore in C. C e E sono i piu importante. I punti maggiori sono: il gruppo C ha la limite bassa a 1 chm. di diam. e una massa di E12 (un trillione) chg. e pianeti maggiori e minori (pianetini) sono reconosciuti, con giganti e sotto-giganti in il primero grado e nani e sotto-nani in il secondo; Plutone, Eris, Sedna, e EL61 non sono pianeti maggiori e sono, come gli asteroidi, planetoidi en E; le comete non sono separate degli asteroidi perchè sono un tipo speciale e temporaneo di alcuni asteroidi. Come i satelliti sono corpi meno gran che orbitano altorno di corpi piu grandi, 4 tipi sono riconosciuti: primario (alcuni stelle compagni), secondario (pianeti e meteoroidi), terso (lune e sotto-lune), e quaternario (sotto-lune che girano altorno delle lune, per esempio, il anello di Rhea). La progressione Titius-Bode è considerata artificiale e un sistema di 12 pianeti è proposto di essere la configurazione originale, avente fissionati del sole, con 2 essendo in che è adesso il Cinto Principale e due in che è adesso il Cinto di Kuiper e 2 altri mancanti avendo stato gemellati con Giove e Saturno con Mercurio e Marte essendo lune nel passato. Una definizione e classificazione per le lune, per i meteoroidi e le loro grandezze e masse, una classificazione per i pianeti e corpi cilesti in genere, e una definizione per “stella” sono presentate anche. Una nuova parole , “stelloidi”, designando stelle, nani neutrone, nani grigi, nani bianchi, nebulose pianetare e di resti di supernova, e buchi neri, e introdotto. Nane brune sono considerate stelle.
Sumario
Un examen comprensivo, sistemático, y analítico de las definiciones possibles y viables científicas de "planeta" es presentado. Una historia breve de la palabra planeta es presentada también. Una lista larga de las significaciones de planeta es incluyendo, que es entonces reducida a una lista breve y agrupada en 5 definiciones con puntos para y contra discutidos. Estos grupos son A, un cuerpo directamente cercosolare, B, basada sobre un sistema decimal empiezando con il metro, Ca, un con apoyo gravitacional, Cb, un que tiene el equilibrio hidrostático, C, que tiene un presión central causando un más grande densidad de los materiales compressos que non-compressos, y E, el equivalente de planeta mayor en C. C y E son los mas importantes. Los puntos mayores son: el grupo C ha la límite baja de 1 km. de diam. y una masa de E12 (un trillion) kilos y planetas mayores y menores son reconocidos, con gigantes y sub-gigantes en el primero grado y enanas y sub-enanas en el segundo; Pluton, Eris, Sedna, y EL61 no son planetas mayores; los cometas no son separados de los asteroides porqué son un tipo especial y transitorio de algunos asteroides. Como satélites son cuerpos menos grandes que giran en torno a los cuerpos más grandes, 4 tipos son reconocidos que son: primario (algunas estrellas compañeros), secundario (planetas y meteoroides), terciario (lunas y sublunas), y cuaternario (sublunas que orbitan alrededor de lunas, por ejemplo, el anillo de Rhea). La progresión Titius-Bode es considerada artificial y un sistema de 12 planetas es propuesto como la configuración original con 2 estando en que son ahora el Cinturón Principal y dos en que es ahora el Cinturón de Kuiper y dos otras extraviadas habiendo estadas gemeladas con Júpiter y Saturno con Mercurio y Marte estando lunas en el pasado. Una definición y clasificación para las lunas y para los meteoroides y sus grandezas y masas, una clasificación para los planetas y cuerpos celestes en general, una definición para estrella son presentadas también y una palabra nueva, estrelloides, designando estrellas, enanos neutrones, enanos grises, enanos blancos, nebulosas planetarias y de restos de supernova, y huecos negros, es introducido. Enanas morenas son consideradas estrellas y más expresamente son sub-enanas rojas.
Resumo
Um exame compreensivo, sistemático, e analítico das definições possíveles e viáveles científicas de "planeta" é presentado. Uma historia breve de a palavra planeta é presentada também. Uma lista longo das significações de planeta é incluendo, que é em seguida reduzida a uma lista breve e agrupada em 5 definições maiores com pontos para e contra discutidos. Estos grupos são A, um corpo diretamente circunsolar, B, basado sobre un sistema decimal 1 m, Ca, um com apoio gravitacional, Cb, um que tem o equilíbrio hidrostático, D, que tem um pressão central causando um mais grande densidade dos materiales compressos que non-compressos, e E, o equivalente de planeta maior em C. C e E são os mais importantes. Os pontos maiores são: o grupo C a 1 qm. de diam. e uma massa de E12 (um trilhão) quilos; planetas maiores e menores são reconhecidos, com gigantes e sub-gigantes em o primero grau e anãs e sub-anãs em o segundo; Pluton, Eris, Sedna, e EL61 não são planetas maiores; os cometas não são separados dos asteroides porquê são um tipo especial e transitório de alguns asteroides. Como satélites são corpos menos grandes que voltam em torno a os corpos mais grandes, 4 tipos são reconhecidos que são: primario (algumas estrelhas companheiros), segundario (planetas e meteoroides), terciario (lunas e sublunas), e quaternario (sublunas que orbitam ao redor de lunas, por exemplo, o círculo de Rhea). A progressão Titius-Bode é considerada artificial e um sistema de 12 planetas é proposto como a comfiguraçao original com 2 estando em que é agora o Cinto Principal e dois em que são agora o Cinto de Kuiper e dois outras extraviadas havendo estadas gémeladas com Júpiter e Saturno com Mercúrio e Marte estando lunas no pasado. Uma definição e classificação para as lunas e para os meteoroides e seus grandezas e massas, uma classificaçao para os planetas e corpos celestes em geral, e uma definição para estrela são presentadas também e uma nova palavra, estreloides, designando estrelas, anaos neutrones, anãos pardos, anãos brancos, nebulosas planetarias e de restos de supernova, e buracos pretos, é introduzido. Anãs morenas são consideradas estrelas.
Introduction and Historical Overview
Glossary
satellites - smaller body revolving around a larger one; primary satellites are stelloid companions, secondary ones revolve around
stelloids; tertiaries are indirectly circumsolar and of the1st order, quaternaries are indirectly circumsolar and of the 2nd order
(e.g., rings around Rhea)
meteoroid- secondary satellite whose motions are contolled by gas drag instead of gravity, which is held up by mechanical forces
and chemical bonds instead of gravity, and does not have hydrostatic equilibrium
asteroid-directly circumsolar body with mass/size above a meteoroid and below a planet (according to Def. E)
planetoid-synonym for asteroid
minor planet- (according to Def. C) one which has a mass/size between that of hydrostatic equilibrium and gravitational control and
support and that for maintaining a true atmosphere
major planet- according to Def. C, one which has a mass/size required to maintain a true atmosphere, where the average
gravitational energy per atom exceeds c. 1 eV (E(=exponent) 23 kgs.; c. 3000 km.); corresponds to planet in Def. E
lesser planet-in Def. E, one below the mass for liquid planets
greater planet-in Def. E, a liquid planet, corresponds to "gas" giant in usual but erroneous usage
giant planet- 1. one with a dominance of liquidity (critical mass of 60 E24 kilos=60 trilion trillion kgs.); 2. solar planet (Jupiter, Saturn)
subgiant planet- methane planets (Uranus and Neptune)
double planet- system where 2 planets have their center of mass or gravity between them
subplanet-planetoids and meteoroids (according to Def. E)
TNO (transneptunian object)- outer, icy planetoids, comprises KB (Kuiper Belt) and SD (Scattered Disk); TNR is the
Transneptunian Region
sublunar- secondary satellite with mass insufficient for gravity support and hydrostatic equilibrium and such that its motions would be
contolled by gas drag
moon – object orbiting a planet, subplanet, or planetar and that is 1 km. diam. or more
supergiant planet– hypothetical planet at 2 or more Jupiter masses (although this could be at 6 Jupiter masses); at this threshhold
electron degeneracy takes over from Coulomb forces
true atmosphere- one which is permanent, global, and substantial (1 millibar or more of surface pressure and a mass of 10 E16
kilos) based on the working definition used by atmospheric modelers being one where most of the incident solar energy
does not reach the surface
PMOs (planemos, planetary mass objects)- planets, planetars, grey dwarfs, black widow pulsars, and large moons (simply moons
according to Def. C)
star- circumgalactic body that undergoes nucleosynthesis, is entirely self-luminous, evolves by gravitational collapse (the direct,
top down method), and is made mostly of plasma
stelloid- stars, grey dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron dwarfs, black holes, and planetary and SNR nebulas
One of the most important matters in astronomy is the definition of planet, especially nowadays, as astronomers are discovering more and more objects in the murky, mysterious outer confines of the Sun’s empire. This is the domain of the TNOs(trans-neptunian objects) comprising the LEK (Leonard-Edgeworth-Kuiper) Belt (30-50 AUs) usually simply called the KB, named for its “inventors”(the ones who first postulated its existence) and the SD (scattered disk) (30-1000s of AUs). The OC(the Oort Cloud)(6000-50,000 AUs) also named for its “inventor”, is a separate entity and is a sphere encompassing the solar system and extending outward containing the long period comets. As there was no formal or official definition for planet there was a debate over the status of Pluto, Sedna, and Eris (UB313). What I propose is a scientific, precise, congruent, coherent, and clear definition which is Def. E. I had earlier proposed Def. C because I had not taken planetary evolution into account enough.
It satisfies the criteria set down by Stern and Levison (2000) which are: physically based, easily determinable, quantitative, uniquely classifiable, deterministic, and robust to new discoveries. I do not include comprised of the fewest possible criteria as the more traits the definition has the more solid it is. Also, unlike them I add that it should cosmogony and that apply to all solar systems so it has the added criterion of universality (although this might be covered under “robust to new discoveries”). They informally recognize the criterion of historicity but I recognize this as scientific and I also include linguistics as well as other criteria.
It also have the advantages they describe: i) planet status is based on a most measurable or estimable characteristic, mass, ii) it can be quantitatively evaluated for any given body, giving a unique result, yes or no, which is not a function of time, iii) is independent of location, iv) clearly define subsets/subdivisions based on scientific criteria, v) it is independent of issues such as whether or not the body has moons, a magnetosphere, or an atmosphere. As well, they have the extra advantages: vi) corresponds to stars in mass/size categories, giants, subgiants, dwarfs, subdwarfs), vi)i are part of congruent and consistent systems of terminology.
Planets: a History
“Planet” came into English in the 1200s (Webster’s New 9th Collegiate) (into French in 1120 (Grand Dictionnaire Etymologique et Historique du Français, Larousse)) and means wandering (star) (Greek, asteria planetis, "wandering stars") and the Indo-European root is pele meaning flat or to spread out which has given us several other astronomical terms: (orbital) plane, co-planar (orbit), planitia (a large low plain on a planetary surface), planum (a large plateau or high plain on a planetary surface), plasma, and (star) field. It gave rise also to the Old Norse flana, to rush around or wander aimlessly, the French flâner, to meander or loaf around, the Celtic lanon, plain, the Slavic, polje, broad flat land or field, the Spanish plata, silver, etc. (Watkins, 2000).
The original definition of planet included the sun, moon, and the 5 known planets as geocentricism held sway. Heliocentricity had already been known and proposed by Greek astronomer and mathematician Aristarchus of Samos in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC and supported by Hellenistic astronomer and philosopher Seleucus of Seleucia a century later (these were the only 2 known proponents; Seleucus was a Chaldean born in Seleucia on the Tigris in Babylonia and was the 1st to theorize that tides were caused by the Moon) so it would take some 2000 years after Aristarchus before it was widely accepted. But once it was then there were 6 recognized planets.
When the first asteroids were discovered in the 1800s they were considered planets and treated as such. For example, each of the major planets had been given symbols and so were the asteroids (for Ceres it was the sign for Venus but with the circle open, Pallas also except instead of the circle it was a diamond, for Hebe it was a cup, etc.)--the 1st 15 of them to 1854 (Cunningham, 1988). After wards, as the practice was becoming cumbersome because of the number being discovered, it was discontinued. And a reference book from 1857 stated that there were 17 planets, 8 major ones, from Mercury to Neptune, and the 9 asteroids (Peebles, 2000).
"Asteroid" and "planetoid" came into the language in 1801, coined by William Herschel (Etymological Dictionary On-Line), who had discovered Uranus in 1781 (the 1st asteroid discovered was Ceres) and 1802 (Webster’s New 9th Collegiate), respectively, and "minor planet" in 1845 with “kleinen Planeten” (small planets) being 1st used in 1854 and “petites planètes” in 1866 (Hilton, 2001). “Planetule”, meaning small planet, was coined by Conybeare (HyperDictionary website) but is never used. The French term "astéroide" was introduced in 1815 (Grand Dictionnaire Etymologique et Historique du Français, Larousse)(the book does not include "planètoide" nor "planète mineure").
Since planetoid indicates the notion that asteroids are not planets but planet-like and the fact that asteroids were also called planets, we can see that from the outset there were 2 notions, 1 traditional, Def. E, and the other holding to a broader meaning, Def. C. And since "planetismal" (coined 1903, Webster’s New 9th Collegiate) means small planet and refers to a small body and "protoplanet"(coined 1949, Webster’s New 9th Collegiate) refers to the early stage of a large body we see reflected here, also, the 2 notions. The ambivalence continues to this day.
Comets, called "pheasant stars" or "broom stars" in ancient China and Japan, have usually been excluded altogether and placed in a class all their own since they had a different shape and not much was known about them but even these were regarded by some as planets or planet-like since antiquity, e.g., several philosophers before Aristotle and a few later ones including Seneca, the famous 1st century Roman philosopher, dramatist, and statesman, in his "Questiones Naturales". It was not until the 1500s that they were regarded as celestial instead of atmospheric, the latter being the Aristotelian view.
And Pluto, found in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh was included as a larger body because as late as 1976 it was believed to be about half the size of Earth, so larger than Mercury and about the size of Mars, and this status was kept because of inertia. The "major" was dropped in some of the discourse due to the notion that only major secondary satellites are planets but also because of the lazy tongue and the fact that in general observation all the secondary satellites of any import are major ones so that there is in this no distinction between major and minor, while the “minor" and even the "major" was/is maintained in most astronomy books and the IAU division dealing with asteroids and TNOs and even meteoroids is called the Minor Planet Center which was established 60 years ago in 1947.
John Davis (1868) wrote, "They are small planets; whether the fragments of a stupendous world shattered by internal convulsions or external violence, or formed as other planets were, no one can tell." And Alan Harris of UCLA wrote whimsically in 1983, "The inhabitants of Glauke became tired of Nature's uniform gray and chose to repaint their planet..." (Cunningham, 1988)(Glauke is 37.5 kms. diam. so is well below the sphericity-by-gravitation threshhold).
There seems also to have been a trend, albeit apparently less common, to identify moons as planets, too. Charles Bonnet (1764) says “We know 17 planets”. At the time of Bonnet there were only 10 moons and 6 major planets known so I imagine since a moon was thought to have been observed for Venus that he was including Neith, as it was dubbed, in the count. Several dictionaries distinguished between primary planets (directly circumsolar) and secondary planets (moons), e. g., Dictionnaire Complet Illustré de la Langue Française from 1925 and the New Webster’s Comprehensive Encyclopedic Dictionary from 1967. But this has fallen out of favour. Some of the examples given include moons but do not specify primary and secondary planets.
Often, the definition for planet is a simple one and goes, “heavenly body revolving around the sun” as in Webster’s New Compact Format Dictionary from 1988 and the New Standard Dictionary from 1962. The Thorndike-Barnhart Comprehensive Desk Dictionary gives, “1. one of the heavenly bodies that revolve around the sun. 2. formerly, sun, moon, and 5 planets”. Petit Larousse Illustré from 1977: “astre sans lumiere propre qui tourne autour du Soleil »; Webster’s 9th New Collegiate: “one of the bodies except comets, asteroids, or moons that revolves around the sun.” Ridpath (1997): “A body that does not give off light, orbiting the Sun or another star”, adding, “The term does not include comets or other small bodies such as meteoroids. Asteroids, however, are sometimes referred to as minor planets.”
As a general pattern there was always a distinction made between large and small bodies, including the 1st 2 examples mentioned, often, though, with Pluto misplaced, in older dictionaries because its size was thought to be planet-size, sometimes, also, with comets explicitly left out as in the 1st one mentioned above and in Ridpath, but, often, too, the meaning is given in the most contradictory and ambiguous terms in the astronomical and general literature, defining planets as what is equivalent to major planets but at the same time distinguishing between major and minor planets. Here is a list of the various mass estimates for Pluto in Earth masses (from Hypothetical Planets, seds.lpl.arizona.edu)(Mars is .11 Earth mass:
Crommelin, 1930 .11
Nicholson, 1931 .94
Wylie, 1942 .91
Brouwer, 1949 .8-.9
Kuiper, 1950 .10
Seidelmann, 1968 .14
Seidelmann, 1971 .11
Cruikshank, 1976 .002
Christy,1978 .002
Even some astronomers who ascribe to a circumscription other than Def. 1 refer to asteroids as minor planets. But most books also say "planets and minor planets" which is Confusionese. Such careless and contradictory semantics that naturally give rise to confusing ambiguities are largely the cause of the problem.
In Hindustani, Arabic, and Malay the word for planet is the same as star which is tara or sitara, kukba, and bintang, respectively, although graha is sometimes use in Hindi. In Chinese the word is xíngxing meaning wandering star; for comet it is huì-xing (returning star), meteor is liú-xing (drifting star), and asteroid is xiao xíngxing (small planet). Comet in Hindustani is ulka tara (tailed star) and meteor is shahaba. Russian is basically the same as other European languages: zvyezda, planeta, cometa, and meteor as is German: Stern, Planet, Komet, Meteor. Hawaiian has hoku hele (star wandering) for planet or major planet, hoku welowelo (star floating in the wind) for comet, and hoku lele (star flying) for meteor. Swahili has sayari for planet, nyota for star, nyota yenye mkia (star with a tail) for comet, and kimwondo for meteor. In Turkish yildiz means star, gezegen means planet, comet is kuyrukluyildiz(tailed star), meteor is akanyildiz (flowing or running star), and asteroid is küçük gezegen (small planet). Kuyruklu is akin to tail and cycle, the Hindi ukla, and the Greek cercos (tail) and telos (end). Planet in Japanese is wakusei, comet is suisei (the Japanese space agency launched a probe in 1986 with this name which flew by Halley (Lang, 2003)), meteor is insei or ryuusei, and hoshi means star and the names of all the planets (major planets by Def. C) except Earth have the -sei suffix and it is also found in its word for constellation, seiza. Curiously, the Latin languages have changed their words for planet and comet from feminine to masculine, except French, but have retained the feminine form. We can see here that names for comets, metors, and asteroids, although sometimes poetic, are not scientific since these bodies are not stars; the same thing goes for small or minor planets, they are often called planets but are not planets.
The Long List (in parentheses are the lower limits where applicable)
1- a directly circumstelloid (orbiting a grey subdwarf, star, or post-stellar), at least
partly reflecting, celestial body with a mass and temperature below that for nucleosynthesis
and total self-luminosity and made mostly of neutral particles
2- as in 1 but massive enough to possess a satellite
3 -as in 1 but macroscopic (1 mcg; 1 mm.)
4 - as in 1 but based on a decimal system starting at 1 m.
5- as in 1 but massive enough for cometary activity
6- as in 1 but massive enough for its motions to be controlled by gravity instead of gas drag (E12 kilos; 1km.)
7- as in 1 but with the mass required tobe held up by gravity instead of tensile strength, mechanical force, or
chemical bonds (E12 kilos; 1 km.)
8-as in 1 but larger than a comet (or the usual comet)
9- as in 1 but based on a decimal system starting at 1 km.
10- as in 1 but with differentiation (when the body forms a core, mantle, and crust)
11- as in 1 but with the mass for differentiation (E19 kilos; 7 km. or less)
12- as in 1 but spherical by self-gravitation
13- as in 1 but with the mass for sphericity by self-gravitation (E19 kgs.; 200 km.?)
14- as in 1 but with mass for magnetosphere
15 as in 1 but with mass for true magnetosphere (E23 kgs.; c. 3000 kms. (c. 1160 miles) ?)
16- as in 1 but with the mass for atmosphere
17-as in 1 but with the mass for a true atmosphere (E23 kgs.; 3000 km.?)
18- as in 1 but where the average gravitational energy per atom exceeds c. 1 eV (E23 kgs.; c. 3000 km.)
19- as in 1 but with solid state internal convection (when the body becomes geophysically active) (E23kgs.; 3500? km.)
20- as in 1 but with central pressure causing compressed materials higher densities than uncompressed ones (E20; c. 1000 km. (600 miles) for icy-rocky bodies and 6000 kms.(3600 mi.) (E23 kgs.) for rocky bodies)
21-as in 1 but having cleared its orbit
22-as in 1 but having zonal dominance, i.e., being larger and more massive than the combined mass and size of all other objects in
the same zone or orbit (E23 kgs.; 3000? km)
23- a body fissioned from a stelloid or having the mass for such a body (as in Def. 15, 17, 18, and 19) and, like it, being directly circumsolar.
Left out were proposals for lower limits at 2000 (1200 miles) and 1000 kms. as these are figures chosen arbitrarily to include Pluto (2270 km. (1411 miles)) , are not based on anything scientific, and are unnecessary, as well as others not scientific and/or which leave out some bodies universally recognized as planets.
Def. 1 has the simplest meaning, implies the simplest and most stable terminlogy, totally corresponds with moons (if moons are given the same definition), and has no arbitrary lower limit, and dust grains are compositionally similar to terrestrial planets, having silicates, metals, and carbon, have the ability to possess moons (in principle, at least), reflect light, and some possibly have circular and/or coplanar orbits. As well, there is precedence for including grains in the planet count as planetismals are defined by some as sbmm. to 1000 km. (Hartmann, 1983, p. 16) and others as primordial dust (Freedman and Kaufmann, 2008, p.G8) and a protoplanetary disk includes dust grains, so grains have been considered planets by some already if only inadvertently.
As for Def. 2, in principle even a microscopic grain could have a satellite, and there apparently can be satellites around 1cm bodies so is much like the above.
Def. 3 would, of course, exclude microscopic grains (granules as I refer to them) and would be an exact and scientific cut-off point and would be very similar to 1 and 2.
According to (Basri and Brown, 2005) estimates for various values of interest to us here are extreme approximations as the criteria are supposedly greatly influenced by composition, temperature, state of differentiation, and other factors and as there are discrepancies in the calculations for some lower limits a numerical system might be used and the most preferable type would be a decimal one and based on size as one for mass would be too complicated as it would involve too many subgrades and it would be difficult to divide into grades. The classification would be only numerical so we would use terms as in the following table but it would be a precise, stable, and non-arbitrary circumscription and would necesarily and logically start at 1, and the logical choice for the baseline for a planet would be a meter as it is the basic unit and the nanometer, mm., or cm. would be too complicated as there would be too many grades or subgrades and they would be insignificant and any mutiple or submultiple would be arbitrary. But if we are to include universality in the definition then there is the disadvantage that the metric system is based on Earth measurements which may not apply universally.
Table 1. Decimal Classification.
class 3 planets
100, 000-1 mln. Jupiter, Saturn
10,000-100,000 Venus, Terra, Uranus, Neptune
1000-10,000 Charon, Pluto, Eris, EL61, Sedna, Mars, Mercury, etc.
class 2 planets
100-1000 Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, Davida, etc.
10-100 Ida, Koronis, Gaspra, Eurynome, etc.
1 km.-10 km. Icarus, Apollo, Aten, Hungaria, etc.
class 1 planets
100 m.-1 km.
10-100 m.
1-10 m.
There are 3 classes or grades and each has 3 subclasses or subgrades which would be designated A (lower), B (middle), and C (upper); in practice the numbers in the 2nd column would end in 9s; becuase of electron degeneracy the upper size limit for a planet might be either about twice the size of Jupiter, so c.300,000 km. (186,000 mi.) or 6 times its size, so some 900, 000 km.(560,000 mi.) .
I have tried many other different numerical bases to see if they might fit with, or approximate, classes based on traits, multiplying by 2, by 3 (an approximation of pi), by 10, with the multiplier successively increased by 1 or successively doubled, the product succesively doubled, tripled, etc., and using the classical Greek pi ratio 7/22 (multiplying by 7 and dividing by 22). for sizes as well as masses, in miles as well as kilometers, in radii as well as diams., but these did not work and many consider it preferable to use bases congruent with actual physical, dynamic, and chemical characteristcs, anyways, and Basri and Brown might be exaggerating most of the discrepancies for the values.
The mass required to display cometary activity is apparently unknown but comet nuclei usually range from about ½ -1 km. to about 50 (30 mi.), although the Centaur Chiron (sometimes considered an ex-moon of Saturn (Romani, 1983; Stewart, 1991)), at c.150 kms.(90 miles), shows some signs of it and some comets have been found measuring 100-400 kms.(60 mi.-250 mi.) (Brandt, 1999) and the usual comet is c. 10 kms.(6 miles), and Lang (2003) says they range from 100 m. to 100 km. and that the mass is only at E15, 1 billionth of Earth's. Def. 8, larger than a comet or the usual comet does not have much scientific accuracy or robustness so should be excluded.
Gravity control is the 1st trait which dynamically distinguishes small secondary satellites from larger ones and is said to be around 1 km. diam. or 12E kilos (Freedman and Kaufman, 2008).
The required gravity to hold together parts of a body rather than tensile strength, mechanical forces, or chemical bonds refers to some asteroids that have fragmented and reassembled such as comets Tempel 1 and Shoemaker-Levy 9 which are at 4 and 6 kms. diam. average (2.5-4 mi.), along with some MB (Main Belt) objects (inferred from their densities) but applies to any object and is designated at 1 km. minimum (or E12 kilos mass)(Freedman and Kaufmann, 2008, p.194). This is, of course, the same for Def. 6.
Basri and Brown (2006) make note of several mass/size related phenomena or processes which they discard except for sphericity by self-gravity, which they promote, but state that no one regards comets and small asteroids as planets but this is totally false as there are many asteroids with simlar sizes and asteroids are called minor planets and are treated as such by the IAU and these are often called planetismals and these are planets by definition so they are, indeed, regarded as planets by many. Even smaller bodies like Hermes, which is .4 km., is called an asteroid and included as a minor planet. Some are even boulder-size (5 m., discovered by Spacewatch, Lewis, p. 373) and are treated as minor planets.
Def. 10 would exclude some bodies which have the mass for differentiation so that we would have an asymmetrical situation whereby smaller bodies are considered planets yet some larger ones not. This is also the case for Def. 11. An outstanding example of this are irregular KBOs having suffered catastrophic impacts such as EL61 (2000x1500x1000 km. diam., (1240x930x600 mi.) mass 4 E21) which has become oval and is the parent body of a collisional family of 5 other KBOs which are also above the limit all being around 700 km. diam.
Defs. 10-13 are based on hydrostatic equilibrium (when pressure and gravity are equal), as opposed to sphericity by surface tension as occurs for many chondrules or rapid rotation as is the case for some small asteroids, e.g., Icarus which is spherical with a rotation of only about 2 hrs. 20 mins. and is 1.4 kms. wide (Burns and Tedesco 1979, p. 509). It was probably Stern in 1993 who 1st proposed the category and apparently designated it as major planets (Bakich, 2001, p. 302).
There is much disagreement for this lower demarcation point for roundness so it is not as easily determinable as Stern and Levison, who support the sphericity by self-gravity definition, contend, and the estimates go from 100 kms.(60 mi.) to 900 (560 mi.) and the self-gravity and differentiation criterion seem to be confused as they are ambiguously stated as different or analogous concepts. This critical diameter at which point there is hydrostatic equilibrium, differentiation, and sphericity, is given by Kirsten (1973, p. 302) as 10-50 kms. (6-30 mi.), Wasson (1974) who calculates 700 km.(435 mi.) for a rocky "planetismal" and 440 km. (270 mi.) for an iron-cored one which is cited by Hartmann (1983, p. 206) who points out that empirical data show spherical asteroids and moons have a lower diam. limit of 360-600 km. (220 mi.-370 mi.) which supposedly largely concurs with this (Phoebe is at 230 km. (140 mi.) is roughly spherical and has a mass of .8 E19; Mimas at 400 km. (250 mi.) has a mass of 3.7 E19 is very spherical and Interamnia is at 333 (200 mi.) and 5.7 E19 but is irregular; see Table 1), Wilkening (1979) as 100 kms., Schutz (1992) calculates 7 E22 kilos, Stern and Levison (2000) calculate about 200, Ranzini (2002, p.10) 100 km. In Moore (2002, p. 31) they give 200 km. as do Freedman and Kaufmann (2008). Basri (2003) states 500 (310 mi.), Basri and Brown (2005) state 800 (500 mi.), and McCoy et al (2005, p. 14) 20-200 km. (12-120 mi.).
However, Daphnis, a gap moon of Saturn and original to it, not captured, is massive enough to have collapsed into a spheroid (has acheived hydrostatic equilibrium)(its rotational period is not fast as it is 14 hrs.) and is 6-8 km.(4-5 mi.) across! (Wikipedia-Daphnis; Porco et al, 2005). It is Kirsten who came the closest. So this minimum is now known to be as low as 7 km. as just mentioned so is lower than usually estimated. Some bodies solidified in hydrostatic equilibrium and subsequently were deformed by impacts. And gravity support and gravity control might be correlated to this. It is, however, unclear as to whether there is a difference between sphericity by differentiation and by self-gravity. If there is the latter would have the higher baseline value.
Table 2. the Largest Asteroids and Moons.
Top 10 of the MB.
name no. diam. mass distance year shape type
(km.) (kgs.) (inAUs) dscvd.
Ceres 1 900-1000 9 E20 2.8 1801 S C
Pallas 2 523 2.2 E20 2.8 1802 O C
Vesta 4 520 2.7 E20 2.4 1802 O C
Hygiea 10 430 8-9 E19 3.2 1849 O C
Davida 511 337 6 E19 3.2 1903 O C
Interamnia 704 333 5.7 E19 3.1 1910 S C
Europa 52 312 5-7 E19 3.1 1858 S C
Eunomia 15 330 3.3 E19 2.6 1851 O S
Juno 3 290 3 E19 2.7 1804 S S
Sylvia 87 300 1.5 E19 3.5 1866 O S
For shape S=spherical or spheroidal and O=oblong or ovoid.
For type S=silicaceous and C=carbonaceous
Between 200 and 250 kms. diam. and spherical or spheroidal are Alauda, Cybele, Diotima, Egeria, Euphrosyne, Herculina, Hermione, Themis, and Ursula. Flora, Loreley, Massalia, and Siegena are between 140 and 165 and are spherical or spheroidal and have normal rotation rates. All are of the C-type except Flora and Massalia.
Data from Wikipedia and Chapman (1999).
There are about 140 MB asteroids larger than 100 kms. diam. (Lodders and Fegley, 1996, p. 241) with 33 above 200, some 3000 over 20, and only 4 over 360. Primitively, there were some 600 spherical MB asteroids larger than 1000 km. diam. (Couper and Henbest 2002, p. 147).
Top 2 Dozen of the KB.
name designation diam. mass distance year discovered
(in km.) (in kgs.) (in AUs)
Eris UB313 2370 1.6 E22 67 2003
Pluto 2320 1.3 E22 40 1930
Santa EL61 2000 4 E21 43 2003
Orcus DW 1600 7.5 E20 40 2004
Sedna VB12 1500 8 E20-7E21 526 2003
Charon 1270 1.5 E21 40 1978
Quaoar LM60 1260 1-2.6 E21 43 2002
Easterbunny FY9 1250 4 E21 46 2005
Ixion KX76 1065 5.5E20? 40 2001
AW197 940 5.2E20? 47 2002
Varuna WR106 900 6 E20 43 2000
Buffy XR190 425-850 1-5 E20 57 2004
RR43 700 43 2005
SM55 700 42 2000
TX300 700 43 2002
TO66 330-750 43 1996
EB173 300-700 2000
OP22 666 43 2003
TL66 575 83 1996
Chaos WH24 550 46 1998
DE9 420-500 55 1999
TC36 350-470 40 1999
JQ 1 382 44 1994
TL8 350+160 52 1995
SM55, TO66, OP32, RR43 are part of the collisional family of EL61 which has 2 moons.
Those with an SMA of over 50 are outer belt planetoids (SDOs, Scattered Disk Objects) and are opposite to the inner belt (Classical KBOs) having high inclinations and eccentricities and large numbers.
The masses for RR43 and down are unknown.
Data are from various sources but mostly and primarily Wikipedia.
Top 20 Moons.
moon planet diam.(kms.)
Ganymede J 5200
Titan S 5100
Callisto J 4800
Io J 3600
Europa J 3100
Luna T 3500
Triton N 2700
Titania U 1600
Rhea S 1500
Iapetus S 1400
Umbriel U 1170
Ariel U 1160
Dione S 1120
Tethys S 1060
Enceladus S 500
Miranda U 480
Proteus S 436
Mimas S 400
Hyperion S 350
Larissa N 205
Data from Lodders and Fegley (1998).
All are spherical except Larissa which is spheroidal and Proteus and Hyperion which are irregular.
The figures are mostly approximate.
A delineation for an atmosphere or magnetosphere would probably be too difficult to determine as the difference between no atmosphere and a tenuous , i.e., rarified or minimal, one would be practically impossible to establish scientifically. Pluto has only a tenuous and seasonal atmosphere (3 microbars) and Mercury also has a tenuous and temporary one (1 femtobar-10 picobars) occurring only nocturnally.
A definition for what could be termed a true magnetosphere, i.e., one that is a magnetic field which is intrinsic, global, substantial, and permanent can be formulated and is as follows: one which is strong enough so that its pressure on the solar wind is greater than the pressure of the solar wind and therefore is able to effectively divert it around and away from itself.
Ganymede has an equatorial magnetic field strength (magnetic flux density) of c. 750 gammas (=750 nanoteslas; the SI unit is the tesla, the cgs (cm, g, sec) unit is the gauss and 1 tesla = 10,000 gausses) with a mass of 1.5 E23, Mercury is at 330 gammas with a mass of 3.3 E23, Earth 30, 000, Jupiter 400, 000, Saturn 22,000, Uranus 23,000, and Neptune 14,000 (Lang, 2003). Mars has only a remnant field of 15 gammas (it was probably once very substantial) and Venus is unmagnetized. Probably the lower limit is at 100-300 gammas. The mass for this is too complicated to calculate so is unknown but we can estimate it is likely to be E22-23.
One for true atmosphere, i.e., one that is permanent, global, and substantial, can also be formulated and is as follows: with a surface pressure of 1 millibar or more and a mass of 1016 (E16) kilos based on the working definition used by atmospheric modelers being one where most of the incident solar energy does not reach the surface (Johnson and Matson, 1989). And it should be added, or this would imply, having weather, i.e., clouds and winds, although tenuous atmospheres can have winds.
Pecnik and Broeg (2007) define a planet as having a supercritical core as opposed to a subcritical one within the appropriate manifold (solution set) and which can maintain an equilibrium N atmosphere of T cs in a vacuum. Using the manifold paradigm they claim to avoid the issue of tenuous atmospheres using the critical core mass, a crucial quantity in planetary formation, whereas previous attempts were not able to differentiate between a dilute atmosphere and a vacuum. It is not clear, however, how this avoids the issue.
The TPC (terrestrial planethood criterion) is fulfilled for detailed constitutive relations for Earth, Venus, Mars, Titan, and Europa but is unknown for Mercury, Pluto, Luna, Io, Ganymede, Callisto, Dione, Rhea, and Iapetus, and not fulfilled for Ceres, Mimas, and Enceladus, which do, however, fulfill the isothermal model, and most likely neither one for Tethys. It is not applicable for the liquid planets. They do not specify or identify a set value but it is presumably at or about 4 E22 kilos as Europa, which is at 4.8 E22 kilos, is the smallest one listed as definitely with a supercritical core, and has a diam. of 3200 km. for a density of 3. We can surmise that Mercury, Luna, Ganymede, Io, and Callisto would fulfill the criteria as they have larger masses than Europa. Dione, Rhea, Iapetus, Ceres, Mimas, and Enceladus have smaller masses than even Pluto. The minimum escape velocity might be 2 km/sec. as Titan is at 2.6., and Europa at 2. However, the Moon has no appreciable atmosphere and it seems it is because it is too small. Its escape velocity is 2.4 and its mass is 7.4 E22. Europa has no appreciable atmosphere either but neither do Ganymede, Callisto, and Io which are at 1.5 E23, 1 E23, and 9 E22 kilos. Titan is 1.4 E23 and it probably retained an atmosphere from Saturn’s as it is believed it was once more extensive (Kuiper, 1952, p. 341). They also say the criterion can be used alternatively for the planet major planet definition.
They state, too, that roundness might depend on cosmogony instead of physical properties themselves but most do and any good definition for planet based on physical traits as opposed to a numerical system includes cosmogony.
At 3000 kms. diam. the average gravitational energy per atom exceeds c. 1 eV, the typical energy for chemical reactions (Basri and Brown, 2005). This sounds like a very good criterion for planet or major planet. It appears not to have a range estimate and not to be in much dispute.
3500-6500 kms. (about Moon to Mars size) is the threshhold for solid state convection to occur (Basri and Brown, 2005). Unfortunately, there is a wide discrepancy in this value.
Compression forces are yet another threshold (Basri and Brown, 2005) and in this the central pressure becomes large enough so that the compressed materials attain significantly higher densities than the uncompressed ones. This would be at 6000 kms. for rocky bodies and 1000 for icy-rocky ones. This not a good criterion as it applies widely differently according to chemical composition.
"Having cleared its neighbourhood" is the definition proposed by the IAU but this might exclude Jupiter, since it has 2224 Trojan asteroids (Wikipedia-Trojan Asteroids (as of 2007), Britannica On-Line Encyclopedia gives 2060(as of 2005), the MPC website lists some 2420 as of June 2008) in its orbit and might have an estimated 10s of 1000s, but also Earth, Mars, and Neptune for the same reason, although their retinue is practically nil with only a few small representatives (2 or 3, 4, and 6 respectively (MPC website; Moore, 2002)) as it is unclear if these asteroids formed with these planets or were captured.
The use of "dwarf planet” for large asteroids when the defintion for planet is restricted to larger bodies is ambiguous, contradictory, incoherent, and confusing, as these larger asteroids are considered planets and not planets at the same time. Instead of clearing up the matter it is continuing the same muddled terminology and semantic carelessness and contradiction but with new words. And "small solar system bodies" for those bodies below larger ones is awkward, complicated, gratuitous, and unwieldy. “Minor or small circumsolars or minor secondaries” can easily be used. Also, part of the definition is stated negatively “is not a star or a moon” when it could easily be stated properly. And there are many astronomers who object (New Scientist, 2006 a, b; World Science, 2006).
And it is the same as, or implies, being fully accreted so would exclude Mercury and possibly Mars if they turn out to be former moons of Venus and an exploded planet respectively (Van Flandern, 1999, 2007), as indicated by the former's high inclination, eccentricity, and core density and calculations done by Van Flandern and Harrington (1976) (it was Harrington who made the 1st direct calculation of Pluto's mass, only about 1/5 of our moon). The core density indicates it may not have formed so close to the Sun. Even if it wasn’t, such a case could occur in another planetary system and the definition should apply universally. Musser (2006), however, says it would require too much time for Venus to lose a moon. But it might exclude them, anyways, as they may be considered as not fully accreted and the accretion factor can be excluded in any case as the planetismal hypothesis is not very solid.
The “isolation mass” is given as about equal to 1 Mercury mass (.3 E24 kgs.) at 1 AU and some 7 Earth masses in the KB (42 E24 kgs.) (Basri and Brown, 2000). The smallest planet known so far orbits the neutron star PSR 1257+12 (PSR means Pulsating Source of Radio) and is closer to its sun than Mercury, .2 AU, and might also be an escaped moon, having a mass of 1.2 E23; Mercury is at 3.3 E23. This criterion, like compression forces, is also dependent on location.
The mass baseline for a body split from the sun would correspond to the baselines for Defs. 15, 17, 18, 19, and 22.
Short List
A
1- a directly circumstelloid (orbiting a grey subdwarf, star, or post-stellar), at least partly reflecting, celestial body with a mass and temperature below that for nucleosynthesis and total self-luminosity and made mostly of neutral particles
2-as in 1 but massive enough to possess a moon or moons
3 -as in 1 but macroscopic
B
4 - as in 1 but based on a decimal system starting at 1 m.
C a
5- as in 1 but massive enough for cometary activity
6- as in 1 but massive enough for its motions to be controlled by gravity instead of gas drag
7- as in 1 but with the mass required to be held up by gravity instead of tensile strength, mechanical force, or chemical bonds
9- as in 1 but based on a decimal system starting at 1 km.
C b
10- as in 1 but with differentiation
11- as in 1 but with the mass for differentiation
12- as in 1 but spherical by self-gravity
13 - as in 1 but with the mass for sphericity by self-gravitation
D
20- as in 1 but with central pressure causing compressed materials higher densities than uncompressed ones
E
15 as in 1 but with mass for true magnetosphere
17-as in 1 but with the mass for a true atmosphere
18- as in 1 but where the average gravitational energy per atom exceeds c. 1eV
19- as in 1 but with internal convection
22-as in 1 but having zonal dominance, i.e., being larger and more massive than the combined mass and size of all other objects in the same zone or orbit
23- a body fissioned from a star or having the mass for such a body (as in Def. 15, 17, 18, and 19) and , like it, being directly circumsolar.
These are obviously grouped according to the observation that they are more or less similar as their mass/size values are approximately the same. C and E are the most important ones.
An argument against A is that there are no interstellar grains that are stars even though such grains might be circumgalactic as they are part of nebulas so it can be contended there should not be grains that are planets, either, nor moons for that matter.
In support of Cb one can maintain that, since we define stars based on more than orbital mode as process and chemistry are included and the process is internal, it can be argued we should do the same for planets so it should also be a process and be internal and chemical. This would be melting to the point of hydrostatic equilibrium and differentiation with its consequential sphericity. However, stars are also spherical and in hydrostatic equilibrium. by contrast, Def. 23 is unique to certain bodies. As well, basing a definition simply on shape or a notion that a planet is round is not very robust.
One might argue that giant planets are not differentiated so wouldn’t be considered planets but they do have the mass for it and that is part of the definition and they do have some kind of differentiation as they have an H-He layer and a metallic-icy core and they are, of course, spherical.
As there are objects, like some asteroids, which are like higher mass objects, these higher mass objects undoubtedly and universally considered planets, in that they (some asteroids) are differentiated and/or round, have the same chemistry as some of them, and are in tact, it might be said that the separation between these asteroids and “major planets” is artificial and an analogy can be drawn between this and bio-taxonomy where lower organisms are artificially separated as protistans. For example, Ceres, which is almost 1000 km. diam., is probably differentiated and certainly spherical, maybe has water ice, and might have had an ocean and volcanism and might have a tenuous atmosphere (Wikipedia-Ceres). So morphologically and chemically these objects are somewhat similar to the larger bodies. However, these smaller bodies are primitive only in the planetismal model which is not well substantiated and they are similar chemically only to terrestrial bodies. Also, we should consider their different origins so that the separation is not at all artificial and it might be considered artificial to include these smaller bodies as planets.
One might contend, too, that fragments of "minor planets" are not really planets, that they are really just parts of larger bodies. Such fragments, however, can also be considered bodies in their own right and are considered as such, just the same as a "major planet" hitting another might split into 2 or more "major planets." "Minor planets", however, are probably fragments of moons (see Cosmogony below) so their fragments would not qualify very much as planets and "minor planets" would be a misnomer and in any case they are still fragments.
But whatever the definition the terminology must correspond with it and be appropriate and consistent so there can be semantic and taxonomic coherence. See Table 3 for the classification and terminology for each.
To add alliterative correspondence with major and minor moons for A, B, and C the terms principal planet and petty planet could be used as synonyms for major and minor planet and which corresponds with the French “planète principale” and “petite planète” which are sometimes used. Hartmann (1983) has used the term “principal planet”, p.16, as noted earlier; so has Prentice, as noted later, but not exactly in the same sense.
To sum up the pros and cons for each:
Points for A: simplest terminology, no lower limit to determine, corresponds completely with I (the 1st def. for moon). Points aganst: includes fragments including very small objects not generally considered planets so does not correspond well with the general notion of planet and has no cosmogonic basis.
Points for B: stability and low arbitrariness of a numerical system, includes all meteoroids treated as asteroids by the MPC, corresponds well with the generally used definition but not the general notion. Points against: includes fragments, is not based on physical or chemical traits, and would not correspond well with the traditional terminology, Def. I or a numerical definition for moon would have to be used, or else the lower limit for planet would be below that of moon, a definition for moon which may not be satisfactory, and as already mentioned, it does not go with the general notion of planet.
C is the one which is most congruent with the nomenclature generally used since the 1800s, corresponds best with the definition generally used, mostly includes both solitary and belt bodies so includes bodies similar to larger ones, corresponds with II (the 2nd definition for moons) which, in turn, corresponds best with the most common notion of moons, there are 7 traits (Defs. 5, 6, and 7, plus hydrostatic equilibrium, differentiation, self-gravity, and sphericity), although most of these could be considered the same so there would be only 2. The points against are that it includes fragments and that these might not really planets especially considering cosmogony (see Cosmogony below) but if one subscribes to the idea that the baseline for moons should be lower than for planets (see the Moon section) than there are 2 points against unless, of course, Def. I is used; also, the major criterion's baseline is hard to figure and different baselines might be used so it is not clear-cut and may or may not involve 2 or more different criteria.
Points for D: includes some bodies similar to larger ones. Points against: it does not correspond well with the generally used terminology and definition, cuts across the asteroid category, and is based on a single and relatively unimportant trait which varies widely according to composition. In all, it has 1 point for and 10 against.
Points for E: there are 6 traits, perhaps the most, on which to base it and most of them, apparently, at least, are fairly easily determinable and have no wide discrepancies, bodies can be distinguished not only on mass and size but also from belt bodies in general so there are no ambiguities as to the members, so the circumscription is clear-cut, all are in tact, all members are universally recognized as planets, it is more easily identifiable and determinable than C, corresponds with the traditional definition or view, and, if we accept the solar fission hypothesis (see Cosmogony below), as we probably should, then, it corresponds with real planets, as one might say, based on the mass/size for these, and cosmogony could be considered the major point/deciding factor(even considering the planetismal hypothesis a planet is a body thet forms from a nebular ring which would also exclude asteroids and meteoroids). Points against: the terminology changes would be several, it corresponds only somewhat with modern (since 1800s) use, excludes bodies that are very similar for which they might be seen as larger versions or counterparts but are not cosmogonically.
Concerning the terminology for E, “major and minor planets” would have to be eliminated or have their meanings changed, the meanings for “giant”, “subgiant”, “dwarf”, and “subdwarf" in reference to planets might have to be dropped or changed, too. However, the alterations would not be much of a problem as the names greater and lesser planets could easily be used as well as giants, methane or icy planets, and terrestrial planets, and the meaning for these last 3 would not be changed. "Major has sometimes been used for the greater planets but never minor for the terrestrial planets. The MPC would have to change its name to the Planetoid Center, the Planetoid-Meteoroid Center, or the Meteoroid-Planetoid Center (with this the acronym would stay the same!). The words “planetismal” and “protoplanetary disk” would have to be eliminated in any case, anyways, if we accept the SFH (see Cosmogony below) as we probably should. And "planetoid" could easily and comfortably be used instead of "minor planet," and was used some 40 years before the latter. So the nomenclatural changes would not be extreme and would be quite manageable.
The lower limit for a planet fissioning from a star might not be different from solar system even though stellar masses vary so it would probably be universally applicable. The isolation mass might also be universal.
The 19 points I use to do a quantitative analysis, are listed below with the counts for each group except that for A I used Def. 1. I did not include "includes Pluto" as this is a political consideration. For easily determinable I placed a question mark as, contrary to what Stern and Levison claim, sphericity is not easily determinable, it has to be measured and there is disagreement concerning some objects (I, for instance, believe there are several more asteroids and TNOs which are spherical than the IAU admits such as Interamnia, Europa, and Juno); there is also some difficulty in determining which are globular by self-gravity and which aren't. Some might exclude a few criteria such as "above the minimum for moons" but, in any case, for this I use Def. II. I did not include "below the baseline for stelloids" (20 kms. diam., neutron dwarfs) as neutron dwarfs probably do not exist as such (see Stelloids). Some, also, might score a few of these differently but the 2 that are the most supported are A and E but "being in tact" I think perhaps should be a necessary requirement as it seems unsatisfactory to include fragments. Overall, whatever the case, the scores would be more or less the same.
A1 B Ca Cb D E
cosmogony 0 0 0 0 0 1
non-arbitrariness 1 1 0 0 0 1
physical and/or chemical traits 1 0 1 1 1 1
excludes fragments 0 0 0 1 0 1
lower limit not ambiguous 1 1 0 0 0 1
members not ambiguous 1 1 0 0 0 1
does not cut across asteroid-large body line 1 1 1 0 0 1
universally applicable 1 ? 1 1 1 1
easily identifiable or determinable 1 1 0 ? 0 1
independent of location 1 1 1 1 0 1
robust to new discoveries 1 1 1 1 1 1
uniquely classifiable 1 1 1 1 0 1
not a function of time 1 1 1 1 1 1
correspondence with general meaning or notion 0 0 1 0 0 1
independent of extra issues 1 1 1 1 1 1
has clearly defined subsets 1 1 1 1 0 1
nomenclatural preservation 0 ? 1 0 0 0
includes similar bodies 1 1 1 1 0 0
above lunar baseline 0 0 0 1 1 1
14 12 12 10 6 17
Table 3. Categories for Secondary Satellites
general categories
micro-macro
meteoroid-gravitoid
lesser-greater
minor (low mass)-major (high mass)
A
micrometeoroids
macroplanets/planets
macrometeoroids
gravitoids
asteroids (dwarfs)
major planets
subgiants (terrestrial planets)
giants (liquid planets)
here subdwarfs are meteoroids and asteroids and meteoroids together are minor planets
simplified classification
minor planets
meteoroids
asteroids
major planets
B
subplanets
planets
class 1
class 2
class 3
C
meteoroids
micrometeoroids
macrometeoroids
planets
grade 1 asteroids (subdwarfs)
greater planets
grade 2 asteroids (dwarfs)
major planets
subgiants (terrestrial planets)
giants (liquid planets)
simplified classification
subplanets (meteoroids)
planets
minor planets (asteroids)
major planets
D
meteoroids
micrometeoroids
macrometeoroids
gravitoids
lesser asteroids
planets
greater asteroids (dwarfs/minor planets)
major planets
subgiants
giants (liquid planets)
E
meteoroids
micrometeoroids
macrometeoroids
gravitoids
planetoids
planets
lesser planets
subdwarfs (lunar planets)(Mercury and Mars)
dwarfs (Venus and Terra and helium planets)
greater planets (liquid planets)
subgiants (Uranus and Neptune)
giants (solar planets)(Jupiter and Saturn)
Cosmogony
Historical Overview
It is said by some that Anaximander had foreshadowed Kant and Laplace because he saw the origin of the Universe as a sphere of fire that grew around a vapour that surrounds the Earth and that the sphere fell apart into several rings forming the sun, moon, and stars (Internet Enc. Phil.-Anaximander). But this is not an account of the solar system as the view is geocentric and it isn't the vapour that formed the rings but the fire and the fire wasn't a disk but a sphere. Also, the vapour might have referred to the atmosphere. Seeing this as an early version of the solar nebular hypothesis is quite a stretch to say the least.
French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was the 1st to propose a model for the origin of the solar system in his Le Monde (aka Traité de Lumière) for which he delayed publication because of the Inquisition (which continues to this day but in a more subtle form) and it was published only after his decease. In his view, the Universe was filled with vortices of swirling particles and the Sun and planets had condensed from a particularly large vortex that had somehow contracted which explained the circular motion of the planets and was on the right track with condensation and contraction but this was before Newton's theory of gravity and we now know matter does not behave in this fashion (Williams and Cremin, 1968). He also maintained that there was no vacuum(Le Monde-Wikipedia).
René Descartes (1596-1650), known in his time as Renatus Cartesius (Latinized form), was born to Joachim Descartes and Jeanne Brochard in La Haye (renamed Descartes), near Tours, in Tourain, Indre-et-Loire, the last born of 4 children. His father was a lawyer, magistrate, and provincial parliamentarian. He was a sickly and fragile child. In 1607, at age 11, he entered the Jesuit Collège Royal Henri-le-Grand in La Flèche, where he studied the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (or logic) and the “mathematical arts” of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, as well as metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics. During 1615-1616 he received a bachelor's degree and license in civil and canon law at the Université de Poiters. In 1619 he went to the Netherlands to become a volunteer for the army of Maurice of Nassau but left his service planning to travel through Germany to join the army of Maximilian of Bavaria. It was here, holed up in his famous "stove-heated room," that he conceived of the mission which would so profoundly affect philosophy: to reconstruct the whole of philosophy anew. He moved to the Netherlands in 1628 where he stayed for 20 years, in order to achieve solitude and quiet that he could not find with all the distractions of Paris and the constant intrusion of visitors, until moving to Sweden at the invitation of Queen Christina to be her personal tutor deceasing shortly after from pneumonia. He taught at Frankener and Utrecht universities (Wikipedia; Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy).
In 1643 he began an affectionate and philosophically fruitful correspondence with Princess Elizabeth Palatine of Bohemia, daughter of Queen Elizabeth Palatine of Bohemia (the "Winter Queen" and "Queen of Hearts"), a bright and scholarly aristocrat called "la Grecque" because of her knowledge of classical languages, who had read the Discourse on Method, a correspondence that was to last 7 years, until his decease. The relationship may have been amorous. It was during this time he penned his Principia Philosophiae, published in 1644, in 4 parts: The Principles of Human Knowledge, The Principles of Material Things, The Visible Universe, and The Earth. He had a daughter named Francine, by a servant girl, Helen Jans, in Amsterdam, in 1635, who died from fever at only 5 years. The Meditations and Principles were translated from Latin into French for a wider, more popular audience and were published in 1647. In 1646 he initiated another long corresponce with Queen Christina which brought about her invitation 3 years later (Wikipedia).
Descartes has been called the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which continue to be studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. He was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution. He went against Aristotelianism-Scholasticism, which rejected nature and reason, an especially nonsensical and incoherent view still prevalent in science to this day, and therefore supported rationalism. He also went against its teleological and substantial form ideas, and proposed mechanistic explanations, methodological skepticism, deductive reasoning, and mind-body dualism, as well as an ontological "proof" for the existence of God. His most famous quote is "Cogito ergo sum" ( Je pense, donc je suis; I think, therefore I am or I am thinking, therefore I exist), perhaps the most well known in philosophy, found in §7 of part I of Principia Philosophiae and in part IV of Discours de la Méthode (Wikipedia).
He also made very important contributions to mathematics and is credited as being the founder of analytical geometry. His invention of Cartesian coordinates revolutionized the discipline by providing the first systematic link between Euclidean geometry and algebra. Using the Cartesian coordinate system, geometric shapes can be described by Cartesian equations — algebraic equations involving the coordinates of the points lying on the shape. These coordinates are also essential tools for most applied disciplines that deal with geometry, including astronomy, physics, engineering, and many more. They are the most common coordinate system used in computer graphics, computer-aided geometric design, and other geometry-related data processing. He was the 1st to do a graph, allowing a geometric interpretation of mathematical functions. The Cartesian product, which is the direct product of two sets, is named for Descartes, whose formulation of analytical geometry gave rise to this concept. Descartes' rule of signs, first described by him in his work La Géométrie, is a technique for determining the number of positive or negative roots of a polynomial. The rule gives an upper bound number of positive or negative roots of a polynomial. The Folium of Descartes is an algebraic curve in geometry first proposed by him in 1638 (Wikipedia).
After the discovery of "fuzzy stars," also called nebulas, philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, in 1734, originated the solar nebula hypothesis in his Philosophical and Mineralogical Works, Vol.1. (the Principia), and Immanuel Kant followed suit in 1755 in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens). but a detailed framework for the idea was done by Pierre Simon, marquis de Laplace, in 1796 in his Exposition du Systéme du Monde. In this the Sun forms from a large, diffuse gas cloud possessing a small amount of angular momentum. As the cloud condenses its angular velocity increases and so it takes up a lenticular shape. At some later stage the gravitational attraction balances out the centrifuglal force and further contraction proceeds only after the ejection of a ring of material. This process repeats itself with the condensation of a planet in each ring. But it soon was realized that the angular momentum in this model was mostly in the Sun which was at odds with the facts since 99% is in the planets. Other important problems with this hypothesis became apparent with time and the model broke down on several points including that the Sun would still be spinning on the verge of rotational instability today, it does not yield the mass and composition of the planets, nor prograde revolution.
The strongest criticism was made by renowned 1800s physicist James Maxwell who in an essay on the rings of Saturn in 1857, showed that if they were to be stable, they had to be comprised of small solid particles - rigid solid rings would have been torn apart by differential rotation, and gas rings would have dispersed quite readily. The same argument was applied to the rings of planetary material proposed by Simon, necessitating that the rings should be hundreds of times more massive than the planets they were to form, in order that they may be durable (Oxley, 1999).
The first suggestion of the dualistic type, 1 that requires a 2nd body, the others being monistic, was by Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, in De la formation des planètes, in 1745, in which a passing comet grazed the surface of the Sun, tearing the required future planetary material from it. It is now known that comets have a mass much inferior for what is necessary to achieve this effect, although the mechanism might be valid for larger bodies. As the true nature of comets became known by the 1870s, Bickerton (1878) suggested instead a collision between the Sun and a passing star. As in Leclerc's idea, the planets formed by direct condensation from the ejected material.
In an attempt to overcome the angular momentum problem, French mathematician Edouard Roche (1854) postulated that the initial mass distribution in Simon's model, may not be uniform, but instead was highly centrally condensed. If a uniformly rotating cloud with a mass distribution of this type, were to collapse to produce a star and planetary system as envisaged by Simon, the angular momentum of the central body would naturally be smaller. Indeed, given an arbitrarily steep initial density profile, the gross angular momentum distribution observed in the solar system could be satisfactorily accounted for. The initial high density profile could be accomplished by assuming that the star formed in isolation, and subsequently captured the sphere of planetary material.
Roche was a professor of pure math at Montpellier, his native city, and is famous for determining, in 1848, the limit of distance from the parent planet at which a moon can remain in tact which is about 2.5 times the radius of the planet for a body in hydrostatic equilibrium and about 1.4 for a smaller, rocky body. This is called the Roche limit but it was largely based on the work of Italian-born (in Torino) French mathematician, Joseph Louis Lagrange, regarded as the 18th century's greatest. The Roche lobe is also named for him and is the volume, which has a lobular form, and whose boundary, the Roche surface, determines the maximum sizes of stars in a binary system relative to their separation; their gravitational sphere of influence is defined by this boundary (Moore, 2002).
The Hill sphere, defined by the American astronomer and mathematician George Hill, is also known as the Roche sphere, as it is based on the work of Roche. It is the volume around a planet, moon, or sublunar object, where it dominates in attraction of satellites to that body, rather than to a larger 1 which it orbits, so for a planet to retain a moon, the moon must have an orbit that lies within the Hill sphere of the planet. That moon would, in turn, have a Hill sphere of its own. In other words, it approximates the gravitational sphere of influence of a smaller body in the face of gravitational forces from a more massive 1. For any point in space, one can compute the sum of three forces: gravity due to the larger object, gravity due to the smaller one, the centrifugal force experienced by a body at such a point moving with the same frequency, as a planet around the Sun. The Hill sphere for a planet is the largest sphere, centered at the planet, within which the sum of the three forces is always directed towards that planet. It can also be stated as the sphere around a secondary body in orbit around a primary one within which the net force is a centripetal force directed at the secondary body. So the Hill sphere describes the outer limit that a smaller object such as a moon or artificial satellite can stably orbit the larger one. It extends between the Lagrangian points 1 and 2 (L1 and L2) (there are 5 equilibrium points in the orbital plane of any 3 massive objects such that all 3 remain in a fixed geometrical configuration; orbits in L1 and L2 are unstable, although some particular orbits in these vicinities are stable, and those in L3, L4, and L5 are stable), which lie along the line of centers of the two bodies. The region of influence of the second body is shortest in that direction, and so it acts as the limiting factor for the size of the Hill sphere. Beyond that distance, a third object in orbit around the second (e.g., a planet) would spend at least part of its orbit outside the Hill sphere, and would be progressively displaced (commonly termed perturbed or wobbled) by the tidal forces of the central body (e.g., the Sun), eventually ending up orbiting the latter. This is a 3-body problem that Hill worked on which is a fundamental issue in celestial mechanics and it is a rather important factor in zonal dominance and isolation mass.
Almost all dualistic theories were created in an attempt to explain the angular momentum distribution in the solar system. Most early theories involved material being torn from the Sun during a close encounter with a secondary body. In these the solar material enters orbit around the Sun and cools to form the planets. This type of interaction was resurrected by Thomas Chamberlin (1901), Forest Moulton (1905), Svante Arrhenius (1913), who suggested a head on collision between the Sun and the passing star leading to 1 star and a gaseous filament, James Jeans (1917), and Harold Jeffreys (1918).
Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius was born 1859 to a family of farmers, was founding father of physical chemistry, formulated the Arrhenius equation, was the 1st to recognize the greenhouse effect, developed the theory of ionic dissociation, had 8 honorary doctorates, and had 3 awards, the Nobel in 1909, the Royal Society's Davy Medal, and the Chemical Society's Faraday Medal. He was author of the panspermia theory in biology (Moore, 2002; nobelprize.org; Wikipedia). His grandson Gustaf, born in Stockholm in 1922, worked in oceanography, especially at Scripps, geochemistry, space chemistry, and biology. His wife Jenny is the daughter of Norwegian chemist and Nobel laureate George de Hevesy (repositories.cdlib.org).
English theoretical physicist James Jeans (1919) returned to the centrally condensed initial configuration of the Simon model envisaged by Roche. Using an argument, for which Roche himself provided the analysis, he showed that in the centrally condensed hypothesis, the surrounding material would be so diffuse that tidal forces from the forming star would prevent planets forming in the rings. Jeans' description is the most complete and was popular for a long time but gradually lost favour due to the many complications which could not be resolved.
Jeans was born in Omskirk, Lancashire in 1877 and is also known for having formulated the idea of continous creation which laid the groundwork for the steady state theory. One of his major discoveries, named Jeans' length, is a critical radius of an interstellar cloud in space which depends on the temperature and density of the cloud and the mass of the particles composing it. A smaller nebula will not have sufficient gravity to overcome the repulsive gas pressure forces and condense to form a star but a larger will collapse to eventually become a star. Jeans mass or instability solves for the critical mass a nebula must attain in order to collapse. He also helped to discover the Rayleigh-Jeans law, which relates the energy density of black body radiation to the temperature of the emission source. He also made important contributions in the areas of quantum theory, radiation, and stellar evolution. He taught at Cambridge and Princeton, was awarded the RAS Gold Medal in '22, was knighted in '28, and was a member of the Order of Merit. In the latter part of his career, in the '30s, he devoted himself to popularizing astronomy through the books The Universe Around Us, The Mysterious Universe, Though Space and Time, and The Stars in their Courses, and radio broadcasts (Wikipedia; Moore, 2002).
Forest Moulton in 1900 had also shown that the nebular hypothesis was inconsistent with observations because of the angular momentum. Moulton and Chamberlin in 1904 originated the planetismal hypothesis (Sherrill, 1999; Wikipedia). Along with many astronomers of the day they came to believe the pictures of "spiral nebulas" from the Lick Observatory were direct evidence of forming solar systems. These turned out to be galaxies instead but the Shapley-Curtis debate about these was still 16 years in the future. One of the most fundamental issues in the history of astronomy was distinguishing between nebulas and galaxies.
Moulton and Chamberlin suggested that a star had passed close to the Sun early in its life to cause tidal bulges and that this, along with the internal process that leads to solar prominences, resulted in the ejection of filaments of matter from both stars. While most of the material would have fallen back, part of it would remain in orbit. The filaments cooled into numerous, tiny, solid fragments, ‘planetesimals, ’and a few larger protoplanets.
Jeans (1928) took up the concept of the filament and showed that "droplets" would form given a favourable filament density and suggested the filament would develop as a result of tidal effects of a passing star causing rotational instability in the Sun. The filament would be cigar-shaped so that the more massive planets would form in the center.
Jeffreys (1929) returned to the idea of a collision but only of the grazing type and from which a filament would form between the 2 stars which would eventually break away and, as a result of instabilities, would collapse into "droplets" some of which remained captured by the Sun and condensed into planets. He showed that this process would produce masses in approximate agreement with observed planetary masses.
The work of Henry Russell (1935) showed that if the solar material had been pulled away from the sun with the force necessary to account for the angular momentum of Jupiter, the material would have continued out of the solar system entirely.
The temperature issue forms another of the early major objections. Lyman Spitzer (1939) demonstrated that if sufficient material were to be drawn from the Sun to form the planets, the material would have had to originate from depths of the Sun, where the temperature would be of the order of millions of degrees. Clearly, with temperatures as high as this, no amount of modification to the mass or radius using this model could maintain the plausibility of the fragmentation process under the current interaction assumptions. He also showed that a column of material drawn out from the sun would dissipate rather than condense. Another important objection to planets forming from hot solar material, comes from the distribution of the light elements lithium, beryllium, and boron. All these are rare in the Sun, as they are consumed in nuclear reactions, but they are comparatively abundant in the Earth's crust.
The Chamberlin-Moulton model received favourable support for about 3 decades but passed out of favour by the late '30s and was discarded in the '40s by the realization it was incompatible with the angular momentum of Jupiter, but a part of it, planetesimal accretion, was, of course and unfortunately, retained.
T.J.J. See, was an American astronomer and Navy Captain born near Montgomery City, Missouri in the 1800s. He earned his master's and PhD at Berlin U and then worked under the famous Ellery Hale at Lowell. He had a cult following largely because of his many (some 60) articles in Popular Astronomy but also in Astronomische Nachrichte (Astronomical News) (mostly in English). While at the USNO 's Mare Island, Cal. station, he developed a model which he called capture theory, published in 1910, in his "Researches on the Evolution of the Stellar Systems: v. 2. The capture theory of cosmical evolution, founded on dynamical principles and illustrated by phenomena observed in the spiral nebulae, the planetary system, the double and multiple stars and clusters and the star-clouds of the Milky Way" (T.P. Nichols, Lynn, Mass.) which proposed that the planets formed in the outer solar system and were captured by the Sun; the moons were formed in thus manner and were captured by the planets. This caused a feud with Moulton. A preview was presentedd in 1909 at a meeting of the ASP (Astronomical Society of the Pacific) at the Chabot Observatory in Oakland, Cal., and newspaper headlines blared "Prof. See's Paper Causes Sensation" (San Francisco Call) and "Scientists in Furore Over Nebulae" (San Francisco Examiner) (Sherrill, 1999). Our current knowledge of dynamics makes capture most unlikely as it requires special conditions.
Kristian Birkeland (1912) proposed that ions emitted from the Sun which, under the influence of the solar magnetic field, spiral out towards their limiting circular orbits. He never followed up to give a detailed mathematical model. He was a Norwegian physicist and chemist, born in 1867, a professor and researcher at the U. of Oslo, and was the 1st to propose the link between the auroras and solar magnetic activity. In 1908 he devised a solar-terrestrial interaction model which took 65 years to confirm and included field-aligned currents now called Birkeland currents and auroral electro-jets. Enormous Birkeland currents connecting Jupiter and its moon Io were recorded by the Voyager spacecraft in 1979. In 1984 Farhad Yusef-Azdeh, Don Chance, and Mark Morris discovered Birkeland currents on a galactic scale. Working with the Very Large Array radio telescope, they found an arc of radio emission some 120 light-years long near the centre of the Milky Way. The structure is made up of narrow filaments typically 3 light-years wide and running the full length of the arc. The strength of the associated magnetic field is 100 times greater than previously thought possible on such a large scale, but the field is nearly identical in geometry and strength to computer simulations of galaxy formation. Alfven had promoted his ideas since 1939. It was Birkeland who invented plasma physics in 1896. In 1903, along with Edye, he invented the electric arc process, a means for the fixation of nitrogen.
In Jeans' filament model (1917), a massive star passing close to the Sun pulls a filament of material from it. Unlike Leclerc's original suggestion and like the Chamberlin-Moulton model, the passing body here is a star, and also like in Chamberlin and Moulton, it is not required to graze the Sun. And only a very close approach of a second star was necessary to eject material, instead of requiring solar prominences. Instead, the tidal field acting on the Sun induces a distortion. Objections relating to the dynamics of the interaction have been put forward by Jeffreys (1929) and Russell (1935)(of Hertzsprung-Russell diagram fame) among others. Jeffreys noted that if Jupiter did indeed form from solar material, and since in its present state it has a similar mean density to the Sun, it should also currently have a similar spin period, not the observed value of 60 times as fast.
Even if the attraction of the retreating massive star is accounted for, insufficient angular momentum can be imparted to the planetary material, to account for the orbit of Mercury, let alone the other planets. In fact, if the orbits of the protoplanets are not modified considerably, at first perihelion passage they will be reabsorbed by the Sun (Oxley, 1999).
In order to overcome many of the problems raised against Jeans' filament concept, Jeans suggested that the interaction may have occurred at an early stage in the Sun's evolution, at a time when the Sun was much cooler and larger in extent, perhaps extending out to the orbital distance of Neptune. Indeed, most of the objections against the hot condensed Sun interaction would not apply to a cool extended body. However, this type of interaction also has its problems one being how the newly formed planets would interact with the collapsing Sun. Another point is that if the Sun were to be tidally disrupted the parameters of the interaction would imply that the star would have around 10 times the mass of the Sun, and that the largest possible interaction distance would be around 4 solar radii. If it is assumed that the massive star is on the main sequence, then its radius would be slightly greater than the interaction distance, suggesting that the interaction would be more collisional in nature than tidal, a return to Leclerc's original suggestion. Obviously this argument does not apply to exotic compact bodies such as massive black holes (Oxley, 1999).
These methods have not resolved the angular momentum problem. Mostly they involve material spiralling in to join the central condensation, and this would give hundreds, if not thousands, of times more angular momentum than is possessed by the Sun, in fact the Sun could not form at all. The linkage of outflowing ionized material to the solar magnetic field, could remove a considerable amount of angular momentum, but the rate of outflow, and the required dipole moment for the Sun, are extremely implausible. In any event, for the mechanism to operate it is first necessary for the Sun to form (Oxley, 1999).
Dutch astronomer Berlage (1927, 1957, 1967) posited ion ejections from the Sun. In its initial state the Sun was surrounded by a flattened nebula and emitted ions into it which acquired space charge as a result which increased with distance. The equilibrium configuration is a series of concentric rings, each consisting of 1 particular element, those nearer to the Sun having the heaviest atomic weight. There are many invalid points here including the omission of centrigugal forces and the space charge would not form since ionization in a solar envelope is only negligible (Williams and Cremin, 1968). He authored 17 articles, probably more than anyone, all in the Proc. RDA (Royal Dutch Academy) save the 1st, his most detailed being in '57, and 2 books on the subject, from 1927-67.
Ross Gunn (1932) revived the idea of a single star breaking up as a result of rotational instability, which comes about because of EM effects in the initial star, forming the Sun and a companion star. Thermal asymmetry, 1 face of the the newly-formed stars being hot while the other is cool, causes the stars to move apart. This offered an explanation as to why 2 stars can come to be very close together in order for a filament to be efficiently formed, Gunn having concluded the grazing collision of Jeffreys was too improbable.
In Lyttleton (1937, 1940) a companion star to the Sun collides with a passing star. Such a scenario was already suggested and rejected by Russell (1935) of Hertzsprung-Russell diagram fame (which shows the luminosity-temperature relations of stars). Lyttleton (1937) showed terrestrial planets were too small to condense on their own so suggested 1 very large proto-planet broke in 2 because of rotational instability, forming Jupiter and Saturn, with a connecting filament from which the other planets formed. In a later model (Lyttleton, 1940, 1941) involves a triple star system, a binary plus the Sun, in which the binary merges and later breaks up because of rotational instability and escapes from the system leaving a filament that formed between them to be captured by the Sun. Objections of Spitzer apply to this model also.
Swedish astrophysict Hannes Alfven (1942, 1946) included EM effects in equations of particle motions and angular momentum distribution and compositional differences were explained. In 1954 he 1st proposed the band structure in which he distinguished an A-cloud, containing mostly helium, but with some solid- particle impurities ("meteor rain"), a B-cloud, with mostly hydrogen, a C-cloud, having mainly carbon, and a D-cloud, comprised mainly of silicon and iron. Impurities in the A-cloud form Mars and the Moon (later captured by Earth), in the B-cloud they condense into Mercury, Venus, and Earth, in the C-cloud they condense into the outer planets, and Pluto and Triton may have formed from the D-cloud.
He was born in Norrkoping in 1908 to physician parents and is famous for his work in MHD and plasma physics. He discovered the Alfven wave which lead to his founding of MHD by combining EM theory with hydrodynamics. He received his PhD at Uppsala in '34. He worked at Uppsala, the Nobel Inst. for Physics, the Royal Inst. of Technology (KTH in Swedish), and UCSD (U. of Cal. at San Diego). He was a member of 9 scientific organizations and recipient of 5 awards, the Nobel (with Louis Néel of France) in '70 for his work in MHD and plasma physics, the RAS Gold Medal in '67, the Franklin Inst. Gold Medal in '71, the Lomonosoff Gold Medal from the Russian Academy of Sciences, also in '71, and the AGU(Am. Geoph. Union)'s Bowie Medal in '88. He spoke 5 languages.
He often had unorthodox views so that the hopelessly biased and orthodox peer-review system tended to pass up his articles and often his contributions were initially disregarded or opposed but later recognized because of lab experiments or measurements in space. Alfvén had developed a model whereby cosmic rays were accelerated by collisions with magnetized plasma clouds emitted by the Sun. Later, Enrico Fermi had the cosmic rays colliding with moving magnetized plasma clouds in interstellar space. The physical principle was the same, but Fermi got the credit and it was dubbed the Fermi mechanism.
He formulated the concept of frozen-in magnetic field lines but warned against its unjustified use especially in space, which might apply to Hoyle's hypothesis; the guiding center approxiamtion for charged particle motion; critical ionization velocity, which figures prominently in his cosmogonic model and which was verified years later in lab experiments but verification in space proved elusive; a special kind of co-rotation which lead him to correctly predict the rings of Uranus (this was never accepted for publication); was 1 of the 1st to postulate a galactic magnetic field which is now generally recognized; developed plasma cosmology, which is an alternative to both the steady state and Big Bang and which advances the ideas of a universe full of plasma and symmetric cosmology which involves equal amounts of plasma and antiplasma bounded by a double layer. The conceptual origins of plasma cosmology were developed during 1965 by Alfvén in his book Worlds-Antiworlds, basing some of his work on the ideas of Kristian Birkeland and Oskar Klein's earlier proposal that astrophysical plasmas had an important influence on galaxy formation. During 1971, Klein extended Alfvén's proposals and developed the Alfvén-Klein model. Their cosmology relied on giant astrophysical explosions resulting from a mixing of cosmic matter and antimatter that created the universe or meta-galaxy, as they preferred to call it. This hypothetical substance that spawned the universe was termed "ambiplasma" and took the forms of proton-antiprotons (heavy ambiplasma) and electrons-positrons (light ambiplasma). The exploding double layer was also suggested by Alfvén as a possible mechanism for the generation of cosmic rays, x-ray bursts, and gamma-ray bursts. Ambiplasma was proposed in part to explain the observed baryon asymmetry in the universe as being due to an initial condition of exact matter- antimatter symmetry. Ambiplasma would naturally form differential pockets of matter and antimatter that would expand outwards as annihilation between matter and antimatter occurred at the boundaries. They concluded that we must happen to live in one of the pockets that was mostly baryons rather than antibaryons. The processes governing the evolution and characteristics of the universe at its largest scale would be governed mostly by this feature. Alfvén postulated that the universe has always existed, as I do (see Cosmology in Extra Essays) due to causality arguments and rejection of ex nihilo models as a stealth form of creationism. The cellular regions of exclusively matter or antimatter would appear to expand in regions local to annihilation, which he considered as a possible explanation for the observed apparent expansion of the universe as merely a local phase of a much larger history.
The inner layer of the plasma sheet, which is the source of the aurora borealis, is named for him. He also discovered the Alfven velocity and the Alfven number and an asteroid is named for him (Falthammar and Dressler, 2006; Wikipedia; Nobelprize.org; Millar et al,1996; Moore, 2002).
Nolke (1932 ) showed that in order for the filament to be stable against the tidal action of the Sun its mass would have to be comparable with it. He had also cast doubt (1930), like Russell, on the ability of any resisting medium to round off the orbits. Bhatnagar (1940) demonstrated that in a 2-body problem the formation of a connecting filament was quite impossible which invalidated most of the above hypotheses. He also conluded, regarding Lyttleton's idea, that the Sun's companion would have to be so close to the Sun at the time of collision with the passing star that the Sun would have to be involved in the collision as well.
Egyed (1960) placed the question against the background of Dirac's cosmology in which the gravitational constant decreases with time so that, under suitable conditions, there could be an instant where the centrifugal force at the solar equator was equal to the surface gravity and a planetary mass escaping at this time would cause a decrease in the solar radius and the process would repeat itself to form a number of planets. Williams and Cremin point out that it's hard to see how this process would end and if it did the Sun would presumably be in a rapid spin and the scenario is subject to Nolke's and Russell's points.
Banerji and Srivastara's scenario (1963) involved a magnetic star of 9 solar masses assumed to radially oscillate with a small amplitude and showed that the nearby passage of a star of similar mass increases the amplitude oscillation of the magnetic star and renders it unstable. This instability would lead to ejection of matter from which the planets would form. They concluded the 2 stars need not pass very close nor need a high velocity to produce the required angular momentum distribution. This, of course, does not offer an explanation of twinning nor the small sizes of Mars and Mercury, and involves masses which do not apply to the Sun, and is also subject to Nolke's and Russell's points.
American chemist Harold Urey, who founded cosmochemistry, put forward a scenario (1951, 1952, 1956, 1966) based largely on meteorites and using Chandrasekhar's stability equations and obtained density distribution in the gas and dust disk surrounding the primitive Sun. In order that volatile elements like mercury could be retained by the terrestrial planets he postulated a moderately thick gas and dust halo shielding the planets from the Sun. In order to form diamonds, pure carbon crystals, Moon-size objects, gas spheres that became gravitationally unstable, would have to form in the disk with the gas and dust dissipating at a later stage. Pressure fell as gas was lost and diamonds were converted to graphite, while the gas became illuminated by the Sun. Under these conditions considerable ionization would be present and the gas would be accelerated by magnetic fields, hence the angular momentum could be transferred from the Sun. He postulated that these lunar-size bodies were destroyed by collisions, with the gas dissipating, leaving behind solids collected at the core, with the resulting smaller fragments pushed far out into space and the larger fragments staying behind and accreting into planets. He suggested the Moon was just such a surviving core.
Urey was born in Walkerton, Indiana, in 1893, son of a teacher and Church of the Brethren minister, and Cora Reinhoehl, and grandson of pioneers. He completed his B.Sc. in zoology in 1917 and his PhD in chemistry at the U. of Chicago in 1923. He worked at John Hopkins, Columbia, U. of Chicago, and U. Cal-San Diego, and for a year with Niels Bohr on atomic structure in Copenhagen at the Inst. for Theoretical Physics. He won 10 awards including the Nobel for chemistry in 1934 for having discovered deuterium (heavy hydrogen isotope) and heavy water (water enriched in deuterium (as deuterium oxide and deuterium protium oxide) in 1931, and had 15 honorary doctorates. He was editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics and worked on the Manhattan Project during the war. The famous, landmark experiment by then-graduate student Stanley Miller in '53 on the origin of life was done under his direction and in his U. of Chicago lab (Nobelprize.org, Moore, 2002, Millar, 1996).
In Fred Whipple's picture (1948) a smoke cloud of about 60,000 AUs diam. and with 1 solar mass contracts and produces the Sun. It has a negligible angular momentum thus accounting for the Sun's similar property. This smoke cloud captures a smaller 1 with a large angular momentum. The collapse time for the large smoke and gas nebula is about 100 mln. yrs. and the rate is slow at 1st, increasing in later stages. The planets would condense from small clouds developed in, or captured by, the 2nd cloud, the orbits would be nearly circular because accretion would reduce eccentricity due to the influence of the resisting medium, orbital orientations would be similar because the small cloud was originally small and the motions would be in a common direction. The protoplanets might have heated up to such high degrees that the more volatile compounds would have been lost and the orbital velocity decreases with increasing distance so that the terrestrial planets would have been more affected. The weaknesses of this scenario are that practically all the final regularities are introduced as a priori assumptions and most of the hypothesizing was not supported by quantitative calculations. For these reasons it did not gain wide acceptance.
Whipple was an American planetologist, born to farmers in Red Oak, Iowa in 1906, famous for his rocky snowball picture of cometary structure in the '50s, which was an aggregate of ice and silicates, only partly confirmed, evidence confirming mostly the Van Flandern model (of asteroid, MB, origin) (Keller et al, 2005). He worked mostly at Harvard where he directed the SAO (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory) from '55-'73, did his B.Sc. at UCLA in math and his PhD at UCal-Berkeley in '31. He wrote a standard textbook, Earth, Moon, and Planets. He discovered 6 comets and asteroid Celestia. He has an asteroid, the 6 comets, and an observatory in Arizona named for him (Moore, 2002; Brit. On-Line; notablebiographies.com).
Dauvillier (1942, 1947, 1956, 1963) proposed an ionized tidal filament and showed that EM effects would stabilize filaments long enough for condensation into planetary twins to take place and would occur at exponentially increasing distances, the twin planets merging while still gaseous excepting the Terra-Luna system. The explanation of this idea by Wiliams and Cremin is incomplete and I was unable to find the articles in question and I don't have his books.
The vortex model of 1944, which harkens back to the Cartesian model, involved a pattern of turbulence-induced eddies in a Laplacian nebular disc. In it a suitable combination of clockwise rotation of each vortex and anti-clockwise rotation of the whole system can lead to individual elements moving around the central mass in Keplerian orbits so there would be little dissipation of energy due to the overall motion of the system but material would be colliding at high relative velocity in the inter-vortex boundaries and in these regions small roller-bearing eddies would coalesce to give annular condensations. It was much criticized as turbulence is a phenomenon associated with disorder and would not spontaneously produce the highly ordered structure required by the hypothesis. As well, it does not provide a solution to the angular momentum problem and does not explain lunar formation nor other very basic characteristics of the solar system (Woolfson, 2000).
The model was formulated by German physicist and philosopher Baron Karl Friedrich von Weizsäcker who had, in 1938, independently of Bethe, proposed a theory for solar energy: a series of catalytic nuclear fusion reactions turning hydrogen to helium (Britannica On-Line; Millar et al, 1996) and with Bethe in 1937 came up with the Bethe-Weizsäcker formula for cyclical nuclear fusion in the stellar process and also published the Weizsacker formula in 1935 which described nuclear masses that allowed to reproduce empirical formulations between masses of different isotopes (e18.physik). During WW2 he worked on developing an atomic bomb for Germany but in 1957 signed a Göttingen 18 manifesto opposing the acquistion of atomic weapons by West Germany. His father Ernst was a diplomat in the National Socialist government and his younger brother Richard was German president from 1984-94 (Britannica On-Line).
The Weizsacker vortex model was modified by Ter Haar (1948) in that regular eddies were discarded and replaced by random turbulence which would lead to a very thick nebula where gravitational instability would not occur. He concluded the planets must have formed by accretion and explained the compositional difference (solid and liquid planets) as due to the temperature difference between the inner and outer regions, the former being hotter and the latter being cooler, so only refractories (non-volatiles) condensed in the inner region. A major difficulty is that in this supposition turbulent dissipation takes place in a time scale of only about a millenium which does not give enough time for planets to form. Dirk ter Haar (1919-2002) was a Dutch theoretical physicist who earned his PhD at Leiden and is best known for his work in statistical physics, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics (Wikipedia).
Gerard Kuiper (1944) also argued that regular eddies would be impossible and postulated that large gravitational instabilities might occur in the SN (solar nebula), forming condensations. In this the SN could be either co-genetic with the Sun or captured by it. Density distribution would determine what could form: either a planetary system or a stellar companion. The 2 types of planets were assumed to be due to the Roche limit. No explanation was offered for the Sun's slow rotation which Kuiper saw as a larger G-star problem.
Born Gerrit Pieter Kuiper (1905-1973), in Harenkarspel, Holland, to Gerrit (a tailor) and Antje (née de Vries), this is, of course, the same Kuiper who hypothesized the Kuiper Belt long before it was discovered and named for him. He studied with the famous Bart Bok at Leiden where he was taught by Ejnar Hertzprung, Willem de Sitter, and Jan Oort among others. and then emigrated to the US in '33 joining the Lick staff. Fred Whipple became a long-time friend and colleague. Kuiper invented the term "contact binary" for the very close double star Beta Lyrae. He then moved on to Yerkes where he tightened the definition of the mass-luminosity relation, and concluded that white ddwarfs are highly compact objects that behave differently from main- sequence stars. he was then director of Yerkes and also of another observatory, the MacDonald which was established by Yerkes in Texas in 1939. There followed a whole string of discoveies--the atmosphere of Titan, the tenuous CO2 atmosphere of Mars, a 5th moon of Uranus, Miranda, a 2nd of Neptune, Nereid, and methane in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune. An early ambition to set up an institute for solar system studies was fulfilled in 1960 with the LPL (Lunar and Planetary Lab). He was intimately involved in NASA's space program, initiated the use of airborne telescopes for IR observations (the Kuiper Airborne Observatory is named for him), and revitalized planetology in an era dominated by stellar and galactic research and is sometimes considered as the father of modern planetary sciences (Moore, 2002; Wikipedia; Biographical Memoirs, vol. 62-National Academies Press (books.nap.edu); Millar et al, 1996).
Russian astronomer Otto Schmidt (1944) presented his model for planetary origins in the same year as Kuiper. In it the Sun passes through a cloud of gas and dust capturing some of it to form the SN with collisions reducing it to a bun-shaped disk. The mass and angular momentum of this nebula are postulated rather than derived as is the case for most of the suppositions in this category. The temperature difference explained the compositional difference. It explained co-planar rotation and by a postulate mass and angular momentum were also in agreement with the requirements but no attempt was made to explain the Sun's slow rotation nor the twinning of planets. Extensions of the model, together forming the Russian school, are reviewed in Levin (1958) and include Gurevich and Lebedinsky (1950), Safronoff (1967,1969), Safronoff and Vityazeff (1985), Safronoff and Ruskol (1994), and Ruskol (1981), among others. Schmidt also proposed the co-accretion hypothesis for the Earth and Moon in 1959 and Ruskol has written several articles on the Moons's origin and includes his idea in his 1981 article, which involves circumplanetary swarms for terrestrial planets and accretional disks for outer planets.
In Hoyle's hypothesis (1944) the companion went nova with ejected material captured by the Sun and planets froming from this material. In a later it was a supernova (1945). In 1955 proposed a similar system to Simon and with more mathematical detail in 1960. It differs from Simon in that a magnetic torque occurs between the disk and the Sun, which comes into effect immediately or else more and more matter would be ejected resulting in a much too massive planetary system, 1 comparable to the Sun. The torque causes a magnetic coupling and acts to transfer angular momentum from the Sun to the disk. The magnetic field strength would have to be 1 gauss. The existence of torque depends on magnetic lines of force being frozen into the disk (a consequence of a well-known MHD (magnetohydrodynamic) theorem on frozen-in lines of force). As the solar condensation temperature when the disk was ejected could not be much more than 1000 degrees K., a number of refractories must be solid, probably as fine smoke particles, which would grow with condensation and accretion. These particles would be swept out with the disk only if their diam. at the Earth's orbit was less than 1 m. so as the disk moved outward a subsidiary disk consisting of only refractories remains behind where the terrestrial planets would form. The model is in good agreement with the mass and composition of the planets and angular momentum distribution provided the magnetic coupling is an acceptable idea, but not explained are twinning, the low mass of Mars and Mercury, and the planetoid belts.
English astrophysicist and cosmologist Frederick Hoyle (1915-2001) is, of course, most famous for his steady state, continuous creation theory. He is also known for his fundamental explanation of how stars synthesize refractories, a model for the collapse of interstellar dust clouds to form stars, and reviving the panspermia idea, and was the 1st to provide a mathematical description of stellar accretion. He also wrote science-fiction novels (Moore, 2002; Millar et al, 1996).
Edgeworth demonstrated that direct condensation of Sun and planets is not possible (1946), much the same conclusion reached by Jeffreys (1918). But he also presented a supposition (1949) in which there was a rotating disk as in the Simon idea but, as he considered magnetic fields too speculative, he posited viscous forces to transfer angular momentum. Vortices would form in the disk with collisions between them causing an increase in mean size. He calculated that it would take 100,000 yrs. for a mass of planetary size to form at the Earth's orbit and 5 mln. at Neptune's orbit. In Edgeworth (1963) there is a slightly different coupling method from that of Hoyle but is essentially the same and indicated further that magnetic coupling is possible.
This is the same Kenneth Edgeworth (1880-1972) who formulated the idea of a TNR (1943) preceded by Frederick Leonard in the '30s and followed independently by Gerard Kuiper in 1951 (Moore, 2002). He also distinguished himself in WW1 winning a DSO and MC. After the war he was promoted to Lt.-Col., retiring in '26. In the '30s he wrote 4 books on international economics. His autobio is called Jack of All Trades (Allan Figgs, Dublin, 1965)(Hollis, 1996).
Swiss astronomer Louis Jacot (1951, 1962, 1981) resurrected the Cartesian vortex model but proposed a heirarchy of vortices or vortices within vortices, i.e., a lunar system vortex, a solar system vortex, and a galactic vortex. He put forward the notion that planetary orbits were in spirals, not circles or ellipses (it is a known fact that planetary orbits are not fixed circles but are slowly spiralling outwards, Earth's anomalistic year (a planetary orbit measured from perihelion to perihelion) being 4 min., 44 sec. longer than the sidereal year (a planetary orbit measured relative to the background stars), however, the accepted explanation is the gravitational displacement on any particular, given planet by the other planets, not a vortex), so recognized that the solar system is in expansion, and that planets were expelled, 1 at a time, from the Sun, specifically from an equatorial bulge caused by rotation, and that 1 of them shattered in this expulsion leaving the asteroid belt. The KBO was unknown at the time but presumably it, too, would be the result of the same kind of shattering. In this model there were 4 phases to the planets, no rotation and keeping the same side to the Sun "as Mercury does now" (we've known, of course, since 1965, that it doesn't), very slow, accelerated, and finally, daily rotation. The moons, like the planets, originated as equatorial expulsions, but from their parent planets, with some shattering, leaving the rings, and Earth is supposed to eventually expel another moon. Besides the expansion of the solar system, planets move away from the Sun, Jacot also proposed the expansion of galaxies, stars move away from the hub, and moons move away from their planets. He explained the differences between inner and outer planets and inner and outer moons through vortex behaviour. Mercury's eccentric orbit was explained by its recent expulsion from the Sun and Venus' slow rotation as its being in the slow rotation phase, having been expelled 2nd to last.
In fact, Jacot was at least partly right concerning vortices. George Vatistas, a researcher and professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia in Montreal, was the 1st to discover geometrical shapes in the centers of vortices in the lab, and some galaxies have similar central shapes, squares or triangles (le Code Chastenay science show). Spiral galaxies are, in fact, vortices. Other geometrical shapes have been found in vortices in nature: a hexagon at the South Pole of Saturn's atmosphere observed by Cassini and a pentagon in Hurricane Isabel seen in 2003.
Jacot opposed Newtonian as well as Einsteinian theory and the Big Bang and believed in a type of continuous creation in which galaxies continually formed, broke up, and were replaced by new ones from the debris, a universe without beginning nor end, a universal ether, and Bode's Law, placed emphasis on continuum, dynamism (motion), and evolution in the Universe, probably supported some kind of LaSage gravity, and held that there was no vacuum. He also protested the tyranny of official science (the soft Inquisition as he also referred to it).
Some of his other books included l'Univers en Marche in '44 (with a '52 publication date, as well), Attraction ou Distraction Universelle? from '54, La Terre s'en Va in '58, Méditations sur le Mouvement from '63, l'Evolution Universelle which came out in '64, Histoire Critique de la Pensée (4 vols.) from '70, and Préjugés et Contradictions de la Science and l'Imposture Scientifique, both published in '73. Several of these are available in English translation. His ms. for Science et Bon Sens was titled Retour à Descartes et à la Logique en Science. He may have also been a lawyer and playwright judging from certain bibliographies. I have been unable to find any biographical information on him.
McCrea's model (1960, 1978) includes fission but it occurs in a PN (protoplanetary nebula) instead of the sun and there is no solar nebula. Agglomerations of floccules (which are presumed to compose the supersonic turbulence assumed to occur in the interstellar material from which stars are born) formed the sun and protoplanets the latter splitting to form planets. The 2 portions can not remain gravitationally bound to each other, are at a mass ratio of at least 8 to 1, and for inner planets they go into independent orbits while for outer planets one of the portions exits the solar system. The inner protoplanets were Venus-Mercury and Earth-Mars. The moons of the greater planets were formed from "droplets" in the neck connecting the 2 portions of the dividing protoplanet and these droplets could account for some of the asteroids. Terrestrial planets would have no major moons which does not account for Luna nor the lack of moons for Venus and Mercury. Presumably, if we incorporate an explosion into this model, another pair of terrestrial planets would have occured between Mars and Jupiter and were blown up in a war leaving the 2 belts of the MB. But it does not account for the TNR. It predicts certain observations such as the similar angular velocity of Mars and Earth with similar rotation periods and axial tilts but does not have an explanation for the twinning of planets nor of moons. In this scheme there are 6 principal planets: 2 terrestrial, Venus and Earth, 2 major, Jupiter and Saturn, and 2 outer, Uranus and Neptune; and 3 lesser planets: Mercury, Mars, and Pluto. Another fascinating model but inadequate.
William McCrea (1904-99) is also noted for having discovered, in 1928, that 3/4 of the Sun is made of hydrogen and 1/4 helium; previously it was thought to be composed mostly of iron. He was born in Dublin, had 2 doctorates (a PhD and a DSc), was president of the RAS (Royal Astronomical Society) and president of Section A of the BAAS (British Association for the Advancement of Science), was knighted in 1985, and received the RAS Gold Medal (Wikipedia).
In American astronomer A. G. W. Cameron's picture (1962, 1963), the protosun has a mass of about 1-2 suns with a diam. of some 100,000 AUs, is gravitationally unstable, collapses, and breaks up into smaller subunits. The magnetic field is of the order of 1/100,000 gauss. During the collapse the magnetic lines of force are twisted. The collapse is fast and is done by the dissociation of H molecules followed by the ionization of H and the double ionization of He. Angular momentum leads to rotational instability which produces a Simonian disk. At this stage radiaton will remove excess energy and the disk will be quite cool in a relatively short period (about 1 mln. yrs.) and the condensation into what Whipple calls cometismals takes place. Aggregation of these produces giant planets which in turn produce disks during their formation from which evolve into lunar systems. The formaton of terrestrial planets, comets, and asteroids involved disintegration, heating, melting, solidificaton, etc.
This is the same Cameron who was amomg those to formulate the convoluted, improbable, and implausible model for the Moon's origin known as the Big Splat or Giant Impactor Hypothesis.
Woolfson (1960) had proposed that a 10 solar-mass star travelling at 100 km/sec approaching the Sun would form tidal bulges in the latter from which Pluto and the planets would each break away in turn. After criticism from Briggs (1960) he proposed (1964)that the approaching star would be a supergiant from which a filament is drawn as a result of tidal effects from the Sun. This filament would break into droplets as in Jeans and Jeffreys. The argument here is numerical; by choosing suitable initial conditions a system is obtained with the M and AM that agree with observed values. The objections of Spitzer apply here once again.
Dormand and Woolfson (1974, 1977) and Woolfson (1978) propose a collision between planets. A complete vapourization is possible as “…an amount (of kinetic energy) more than enough to vapourize all the planetary material” (emphasis by the author) (Woolfson, 1978). This would probably apply also to an internal explosion. In their intriguing but unlikely model, the filament capture hypothesis, as in Woolfson,s earlier versions, a filament is thrown out by a passing proto-star which is captured by the Sun and planets form from it. In this there were 6 original planets, corresponding to 6 point-masses in the filament, with planets A and B, the 2 innermost, colliding, the former liquid at twice the mass of Neptune, and ejecting out of the solar system, and the latter solid at 1/3 the mass of Uranus, and splitting into Earth and Venus. Mars and the Moon are former moons of A, the latter obviously captured by Earth and the former, of course, went on to become circumsolar. Mercury in this is either a fragment of B or an escaped moon of A. The collision also produced the asteroid belt and the comets. An interesting idea, to be sure, but it doesn't account for the twinning of planets and moons and the close approach of a star is highly improbable as is the collision. As well, a solid planet smashing a liquid one would not break up and the liquid one would splash out and dissipate. Also, observations of other solar systems show nebular disks and not filaments.
Michael Woolfson is a British physicist, born in 1927, who worked at Cambridge and York, earning his M.A. at Oxford and his PhD and DSc at UMIST (U. of Manchester Inst. of Technology) and also worked in crystallography and computer simulation. He received the Ewald Prize from the International Union of Crystallography in 2002 and is a Fellow of RAS, the Royal Society, and the Inst. of Physics.
A collision has been proposed for the retrogade rotation of Venus and also for Uranus, however, it is probable that these peculiar spins are caused by a very large tilt that eventually was large enough to tip the planet over due to tidal effects, and, in the case of Venus, involves not having a moon (the Chaotic Obliquity of Venus, bdl.fr/Equipes/ASD/Venus).
Australian astronomer A.J.R. Prentice (1978) presented a "modern Laplacian" hypothesis.
Jeans (1931) divides the various models into 2 groups: those where the material for planet formation came from the Sun and those where it didn't and may be concurrent or consecutive. William McCrea (1963) divides them into 2 groups also: those that relate the formation of the planets to the formation of the Sun and those where it is independent of the formation of the Sun, where the planets form after the Sun becomes a normal star. This is similar to Hervé Reeves' classification (1978) where he categorizes them as co-genetic with the Sun or not but also as formed from altered or unaltered stellar/interstellar material. He also recognizes 4 groups : ones based on the solar nebula, originated by Swedenborg, Kant, and Simon in the 1700s; the ones proposing a cloud captured from interstellar space, major proponents being Alfven (1954, 1978) and Gustaf Arrhenius (1978)(Alfven and Arrhenius (1975, 1976); the binary hypotheses which propose that a sister star somehow disintegrated and a portion of its dissipating material was captured by the Sun, principal hypothesizer being Lyttleton in the '40s; and the close-approach-filament ideas of Jeans (1916) and Jeffreys (1918), and, as already mentioned, Woolfson and Dormand. In Williams and Cremin (1968) the categories are: (1) models that regard the origin and formation of the planets as being essentially related to the Sun, with the 2 formation processes taking place concurrently or consecutively, (2) models that regard formation of the planets as being independent of the formation process of the Sun, the planets forming after the Sun becomes a normal star; this has 2 subcategories: a) where the material for the formation of the planets is extracted either from the Sun or another star, b) where the material is acquired from interstellar space. They conclude that the best models are Hoyle's magnetic coupling and McCrea's floccules. Of course, no mention of solar fission theory is made nor by Woolfson (2000) which also presents a fairly extensive historical overview.
the SFH and EPH (last modified June, 2010)
In the SFH (solar fission hypothesis)(Van Flandern, 1999, 2007a,b, 2008; MetaResearch (http://www.metaresearch.org/) (click the Publications tab on top, then click Archives in the index on the left, then go to MRB (MetaResearch Bulletin) and you'll find the index of past issues on the left), which bears some similarity to the Jacot hypothesis, there are 6 pairs of twin planets each fissioned off from the equatorial bulges of an overspinning (outward centrifugal forces exceed the inward gravitational force) Sun at different times so having different temperatures, sizes, and compositions and having condensed thereafter with the nebular disk dissipating after some 100 mln. years, with 6 planets exploding. Four of these were helium dominated, gaseous, and unstable (helium class planets). These were V (Bellatrix) (V standing for the 5th planet, the 1st 4 including Mercury and Mars), K (Krypton), T, and X. In these cases, moons also exploded because of tidal stresses leaving the 4 component belts of the 2 major planetoid zones and V was the parent of 2 large twin moons, Bellona and Mars.
Following the explosion of Bellatrix, Mars, the inner moon, and Bellona, the outer, went into elliptical orbits as a double planet. Tidal forces slightly reduced angular momentum in these orbits, spin angular momentum was eliminated, and tidal stresses on each body progressively rose but were greater on Bellona because it was the smaller body (in moons it is the smaller that is outer) so it explodes, the debris and subsequent collisions leaving the inner, silicaceous MB (Van Flandern, 2007b)(see Extra Essays for bio). Krypton would have had several pairs of smaller moons, half blowing up, with bodies like Ceres surviving as ex-moons with debris and subsequent collisions forming the outer, carbonaceous MB. The same case would go for T and X.
The evidence for Mars as a former moon is as follows:
Much less massive than any planet not itself suspected of being a former moon
Orbit has eccentricity of near 10%, as would be expected for an escaped moon.
Spin is slower than larger planets, except where a massive moon has intervened (Mercury
escaped from Venus; Moon robbed Earth of original 2-4 hour spin rate.)
Large offset of center of figure from center of mass – common for moons, not for planets
Evidence that an explosion occured nearby is as follows:
Shape not in equilibrium with spin, indicating reshaping by some cataclysm
South hemisphere is saturated with craters, the north has sparse cratering – indicates either a removal mechanism
in the north or a massive cratering event in the south
The crustal dichotomy boundary is nearly a great circle – indicates that something nearby but external to Mars and short-lived
devastated half the planet
North hemisphere has smooth, 1-km-thick crust; rough southern crust is up to 20-km. thick –suggests massive bombardment
of the south half from a planet-sized source
Crustal thickness in south decreases gradually toward hemisphere edges – consistent with external event, but not a local one
Lobate scarps occur near hemisphere divide, compressed perpendicular to boundary – indicates that impacts near the
hemisphere boundary were extreme grazers
Huge volcanoes arose where uplift pressure from mass redistribution following pole change is maximal – consistent with
present shape not being in equilibrium
Sudden 90° geographic pole shift occurred – as would happen if a great mass were added to one hemisphere centered on
Mars equator, causing planet to tip over
Much of original atmosphere has been lost – as would result from a major cataclysm
A sudden, massive flood with no obvious source occurred – cataclysm may have brought the water from oceans on the
source body (could this be the flood spoken of in the BIble and many other sources from diverse cultures?)
Xe129, a fission product of massive explosions, has an excess abundance on Mars
Crustal magnetization in southern highlands is weak to absent in northern lowlands
Planet A, the explosion for which is postulated to have caused the LHB (Late Heavy Bombardment), was twinned with Jupiter and B, the explosion for which is postulated to have caused another LHB (Late Heavy Bombardment), with Saturn. In planets A, Jupiter, B, and Saturn, being gigantic solar planets, the inner partner in each pair was subjected to enormous tidal stresses causing it to blow up and this is why we see giant planets without partners in other solar systems as well. The explosions took place before they were able to fission off moons and as they were liquid they left no trace. Venus-Terra ended up as the innermost pair as it was the last to split off and T (for Transneptunian) and X (for the 10th planet in the traditional arrangement) as the outermost but was the initial innermost since it was split off 1st.
The PH (planetismal hypothesis)(or PAH (planetismal accretion hypothesis)) can be used to support Defs. A, B, or C as it can be argued given this evolutionary model that small bodies are early stages of a planet. However, as earlier mentioned, collisional evolution would make most of these fragments of larger bodies so would not qualify as early stages of a planet and distinguishing between the 2, fragments, left-overs from accretion, or rubble piles, occasions uncertainties.
Planetary formation is important in formulating a definition for planet and the SFH and EPH (exploded planet hypothesis)(Olbers, 1812; Lagrange, 1814; Brown and Patterson, 1942; Ovenden, 1972, 1973; Opik, 1978; Van Flandern, 1977, 1978, 1999, 2007; MetaResearch http://www.metaresearch.org/) can be considered as arguments for Def. E, however, there might be a problem with it, but a minor one, as some of these newly circumsolar bodies, remnants of the explosions, might be former moons, such as Ceres, as suggested by Van Flandern (but the planets in question might have had only 2 large moons each) and as would also be the case for Mars and Mercury (Van Flandern and Harrington, 1976; Woolfson, 1979)(Robert Harrington was Tom Van Flandern' s colleague at the USNO and became a Planet X hunter but never found it and there is no major planet in the KB nor beyond; there could be, however, an undetected stellar companion to the Sun (see Death Star)) so there would be a contradiction in regarding some former moons as planets and others not. This would be only minor, though, as there would be numerical values attached and would be based on the 6 traits elucidated in the Short List section so Mars and Mercury would be above this limit and whether or not they are ex-moons could be considered secondary.
The main argument given against the EPH is that there isn’t enough mass in the MB but this is easily contradicted by the fact that, in such an explosion, most of the mass would be vapourized (Van Flandern, 2007) so such an argument is untenable. Also, there is ample evidence for such explosions (Van Flandern, 1999, 2007), over 100 points of evidence in 11 lines of evidence including: 10 from asteroids; 30 from comets (including Opik’s (1978) test for comets which indicates an explosion origin for these); 27 from planets (by Def. E); 12 from moons and ring systems; 20 from meteoroids; and several miscellaneous. Here are the major ones:
asteroids:
1. explosion signatures in the distribution of orbital elements (semi-major axis, eccentricity, and inclination) found
in fragments of artificial satellites that have blown up.
2. mean relative velocities of asteroids are 5 km/sec.
3. low optical reflectivity of asteroids would be expected from the charred residue from an explosion
4. small size and elongation of asteroids and meteoroids and crater chains implying origin through tidal decay of moons
likely caused by an explosion
5. Kirkwood gaps
6. asteroids with moons
7. similar spectrums and albedos in asteroids (and captured asteroids) suggesting common origin
8. 1000 objects 1 km. or more still in earth-crossing orbits; these would all have been eliminated in 30 mln. yrs. unless there
was a recent origin (which would not be from a solar nebula) or continuous production; the latter has been shown to be
untenable
meteorites:
1. rapid melting in some meteorites
2. meteor showers as debris clouds
3. glassy tektites found all over the Earth have several characteristics suggesting an explosion origin including melting shortly
prior to atmospheric entry and implied high pre-entry velocities (O'Keefe, 1976)
comets:
1. comets mostly rocky instead of icy
2. comets with moons
3. split velocities of comets
4. Halley's abundance ratio of N2/NH3 is 1/10 meaning an origin in inner solar system; it would be at 100/200 if the origin
was in the outer solar system
5. Temple 1 from the Deep Impact mission and Shoemaker- Levy from the Stardust mission
6. perihelion bias
7. hyberbolic trajectories which are part of the standard model, are not observed
8. hemispheric bias in the distribution of directions of new comets: some 70-80% of comets come from 1 hemisphere of the
sky and some 20-30% from the other which is required by EPH as nearly parabolic trajectories that are to become
today's new comets are not sent off in equal numbers in all directions
9. Kreutz sun-grazers
planets:
1. sudden obliteration of the larger older craters on Mars
2. Jupiter has insufficient mass to interfere with the formation of a major planet
3. abundance of deuterium to H on Venus indicating presence of abundant water in past not accounted for by cometary
influx alone
4. sudden, massive, and short-lived influx of water on Mars
5. recent loss of abundant flowing water on Mars indicated by deuterium/H ratio moons:
6. Phobos and Deimos captured after planetary break-up in gravitational screen capture instead of from asteroid zone
(Van Flandern, 1999)
7. grooves on Phobos likely caused by collision which captured it into lunar orbit
8. large number of low-angle impacts on Martian surface suggesting former large population of temporary moons
9. magnetism and radioactivity on Moon can't be native to it
general:
1. all airless bodies coated with black material
2. hemispheric asymmetry of Luna, Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury caused by blast waves
Some of these might be explained otherwise but it isn’t likely most would nor could they be explained as well. And the geological evidence on Earth for one of the explosions coincides with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Moreover, evidence gleaned by Deep Impact on comet Tempel 1, shows comets to be of both terrestrial and icy composition.
Also, Jupiter’s gravitational influence probably does not explain the wide variety of distances, eccentricities, and inclinations so a planet (Mars size) must be invoked in the MB to cause these (Freedman and Kaufmann, 2008) which is a complete contradiction. As well, Jupiter is not large enough and would not be able to arrest the development of a planet and even less so Neptune regarding the KB.
The internal explosion of a planet is possible and would be caused by natural nuclear fission as proposed by geophysicist J. Marvin Herndon (1998, 2002) and there is empirical evidence for this, a natural uranium reactor found in an Oklo, Gabon mine (Naudet et al, 1974) and there is evidence of a natural fission reactor in the Earth’s geological past (Cowen, 1976).
Joseph Farrell (2007) proposes an interplanetary war as the cause of of 2 explosions based on very good evidence from many ancient literary sources. He designates 1 of his 2 exploded planets as having the mass of Saturn but solid which is not really possible but he does not necessarily accept the standard model for the fluidity threshold (pers. com.). He states, too, that planets don't suddenly explode by themselves because there wouldn't be the energy for it and that there's no model for it but Van Flandern says natural nuclear fission reactors might have the capacity to provide this energy (MetaResearch website--planetary explosion mechanisms) and has a model for it: When tidal stresses reach a maximum and internal conditions are otherwise suitable they can act as a trigger for a sudden planetary core collapse blocking the planet's normal heat flow and leading directly to an explosion. There is the criticism that a planet or moon does not have enough energy to allow for an explosion of this magnitude but if this is so, then we are back to square 1-- without any viable or plausible explanation of planetary evolution. The Van Flandern model is the best we have at this time. There is evidence of cataclysms in other solar systems (Planetary smashup leaves trail of frozen lava-New Scientist, August, 2009). These are said to be caused by collisions but could be caused by explosions. In any case, collisions are omitted from the Flandernian model because spaces between planets are too large to allow for such events. There is, however, the possibility that collisions might occur in young, chaotic systems, like those in the New Scientist article, a stage postulated in the electric universe model (plasma cosmology), and most solar systems have planets with eccentric orbits. The evidence suggests explosions in our solar system, at least for the MB instead of collisions. The TNR has its 2 belts sharing the same inner rim which might be suggestive of a collision. It is also possible there were explosions for most of the missing planets and collisions between their destabilized moons where there were many moons.
Farrell also says no exploded planet or planets have been observed in modern astronomical history but they wouldn't because there are no more helium planets in our solar system and the tidal stresses are no longer in operation (but he maintains that they are, pers. com.) and we couldn't detect them in other solar systems. His scenario does not explain the KB since there would be no reason to blow up those 2 original planets as they would be fluid and therefore have no people on them and were out of the life zone, in any case, so would be out of the picture.
There is enough evidence to conclude that there was, indeed, a celestial body that was blown up by an advanced civilization in a war sometime in the past, as such accounts are widespread, occurring not only in Sumerian or Babylonian texts, which Farrell especially quotes and refers to, but also in Greek, Roman, Germanic, and Indian mythology, but that body may have been Bellona, the others, or most of them, blowing up through natural means or broken up from collisions. We can consider the failed planet hypothesis as disproven.
To summarize solar system events, as far as we know and as best as we can tell, this is what happened, going from the inner to the outer planets, not in chronological order:
1. Venus lost its moon Mercury which became the innermost planet
2. Bellatrix, a gaseous helium planet, blew up; it had 2 moons, 1, Bellona, was blown up with a plasma weapon, with subsequent collisional evolution forming the inner silicaceous asteroid belt, the other, Mars, remained in tact;
3. Krypton, also a gaseous helium planet, blew up; it had 2 large moons, both blew up (or collided) with subsequent collisional evolution forming the outer carbonaceous and more massive asteroid belt; it possibly had several smaller moons
4. A, a giant liquid planet, exploded before it was able to fission off moons
5. B, a giant liquid planet, exploded before it was able to fission off moons
6. T, a gaseous helium planet, blew up; it had large 2 moons, both exploding, with possibly several smaller moons
7. X, also a gaseous helium planet, blew up; it had large 2 moons, as well, both exploding, with possibly several smaller moons
8. some of the debris from the lunar explosions was thrown out to form the Oort Cloud of comets
The spacing in the original solar system would have been a 1-2 ratio in orbital periods as this is the most stable and approximates best the current positions and such spacing indicates 2 MB planets and 2 in the TNR, which also has an inner and outer belt, or 12 in all. Zipf’s Law also has a 1-2 progression. The Titius-Bode progression is probably an artifact and is generally considered as such. The T-B progression doesn’t work out in the 55 Cancri planetary system either (Poveda and Lara, 2008) contrary to what the authors claim (they skip .07 and .16 distances to make it appear as if it does).
The Galilean moons show distances which approximate the T-B progression but they also show a close approximation of the 1:2 geometric progression in orbital period. The Uranian moons do not show any T-B progression but do show a 1:2 orbital period progression. The Neptunian moons do not show any T-B progression either but do show an approximation for a 1:2 orbital period law except for the gap between Galatea and Larissa. The Saturnian system is too complex to be significant to this topic is excluded.
There is a trend toward twinning among moons: Jupiter’s Io-Europa and Ganymede-Callisto, Uranus’ Ariel-Umbriel and Titania-Oberon and Neptune’s Naiad-Thalassa and Despina-Galatea and there is enough space to allow for a lost companion for Miranda, Proteus, and Larissa. This is good evidence for the SFH but also for the origin of moons by fission. There is a reversal in sizes/masses in twin pairs in moons as the inner one is larger and this is because in planets there is loss of mass and spin angular momentum, whereas in stars there is a gain in these, resulting in the opposite condition in moons (Van Flandern, 2007). Solid planets split off only 1 moon but fluid ones split off at least 2.
There are several problems with the planetismal model: it does not well explain angular momentum distribution, accretion stickiness, planetismal collisions, nor coplanar and circular orbits, and has no explanation at all for the twinning of planets. Solar fission (Van Flandern, 1999), by contrast, accounts well for the twinning of planets, coplanar and circular orbits, angular momentum distribution, and does not require planetismal collisions.
As stated above, James Maxwell, renowned British physicist, showed that the shear forces from a disk with differential rotation would have prevented the condensation of individual planets and famous British astro-physicist James Jeans analyzed the breakup of rapidly spinning bodies under the stress of centrifugal force and concluded that the nebular hypothesis was invalid (Britannica Online, 2008)(italics mine). About planetismal collisions J. J. Lissauer states, "almost all the previous calculations were wrong." He and David Kary, both of the State U. of NY at Stony Brook, have done more accurate calculations and have done computer simulations of 10s of mlns. of planetismals encountering a protoplanet. Lissauer states, "We came to the conclusion that if you accrete planets from a uniform disk of planetismals prograde rotation just can't be explained." The University of Toronto's Luke Dones and Scott Tremaine have confirmed that conclusion through calculations and another 100 mln. simulations. Lissauer goes on to say the results together are robust and "Prograde rotation from a uniform disk is wrong" (Kerr, 1992)(italics mine). They go on, however, to propose band-aid solutions to the refuted PH. Of course, there are those who contend the disk wasn't uniform such as Hannes Alfven (1978) who claims it had a band structure but even so any such disk cannot form planets. And as Van Flandern points out bodies in orbit do not collide but librate instead, as we see in the Trojan asteroids, excepting special cases, i.e, the aftermath of explosions. The nebular disk is considered to be turbulent so that collisions would be probable however the grains would fragment on collision and would not stick together nor fuse--the rule in the subplanet belts is that bodies fragment on collision, not aggregate.
Arguments against the SFH are that the sun does not rapidly spin and has a tilt of 7°. However, the same argument about the sun’s tilt can be made against the PH and, also, both can be explaned by subsequent evolution, i.e., gravitational interaction with the planets causing the tilt and the slowing down of the spin over time, largely because of angular momentum transfer.
The SFH has not been published in a (peer-reviewed, scientific) magazine because it is outside the box but this is no reflection on its merit which is impressive as are the credentials of its authors. Much nonsense is published in peer-reviewed, scientific magazines and much great science is published outside of them and the peer review system is notoriously biased in favour of the conventional view; they are in no way a measure of merit. There is no compelling evidence against the SFH and there is much in favour of it and the PH has no compelling evidence in its favour, requires complex explanations for collisional accretion of planetismals, and has been basically refuted. The SFH might be 1 of the greatest intellectual triumphs in the history of astronomy.
But, of course, orthodoxy will never accept any unconventional theses no matter how plausible, logical, well-substantiated, and even proven and there is a reactionary, abusive, extremist faction in it making incoherent and hypocritical accusations, which is even more subjective, irrational, obstinate, and close-minded than orthodoxy in general. I won't say that the PH and FPH (failed planet hypothesis) are crackpot ideas simply because they're wrong nor that all who support them are crackpots but there are some who are--the reactionary faction. They become hysterical at even the suggestion of anything new, unorthodox, or unconventional, and are abusive as a knee-jerk reaction and pattern. This is not normal behaviour, in fact, it is maladaptive and severely so, and it doesn't occur on the SFH-EPH side. This behaviour might be explained as them having their ego state still in the child phase, with probably having a very strict and rigid upbringing, and so being totally dependent on orthodoxy which has replaced their parents so in their maladaptive state any threat to it they consider a threat to them and react hysterically. They also have an abnormally extraverted personality so they tend to psychosis, neurosis, and anti-social behaviour.
Original Solar System
planet OD OOP OM CD COP CM T-B NM CNM
Venus .4 .25 .8 .7 .6 .8 .4 1 0
Terra .6 .50 1 1 1 1 .7 1 1
Bellatrix 1 1 8 - - - 1 2 -
Krypton 1.6 2 10 - - - 1.6 2 -
A 2.5 4 130 - - - 2.8 ? -
Jupiter 4 8 170 5 12 320 5.2 8 60
B 6 16 40 - - - 0 -
Saturn 10 32 50 10 30 95 10 23 60
Uranus 16 64 14 20 84 14 20 18 27
Neptune 25 128 17 30 165 17 6 13
T 40 256 2 - - - 38 2 -
X 64 512 3 - - - 76 2 -
Adapted from Van Flandern.
OD=original distance, OOP=original orbital period, OM=original Mass, CD=current distance, COP=current orbital period, CM=current mass, T-B=Titus-Bode progression, NM=known native moons, CNM=current no. of moons.
The figures for distance are in AUs, for orbital periods are in Earth years, and for masses are in Earth masses.
In the last version, Bellatrix and Krypton have original masses of 2 and 3 and the original distances, orbital periods, and masses are different for most of the planets.
The 5 mass extinctions, the 1st in the Cambrian, the last in the Cretaceous, do not correspond to either this model nor any others so there would be either one extinction not detected, which is unlikely, or the extinctions are due to something else, or one of them is, or 2 of them were due to explosions as the other 2 occurred in the outer solar system.
55 Cancri Planetary System.
orb. prd. (days) AUs T-B mass
a 3 .04 .04 12 earths
missing 6 .07
b 15 .12 .10 36 earths
missing 30 .16
c 44 .24 .28 70 earths
missing 120 .52
d 260 .78 1 60 earths
missing 500
missing 1000 2 2
missing 2000
e 5200 5.8 4 4 jupiters
missing 10000 16
We can see that the T-B progression doesn’t work out here either contrary to what the authors claim (they skip .07 and .16 to make it appear as if it does).
b, d, and e migrated outward and c migrated inward.
Moons Supposedly Showing a T-B Pattern.
orb. prd. ( days) dist. ( mlns. of kms.)
Jupiter
Metis .3 .13
Adrastea .3 .13
Amalthea .5 .18
Thebe .7 .22
Io 1.8 .4
Europa 3.6 .7
Ganymede 7.2 1
Callisto 16.7 2
Uranus
Miranda 1.4 .1
Ariel 2.5 .2
Umbriel 4.1 .3
Titania 8.7 .4
Oberon 13.5 .6
Neptune
Naiad .30 .048
Thalassa .31 .050
Despina .33 .052
Galatea .43 .062
Larissa .55 .073
Proteus 1.1 .12
The Galilean moons show distances which approximate the T-B progression but they also show a close approximation of the 1:2 geometric progression in orbital period. The Uranian moons do not show any T-B progression but do show a 1:2 orbital period progression. The Neptunian moons do not show any T-B progressioon either but do show an approximation for a 1:2 orbital period law except for the gap between Galatea and Larissa. The Saturnian system is too complex to be significant to this topic so was excluded.
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Planetary Classification
Some maintain that there are no real distinctions in nature but this is true only in theory. In practice, classification is unavoidable, necessary, and essential, and is how we know and understand nature or how we better know and understand it. Also, the classification isn’t in the mind of the classifier since the classifier is part of nature. Another myth easily debunked is the one that says there are only individuals but in order for these to exist they must be contrasted with groups and vice-versa. So if one exists so does the other necessarily, like 2 sides to a sheet.
There are 5 ways to classify secondary satellites: by distance, chemical composition, mass and mass dependent or related characteristics, dynamic relations, and solar system architecture. The chemical classes are terrestrial (silicates and iron, melting point 2000 K) (the solid bodies), solar (hydrogen and helium, melting point 14 K) (Jupiter and Saturn), and icy (carbon and nitrogen, melting point 273 K)(Uranus and Neptune); refractory and volatile refer to evaporation point (high and low, respectively). The terrestrial bodies are refractory and volatile includes both solar and icy. Dynamic relations are solitary/minibelt and belt. And solar system architecture is disk and OC. There are 4 zones in the disk: inner terrestrial, solar, icy, and outer terrestrial. Table 4 contains a classification for planets and planetoids.
Celestial mechanics must be considered in any proper meaning for planet. There are 3 types of orbital modes for celestial bodies, relational or barycentric- based (what object revolves around what object), locational (populations or zones), and geometric (shape of orbits and orbital inclination). In the 1st group there are 3 orders or levels: circumgalactic, directly circumstelloid, and indirectly circumstelloid, the last 2 forming a superorder or superlevel.
And giant planets are not necessarily outer ones, as many have been found, very surprisingly, close to their suns, however, these have migrated inward due to gravitational scattering (Weidenschilling and Marzari, 1996) so, normally, such planets are, indeed, outer ones as they necessarily form a considerable distance from the central body. But they could be mirror matter (aka, shadow matter) as proposed by Foot and others who have also proposed mirror stars and mirror planets in our own solar system (Foot, 1999a,b; Foot et al. 2000; Foot and Silagadze, 2001). The concept was formulated to explain the lack of symmetry in neutrinos which have only left-handed symmetry--its mirror counterpart would have right-handed symmetry. It is invisible and undetected and if an asteroid, for instance, made of this type of matter collided with the Earth it wouldn't be noticed. It has also been hypothesized as an explanation for dark matter (Hodges, 1993; Foot, 2001). Lee and Yang (1956) 1st proposed the idea and interest was revived by Foot and Gninenko (2000). It was Robert Forward who invented the term "mirror matter" but as a synonym for anti-matter which is not the same thing. And others also claim the concept has much good evidence to support it (Foot and Volkas, 1995, etc.).
There might be a supergiant class, which is an extension of the giant class so is not separate from it, and would be planets at 2 or more Jupiter masses; at this threshold electron degeneracy takes over from Coulomb forces (Basri, 2003; Basri and Brown, 2005). Although this is said also to be higher, up to 10 Jupiter masses (Wikipedia-Brown Dwarfs).
The following is a list of chemical features:
terrestrial/ refractory
high orbital velocity, high density, dominance of solidity, low mass/size, high solar constant, core compostion metallic, silicate
mantle, crust present.
mercurial
B type plasma clouds, large core, atmospheric mean molecular weight variable, density of 5.
euterrestrial
high atmospheric mean molecular weight, density of 4, medium core size, atmospheric mass 10 E16- 10 E18,
plasma cloud type A, volcanism.
volatile
low orbital velocity, low density, low solar constant, core composition rocky.
solar and methane planets
high mass/size, dominace of fluidity, plasma cloud type C,
small core size, atmosphere mostly hydrogen and helium, high thermal emission, low atmospheric mean
molecular weight, atmospheric mass 10 E22, rings present.
solar planets
hydrogen-helium mantle, closely similar mass, volume, circumference, surface area, and diameter, density of .1.
methane planets
ionic mantle, methane at 2-3%, surface temperature in 70s K., closely similar mass, volume,
diameter, circumference, surface area, escape velocity, GM, and magnetic axis, density of .3.
For smaller bodies, that is, excluding the giant planets, we can delineate 4 primordial zones according to composition and spectral reflectance (according to Hartmann (1999, 314-15):
grey c. 1 - c. 3.7 AUs (terrestrial planets and the inner half of main belt)
black c. 2.5- c.3 AUs (carbonaceous; outer half of MB)
brown c. 4- c. 30 AUs (carbonaceous-icy)
red- c. 32 - c. 64 AUs (KBOs; OCOs are thought to have originated from the brown zone but actually came from the grey
and black zones)
Table 4. Planetary and Planetoid Classification.
disk
inner refractory/terrestrial
cl. Mercury
cl. euterrestrial
grade 1 planetoids
grade 2 planetoids
planets
sbcl a (Venus, Terra )
sbcl b (Mars)
volatile
solar
planets (Jupiter, Saturn)(giants)
icy
methane planet zone
planetoids (Centaurs)
planets (Uranus, Neptune)(subgiants)
outer terrestrial
KB
grade 1 planetoids
grade 2 planetoids (Pluto, Sedna, etc.)
planets 0
OC
grade 1 planetoids
grade 2 planetoids ?
The Main Belt
There are 6 known planetoid belts: the Martian belt, in the Martian orbit (containing only 4 known bodies); the Main Belt; the Jovian Trojans, in the Jovian orbit; the Neptunian Trojans (only 6 are known), in the orbit of Neptune; the Centaurs, between Jupiter and Neptune; and the TNR. Only 2 of these are major belts being the MB and TNR both having an inner and outer belt.
There are 16 MB classes (excluding O, I, and U) recognized but there are actually only 2, which represent 2 ultimate origins and I refer to them as megaclasses S and C, classes seperated out artificially, the former having 8 and the latter also.
Megaclass S is coextensive with the igneous Bell (1986) superclass, is silicaceous, red in the reflectance spectrum, with about 20 % abundance, has olivene and/or pyroxene, ordinary chondrite or achondrite meteorite analogs (stony and stony-iron), and a high albedo, and dominates the inner belt. Its Tholen classes are S, Q, R, V, M, E, A, and L.
Megaclass C is primitive or metamorphic in the
There are several subsequent parent bodies as we can see in the 5 groupings within the megaclasses which are Q-R-V-S, these all having low-Ca-pyroxene; M-E, both having enstatite; C-G-B-F-D, which all contain hydrated silicates; C-G which possess phyllosilicates; and B-F, as both have a .04-.08 albedo.
In order of abundance the classes are: C, S, M, D, F, P, G, E, B, T, A, V, Q, R, with Q and A having only 3 minor planets a piece (Peebles, 2005). The letters stand for metallic (M), red (R), Vesta (V), enstatite (E), pseudo-M (P), flat (F), I (inconsistent data), and U (unclassifiable).
The SMASS classification (Bus and Binzel, 2002) has 15 classes (O and L were added and have only 1 minor planet each), 11 subclasses, and 9 superclasses but most are in 3 major groupings, C, S, and X, which correspond to the classic 3 of C, S, and M (Chapman et al, 1975). In Tholen (1989) there are 14 classes in 9 superclasses and most are also in the same 3 superclasses.
A few small classes, K (2 minor planets), T, D, and P, are a mixture of characteristics from both megaclasses but this is most likely due to collisional evolution. J is sometimes separated out from V but the 2 are still recognized as forming 1 group. Subclasses are designated with an additional letter or letters to denote the mixture of classes.
The first planetoid discovered photographically was Brucia in 1891 by Max Wolf named for Catherine Bruce who paid for his telescope at the Königstuhl ("king's chair") Observatory in Heidelberg, telescope used to discover more MB minor planets than any
other in the world (Peebles 2000).
Comets
These are fragments thrown out into a sphere around the solar system called the Oort Cloud from lunar explosions in what is now the MB. 2 types of comets are recognized, short (under 200 yrs.), designated with D and a number, and long period (over 200 yrs.), designated with C and a number, the periods referring to their orbits. Comets are often denoted with a longer name, an example being C/2002 B2 which means it was the 2nd long period comet discovered in the 2nd half of January, 2002, the year being divided into 26 fortnights denoted A-Z (Moore, 2002).
Short period comets are further subdivided as Jupiter-family or ecliptic comets, which have modest inclinations and periods, typically less than about 20 years, so named because their periods are close to Jupiter's which is at 12, and Halley-family or random comets, which have high inclinations and long periods, between 20 and 200 years (Weismann, 1999; Lang, 2003), so named from its most important representative. The Tisserand parameter is a number that differentiates between the 2 families, is calculated from a comet's orbital elements (geometric characteristics), and was formulated by dynamicist François Tisserand around 1900 as a way of identifying returning periodic comets (Weismann, 1999).
Comets have a nucleus, which is typically 1-10 km. diam., but can be only a tenth of a km. (Lang, 2003), with a mass of usually only E15 kilos which is only about 1 billionth the mass of Earth, and is made of dust, rock, and ice; coma, a spherical, yellowish cloud of gas and dust up to .01 AU in diam.; and tail. The tail is of 2 major types, dust and plasma or ion. The former is made of made of dust particles, is curved and yellow, and is up to .1 AU long, while the latter is made of ionized molecules, is blue and straight, and is up to 1 AU long (Lang, 2003). But there is a rare 3rd kind, seen in Hale-Bopp, a sodium tail, and there is also an anti-tail, that appears to point toward the sun but only because of perspective, which sometimes occurs (Brandt, 1999). They also have a hydrogen cloud, which is UV radiation, and is composed of hydrogen molecules, and is up to .1 AU in diam. (Brandt, 1999; Lang, 2003).
They lose material at each perihelion and eventually become defunct. The lifetime of short period comets is probably some 10,000 yrs. In most years perhaps 25 comets become bright enough to be seen with amateur telescopes. Kreutz sungrazers are among the brightest (Moore, 2002).
Halley is probably the most famous and was recorded as early as 240 BC in China and is named for 1700s British astronomer Edmund Halley who successfully predicted its return for 1758-59. It was officially designated 1P identifying it as the 1st periodic comet to be found. Prior to this they were thought to pass through the inner solar system only sporadically. About 1000 comets are now known (Brandt, 1999).
As earlier mentioned, comets were called "pheasant stars" or "broom stars" in ancient China and Japan and have usually been placed in a class all their own and the Aristotelian view predominated for a long time so were regarded as atmospheric instead of celestial until the 1500s.
TNR (Trans-Neptunian Region)
Some 1000 KBOs have been discovered so far (Cowen, 2006). About 2 dozen are over 400 km. diam.; 11 % have moons including 4 of the 5 largest, Eris (1), EL61(2), and Pluto-Charon (2) , 1 % are double planets, and according to the power law for every object of 1000 km. diam. there should be 1000 at 100 km. diam. (Wikipedia). Extrapolating discovery stats for a 60 -wide band all around the ecliptic 70,000 such objects are thought to exist.
The KB is characterized by mostly circular orbits and low inclinations and has an inner and outer belt. The inner, containing the Classical KBOs (cubewanos, named for QB) is non-resonant, stretches from about 40 AUs to about 50 AUs, while the outer contains the plutinos, named for Pluto (those in a 3:2 resonance with Neptune, they go around the sun twice for every 3 times Neptune does), which comprise c. 25% of KBOs, and twotinos (with a 2:1 resonance with Neptune), and stretches farther out. Both are reddish in spectral analysis. The largest plutinos are Pluto-Charon, Orcus, Ixion, VS2, Huya, and AZ84. The 2nd plution discovered was RO in 1993. The largest classical KBOs is Makemake, other largest ones are Quaoar and Varuna, and smaller ones are Chaos, Logos, Deucalion, TX300, AW197, and UX25. KBOs have perihelions (closest approach to the sun) of 30 AUs and apohelions (farthest distance from the the sun) of 55 AUs. The KB is 20-100 times more massive than the MB.
The Scattered Disk, by contrast, has mostly eccentric orbits and high inclinations, and no resonance but can have various and temporary resonances. SDOs have perihelion of about 30 AUs and apohelions of as much as several 100 AUs. They are white or greyish in spectral analysis. Over 100 have been found as of 2008. The 1st SDO discovered was TL8 in 1995 and the 1st to be identified as such was TL66 in 1996 (Wikipedia). The most distant object known is 2000 OO67 with a semimajor axis of 544 and has a diam. of 28-87 km. Elliott et al, in a report from the Deep Ecliptic Survey, distinguished between scattered-near and scattered-extended SDOs, the latter being also called detached objects. S-N SDOs are non-resonant, do not cross planetary orbits, and have a Tisserand parameter of less than 3. S-D SDOs have a Tisserand parameter of greater than 3. Examples of S-Es are Sedna, CR105, and VN112. Centaurs are cis-Neptunian SDOs.
The 3 belts are disks sharing the same inner rim, the 2 inner ones, the KB, being more or less circular and the outer one, the SD, being more or less ovaloid. The Kuiper Cliff represents a drop in numbers between the 2 populations.
A long gap of 62 years stretched before Jewitt and Luu (1993) discovered the 2nd KBO, 1992 QB1 (diam. 150 km.), which they nicknamed Smiley, the 1st, of course, being Pluto, found by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930.
Double Planets
A meaning for double planet was done by the IAU, as well, concurs with Stern and Levison (2000), is here defined the same way, and is as follows: 2 planets revolving around a common center of mass which is between them which means a mass or size ratio range of .5/1 to 1/1. The same goes for planetoids and meteoroids. Pluto-Charon is a double planetoid as the common center of mass is between the 2 bodies and both have planetoid mass. However, this system is more complex than previously believed as 2 small moons, Nix, named after the Greek goddess of night, and Hydra, the nine-headed serpent guarding Pluto's abode, have recently been discovered in 2005 by Max Mutchler and Andrew Steffl of the Hubble’s 9-member Pluto Companion Search Team lead by H.A. Weaver (2006). They orbit both Pluto and Charon instead of one or the other or both in a figure 8. The Earth-Moon (Terra-Luna) system is not double as the common center of mass is in the Earth. In other words, Luna revolves around Terra so is a moon.
Meteoroids
A meteoroid is defined here as a body whose motions are contolled by gas drag instead of gravity in a solar nebula and whose integrity is maintained by non-gravitational forces (below the size/mass of comets might be a 3rd criterion). I divide them into 5 groups: grains, pebbles, cobbles, boulders, and blocks arranged as follows.
larger meteoroids/greater ring objects
220 m.- 1 km. large blocks 2.2E9-E11
5 m.- 220 m. small blocks 2.5E6-2.2E9
1 m.- 5 m. boulders 1 tonne-2.5E6
6.4 cm.- 1m. cobbles .6 kg.-1 tonne
particles
2 mm.-6.4 cm. pebbles 2 g- 600 g.
1 mm.-2 mm. large grain 0 g- 2 g.
below 1 mm. granules (microscopic grains) below 1 g.
Cobble, pebble, and grain sizes are according to the AGU (American Geophysical Union) scale of sediment and sedimentary rock or lithified clastic rock sizes. The 5 ms. is based on the rod and the 220 on the furlong. The IAU doesn’t distinguish between asteroids and meteoroids so it is avoiding definitions for these, too. An example of this is that some bodies, like Amor, which forms a family, are treated as asteroids yet are below the gravitoid criterion, so it is actually a meteoroid. The MPC should be chanced to the AMC (Asteroid and Meteoroid Center) or the MPMC (Minor Planet and Meteoriod Center).
Meteoroids are regarded by the RAS (the Royal Astronomical Society) as 100 microns to 10 m. across but this is completely arbitrary, and not based on anything scientific. Placing any such bottom line, as it were, to include large meteoroids as planets is the same except perhaps for the minimum for a comet.
Moons
A defintion for moons is also required but this has been avoided by the IAU just as it has avoided the question for planets for many decades. And the same ambiguity with planets occurs with moons. “Protolunar nebula”(Beatty et al) implies either only solitary secondary satellites (indirectly circumsolar) native to the primary are moons or that small objects the size of meteoroids are early stages of a moon, but “moonlets”, referring to ring objects, and sometimes to small solitary, shepherd, or gap moons, implies that moons also include ring objects or some of them as the word means “small moon” like planetismal means “small planet”. There are 3 viable definitions for moons: I (any object revolving around a planet, planetoid, or meteoroid), II (tertiary satellite with the size/mass for self-gravity, sphericity, and differentiation), and III (a solitary tertiary satellite)(see Table 5 for the classifications).
Tertiary satellites can be distinguished into solitary or co-orbital, gap, shepherd, and ring objects, although gap and shepherd moons can be regarded as ring objects. The parallel with planets is very apparent as secondary satellites (directly circumsolar) can be distinguished between solitary or zone dominant larger ones and smaller belt objects and tertiary satellites between usually larger, solitary, or practically solitary (co-orbital), and smaller ring objects.
It could be argued, then, that, because directly circumsolar and indirectly circumsolar are in some way parallel, there should be correspondence in definition between the 2, but it is safe to assume, as the collective mass of moons for liquid planets and the mass for liquid planets is a ratio of 1/10,000 (Canup and Ward, 2006), that there would be no moons the mass of liquid planets, so that in mass, at least, they do not correspond. So Def. I would more or less correspond with A, II with C, and III with E.
It could be argued, too, that the lower limit for moon should be below that for planets but this would mean a baseline of macroscopic using Def. C so would include dust grains which is not satisfactory. This means Def. II includes all the known bodies that are considered moons which orbit "major planets" and also leaves out all the known ones not. As currently known there are no solitary moons orbiting major planets smaller than 1 km. So II is the one which is closest to what we consider moons.
If we define them as solitary (III) it excludes gap moons (objects orbiting in Saturn’s ring gaps: Pan in the Encke gap, Daphnis in the Keeler gap) and shepherd moons (Atlas in the outer A ring, Prometheus in the inner F ring, and Pandora in the outer F ring) also around Saturn and some of the solitary moons are smaller than the gap and/or shepherd moons. Also, it might include dust grains.
There are c. 100 MB asteroids and 15 meteoroids with satellites so far known (Johnson Archive) and 11 asteroids have satellites smaller than 1 km. The smallest, 1990 OS, a meteoroid, is only 300 meters and has a companion only 45 meters wide (Wikipedia). Hermes is a double meteoroid with both components only 400 meters diam. and with only a 1 km. separation (Wikipedia). There are 26 double asteroids but there might be several more already discovered but not recognized as such because of uncertain measurements. 5 of these are twins including Hermes. The largest MB asteroids with moons (those over 200 km. diam.) are Kalliope, Eugenia, Sylvia, Camilla, Hermione, and Elektra. Sylvia is the largest of these. 11 % of KB asteroids have moons including 4 of the 5 largest, Eris (1), EL61(2), and Pluto-Charon (2)(see Double Planets section) and 1 % are double asteroids.
Table 5. Classification of Tertiary Satellites.
I
class 1 (micromoons) (lesser moonlets)
class A (macromoons)
class 2 (greater moonlets)
class B moons (1-10,000)
class 3 moons (1-10)
class C moons (10-10,000)
class 4 moons (100-10,000)
class D moons (1000-10,000)
ring moons
solitary (or co-orbital) moons
II
microtertiaries
macrotertiaries
macrosublunars
moons (1-10,000)
class A moons (1-10)
class B moons (10-10,000)
class D moons (100-10,000
class F (1000-10,000)
micro-macro
sublunar-lunar
III
ring objects
moons
The decimal system is used here and the numbers are in km.
8 moons are co-orbital, all around Saturn: Janus-Epimetheus, Tethys-Telesto-Calypso, Dione-Helene- Polydeuces.
Since a ring has been found around Rhea we need to distiguish between 1st order and 2nd order rings; a moon around a moon would be called a 2nd order moon.
Saturn has 23 moons native to it, Jupiter 8, Neptune 6, and Uranus 18; the rest are captured asteroids or, as for Saturn, gap and shepherd moons.
The formation method for moons is usually considered to be from a subnebula but as the PAH is wrong and there is twinning among moons we can postulate a fission origin. However, another explanation for Luna and Iapetus has been proposed because of several anomalies in these (see Lunar Anomalies).
Statistics
As of April, 2006 there were 330, 800 MB asteroids registered, of these 130, 000 had a permanent official number, and of these 13, 000 had official names. Estimates for the total number above 1 km. range from 1-2 mln. (Crystalinks); for meteoroids the count would be 900,000-1.8 mln. Some 6,000 were discovered every year but now it is 5000 per month! (Crystalinks). And Zoom Astronomy ('07) states there are 40, 000 over 1 km. diam. that are known and 3000 of these are catalogued. Lang (2003) states there are 1000 over 15 kms. and that survey suggests a half mln. over 1.6 kms.
Some 1000 KBOs have been discovered so far (Cowen, 2006). About 2 dozen are over 400 km. diam. (see Table 1 for the sizes of the largest KBOs). Estimates of the number 2 kms.+ is about 6.7 billion (Weissman, 1999).
For the Oort Cloud, the estimates for the total are said to be at least ½ bln. (Hartmann, 1983), Moore (2002) and Ridpath (1997) 1 trln., Hamblin and Christiansen (1990) 10 bln. to 1 trln., and as high as 5 trln. (Freedman and Kaufmann, 2008); Oort suggested 100 bln. (Hartmann, 1983) and Lang (2003) estimates 200 bln. These figures, however, are grossly exaggerated since they are based on a false hypothesis--their origin was, instead, from an explosion in the inner solar system.
For comets in general the number of knowns as of Nov., 2007 was 3354 (Wikipedia, Comets). About 1000 were known in the ‘90s (Frankel, 2000). The totals for moons are 160 known with 99 discovered this century.
Obviously, a mass-size/population ratio in the form of a pyramid exists for planets and planetoids as for stars, red dwarfs accounting for 80% of the stellar population (this probably also includes brown subdwarfs as they are about the same size and mass) with red supergiants and supermassives occurring very rarely. Previously, experts believed that most stars existed as binaries or multiples but now we know that most red dwarfs are single (Lada, 2006).
Stelloids
Brown dwarfs (really subdwarfs) were theorized by Shiv Kumar in the 1960s and the first discovered was PPl (Palomar Pleiades)15 in 1995 by Gibor Basri but 2 others were found shortly after in the same year, Teide 1 and Gliese 229B, but it was the third that made the headlines. Two new stellar classes were created for them, L and T. They are self-luminous, circumgalactic, and undergo deuterium (heavy H) nucleosynthesis (Mayor, 2001; Basri, 2003) which has a short duration (only c. 10 mln. yrs.), and are luminous because they undergo a slow shrinkage and radiate away their gravitational energy and are IR (infrared) so do not emit visible radiation, and form in the same manner as stars. Higher mass brown dwarfs (about 60 jupiters or more) also do lithium fusion (Mayor, 2001) which also has a short duration (c. 100 mln. yrs.). The upper limit for a planet, so lower limit for a brown dwarf, is about 10-12 Jupiter masses (the lower mass for nucleosynthesis) and the mass for brown dwarfs is between c. 10 and c. 80 Jupiter masses. At the latter limit begins light H fusion.
The situation for brown subdwarfs is similar to lesser planetoids or planetoids in general as there are close parallels between the 2 groups. Both are subdwarfs, both are atypical, relatively recently discovered, and sometimes referred to as members of their class/category and sometimes not.
If a star is defined as a celestial object which is self-luminous, forms by gravitational collapse, does nuclear fusion, is gaseous, mostly plasma, supported by thermal pressure, and circumgalactic, as they probably should, then brown dwarfs are stars and neutron dwarfs, white dwarfs, grey subdwarfs, and black holes are not (these would be called post-stellars). And we can’t define them as having the mass and/or size for nuclear fusion as this would include planetary and SNR (supernova remnant) nebulas as these are discrete bodies, too (and they are also post-stellars). If stars are circumscribed as doing light H fusion and/or as emitting visible radiation then brown subdwarfs are not stars but neither are the other objects. And it would be awkward excluding them since L stars contain also red dwarfs. It would also be awkward to exclude brown dwarfs from the stellar category and include at the same time objects which are especially unstar-like, i.e., neutron dwarfs, white dwarfs, grey subdwarfs, and black holes, and it would be a classification not based on any particular definition. And brown subdwarfs are actually reddish and could be considered as red subdwarfs and like them are completely convective. Brown subdwarfs having exhausted their fuel would be, as well, post-stellars. It might be simpler and more convenient to define stars according to the 1 criterion of nuclear fusion or thermal pressure support (white dwarfs and neutron dwarfs are supported by degeneracy pressure, planets by Coulomb forces). In short, brown dwarfs are more star-like than the other objects just mentioned which are considered stars yet there is debate about the status of brown dwarfs and not about the status of the other objects--science isn't often logical. Black holes are the hypothetical final stage, after the supernova stage, in the life cycle of celestial bodies that start out as high mass stars, which have have spent their thermonuclear fuel, no longer have the temperature to maintain themselves, and have become so dense and their internal pressure so weak that gravity completely dominates and overwhelms them so they collapse under it. Something can fall into them but nothing can escape from them (white holes are the inverse and are mathematically valid but probably impossible in nature). The idea was 1st proposed in the late 1783 by astronomer and geologist John Mitchell. He based it on Newton's theory of gravity but it has a lot to do with, and is explained by, GR. Simon Lapace also proposed it, in 1796. They were also called dark stars and in Russia frozen stars and collapsars. It was John Wheeler who invenred the name in the 1960s.
Table 6.
self-luminous form by undergo gaseous mostly plasma supported by circumgalactic
grvtl. collapse nuclear fusion thermal pressure
brown dwarfs 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
white dwarfs ? 0 0 1 1 0 1
grey dwarfs ? 1 0 1 1 1 1
neutron dwarfs ? 1 0 ? ? 0 1
black holes 0 1 0 1 ? 0 1
Red dwarfs have a minimum mass of 80 jupiters and an upper limit of 400-600 jupiters or 1 E30 kilos. Their lowest size is that of Jupiter and they can be as big as half the Sun. Their average size is around 200, 000 kms.(120,000 mi.) diam. By contrast the Sun is 1000 jupiter masses or 2 E30 and 1.4 mln. kms. (870,000 mi.)across. Brown subdwarfs are all about as big as Jupiter which is 140,000 kms.(90,000 mi.) diam.
Neutron dwarfs are hypothesized as small (typically only 30 kms. diam.), superdense bodies that emit radio waves in pulses formed from a Type 2 (with hydrogen in the spectrum, Type 1 is without hydrogen) supernova explosion composed of neutrons but having stellar mass and a solid surface and perhaps a solid core but are probably mostly fluid. Their mass is between a white dwarf (also a small (about Earth-size), superdense object) and a black hole, the 3 being compact objects and after stages of stellar evolution and the first 2 being composed of degenerate matter. However, the white dwarf occurs in a different line of stellar evolution in which a moderate mass star like our Sun becomes a giant and then a white dwarf while the other 2 occur in the line in which a more massive star becomes a supergiant then a supernova and finally a neutron dwarf or a black hole. Neutrons were discovered in 1932 by James Chadwick and the following year Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky hypothesized neutron dwarfs. They are supernova remnants. Some might become quark dwarfs. It is estimated that there are about 100 million such objects in our galaxy. However, this model goes against nuclear chemistry which says that neutrons cannot be packed so densely as they would fly away so they probably don't exist and a better explanation for the phenomenon is provided by the electric universe model, an extension of plasma cosmology, in which a binary star has a connecting plasma field (see Cosmology under Extra Essays). Paul LaViolette has a different interpretation (Decoding the Message of the Pulsars-Intelligent Communication from the Galaxy, 2006).
Pulsars, theorized in 1967 by Franco Pacini and discovered shortly after in the same year by Jocelyn Bell (whose father designed the Armagh Planetarium) and Anthony Hewish at Cambridge, are a type of these and are rapidly rotating, highly magnetized bodies that emit radio waves and black widow pulsars have companions with a planetary mass but a stellar size. Pulsars are designated by the prefix PSR and the central body of the solar system referred to earlier is a pulsar and was the first planetary system found (outside our own, of course); the discovery was made in 1992 by Alexander Wolszczan and Dale Frail at Cornell’s Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico which houses the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope. PSR 1257+12 is a millisecond pulsar (with a very short period), of which there are about 50 known with around half being binaries, and also a black widow type in which one body consumes most of its companion. There are now over a thousand known “pulsating stars”.
Magnetars represent a small percentage of neutron dwarfs and have super-strong magnetic fields, up to 10 E14 gausses and are suspected to derive from higher mass supernovas. They are about 12 mi. diam. (20 km.). They were discovered in 1979 from a gamma-ray burst that was the strongest extra-solar gamma wave ever detected, 100 times more intense than any previous one.
Other magnetic stars include the Ap stars, which have peculiar chemical composition, and have strengths of a few 100 to 10s of 1000s of gausses (the Sun is at 2000-4000 gausses), DA (hydrogen-rich) white dwarfs, which are in the megagauss or even 100s of megagauss range, and are suspected of being evolved from Ap stars.
A quark dwarf is hypothesized to be composed of freed up quarks, up and down quarks, which make up electrons, protons, and neutrons, and would occur in particularly massive neutron dwarfs and where there would be sufficient density pressure due to the object's gravity. Normally these particles are tightly grouped and in consequence hard to study. The process of freeing up is called de-confinement. During this process massive amounts of energy would be released producing a quark nova, a hypothetical implosion that could be the cause of the puzzling gamma-ray bursts, which are the most energetic explosions known. These bodies would probably generate similar emissions as neutron dwarfs except for certain radio emissions, the absence of which is the basis for a special class called radio-quiet neutron dwarfs, which are prime candidates as quark dwarfs and about 7 of these have been observed. Observations released by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in 2002 detected two candidates, designated RX J1856.5-3754 and 3C58, which had previously been thought to be neutron dwarfs. The former appeared much smaller and the latter much colder than should be, suggesting that they are composed of material denser than neutron-degenerate matter. However, some researchers say the results were not conclusive. Recently a third object, XTE J1739-285, has been observed by a team led by Philip Kaaret of the U. of Iowa, and also reported as a possible candidate. Recent observations of supernovas SN2006gy, SN2005gj, and SN2005ap also point to the possible existence of quark dwarfs, and it has been suggested that the collapsed core of supernova SN1987A is such an exotic body.
A quark dwarf's mass and density lie between neutron dwarfs and black holes, and if sufficient additional matter is added it will collapse into a black hole. Neutron dwarfs with masses of 1.5–1.8 solar masses with rapid spin are theoretically the best candidates for conversion. This amounts to 1% of the projected neutron dwarf population. An extrapolation based on this indicates that up to 2 quark-novas may occur in the observable Universe every day.
As well as an explanation for gamma-ray bursts, quark matter/strange matter is one candidate for the hypothetical dark matter that is a feature of several cosmological theories.
Since these objects have a mass above c. 3-4 solar masses (the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit)—either because the star was very heavy or because the remnant collected additional mass through accretion of matter—even the degeneracy pressure of neutrons is insufficient to stop the collapse. After this no known mechanism (except possibly quark degeneracy pressure, hence the hypothetical quark star) is powerful enough to stop the collapse and the object will inevitably form as a black hole.
Models for black holes are:
Kerr-Newman rotating with charge
Kerr rotating with no charge
Reissner-Nordstrom nonrotating with charge
Schwarzschild nonrotating with no charge
The Kerr model is the most plausible as such an object would be rotating and have little charge. Its event horizon would have polar flattening.
Black holes have a singularity (its center), a photon sphere, an ergosphere, and an event horizon.
The photon sphere is a spherical boundary of zero thickness such that photons moving along tangents to the sphere will be trapped in a circular orbit. For non-rotating black holes, the photon sphere has a radius 1.5 times the Schwarzschild radius, which determines the location of the black hole surface (the spherical event horizon).
The ergosphere occurs in rotating black holes and is an oblate spheroid region outside the event horizon where objects cannot remain stationary and which is the result of frame-dragging. General relativity predicts that any rotating mass will tend to slightly "drag" along the space-time immediately surrounding it. Any object near it will tend to start moving in the direction of rotation. For a rotating black hole this effect becomes so strong near the event horizon that an object would have to move faster than the speed of light in the opposite direction in order to stand still. Within the ergosphere, space-time is dragged around faster than light— relativity theory forbids material objects to travel faster than light, but allows regions of space-time to move faster than light relative to other regions of space-time.
Einstein himself believed that black holes would not form, because he thought the angular momentum of collapsing particles would stabilize their motion at some radius but a minority of relativists continued to believe that black holes were physical objects and by the end of the '60s they had persuaded the majority of researchers in the field that there is no obstacle to forming an event horizon.
Gravitational collapse is not the only process that could create black holes. In principle, black holes could also be created in high energy collisions that create sufficient density. However, to date, no such events have ever been detected either directly or indirectly as a deficiency of the mass balance in particle accelerator experiments. This suggests that there must be a lower limit for the mass of black holes. Theoretically, this minimum lies around the Planck mass (c. 1019 GeV/c2 = c. 2 × 10 E-8 kg), where quantum effects would make the theory of GR break down completely. Primordial black holes would be about the same size and are postulated to have occurred in the hypothetical early Universe because of high densities. At the opposite extreme are the supermassives, which may be 100 mln. solar masses, at the centers of galaxies in AGN (active galactic nuclei) some which are quasars, and are believed to be conglomerates of star clusters.
Black holes are black bodies so they only absorb light and don't reflect or emit it. However, in 1974, Stephen Hawking showed that they are not entirely black but emit small amounts of thermal radiation in a perfect black body spectrum. This effect has become known as Hawking radiation and the temperature of this spectrum (Hawking temperature) is proportional to the surface gravity of the black hole, which in turn is inversely proportional to the mass (the radius is also proportional to the mass). Large black holes, therefore, emit less radiation than small ones. Since Hawking's result many others have verified the effect through various methods. If this model is correct then black holes would lose mass, because according to Einstein's mass-energy equivalence, mass is just condensed energy and they would shrink and evaporate over time.
Black hole candidates are Cygnus X-1, companion in a binary star system, which is an X-ray source, and 75% of SXTs (soft X-ray transients) which produce rare and dramatic X-ray outbursts.
The lifetime of a black hole is proportional to the cube of its mass. The potential lifetime is c. 10 E67 yrs!
A preon dwarf is a proposed type of compact dwarf made of preons, a group of hypothetical subatomic particles. These bodies would have huge densities, exceeding 1023 kilos per cubic meter—intermediate between quark dwarfs and black holes. They could originate from supernova explosions and could be detected in principle through gravitational lensing of gamma rays. A preon star having the same mass as Earth but would be about the size of a nugget, tennis ball, or football. Such objects are a potential candidate for dark matter.
A Q-dwarf, also known as a gray hole, is a hypothetical type of a compact, heavy neutron dwarf with an exotic state of matter (quarks and lower). The term Q-dwarf should not be mistaken for quark dwarf, as the Q does not stand for quark, but rather, for a conserved particle number. A Q-dwarf may be mistaken for a stellar black hole. One such candidate is the compact object in V404 Cygnus.
White holes are the inverse, or time-reversed version, of black holes. Nothing can escape a black hole but nothing can fall into a white hole. The equations of GR are symmetric in time which means you can take any solution to them and imagine that time flows backwards and you'll get another valid solution to the equations but that doesn't mean they actually exist in nature as they would exist only if time can flow backwards which it probably can't. In fact, they almost certainly do not exist, since there's no way to produce one--producing a white hole is just as impossible as destroying a black hole, since the two processes are time-reversals of each other ).
Planetars are circumgalactic or have random motion and are former circumsolar planets. And small bodies that have become solar system ejecta would be escaped subplanets in definitions B, C, and D so would be subplanetars.
Grey dwarfs (actually subdwarfs) are bodies that form outside of a planetary system but have substellar size, mass, and temperature, are non-fusors, and probably form like stars as dusty disks are found around them. These would be classified as stelloids.
Grey subdwarfs, stars, and post-stellars together form a group I call stelloids and these together with planetars I refer to as CGOs (Circumgalactic Objects).
“Protostars” are only stellar precursors and are basically central blobs in a contracting solar nebula so the term can be considered a misnomer and should probably be replaced by prestellar object.
Nebulas are classified as reflection, dark (absorption), and emission (HI and HII regions, planetary nebulas, and SNRs).
The following table presents a taxonomy for celestial bodies and Table 8 their sizes and masses.
Table 7. Classification of Celestial Bodies
A. interstellar particles
B. primary celestial bodies
satellites of lower order
secondary (planets, planetoids, meteoroids), tertiary and quaternary (moons and ring components)
stelloids
Class A grey subdwarfs
Class B.
Class I low mass brown dwarfs
Class II
class IIa high mass brown dwarfs
class IIb
class IIb1
i low mass stars
ii (type 1 post-stelloids)
white dwarfs
planetary nebulas
class IIb2 high mass stars
class IIb3 (type 2 post-stelloids)
SNR nebulas
neutron dwarfs
black holes
Celestial objects include extended ensembles, systems of bodies, and (discrete) bodies. Nebulas are mostly the 1st kind, are diffuse, have no definte boundaries, and often are regions that contain up to 100, 000 stars, so are excluded here. A few, however, have identifiable bounds: “planetary” nebulas, that form from white dwarfs, and SNR (supernova remnant) nebulas but I am unaware of the minimum and maximum sizes and masses for these although probably most or all are larger and more massive than stars. Maybe also globules and prestellar nebulas could be considered bodies. Prestellar bodies are “protostars” but may also include globular nebulas. Supernovas occur in high mass stars but can also be produced in white dwarfs that have accumulated matter from a degenerate companion thereby generating X-rays. These star systems are called X-ray binaries. So neutron dwarfs and black holes can also evolve from the low mass line. Quark dwarfs, preon dwarfs, black dwarfs, are not included in the classification for the moment, and primordial black holes are excluded as they would have to do with an early Universe (see Cosmology in Extra Essays). Table 8. Sizes and Masses of Celestial Bodies 1 bln.-2 bln. supergiant stars VV Cephei A
diams. in kms.
100 mln.-1 bln. giant stars
10 mln.-100 mln. giant stars
1.4 mln.-10 mln. dwarf stars black widow pulsars
100,000-1.4 mln. Jupiter, Saturn red dwarfs, brown sbdfs, grey sbdwfs
10,000-100,000 Uranus, Neptune white subdwarfs
10,000-40,000 Earth, Venus
1000-10,000 Pluto, Charon, Sedna, Eris, EL61 Galilean moons
1000-5000 Mercury, Mars
100-1000 Ceres, Juno, Hygeia, Vetsa, etc.
10-100 neutron subdwarfs
1-10
.05-1 blocks
.01-.05 boulders
.0006-.01 cobbles
.00002-.0006 pebbles
.00001-.00002 large grains
<.00001 micrometeoroids
The largest possible size for stars is said to be about 2 bln. kms. diam. or 2600 solar radii by Roberta Humphreys (Wikipedia-VY Can. Maj.); the largest star known is possibly VY Can. Maj., a red hypergiant or supergiant at 5000 lys distance, but this is disputed so the largest might be instead VVCephei A, a red supergiant 3000 lys away (Wikipedia-VY Can. Maj. and List of Largest Stars), but both are around 2000 solar radii. The most massive possible is perhaps 440 solar masses (Moore, 2002) or 8 E35 kilos.
masses in E kilos
stars/stelloids Good astronomy does not consider parabolic, hyperbolic, and suborbital trajectories as orbits as they are not orbits, giant planets as gaseous as they are not gaseous, nor comets as separate from asteroids (if they are larger than meteoroids) or KBOs as they are asteroids or KBOs, too, does not classify Pluto as a major planet or planet (according to Def. C and E, respectively) as it is a minor planet or planetoid, does not use “satellite” to mean only moons as it means a body revolving around a larger one (Moore, 2002; Webster’s 9th New Collegiate), does not use "planet" to mean "major planet", and does not say that brown dwarfs do not do nuclear fusion since they do as earlier explained, does not consider neutron dwarfs, white dwarfs, nor black holes as stars, considers plausible alternative models, and recognizes the reality of UFOs and the overwhelming evidence saying that some are of ET origin or at least have an unconventional explanation or that there is even proof as explained later. An orbit is necessarily a circuit and is circular by nature and definition. There are complete and incomplete orbits, the latter occurring among co-orbital moons, often called a horseshoe orbit. Tadpole orbits are not co-orbital but are exchanged orbits. And circles are not ellipses; the 2 together are closed curves. An ellipse by definition excludes circles the latter having 0 eccentricity. If we are going to be incoherent we could just as well say that an ellipse is a circle with >0° eccentricity. Most major secondaries have circular orbits as we can identify circular in practical terms as being less than .1 degree of eccentricity. Comets are a special and temporary type of planetoid or meteoroid so are not separate from these. Most are planetoids as they usually range in size from about 1-50 km., mostly at 10 km. Asteroids should be defined as a size/mass grade instead of based on composition or location and KBOs are called asteroids in Moore (2002). Giant planets are liquid, made of liquid H and He, and their cores melted ice and molten rock, which is well known. So the myth and fallacy that giant planets are gaseous with solid cores is just that. Lang (2003, p 316) states “Saturn is just a great big liquid drop covered by a thin atmosphere." Hamblin and Christiansen ( 1990, p. 288) affirm, “Jupiter is nearly all liquid…” Hubbard (1999, p. 198) says, “In liquid bodies(giant planets)…” In Lang (2003) it says "liquid metallic H" and "liquid molecular H" for the lower and upper layers of the mantle in the profiles of Jupiter and Saturn and "liquid molecular H" for the Uranus and Neptune mantles. And Freedman and Kaufmann (2008, p. 167) assert: "But in the interiors of these planets the pressures are so high that these substances are liquids not gases. The Jovian planets might be better described as liquid giants!"
32-35 giants
31 subgiants
30 yellow dwarfs, red dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron dwarfs
29 brown subdwarfs, grey subdwarfs
major primary satellites
28 supergiants
27 Jupiter black widow pulsars
26 Uranus, Neptune, Saturn
25
24 Earth, Venus
23 Mercury, Mars
greater asteroids
22 Pluto, Eris
21 Charon, Sedna, EL61
20 Ceres, Pallas, Vesta
19 Juno, Hygeia, Eunomia, Sylvia, Davida
lesser asteroids
12-18
macrometeoroids
6-11 blocks
2-5 boulders
1-2 cobbles
particles
-1-1 pebbles
-3- -2 large grains
micrometeoroids
-5- -4 microscopic grain (granule)
Some Words on Good Astronomy
The state of the cores are often or usually said to be solid but: “Although the term “ice” denotes a combination of water, metahne and ammonia under the high temperatures and pressures deep within a giant planet, this mixture actually will be a hot, liquid soup of various chemical species derived from these molecules" (Hubbard, 1999, p. 197). And in Lang (2003) it says "molten ice" and "molten rock" for cores in the profiles of all the giant planets.
The critical mass for giant (liquid) planets is said to be 6 E25 kilos which corresponds to about 10-15 Earth masses and some 30,000-40,000 km. diam. Earth is at 6 E24, Uranus at 8.7 E25, and Neptune at 1 E26 kilos. And it is bad semantics and unnecessary to use the name Jovian for outer planets as it is Confusionese so we are unable to know if Jovian moons, for instance, means the moons of Jupiter or the moons of the giant planets.
Conclusion
However one defines a planet it would be impractical and unworkable, not to mention unreasonable, to make taboo one or both of the 2 most used meanings of planet (Def. C and E) and even more so and especially egregious to drop the word entirely as suggested by some. But using "planet" only with adjectives as the IAU (whose decisions, at least in this matter, are non-binding) was apparently planning at one point sidesteps the issue, and is just as unworkable, impractical, and unreasonable. Some terms suggested like "planetary object” and “planetary body” are merely gratuitous synonyms for planet since any body or object that’s planetary is necessarily a planet. And the IAU's decision was muddled and simply continues the same contradictions and ambiguities but with different terms.
There is, however, general agreement in the debate: that the circumscription should include “(directly) circumsolar”, that there should be an upper limit and that it should be just below the mass for nucleosynthesis, that there should be a lower limit, and that meteoroids would be excluded. But it is on the lower limit that there is disageement. Def. E, as proposed here, contains no contradictions, ambiguities, nor incongruencies. Also, wanting to maintain Pluto with the same status as before seems rather strange since such status must be based on science and whether it is a minor planet or planetoid makes no difference, is of secondary importance, or is irrelevant.
References and other Sources
literature
Alfven, H. 1942. On the cosmogony of the solar system. Stockh. Obs. Annlr. 14, No. 2, 1-33 and No.5.
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Extra Essays on Related Topics
Thomas Van Flandern-In Memoriam
1000 Eyes
Clyde Tombaugh and UFOs
Death Star
Lunar Anomalies
Cosmology
Thomas Van Flandern, PhD-In Memoriam
Since the sad and unfortunate decease of Dr. Thomas Van Flandern has occured recently (2009, he was 68), after a brief battle with a neoplasm, and he figures so prominently in my Cosmogony section, I am presenting a biographical sketch.
b. June 26, 1940, in Cincinnati
Fascinated with astronomy from a very young age, Dr. Van Flandern made his first contribution to the field at age 19 in 1959 when he and his friend Dennis Smith who was 2 years younger, set the world record for number of artificial satellites tracked during a month as part of Project Moonwatch in Cincinnati. He made his observation from his personal telescope purchased with money earned from his paper route. He graduated from Cincinnati's Xavier University in 1962, with a B. Sc., majoring in astronomy, and then attended Yale on a scholarship sponsored by the U.S. Naval Observatory, where he earned his Master's and Ph.D. in astronomy, specializing in celestial mechanics (the theory of orbits), in 1969. His doctoral thesis was “A Discussion of 1950-1968 Occultations of Stars by the Moon”.
Dr. Van Flandern has had a long and distinguished career. He spent 20 years, from 1963-1983, at the USNO where he became the Chief of the Celestial Mechanics Branch of the Nautical Almanac Office where his team contributed to the regular production of the Nautical Almanac, among other projects; has been honoured with an award from the Gravity Research Foundation; served on the Council of the American Astronomical Society's Division on Dynamical Astronomy; taught astronomy at the University of South Florida and to Navy Department employees; has been a consultant to NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab; made several contributions to the "Project Universe" series for public TV; helped form MetaResearch, in 1991, a non-profit astronomy research organization, to foster inquiry into worthy ideas disregarded simply because they are not orthodox; authored the book, "Dark Matter, Missing Planets, and New Comets" (1993, 1st ed., 1999, 2nd. ed.), elaborating his MetaModel; and during the past decade, has been a Research Associate at the Univ. of Maryland Physics Department in College Park, Md, and a consultant to the Army Research Lab in Adelphi, Md, working on improving the accuracy of the Global Positioning System (GPS).
After his time at the USNO he retired from the civil service at 43. Thereafter, he opposed many orthodox "scientific" hypotheses. In his opposition to the Big Bang hypothesis he was joined by Fred Hoyle, Halton Arp, Geoffrey Burbidge, Jayant Narlikar, Thomas Gold, Hermann Bondi, Grote Reber, Eric Lerner, and Hannes Alfven. He attempted to establish a common set of principles among alternative cosmologists.
His MetaModel supports LeSage gravity, opposes the Big Bang and relativity, postulates solar fission for the formation of planets, a fission origin, as well, for moons, explosions as origins of planetoid belts, and Mercury and Mars as former moons, and proposes certain structures on Mars as man-made. He was editor of the MetaResearch Bulletin, which specializes in reporting anomalies and evidence that does not fit with standard models in astronomy. He also organized astronomical expeditions to solar eclipses, meteor storms, and other celestial events.
Among MetaResearch’s major contributions are:
evidence against the Big Bang and for a better theory of the origin and nature of the universe
experimental evidence that gravity propagates much faster than light, and a new model for the origin and nature of gravity
prediction of asteroid and comet satellites years before their discovery
new evidence favouring the exploded planet hypothesis, and new models for the origin of asteroids, comets, and the solar system
strong evidence indicating certain anomalies seen on Mars are not of natural origin
In 2009, asteroid 52266 was named in his honour, with the following citation given in Minor Planets Circulars, which regularly publishes names given to asteroids: "(52266) Van Flandern = 1986 AD Tom Van Flandern (1940-2009) predicted and comprehensively analyzed lunar occultations at the U.S. Naval Observatory in the 1970s. In 1979 he published pioneering papers on the dynamics of binary minor planets. He helped improve GPS accuracies and established MetaResearch to support alternative cosmological ideas."
In his criticism of the unscientific method, he makes several observations of social phenomena within science which are:
-scientists as a general pattern do not re-examine fundamental assumptions underlying a conventional hypothesis even if it is
incompatible with new observation or experiment.
-powerful vested interests in a status quo develop around certain accepted notions, aided by scientific peer pressure
-extreme scientific specialization (narrow focus) has acted to prevent comprehensive overall critiques of accepted ideas; by his
own account, Dr. Van Flandern was a specialist who turned into a generalist
-equations have been made to substitute for the concepts that underlie them
Although skeptical when it comes to the paranormal, he espoused unconventional views in physics, astronomy, and cosmology. He was 1 of the luminaries in science, was a rational, innovative, and imaginative thinker, and in my estimation his major contribution and where he was especially brilliant is the elaboration and refinement of his solar system evolution model, which, like heliocentricity, might take 2000 years to be generally accepted. He is the Aristarchus of our time.
He had collaborated with Robert Harrington in formulating the ideas about Mercury and his advisor was G. M. Clemence, who had recently retired from the USNO. He and his wife Barbara moved to Sequim, Wa. in 2005 to be nearer children and grandchildren. They had 4 children, Michael, Connie, Brian, and Kevin.
Through MetaResearch, now headed by his son Mike, his work, memory, and ideas will continue.
1000 Eyes
Bourdillon (1852-1921) was an English poet and translator who penned 13 volumes of verse but his best known poem is the one quoted from his Ailes d"Alouette (1891) on the 2nd page.
There was a movie by the title "Night Has a 1000 Eyes" ( 1948, 80 min., b n w) from Paramount and Andre Boehm Productions starring Edward Robinson and Gail Russell, produced by Andre Boehm and directed by John Farrow (husband of jungle girl Maureen O'Sullivan (Jane) and father of Mia Farrow) with music by Victor Young and based on the novel from 1945 by the same title by Cornell Woolrich which was an occult, melodramatic film noir about a vaudeville mentalist who finds he really does have the power of prediction. By the same title were Bobby Vee's wonderful 1963 song (with "The") on Liberty and composed by Ben Weisman, Marilyn Garrett, and Dotty Wayne, remade 10 years later by the Carpenters on their A & M LP Now and Then as one in a medley of 8 great tunes, and the astronomy book in 1998 by Athur Upgren from Perseus, with the subtitle "a Naked Eye Guide to the Sky, Its Science, and Lore."
Other poetry about space includes 4 lines from Tennyson's "Locksley Hall":
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.
And from "Locksley Hall 60 Years After"
Hesper-Venus- were we native to that splendour or in Mars,
We should see the globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars.
While the silent heavens roll, and suns along their fiery way,
All their planets whirling round them, flash a million miles a day.
And in "Merlin and Vivien", from Idylls of the King which was in blank iambic pentameter, often called "the Poet of Science", Tennyson speaks of the Great Orion Nebula:
"...a single misty star
Which is the second in a line of stars
That seem a sword beneath a belt of three;
I never gazed upon it but I dreamt
Of some vast charm concluded in that star
To make fame nothing."
Erasmus Darwin penned:
Roll on, ye stars, exult in youthful prime
Mark with bright curves the printless steps of time
And John Masefield with the 1st line as the title:
I could not sleep for thinking of the sky,
The unending sky, with all its million suns
Which turn their planets everlastingly
In nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs.
If I could sail that nothing, I should cross
Silence and emptiness with dark stars passing,
Then, in the darkness, see a point of gloss
Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing
And rage into a sun with wandering planets
And drop behind; and as I proceed,
See his last light on his last moon's granites
Die to dark that would be night indeed.
Night where my soul might sail a million years
In nothing, not even Death, not even tears.
Irish-born American astronomer Mary Proctor, daughter of English astronomer Richard Proctor, both important popularizers of astronomy, in "Evening with the Stars" from 1924, also waxing poetic, described the same nebula as "Isles of light and silvery streams and gloomy gulfs of mystic shade."
There is, also, the verse in volume 1 of Burnham's Celestial, which is untitled with no author given, and is presented here in part:
Midnight,
There is no sound in the forest -
only the phantom murmur
of the far wind
and its shadow drifting as smoke
through ebon branches; there a single star
glistens in the heart of'night,
A star!
Look skyward still
and see...INFINITY,
Vast and dark and deep, your heritage:
Silent clouds of stars,
Other worlds uncountable and other suns
beyond numbering
and realms of fire-mist and star-cities
as grains of sand drifting
Across the void....
Across the gulf of night....
Across the endless rain of years....
Across the ages.
Clyde Tombaugh's UFO sightings occured in late 1948 when he witnessed 3 green "fireballs" over Las Cruces, NM; in August 20, 1949, from his backyard in Las Cruces, along with his wife and mother-in-law, he saw rectangles of light; and in 1951 at a White Sands observatory he witnessed an object 4 times brighter than Venus crossing the sky in only 3 seconds. In 1956 he affirmed, "I think several reputable scientists are unscientific in refusing to entertain the possibility of ET origin and nature" (Wikipedia).
In fact, there are about 60 points of evidence in 13 lines of evidence and 10s of 1000s of authentic cases all of which add up to proof that a certain % of UFOs have an ET origin or at least one that is unconventional. The myth that there’s no proof is just that.
There are 2 theoretical lines of evidence:
1. astronomical and mathematical evidence supporting the existence of people on other planets and the discovery of other
solar systems
2. the possibility of interstellar travel through 11 different methods ( 1) EM-gravity field propulsion (Plantier, 1953, 1955; Hill, 1995), 2) EM-antigravity (Pagès, 1958,1974), 3) 0-point (vacuum) energy (Puthoff, 1989, 1997, 1998) (the ZPF) (hypothesized by Plantier (1953,1955) and Pagès, 1974)), 4) AMF (anti-mass field) theory (Behrendt, 1987,1988), 5) solar sail propulsion, 6) ion drive, 7) nuclear fusion, 8) antimatter (the 1st 6 are fuelless and 6) and 7) have been verified experimentally) if only for relatively short distances (up to c. 30 to 40 lys; Hill calculates that 37 lys, the Zeta Reticuli distance, could be done in only 7 months (relativistically) with a speed of 99.9999% that of light while Stanton Friedman (1999) gives 6 months and 99.99%); there are 5000 G-stars in a 250 ly radius and nearly 50 within c.50 lys (Dickinson, 1974, 1976); other methods are less conventional: 9) space tunnels (Morris and Thome, 1988), 10) Alcubierre warp drive (1994), 11) the Krasnokoff tube (Krasnokoff, 1998); possibly one kind of method which would be among the more conventional ones, which might include also MHD (magnetohydrodynamics), is used for travel in the atmosphere and another for travel in interstellar space which might be in the last 3)
There are 12 empirical lines of evidence:
1. trace evidence (5000 cases world-wide, some confirming landing sightings, e,g., Soccoro, '64 and Valensole, '65, both including also occupant sightings, Phillips, 1985, etc.)
2. crash recoveries (China-Tibet border (the Dropas) 10,000 BC; Nuremberg, 1561; Del Rio, Tx. '50; Kingman, Az.'53; Ubatuba, Brazil, '57; Lake Onega, Russia '61; Vegas '62; Penkridge, England, '64; Berwyn Mts., Wales, ’74; Carbondale, Pa. ’74; Dalnegorsk, Siberia, '86; Varginha, Brazil, ‘96; etc. (Stringfield, 1978; Randle and Schmitt, 1991; Berliner and Friedman, 1992; Randle, 1995; Wood, 2005; Birnes, 2004; ufologie.net website)
3. abductions
4. visual sightings
5. radar sightings (some confirmed by visual sightings and vice-versa as in Carswell Air Base, '54, Andrews Air Base (many), '52, Fl. Capt. Coleman, '52, Bentwaters, '56, Minot Air Base, '67, Rendlesham Forest, '80 (this last confirmed and corroborated also by trace evidence and including also an occupant sighting)
6. still and motion pictures (some confirming visual-radar sightings, e.g., Copenhagen, '66; Belgium, ‘90)
7. behaviour of the technology (proving it is way beyond our capabilities)
8. mathematics of landing patterns (Cathy, 1969; Chatelain, 1980; Fumoux, 1981)
9. historical and prehistorical evidence (cave paintings (in Hunan, 47,000 BC, Southern France, 20,000 BC, etc.), paintings by Ghirlandaio (Pallazzo Vecchio, Florence, 1400s) and Muzard (Collégiale Notre-Dame, Beaune, France, Middle Ages), and a tapestry by Djordjevic (Decani Monastery, Serbia-Montenegro, 1300s; Bible, Plinius the Elder (85 B.C.), Livius (183 B.C.); reports of incidents, including changelings, strikingly similar to modern abductions from the distant past with the perpetrators understandably seen as fairies, elves, or demons (in fact, the concepts for these beings probably have their origins in space aliens)
10. animal reactions
11. animal and human mutilations
12. governmental disclosures (it is proven, for instance, from FIA (Freedom of Information Act) releases, that there was and continues to be a systematic cover-up and that UFOs have been investigated by not only the USAF but also the FBI, the CIA, ATIC (Air Technical Intelligence Command), the Civil Aeronautics Administration, and the NSA (National Security Agency), and this is in the US alone).
Crop circles have not been firmly established as having an ET connection and the explanations for them by skeptics have been just as ludicrous as for UFOs. They are certainly and obviously not caused by the weather, magnetism, mental activity, nor anything underground; they are certainly and obviously caused by machines. There have been about 10,000 since at least the '70s on 3 continents most in England near Stonehenge and contain strange anomalies. Many are probably hoaxes but no one has ever been seen doing them and there have been a few cases of possible UFO involvement.
Especially proven are abductions and the following are the points of evidence for them:
1) many abductees have PTSD which can occur only if the event is real
2) the Betty hill star map (itself corroborated by 4 different analyses (Fish, Mitchell, Saunders, and Peck; Dickinson, 1974,
1976, 1980)
3) punch biopsies and other marks (to collect genetic material) (Hopkins, 1987)
4) recovery of implants ( Leir, 1998a,b, 2000a,b; Lorgen, 1998)
5) trace evidence (e.g., the Tomey case, 1983 (Hopkins, 1987)
6) virgin pregnancies and sudden pregnancy termination without abortion verified and confirmed by medical professionals
and other witnesses (Hopkins, 1987, pp. 180-1; Greslé, 1993, p. 153)
7) visual and radar confirmation (e.g., Pease Air Base '61 in the Hill case)
8) the fact that the experience is congruent as its content is genetic and occurs generationally and has a consistent and
coherent pattern
9) sleep paralysis is incompatible with the experience and, in any case, many victims are taken fully awake and even outdoors
10) hypnosis is, indeed, reliable and some of the victims remember the experience consciously, e.g., Nadine Lalich (Lamb and Lalich, 2008)
11) abductees have been found to be sane and normal (Zimmer, 1984; Bloecher et al, 1985; Pamell and Sprinkle, 1980;
Parnell, 1988; Rodethier et al, 1993; Spanos et al, 1993; Mack, 1995)
12) there is physical evidence of ET-Terrian hydridization from the past found in Mexico in 1930 and dating back 900 years
(Pye, 2007)
Under crash recoveries, the Roswell and Varginha cases are especially solid and well-documented. The following is a refutation of the Redfern hoax concerning Roswell (“Body Snatchers in the Desert”, 2005)(which is my letter read on SDI (Strange Days, Indeed radio program, July 2005)):
1. it is totally implausible that the witnesses, whose descriptions of the bodies are consistent, would remember them as something they probably had never seen nor heard of, since progeria is a very rare illness, and even if they had they wouldn't confuse it with Roswell and the test flight crew wouldn't be made up of sick people.
2. if it really had been a test flight by the military there would have been a search for the wreckage and the bodies and they would have known where to look and would have recovered them within only a few hours instead of them being found accidentally by civilians after a week.
3. it is totally implausible, also, that the debris that was seen by 14 known witnesses and also handled by many of them, whose descriptions were consistent, was simply aluminum.
4. it is totally implausible, as well, that the witnesses to the crashed vehicle would not know the difference between a disk and a fugo balloon-flying wing combination.
5. what the Wilmots saw the night of the crash was a typical flying saucer not a balloon or flying wing
6. the Roswell mortician was asked about preservation techniques by the military which would not be done if the bodies had simply been Japanese
7. there were only 6 “witnesses” to the supposed event described by Redfern but there were 200 to the real events.
There has, as well, been new evidence which has come to light (new witnesses (Carey and Thomas, 2007) and the Air General Walter Haut affadavit of 2002). The whole thing was very obviously invented by disinformation agents with the collusion of Nick Redfern.
Furthermore, there is new evidence (Mufon Journal, July, 2009; Carey and Thomas, 2009) from recently obtained documents (a verified Schulgen memo from '47 and a Battelle study) that the "memory" metal Nitinol (a specially processed nickel-titanium alloy which recovers its shape, is light-weight, has high fatigue resistance, and can withstand extreme heat) was developed (by the Battelle Memorial Institute) from studies on the debris from the Roswell saucer crash. This is confirmed by Air Brig.-Gnl. Arthur Exon who was Wright-Pat cmdr. in the '60s and Elroy Center, who was senior research scientist at Batelle from 1939-57. The authors of the 2nd progress report referenced in the study were very closely associated with Battelle's chief titanium metallurgist Dr. Howard Cross, who went on to participate in Project Bluebook. Also and not surprisingly, the progress reports have been kept hidden. As the Mufon article states, "The Battelle-Roswell Connection is fast becoming established. Its implications are profound."
The ETT is, evidentially, on a par with heliocentrism, the round Earth, and atomic, quantum, and evolutionary theory, while UFO skepticism is, evidentially, on a par with creationism, geocentrism, and the flat earth and hollow earth ideas. Anti-ufology (the anti-truth culture or movement, i.e., cover-up agents/supporters and crank skeptics, a lunatic fringe among skeptics) makes statements that are obviously false and easily disproven, can't be taken seriously, is pseudoscientific, and has zero credibility; its stance is totally untenable, has been disproven and discredited, and has no evidence for it.
Crank skepticism (skepticultism) is notorious for its abusiveness, extremism (manic or choleric disorder), ultraconservatism, habitual lying (propaganda), incoherence, close-mindedness, obstinancy, expectation "confirmation" or confirmation bias (faulty reasoning whereby only that evidence which supports pre-existing beliefs is considered), psychosis (believing the phenomenon has no physical reality knowing full well it has been overwhelmingly proven to be very physical, especially the abduction component), using avoidance, denial, and projection (hypocrisy) defense mechanisms and the "pragmatic" hypothesis of truth which means whatever is emotionally pleasing to any individual, what works for them, is true, which is, of course, not evidence based so is entirely subjective, antirational, antirealist, and nonsensical so that they are rarely right and when they are it is only accidental. In other words, they believe only what they want to. The UFO phenomenon is not emotionally pleasing as it causes fear and threatens belief systems and the status quo. It is supported and funded by the cover-up, the 2 being partners in crime. Anti-ufology is commited to maintaining these belief systems at any price even making themselves look foolish and incoherent which they are anyways. And skeptics are not debunkers, they are skeptics; they have been unable to debunk the phenomenon. Skepticism, like subjectivism, empiricism, "behaviourism", and gradism, is, in fact, part of antirationalism or irrationalism which rejects reason and logic. Antirationalism in general uses the same hypothesis of truth and includes also the widespread delusions that we are omnipotent and sees reason where it isn't, views held by people unable or unwilling to face reality.
And crank skeptics are too incoherent and imbecilic to understand that conspiracies are possible, they do happen, and that not all conspiracy hypotheses are false, most are true, in fact. They are typically hypocritical since they themselves believe in conspiracies, e.g., that there was a conspiracy to commit a hoax or cover-up some government project at Roswell, that there was a conspiracy to make the JFK assassination look like a conspiracy, that the Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, and that 9/11 was an Arab conspiracy. The truth of a claim does not depend on whether or not there is a conspiracy but instead what the evidence shows which is secondary or totally unimportant to the skeptic. And most "skeptics" are actually believers who are part of the criminal network and hypocritically smear truth proponents to protect the lunatic fringe's criminal activities, the UFO cover-up included.
No serious scientist who is familiar with the subject would deny UFOs and the ET origin of many of them. Most, after all, believe in parallel universes, interstellar travel, extra dimensions, space tunnels, and ET life. Their "skepticism" is purely political and for public consumption, in other words, to protect the cover-up. They know very well what's going on. Most scientists are politicians 1st and scientists 2nd and many are Obscuranti (the international network of criminal cults).
A good case in point is Carl Sagan. In ’62 at an Am. Rocket Soc. conference he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Earth had already been visted by intelligent beings from other points in the Universe and that they have a base on the far side of the moon”(Edwards, 1967, p. 176; Tarade, 1969, p. 121). From Tarade (p. 306): “I believe UFOs exist.” In ’76 he stated, “That beings from the Galaxy have honoured us with their visit is in no way improbable.” He affirmed, as well, that 1000s of years ago Earth was visited by astronauts of ET origin (von Buttlar, 1978, p. 186). He also signed a letter requesting disclosure concerning UFOs (along with Wm. Hartmann and 10 others, addressed to the Air Force Minister Robert Seamans (Secretary is a misnomer) at the AAAS symposium on UFOs in Boston in ’69 (Durrant, 1973, p. 290). He also stopped the announced destruction of the Blue Book files by circulating a petition in the scientific community (Astronomers Heading for the Stars website). So his pseudoscientific skepticism of later years was only for political reasons and for public consumption. (I received a 3-page letter from his ex-wife Lynn Margulis concerning my critique of her book "5 Kingdoms")
Also, notorious "skeptic" and noted astronomer Donald Menzel is known to have seen a UFO in 1949 in New Mexico (Astronomers Heading for the Stars and Wikipedia websites) as he himself relates in one of his books and he might even have been a member of Majestic-12. His ludicrous explanations for UFOs were done to foster skepticism to protect the cover-up. And Allen Hynek is also known to have seen UFOs as he also relates himself in 2 of his books and worked for the Air Force as UFO advisor so his psychic projection explanation and other skeptical statements were also only a cover. In 1947 Vannevar Bush (named in the MJ-12 documents) said that it was impossible that UFOs belonged to the US. Canadian astronomer Terence Dickinson presented the evidence (as referenced here) for the Betty Hill star map but recently did a 180 on the phenomenon as a whole yet is still a member of CUFORN.
In fact, ufology has been infiltrated by many pseudoskeptical and other cover-up agents and supporters, working against ufology from the inside, many holding prominent and influential positions. Some claim to be skeptics which is contradictory, bizarre, extermely suspicious, represents a conflict of interest, is not very credible, and is nonsensical. It would be the same as a creationist being an evolutionary biologist. And there are no open believers who are members of skeptical groups; believers who are members are pretending to be skeptics, so they are pseudoskeptics, which is probably most of them. Some of these cover-up agents or supporters, like Hynek, Jerome Clark, and Redfern, even promote or suggest "psychic projection", the most nonsensical explanation for UFOs, yet taken seriously by many "ufologists", either out of desparation or to discredit ufology. Ambiguous and ambivalent Hynek founded CUFOS, Clark, self-proclaimed skeptic and harsh critic of UFO belief, is editor of its UFO Investigator magazine and a member of the Intruders Foundation Advisory Board. Jacques Vallée and Jenny Randles support other strange and unscientific explanations. Most ufologists form the AAA League (ambiguous, ambivalent, and apologetic) because they are infiltrators. This is also the position of Wm. Cooper (see Majesty 12-hourofthetime and mt.net)
Of the distinguished scientists who openly believe in the ETT (Extraterrestrial Theory)(it is a theory, i.e., something proven, not an hypothesis, somthing unproven), are NASA scientists Richard Haines, Bruce Maccabee, and Maurice Chatelain, plus David Rudiak, David Jacobs, physicists Paul Hill, Jean-Pierre Petit, and Albert Einstein (in his later years), Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth, etc. Noted open believer astronauts include Edgar Mitchell, Gordon Cooper, and Eugene Cernan.
Concerning Einstein I quote from Gerald Haines in an article for the CIA (see the Presidential UFO website): "A massive build-up of sightings over the United States in 1952, especially in July, alarmed the Truman administration." This led the Truman administration and the Air Force to give the order, "Shoot them down!" on July 26, 1952 (see also Shoot Them Down!-The Flying Saucer Air Wars of 1952 by Frank Feschino, Jr., 2007, who also wrote The Braxton County Monster-The Cover-Up of the Flatwoods Monster Revealed, 2004). "Several prominent scientists, including Albert Einstein, protested the order to the White House and urged that the command be rescinded, not only in the interest of future intergalactic peace, but also in the interest of self-preservation: Extraterrestrials would certainly look upon an attack by the primitive jet firepower as a breach of the universal laws of hospitality." At the time these scientists were unaware of the hostile nature of the space aliens and their intents and activities. Haines, an historian, went on to prepare the Haimes Report for the CIA publication, Studies in Intelligence, while at the NRO (National Recon Office) in 1997.
In an April 4, 1950 news conference Truman officially confirmed the fact that UFOs are ET stating, "I can assure you that flying saucers, given they exist, are not built by any power on Earth" (Durrant, 1970; von Buttlar, 1978; Spencer, 1991). And in a press release in 1952 Truman, Johnson (ex-Defense Minister), and Deans (ex-AEC President) stated that the unexplained aerial phenomena are neither a secret weapon, nor a rocket, nor a new type of experimental airplane (Guieu, 1954; Naud, 1977, p. 193)(Truman was 1 of 3 US presidents who saw a UFO, the others being Reagan and Carter). All this was ignored by the media and scientific establishments and the public who obviously were afraid of the truth which basically gave a green light for the cover-up to continue so they were always complicitous in it. It is only or primarily because of this complicity that the cover-up was successful but this support has eroded over the years. Now about half the population believes in UFOs. The following table is a chronology of opinions since the '40s from Gallup, the numbers repesenting percentages (most other surveys indicate believers outnumber skeptics, too, but Gallup is the most reliable).
real imaginary not sure ETT ET life cover-up
1947 5 90 5
1966 46 29 25
1973 54 30 16
1978 57 27 16
1987 49 30 21
1997 48 31 21 45 72 71
The average of those believing UFOs are real is 43% since 1947 and 51% since the '60s and 40% and 29% for those believing they are imaginary. Significant also is the correlation between belief in UFOs and level of education and also age as the following figures for 1978 show:
real imaginary not sure
college 66 23 11
hi school 57 27 16
elementary 36 38 26
under 30 70 20 10
30-49 63 23 14
50+ 40 38 22
Here is what anti-ufology is saying exactly or in effect:
1. stars and the moon are able to shift from 1 point to another in seconds and do sudden stops and sudden
accelerations and meteors are able to hover and can cause people to become disoriented
2. weather balloons are valuable military secrets and must be covered up but only at Roswell
3. people can materialize large objects from their minds
4. hallucinations show up on radar and on film, do punch biopsies, cause virgin pregnancies, do implants, and leave
trace evidence
5. parachute dummies can travel back in time
6. 200 people in New Mexico, military and civilian, conspired to perpetrate a huge and elaborate hoax over a period of
60 years with none recanting
7. 6 shady characters, obviously disinformation agents, making nonsensical claims, are more credible than 200
legitimate witnesses, 17 1st hand
8. air force personnel are unable to tell the difference between a weather ballon and an aircraft and an aircraft from
a flying saucer
9. pelicans are metallic objects
10. natural environmental phenomena include machines under intelligent control
11. hailstones are huge and flat and can glide
12. "because we say so" is a valid scientific argument
13. swamp gas has lights on it, changes colours, and has discoid, spherical, triagular, or cigar shapes.
14. natural formations can exist as large pyramids and human faces and are arranged geometrically like cities but only on
Mars
15. the militaries of the world have developed super-advanced aircraft in prehistory and have been flying them ever since
16. owls are 6 feet tall
It is such comical stuff that maybe all this anti-ufology is really an attempt at humour.
Another important point to underline is that most ETs are extremely hostile and malevolent as we have seen from countless UFO cases. We are no threat to them as our technology is far inferior to theirs and will remain so for 100s or 1000s of years; it is they who are a threat to us (Jacobs, 1998; Bramley, 1989). In fact, it appears they are set to install a global hybrid tyrany around the year 2012 (Jacobs, 1998).
Concerning the idea that UFO abductions are really CIA or military black ops we can confirm that even if this was true which it is probably not, since such incidents have been going on long before there was even a USA as we know from identical reports from folklore from many centuries before and also evidence of hybridization since many centuries also ("Star Child Skull," Pye, 2007), there would still be UFOs of ET origin as they and space aliens have been around since "prehistory" as we know from cave paintings and ancient and medieval art and literature as noted above (or, at least, they would be survivors of an earlier super-advanced civilization on earth destroyed by a cataclysm).
But to call abductees "experiencers" instead of victims, as some people do, is an abomination and is very New Age and pc, both movements engineered by the Obscuranti, as it purposely and deliberately denies the evil nature of such an experience. We are all experiencers and there are different types of experiences and UFO abductions are mostly very bad ones where the person is certainly a victim.
There is often the claim that these space aliens come from another dimension but the definition for this is:
Compact Oxford:
1. a measurable extent, such as length, breadth, or height. 2. an aspect or feature.
Am. Heritage:
Extent or magnitude; scope. Often used in the plural: a problem of alarming dimensions. Aspect; element: He's a good newsman, and he has that extra dimension (William... )
New Webster's 9th Collegiate Dictionary:
1a (1): measure in one direction; specif: one of three coordinates determining a position in space or four coordinates determining a position in space and time
(2): one of a group of properties whose number is necessary and sufficient to determine uniquely each element of a system of usu. mathematical entities (as an aggregate of points in real or abstract space) <the surface of a sphere has two dimensions>; also: a parameter or coordinate variable assigned to such a property <the three dimensions of momentum>
(3): the number of elements in a basis of a vector space
b: the quality of spatial extension: MAGNITUDE, SIZE
c: the range over which or the degree to which something extends: SCOPE -- usu. used in pl.
d: one of the elements or factors making up a complete personality or entity: ASPECT
2 obsolete: bodily form or proportions
3: wood or stone cut to pieces of specified size
(The words in caps are synonyms).
Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics:
1. Of space, the number of parameters needed to specify the position of a particular point. Space has n dimensions when n coordinates are required: points in 1D space lie on a curve; points in 2D lie on a surface; points in 3D lie within a volume.
the other 5 meanings concern matrices, vectors, manifold, combinatorial topology, none having to do with the topic in hand, the last of these having to do with higher dimensions but only in relation to (as analogs of) points, lines, and triangles, and not involving extra dimensions; the 6th has only partly to do with the topic and is: "The power of a fundamental physical quantiy such as length, time, or mass used in the descripton of any physical quantity." And mass is measured in kilos or some other unit of weight.
In other words, it is quite impossible for people, spacecraft, or any other object to exist in any particular spatial dimension. The dimension, extra or not, is always necessarily part of the object. With extra dimensions any object we perceive (in 3D) would be only part of the object. That part of the object we do not perceive would never be an object itself and would not be in any way separate or distinct. An object can no more exist in 1 dimension or 2 than in 4 or 5 or more.
Assuming these extra dimensions exist they would be describing a space invisible to us which would be in the imagination as it would be undefined and there would be no explanation of how it could exist and these extra dimensions have no names and no quantities. Or it would be a parallel universe or parallel universes which would themselves have 3 spatial dimensions each. Since physicists state there are 10 or 23 of these extra spatial dimensions they are not speaking of parallel universes because they would have to be a cluster of these universes to make up the total, so they, the spatial dimensions, would be in multiples of 3, which doesn't add up to 10 nor 23. Also, such clustering is not postulated in any model of parallel universes. And physicists or cosmologists, consider extra dimensions and parallel universes to be separate issues. Put another way, what scientists speak of when they talk about hyperspace and extra dimensions is contrary to nature and reality.
There is the torsion field which is dealt with in "Secrets of the Unified Field," which according to Gabriel Kron, who "invented" it in the 1920s, can be explained only by extra dimensions. But since these are not possible, his interpretation, we can conclude, is wrong and another explanation is required. This other explanation may lie in the oft ignored ZPF with its quantum fluctuations, a theory already proposed in 1913 by Einstein and Otto Stern. Kron's interpretation was based on the standard model, the incomplete Unified Field Theory, which required extra dimensions, instead of ZPF, which was a complete UFT and did not require them.
Also, if what these people (abductees or contactees) mean when they speak of dimensions is parallel universes there would not be any possibility of travel between them if we use the quantum interpretation which is the most plausible as they are non-communicating. As well, even if such travel were possible these beings would still be physical since all parallel universes are physical. If they mean some intangible realm as in the quote above: he has that extra dimension, than they are talking about a purely, abstract idea, that exists only in the popular mind having no scientific basis as the scientific definition has to do with the physical realm.
Furthermore, we do not need to postulate such hypotheses nor time travel, which is probably impossible, too, as interstellar travel is quite doable given an advanced enough technology and the evidence strongly shows ETs come from other solar systems. Moreover, it is possible, that the sun has a companion which itself has a planetary system which might include a planet like ours but that is more evolved and developed advanced space flight and visits Earth. As well, these beings might be survivors of an earlier super-advanced civilization on Earth destroyed by a cataclysm, as mentioned earlier.
What people are reporting concerning UFOs and their occupants when they mention extra dimensions and non-physical beings is noise, disinformation, or hoaxes. The noise or misinterpretation, however, could be based on an intriguing possibility, plasma life, meaning these beings would appear as immaterial because they are gaseous, and would presumably take on humanoid forms. The idea comes from experiments and a discovery of plasma spheres which are postulated to be able to evolve life forms since they can replicate, communicate, and seem to be cellular precursors (New Scientist, 2003). This means they would originate in the atmosphere of our own planet or of another, in a sun, or in interplanetary space. It is probably unlikely, however, and sounds more like science-fiction than science.
Although the ET explanation for UFOs is the most plausible, the idea that the people behind them are really from Earth and our distant past, survivors of a super-advanced civilization which had enough time to evolve to such a point, but was destroyed in a cataclysm, as mentioned previously, has merit. It would explain why we were never rescued, why there is very little information on the mode of propulsion they supposedly use for interstellar trips, and what little there is is not very compelling, and it might be a better explanation of why they think of this planet as theirs. They may have made themselves out to be from another planet or solar system as a ruse or were returning from junkets through outer space and the several different species that are seen might be products of their genetic engineering. Note that many, perhaps all, of what we suppose were space aliens in ancient times appeared very Earthling and that we were created in their image (although some are said to be reptilian). This would tie into the Death Star hypothesis which is alleged to have caused the cataclysm, or several of them, and the fact that civilization goes much further back than we thought (see Death Star below), and may even tie into Atlantis, which is interpreted by some as a planet instead of a continent. It would also explain why there are human faces on Mars. The idea is usually that we originated there and came here but it might be the other way around. Even 100,000 or 200, 000 yrs. gives plenty of time to develop a super-advanced civilization which would have done genetic engineering, attained practical immortality, colonized Mars, tampered with the moon, engineered Iapetus, and even created a galactic pulsar telecoms system as elucidated in LaViolette (2000). The basic theory would be the same but it would have to be relocated from deep space to deep time and it would still not preclude interstellar travel. Or it might even be a combination of the 2. Certainly human origins are not strictly Darwinian and there was at some point in deep time genetic intervention with hybridization by someone, and there was an interplanetary war, giants, cataclysms, and an Eden that may have been Atlantis or may have been Mars's twin (Farrell, 2007). The details are not known with certainty but the basic facts are.
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'width' is a duplicate attribute name. Line 1, position 37. Death Star bell-shaped vessel 1852 Dorchester, Mass. 600 mln. Sci. Am. However, the fossil and archeological records are extremely discrepant. So, for instance, the 1st land vertebrates and insects appeared in the Devonian, about 470 mya, the 1st reptiles in the Carboniferous, about 400 mya, and the 1st mammals in the Triassic, about 300 mya, so the bell-shaped vessel is supposedly 130 mln. yrs. older than the 1st land vertebrates! And the beginning of the genus Homo is thought to be 2.5 mya. One of these records is certainly wrong and the fossil record seems to be well established so it could be the dating methods for the archeological might be off, and they would be way off, but there would still be plenty of time for advanced deep time civilizations to have evolved and could have originated even at 100, 000 yrs. ago.
Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez et al (1980) discovered evidence of an impact in the C-T extinction and proposed an asteroid impact as an explanation for it (1983). Then, using time series analysis, geologists Raup and Sepkoski (1984) found a periodicity of c. 26 mln. yrs. corroborated by Fox ( 1995) using harmonic Fourier analysis but others contest the data (e.g., McGhee, 1990; Benton, 1995) saying some peaks are missing and others occur that are not predicted. Alvarez and Muller (1984) and Davis et al (1984) also came out with a periodicity model. A companion star was proposed as the possible cause of wobbling producing asteroid impacts (Davis et al, 1984; Whitmire and Jackson, 1984; Goldsmith, 1985; Yarris, 1987; Muller, 1988; Silagadze, 2001; Cruttenden, 2005) and dubbed Nemesis by Muller who says it is a red dwarf already known but the distances of most are unmeasured and that it orbits a 1-3 l.y. It would be in the Hydra constellation (Yarris, 1987; Muller, 1988). But Whitmire and Jackson suggested that it is a brown dwarf, as these are harder to detect because of their lower brightness, and Silagadze suggested that it might be mirror matter. Another possible explanation is that the solar system goes through a dense region of the spiral arm that contains closely packed stars and causes wobbles in the Oort Cloud or oscillations as the solar system goes through the galactic plane (Rampino and Stothers, 1984). Cruttenden has determined that Sedna moves in resonance with a hypothetical companion star based on previously published orbital data.
It is possible that this companion star, if it exists, would have a planetary system and that 1 of those planets evolved an advanced life form, i.e, people, long before us so that they would have a superior technology allowing them to make visits here.
A more likely cause, however, would be the superwave, an accepted and established scientific fact, which would cause major damage, such as massive and long-lasting black-outs, but also a global catastrophe (LaViolette, 1997; etheric; YouTube). This superwave is postulated to emanate from a galactic core explosion and is known to have happened several times in the past and can occur at 4 different magnitudes. It has probably caused mass extinctions and ice ages. The frequency of the large ones is 13,000-26,000 years. American physicist Dr. Paul LaViolette says we are overdue for another one. He has made 15 predictions in this area which have all been verified. Gravitational influences and a galactic core explosion, which would be blue, causing a superwave to emanate from a supermassive black hole, are theorized to be the factors behind the implications to Earth. This could cause asteroid hits and a rapid and sudden pole shift which would have devastating consequences for the planet, including earthquakes and "tidal waves".
In any case, in the past 650 mln. yrs. there have been 5 major mass extinctions, the largest being in the Permian-Triassic 250 mln. yrs. ago which killed off 90% of all species and the last one being 65 mln. years ago in the Cretaceous-Triassic period which killed off the dinosaurs A 1 km. planet hits the Earth once every half mln. yrs. on average, a 5 km. planet smashes into it every 10 mln. yrs.(Wikipedia-Impact events). A 10 km. impact would have the effect of 100 mln. atomic warheads (100 mln. megatons)(Alvarez and Asaro, 1992). Even a 1 km. impact at the usual speed of some 20 kms/hr. would cause a gigantic global catastrophe in which 2-4 bln. people would perish. Recent close encounters (JA 1, half a km. diam., closest approach half a mln. kms., 1996; FH, 30 ms. diam., closest approach 40, 000 kms., 2004) were detected only a few days before the closest approach (Wikipedia-Impact event).
Also, abductees intimate that they will have a special role to play sometime soon in relation to a global cataclysm which the ETs could prevent but won't and could cause themselves, in any case.
Underground cities have been built e.g., Mt. Weather in Virginia near D.C. (The Mysterious Mountain, The Progressive Magazine, March, '76; The Doomsday Hideaway, Time magazine, '91)(an interesting side-bar is that there are about 40 underground cities in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, 1, Derinkuyu, was home to 20,000 people and 6 are open to the public (Cappadocia Turkey-Underground Cities website)). Scientists have recently been stating that such a catastrophe is inevitable and it's only a question of when. The general opinion is that it will happen in 2012 or thereabouts as this is when the Mayan calendar ends.
And with society having degenerated so badly we are reminded of the quote from Euripides: "Whom the gods destroy they first make mad."
And there could well have been a whole succession of advanced Earthling civilizations in deep prehistory (as suggested also by Petit, 2003) that were destroyed by the Death Star with some of their knowledge having survived in fragments so that we have the Big Bang, cells and chlorophyll (in the Vrikshayurveda), and DNA (the caduceus symbol), etc., popping up in ancient times where they shouldn't be. In many ancient traditions there are periods in history or prehistory, 4-6 of them, in other words a cyclical theory and the Phenix represents this very concept of birth and rebirth, which does not speak of reincarnation as this is a bogus concept, but might also refer to to the cycloid universe, which is probably not very plausible (see Cosmology below), or simply to the cycle os the seasons.
But there could well have been a whole succession of advanced Terrian civilizations in prehistory (as suggested also by Petit, 2003) that were destroyed by the Death Star with some of their knowledge having survived in fragments so that we have the ideas of the Big Bang, cells and chlorophyll (in the Vrikshayurveda), and DNA (the caduceus symbol), etc., popping up in ancient times where they shouldn't. In many ancient traditions there are periods in history or prehistory, 4-6 of them, in other words, a cyclical theory and the Phenix represents this very concept of birth and rebirth, which does not speak of reincarnation as this is a bogus concept, but might also refer to the cycloid universe.
The Hopi believe in 4 worlds (ages). The 1st was destroyed by fire, the 2nd by ice because of a toppled axis, and the 3rd by a universal flood. The 4th is the current one.
In Hopi prophecy a blue star will signal the end time. There was a blue comet, Holmes 17P, which appeared in late 2007 which may be this sign. The Blue Star is seen as the herald of a Great Purification period beginning prior to 2012. This would last for 7 years in total. Interestingly, the comet has an orbital period of 7 years! (2012rising; Lodders and Begley, 1993).
In the Aztec system there are 4 stages, as well, called suns, the 1st (Matlactli Atl ("10 Waters")) belonged to the giants, and was destroyed by water, i.e., a flood, the 2nd (Ehecoatl (Winged Serpent)) by a strong wind (a man and woman were saved), the 3rd (Tleyquiyahuillo) by fire, the 4th (Tzontlilic) by water, too, and the 5th is the current age, the Sun of Movement, characterized by great wars and diseases, and is to end in earthquakes.
The Maya calendar is based on the cycle of the Pleiades, each cycle lasting 5,125 years, and the current cycle ends in 2012.
Vedic scriptures divide history into 4 epochs (yugas). The 1st was Krita (or Syata), the Golden Age (the Garden of Eden, if you will), lasting 4800 divine years (1.7 mln. human years). Treta was the 2nd, lasting 3600 divine years (1.3 mln. human years), with Dvapara being the 4th and having a duration of 2400 divine years (864,000 human years). The current yuga is Kali, named for the goddess of destruction, which is to last 1200 divine years (432,000 human years), was said to be charactrized by chaos, evil deeds, war, natural disasters, and tyranical rulers.
The Hebrew Shmi Tot tradition holds that life was destroyed 6 times before, each time by a cataclysm, each age lasting 7000 years, so the current age being the 7th.
Notice the similarity in the durations and notice also that the number of mass extinctions is more or less the same as the number of periods in ancient systems. Also, the duration of the yugas is halved in 3 periods, Treta being the odd one out, so there is a 1/2 ratio, a preceding age, if there was one, lasting 3.2 mln. yrs., but if we make the ratio consistent, and take the numbers to mean when the ages began instead of how long they lasted, it would go 3.2, 1.6, .8, and .4 mya, the 1st number is exactly the time of the 2nd exploded planet event as postulated by Van Flandern (see astro-taxonomy.net). And the 1/2 ratio is the same as for the orbital periods of the original solar system as postulated by this same astronomer. As well, the divine year corresponds to 360 human years which is the number of degrees in a circle and the Sumerian-Babylonian shar is 10 times this number.
And there is evidence of deep time civilizations:
artifact dscvd. place age (in yrs.) source
copper coin 1871 Ill. 200, 000 Smithsonian Inst.
female figurine 1889 Nampa, Id. 2 mln. Farrell (2007)
gold chain Ill. 300 mln. Cremo and Thompson (1999)
iron pot Okl. 312 mln. Cremo and Thompson (1999)
shoeprint 1992 Nev. 5 mln. NY Sunday American
Alvarez, L. 1983. Experimental evidence that an asteroid impact led to the extinction of many species 65 mln. yrs. ago. Proc. NAS
80: 627-42.
Alvarez, L. and Asaro. 1992. The extinction of the dinosaurs. In "Understanding Catastrophe", J. Bourriau, ed., pp. 28-56,
Cambridge U. Press.
Alvarez, L. et al. 1980. ET cause for the C-T extinction. Science 208: 1095-1108.
Alvarez, W., Muller, R. 1984. Evidence in crater ages for periodic impacts on the Earth. Nature 308: 718-20.
Benton, M.J. 1995. Diversification and extinction in the history of life. Science 268: 52-58.
Cruttenden, W. 2005. "Lost Star of Myth and Time". St. Lynn's Press.
Davis, M., Hut. P., Muller, R. 1984. Extinctions of species by periodic comet showers. Nature 308: 715-17.
Farrell, J. P. 2007. Cosmic War. Adventures Unlimited.
Fox, W.T. 1987. Harmonic analysis of periodic extinctions. Paleobiology 13: 257-71
Glashow, S.L. 1986. Positronium Vs-the Mirror Universe. Phys. Lett. B 167: 35.
Goldsmith, D. 1985. "Nemesis". Walker; New York.
Matese, J.J., Whitman, P.G., Whitmire, D.P. 1999. Cometary Evidence of a Massive Body in the Outer Oort Cloud. Icarus 141:
354-66.
McGhee, G.R., Jr. 1990. Catastrophes in the history of life. in "Evolution and the Fossil Record," K.C. Allen, D.E.G. Briggs,
eds., pp. 26-50, Smithsonian Inst.
Muller, R. 1988. "Nemesis". Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Petit, J.-P. 2003. OVNIs et Armes Secrètes Américaines-l'extraordinaire témoignage d'un scientifique.
Rampino, M.R., Stothers, R.B. Terrestrial mass extinctions, cometary impacts, and the Sun's motion perpendicular to the galactic
plane. Nature 308: 709-12.
Raup, D.M., Sepkoski, J.J. 1984. Periodicity Extinction in the Geological Past. Proc. NAS 81: 801-5.
Raup, D.M., Sepkoski, J.J. 1986. Periodic Extinctions of Families and Genera. Science 231: 833-35.
Silagadze, Z.K. 2001. TeV scale gravity, the mirror universe, and ...dinosaurs. Acta Phys. Polon. B 32: 99-128.
Strickberger, M. 1996. Evolution. Jones and Bartlett.
Whitmire, D.P., Jackson, A.A. 1984. Are periodic mass extinctions driven by a distant solar companion? Nature 308: 713-15.
Yarris, L. 1987. Does a companion star to the Sun cause Earth's periodic mass extinctions? Science Beat, Spring.
Lunar Anomalies
Iapetus is a very anomolous body. It has hexagonal cratering, its inclination is 15 which is unusual for a circular or near circular orbit, has an unexplained equatorial ridge, is a tetradecahedron, its distance from Saturn is 60 Saturn radii which is a number that has particular importance in Sumerian culture so some say it was manufactured. And there is a picture of it taken by the Cassini probe which shows the Yin-Yang symbol! (Farrell, 2007, p. 390; Hoagland, Enterprise Mission website-A Moon with a View). There is, as well, a 3 bln. yr. old sphere that was found in an Ottosdal mine, Transvaal, S. Africa, that is a replica of Iapetus complete with central ridge and crater!(Farrell, 2007, p. 409; Hoagland, Enterprise Mission website-A Moon with a View).
Iapetus is very similar in appearance to the "Star Wars" Death Star as it is complete with equatorial ridge and large crater! (Farrell, 2007; Hoagland (Enterprise Mission website)). Anaken, which is the 1st name of Luke Skywalker's father and is the alter ego of Darth Vader, sounds much like the Annunaki, the 12 Sumerian gods, and the story appears to be based largely on the Sumerian legends. Arthur Clarke had mentioned these anomalies in his "2001: a Space Odyssey" some 30 years before Cassini. So were they members of some secret society having access to ancient esoteric texts? Obviously, Clarke's "skepticism" about UFOs didn't look very credible since he was a sci-fi writer (perhaps the fact he was very curmudgeony and obnoxious about it was a way to make himself look as if he was serious) and considering this new information about Iapetus we can safely say that, like with many scientists, it was only a cover to protect the status quo.
The Moon is also a very anomalous body. There have been structures and lights observed on it by several sky-watchers, both amateur and professional, called TLPs (Transient Lunar Phenomenons). German astronomer Franz von Gruithuisen identified ruins of a city in 1824 in a place now called Gruithuisen City on moon maps; Royal Society members saw lights arranged geometrically in the Sea of Crises which disappeared after many observations; Johann Schroeter 1st saw Crater Linne in 1843 but it disappeared almost enirely over a period of several years; James Bartlett, 7 weeks later, saw a similar phenomenon in the same region; amateur John O'Neill, in 1953, saw a huge bridge (20 miles by 5 miles) in the Sea of Crises which was later confirmed by illustrious British Astronomer H.P. Wilkins and another illustrious astronomer Patrick Moore (Tarade, 1969); Wilkins also saw domes suddenly appear which was confirmed by several other expert observers and their numbers were increasing rapidly--there were about 200 (see also Wilson, 1975; Brian, 1982; Knight and Butler, 2006; Hoagland and Bara, 2007).
As well, several Ranger and Luna probes had serious problems because of gravitational inconsistencies with the standard model for Luna. As it turns out, as Werner von Braun stated in 1969 in an interview with Time, the neutral point is 70,000 kms. (43, 500 mi.) from the Moon instead of the 40,000 kms. (24,000 mi.) it is supposed to be so that its gravity is 2/3 that of the Earth instead of the 1/6th it is thought to be. Gordon MacDonald of NASA stated, in a July 1982 issue of Astronautics that a NASA study found it moved more like a hollow object. And astronauts on the moon were unable to jump higher than 1 1/2 ft. but should have been able to jump 6 ft. And seismographic experiments on the Apollo 12, 13, and 14 missions produced results that staggered NASA scientists: artificially generated moonquakes lasted from 55 mins. to 3 hrs. and 20 mins. and travelled to a depth of 22-25 miles. As well, the waves started small and then went to a peak and lasted "for unbelievably long periods of time." In fact, the mass for the Moon is stated as .07 E24 kilos but with its diam. of some 3400 kms. it should be more like .2 E24 kilos.
So some believe the Moon was manufactured. So was it? Since it is shown to be as old as Earth perhaps it is better to consider it as having been tampered with, instead, which would explain the anomalies and also be in accord with fission theory which makes it necessary for the Earth to have a moon by nature. Also, it doesn't have the same types of anomalies Iapetus has. If there was a civilization on it it certainly could not have been native to it and was only a colony or an outpost. Also, if it was hollow or less dense then the gravity would be much less not much more. Moreover, tides would be much stronger than they are if the Moon's gravity was stronger.
It is true that no model for Luna's origin has been successful. The 4th and latest postulates a Mars-sized body which supposedly was part of a double planet system with Earth but a collision in such a configuration is grossly improbable and such a system is basically impossible to begin with as double planets do not form unless they were former moons which is impossible in the case of Earth. Such a body coming from elsewhere in the early solar system to collide with another is even less probable. Prominent planetologist John Lewis (2000) described it as messy, poorly constrained, not very testable, intractable, but the best we have. Other problems with it are:
ratios of the Moon's volatile elements are not consistent with the giant impact hypothesis.
there is no evidence that the Earth ever had a magma ocean (an implied result of the giant impact hypothesis),
and some material was found which may never have been in a magma ocean.
iron oxide (FeO) content of 13% of the bulk Moon properties rule out the derivation of the proto-lunar material from any
but a small fraction of Earth's mantle.
if the bulk of the proto-lunar material had come from the impactor, the Moon should be enriched in siderophilic elements,
when it is actually deficient of those.
certain simulations of the formation of the Moon require about twice the amount of angular momentum that the
Earth-Moon system has now.
The 1st lunar formation model was the fission model by George Darwin in 1879, the 2nd was the capture hypothesis by Gerstenkorn in 1955, the 3rd the co-accretion or condensation idea by Otto Schmidt in 1959.
Brian, W.L., II. 1982. Moongate- Suppressed Findings of the US Space Program: the NASA Military Cover-Up. Fut. Sc. Res.
Farrell, J. P. 2007. the Cosmic War. AUP.
Hoagland, R.C., Bara, M. 2007. Dark Mission-the Secret History of NASA. Feral House.
Hoagland-Enterprise Mission: a Moon with a View.
Knight, C., Butler, A. 2006. Who Built the Moon? Watkins.
Tarade, G. 1969. Soucoupes Volantes et Civilizations d'Outre-Espace. J'ai Lu.
Wilson, D. 1975. Our Mysterious Spaceship Moon. Dell
Cosmology last modified July, 2010
Inflation might be on its way to being falsified as we see from observations. Gaussianity is the bell-shaped distribution of temperature fluctuations across the Universe and the minute but important (variations on the order of 1 in 100,000) skewing of the distribution, non-gaussianity, measured in fNL, is between 50 and 80 but should be between 0 and 1 according to inflation, cyclical models predicting at least 100 times the inflationary value. Admittedly, the error bar is still too big as it is at 2.8 sigma (over 99% reliability) when it should be at 5 (99.99995%). And there is no solid scientific idea for why and how inflation might have happened (New Scientist, "Inflation deflated," June 7-13, 2008). Inflation is used to "solve" what are referred to as the 3 main problems with the Big Bang model, the horizon, flatness, and structure problems.
Other problems with the Big Bang are that a singularity is impossible, the inhomogeneity of the large-scale universe contradicts the model's expectation of homogeneity, and the red shift can be explained in other ways. Grote Reber theorizes the red shift is due to repeated absorption and re-emission or interaction of light and other EM radiations by low density dark matter over intergalactic distances. As well, the standard model assumes intergalactic space empty but this has been proven false by Grote Reber who discovered it was full of protons and electrons emitting EM radiation. It also assumes the Universe to be isotropic but NASA's WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) has found it to be the opposite and evidence against had already been mounting so that the 1st "Crisis in Cosmology" Conference was held in Portugal in 2007 ("To Bang or Not to Bang,"-Sci-Tech News-Soft Pedia website).
Reber (1911-2002) was inventor of the radio telescope and the 1st radio astronomer and said, "Red shifts have nothing to do with motion. It is not my idea. Hubble knew this over 60 years ago...The Big Bang is a concoction of latter day saints" (New Scientist, '94). He also wrote many "Cosmic Static" articles (1940-48) which were reprinted in Sullivan (1984)( see also Grote, 1977, 1982a and b, and Sullivan, 1984). He was the recipient of the Bruce Medal (1962), the the Russell Lectureship (1962), the Jackson-Gwilt Medal of the RAS (1983) and a museum at the Launceston Planetarium, an asteroid, and a medal were all named for him (Wikipedia-Grote Reber). Others who oppose the Big Bang hypothesis include Fred Hoyle (who ironically coined "big bang" in 1949 on The Nature of Things, a BBC radio program (Wikipedia-Fred Hoyle)), Thomas Gold, Hermann Bondi, Geoffrey Burbidge, Jayant Narlikar, Hannes Alfven, Eric Lerner (1992), Anthony Perratt, Tom Van Flandern (loc. cit.), and Halton Arp (1998), Paul LaViolette (Genesis of the Cosmos: the Ancient Science of Continuous Creation, 2004), Donald Scott (Electric Sky, 2006), David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill (Thunderbolts of the Gods, 2005, and Electric Universe, 2007). An alternative would be the steady state model (formulated by Gold (who coined "magnetosphere" in 1958 (Wikipedia-magnetosphere)), Hoyle, and Bondi in 1948) and plasma cosmology, major proponents being Alfven (Worlds-Antiworlds, 1966, Cosmic Plasma, 1981) and Lerner, and an extension of which is the electric universe theory (Donald Scott, 2006; David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill (loc. cit.)). LaViolette proposes continuous creation and makes very plausible and well-substantiated connections with ancient symbols and legends.
In continuous creation, molecular hydrogen (H2) figures prominently. It explains the missing, dark matter and the red shift and is abundant but is hard to detect. Here is an exccerpt from Marmet (2000):
“Using the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory, E. A. Valentijn and P. P. van der Werf recently detected huge amounts of molecular hydrogen (H2) in NGC 891 , an edge-on galaxy 30 million light-years away in Andromeda (Valentijn and van der Werf 1999). In their report, published in September 1999, they state that their result 'matches well, the mass required to solve the problem of the missing mass of spiral galaxies.' They conclude that the galaxy contains 5 to 15 times more molecular than atomic hydrogen.
It is generally accepted that atomic hydrogen is by far the most abundant particle in the universe. It is also well established that about 10 times as much molecular hydrogen as atomic hydrogen solves the missing mass problem. Finally, Valentijn adds: 'The halo culture that has grown up around the dark matter problem might never have arisen if the ISO results had been known earlier.'
Two months after the publication of this discovery, in a piece published in Nature, Nov. 25, 1999, P. Richter, et al. reported the discovery of the absorption lines of molecular hydrogen in a high-velocity cloud of the Milky Way halo (Richter et al. 1999).''
And in 1997, scientists created matter from light for the 1st time in a lab. A team of 20 physicists from 4 institutions created particles of matter from ordinary light. The experiment was carried out at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) by scientists and students from the University of Rochester, Princeton, the University of Tennessee, and Stanford. The team reported the work in the September 1 issue of Physical Review Letters.
It may also have something to do with quantum fluctuations and the ZPF (0-point field) and the ether, which has been corroborated by the experiments of Dayton Miller and is a mainstay of the Pearson model, sometimes called the Big Breed.
Big Bang hypothesizers say that there is an expansion of space not of matter but it is not possible for space to expand as expansion requires volume which requires matter. Moreover, there can't be space without matter. And it is impossible for time to begin at a certain point since it has to have a past or else it is not time. It is also impossible for nothing to exist as this is a paradox and contradiction. It is also impossible for there to be matter-energy and space-time in 1 point with nothing existing around it. As well, space itself cannot be flat nor curved-- only material objects can have a geometry.
To replace the singularity Robert Brandenberger has proposed strings but string theory has proven unsuccessful (Smolin, 2007). Paul Steinhardt and Justin Khoury postulate membrane expansion and invoke hyperspace so include string theory, which requires extra dimensions, but are impossible and were invented to unify gravity with the other 3 fundamental forces but this was unnecessary as the unification was already done with ZPF theory (McTaggart, 2002). Sean Carroll of CalTech says baby universes spring from older universes but that they start with empty space which is, again, an impossibility since space is dependent on matter, and also time and energy.
If these extra dimensions exist they would be describing a space invisible to us which would be totally in the imagination as it would be completely undefined and there would be no explanation of how it could exist and these extra dimensions have no names and no quantities. Or it would be a parallel universe or parallel universes which would themselves have 3 spatial dimensions each. Since physicists state there are 10 or 23 of these extra spatial dimensions they are not speaking of parallel universes because they would have to be a cluster of these universes to make up the total, so they, the spatial dimensions, would be in multiples of 3, which doesn't add up to 10 nor 23. Also, such clustering is not postulated in any model of parallel universes. And physicists or cosmologists, consider extra dimensions and parallel universes to be separate issues. As well, there are serious contradictions in descriptions of extra dimensions as they are said to be small (they have size, therefore volume, therefore 3 dimensions), are extended (have length), and are curled up (have shape, i.e., 3 dimensions). Put another way, what scientists speak of when they talk about hyperspace and extra dimensions is contrary to nature and reality. Also, some, e.g. Martin Grumiller of the Vienna University of Technology's Institue of Theoretical Physics, postulate a 2-D Universe (length and width) according to the holographic model of the Universe (Science Daily, 2009).
There are certain anomalies in networked machines known to most electrical engineers which, according to Gabriel Kron, who did work on the torsion field using tensor analysis in the 1930s, can be explained only by extra dimensions (Farrell, 2008). But since these are not possible, his interpretation, we can conclude, is wrong and another explanation is required. This other explanation may lie in the oft ignored ZPF with its quantum fluctuations, a theory already proposed in 1913 by Einstein and Otto Stern. Kron's interpretation was based on the standard model, the incomplete Unified Field Theory, which required extra dimensions, instead of ZPF, which is a complete UFT and does not require them.
As well, the Universe is everything so it can't be finite as there would be something outside of it which would be a contradiction or there would be non-existence outside of it and non-existence is also impossible because it is paradoxical to say nothing exists. Time necessarily always has a past so it can't start at any point and if it did there would be nothing before it and it is paradoxical to say that nothingness exists. The Universe is necessarily infinite in time both negatively and positively and in space and the same would go for each state of the Universe. As there is no beginning nor end there is also no purpose for the Universe beyond its own existence.
You take away inflation, expansion, homogeneity, isotropy, finiteness, and the singularity and there isn't much left.
The issue of theology necessarily enters the picture at some point in any discussion of cosmology and the latter 2 sciences along with the science of ontology are often considered to comprise metaphysics or just the latter 2. Certainly, there is a close relationship between ontology, cosmology, and theoretical or general physics. My thesis is that monotheism, which arose independently in India (in a faction of Hinduism) and the Near East, is really an anthropomorphization of pantheism as God is described as absolute, perfect, all-knowing, everywhere, without beginning nor end, and a spirit being. So God is largely a concept or defintion. If one wishes to ascribe divinity to the Absolute or Universe then there is, if one doesn't then there isn't.
"Parallel" universes is also a big issue in cosmology and since the Universe is everything it is not possible for these to exist separately so it must be clarified that when we speak of such entities we are speaking of states or versions of the same Universe. In other words, it is a fallacy that there are universes existing physically separately from our own. In the quantum interpretation this is also the case--each state of the Universe exists in the same space-time.
Also, any event that occurs in another universe would depend on, be determined by, other events before it so it might tend to lead us to conclude it is impossible for any given event to occur otherwise. However, each of the preceding events for any given event is dependent on would also occur in pairs. And there is the idea of "every event has an opposite event." The position that there cannot be an event without its opposite has merit. It would be a symmetrical or complimentary principle. So to the question "is the alternative possible?' the answer might be that it is even necessary. So states of the universe would be arranged in a binary fashion and there would be parsimony in this. In other words, the Universe has 2 subsets of states, which could be life and non-life, and each of these subsets in turn has 2 subsets, ad infinitum. Binary splitting occurs in bio-taxonomy (where it takes billions of species (most now extinct) to produce 1 human species, it should be noted) as well as in the quantum interpretation.
As well, there could not be, for instance, cubical planets or square orbits, male ovum-producers, married bachelors, and there would not need to be and they (states of the Universe) would all have 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension. But the constants would be different. The operative words here are "possible" and "necessary". In metaphysics, there is the actual world and possible worlds and one might say that each world "sees" itself as actual and all the others merely possible so that, in fact, all are actual as well as possible (modal realism)(see also Lewis, 1982).
Another point is that there is a splitting at each moment or event which would lead one to believe each state begins at this point but there are also multiple histories (sum-over-histories=path integral formulation, Feynman, 1948) and it is only the events that split not entire "universes" beginning anew--these always existed, anyways.
The single universe hypothesis is simple but we are left wondering “where did the alternative go?” The multistate hypothesis is complex but it answers this question, explains probablity and the double slit experiment, and also the fine-tuning, and maintains the wave function. In other words, it has great explanatory power. The parsimony principle (Occam's razor) is applicable only when there are 2 or more equally valid explanations. In this case parallel universes is the more valid explanation. Also, it is the simplest explanation for the universal wave-function and the double-slit experiment. The quantum interpretation is deterministic and objectivist and is compatible with modal realism.
The fine tuning refers to the fact that the physical or fundamental constants are all just right for life to exist which prompts the very arrogant, unscientific, and especially distasteful anthropic principle which states the Universe "was created for us" or "so we can exist", which also apparently assumes the irrational and disproven notion that we are alone in the Universe, when the conclusion or observation should be stated as "we exist because of the fine tuning" and to this could be added "which is accidental but inevitable."
Contrary to what some claim, "parallel" universes do not allow for the possibility of travelling through time. In that idea the paradox is averted as, if someone were to go back in time he wouldn't cause himself not to be born, for instance, he supposedly would have automatically crossed over into another timeline-state but there is no explanation as to why and how this would happen. And properly formulated, parallel universes would be non-communicating (this is also according to the quantum interpretation) so it wouldn't be possible for anyone to cross over. Travelling between them would cause the Cosmos to be unstable and disfunctional and would collapse. As well, there is no empirical evidence for time travel.
The bottom line is there cannot be a Universe like ours by accident and since it always existed then it couldn't have been created which leaves us with the alternate reality solution and the Everett model is perfectly compatible with my ontological formulation of it. There does seem to be a question mark about why it would be that the laws of physics would be different if the physical constants are and if they would be different in the Everett model.
The idea goes back further than we might think as it may have been proposed by Albertus Magnus in the 1200s and William Wordsworth in "Song of Myself" depending on the meaning intended. It is incorrectly stated as being proposed in the Rig Veda and Puranas in Wikipedia (Multiverse) as the notion there, is, instead and amazingly, of the cyclical Big Bang (Wikipedia-Hindu cosmology) and the singularity is called the Bindu! (as the feminine variant Bindi (point) it is worn by Indian women as a spot on the forehead). It may have been 1st thought up by sci-fi writer Olaf Stapledon (1932). It was 1st formulated scientifically in our era by Hugh Everett III (1957) and was later popularized by Bryce DeWitt (1973) and Max Tegmark (1998).
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About the Author
I was born in 1950 in Canada, was the son of a physics professor, and am descended on the maternal side from the noble Castracani line.
I have a Certificate in Metaphysics (ontology and cosmology, 15 lessons) from the Pathways to Philosophy program of the ISP (2008), which is affiliated to the University of London; a Diploma in Adult Psychology from ICS (International Career School, aka International Correspondence Schools)(2008); an art diploma from ICS (18 lessons); 4 certificates in psychology (2008-9) (Psychology 101, 18 lessons, Introduction to Psychology, 8 lessons, Social Psychology, 5 lessons, Organizational Psychology 101, 10 lessons), 1 in geography, 1 in ufology (UFO Studies, 11 lessons), 1 in Spanish (all from 2008), 1 in the supernatural (Haunted Places), and 1 in astronomy (9 lessons)(2009) from Universal Class. I have taken a graduate course in planetology (Exploring the Solar System, 12 lessons) at Swinburne U. (2008), a linguistics course (Linguistics 101, 10 lessons) at UNC (Univ. of N. Carolina), and a cultural anthropology course (12 lessons) at UNC (Fall, 2009), and am taking an astronomy course (27 lessons) at Granton, and am now enrolled in a 3-course human relations and general and abnormal psychology diploma program, of which the 1st 2 courses (Human Relations, 17 lessons, Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, 25 lessons) are completed (2009- 10), and a botany certificate course (Plant Biology, 27 lessons) at this same institute, a philosophy course (Basic Philosophy, 6 lessons) at SAC (Stonebridge Associated Colleges), an art course from FAS (Famous Artists School) (10 lessons), and am studying at the Associate level for the ISP. I purchased courses from the Teaching Company in the following subjects: planetology, cosmology, linguistics (3 courses), physical anthroplogy, cultural anthropology, psychology (2 courses: Great Ideas of Psychology, 48 lessons, Theories of Human Development), philosophy (2 courses: Great Ideas of Philosophy, 60 lessons, the Modern Intellectual Tradition, 36 lessons), biology (2 courses), music, and literature (4 courses); and a music course, Gary Ewer's Easy Music Theory (2008); and took an astronomy course at BNU (Barnes and Noble University)(2006). I am enrolled for fall 2010 at Oxford U. for a Level 4 metaphysics course (Reality, Being, and Existence, 10 lessons). All of the courses were/are home study. No certificates or diplomas are given for individual courses at BNU, Swinburne, UNC, Gary Ewer's, the Teaching Co, and Oxford.
I was twice member of the CSTM (Canadian Science and Technology Museum) as Astronomy Associate (as subscriber to Sky News)(1995 and 2005), once a member of SEN (Space Explorers Network) (1995), SP (Shadow Poetry)(2006-7), the RCGS (Royal Canadian Geographic Society)(2007-8), the ASP (Astronomy Society of the Pacific) (2008), the world's largest general astronomy organization, the NSS (National Space Society)(2008), the FPSI (Friends of the Planetary Science Institute)(2008), the Intruders Foundation (2008), the Institute of Philosophy (2008), CASCA (Canadian Anthropological Society/té Canadienne d'Anthropologie) (2008), MetaResearch (2008-), Smithsonian Institute (2008), LAGB (the Linguistic Association of Breat Britain)(2009).
I am currently a member of the WHS (Willi Hennig Society) (since 2006), the ISP (International Society for Philosophers)(lifetime member, since 2007), MUFON (Mutual UFO Network)(the world's largest ufology group)(since 2007), the CFP (Canadian Federation of Poets) (since 2007), the CLA (Canadian Linguistics Association) (since 2009), the CPA (Canadian Psychology Association) (since 2009), the FCA (Federation of Canadian Artists) (since 2009), the IAPT (International Association of Plant Taxonomy) (2009), and the SSB (Society of Systematic Biology) (2010).
I have about 950 books including over 70 on astronomy, over 60 on biology, around 20 on earth sciences, 114 on language and languages, 92 on the paranormal ( including 60 on UFOs), 16 on philosophy, and 17 on psychology.
My poems have appeared in 4 anthologies: Quest of a Dream IV (’94, Pacific Rim), River of Dreams, (’94, NLP), Illuminating Shadows (2006, SP), and SP Quill Anthology (2008); and in SP Quill magazine (Autumn, 2006). I was nominated for Poet of the Year in ’95 by the IPS and received the SP You’ve Been Spotted Award (October, 2006).
I have done 3 large-scale cladistic analyses (cf. http://www.empirebiota.info/), a version of which was submitted to 10 magazines but remains unpublished. A condensed version of "Sizing Up the Planets" was been accepted for publication in 2008 but remains unpublished.
Politiically, I am a liberal, progressive rightist, economic centrist, and federalist, and recognize that the left is not more liberal nor progressive than the right. Philosophically, I am a rationalist (which includes innatism), objective idealist, objectivist, epistemic realist, and Stratonician.
Updated May, 2010.
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