Posted on 04/05/2006 7:53:38 PM PDT by KevinDavis
A FIFTH terrestrial planet may once have orbited between Mars and Jupiter. Although gravitational disturbances would have sent the planet hurtling into the sun or out into space long ago, traces of this long-gone world may still be visible in part of the asteroid belt today.
Recent simulations have suggested that the gas giants of our solar system formed with circular orbits but moved into their more elongated paths about 4 billion years ago – 700 million years after the solar system formed. While the gas giants were in circular orbits, rocky planets should have formed in stable orbits out to a distance of 2.2 astronomical units (1 AU = 1 Earth- Sun distance).
However, there are no planets between Mars, which lies at 1.5 AU from the sun, and Jupiter at 5.2 AU. That puzzled Sean Raymond of the University of Colorado in Boulder and John Chambers of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. "There's room for another planet between Mars and Jupiter," says Chambers. "Given that planets formed everywhere else, why couldn't another planet have formed there?"
The researchers modelled what would have happened in that region, and found that a planet about the size of Mars could have formed 2 AU from the sun and remained stable there until the orbits of the gas giant changed.
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
It would take a lot to change the orbit of any of the gas giants. That material doesn't appear to be present now. Jupiter could force the asteroids into the present Belt, but the rest of the planets and asteroids wouldn't do much at all to Jupiter.
I have seen numerous theories about Mars and Earth history presented separately. Rarely, if ever, do I see credible sources try to tie the theories/events together, even though the time frames are roughly the same. Perhaps the missing planet (or a large portion of it) struck the Earth and coalesced into what we now know, billions of years later, as Earth and Moon.
Something massive might have passed through the solar system and is long gone leaving a few clues but nothing else.
That hypothesis is currently popular. It was also the main hypothesis they taught us in grammar school in the 50s.
Paging Art Bell...
Planet X
Long-Destroyed Fifth Planet May Have Caused Lunar Cataclysm, Researchers Say
SPACE dot COM | 18 March 2002 posted: 03:00 pm ET
By Leonard David, Senior Space Writer
Posted on 03/25/2002 5:42:10 PM EST by vannrox
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/653287/posts
Hoagland has borrowed (ahem) TVF's idea.
It would be nice if TVF would drop Hoaxland's "Face on Mars" crap, but alas...
Here's the link to the most current revision to TVF's EPH:
The Exploded Planet Hypothesis – 2000
Tom Van Flandern, Meta Research
http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/eph/eph2000.asp
There was a program on last night on one of the cable channels about this collision and how the moon was formed from the debris which bounced back into space.
How could man survive on the moons of Pluto? People just wouldn't be able to stand the conditions there. It would take upwards of 10 hours to send a reply to FR and get a response--twice as long when the earth was on the far side of the sun, and for a couple of months each year it would be impossible even to read FR. No thanks.
So, be vewy, vewy, quiet!
According to the chart in the link, the correspondence looks pretty good, when one includes a small constant term, except for Neptune. I realize that this is a phenomenological law. I don't know so much about astronomy; IIRC, I actually read about Bode's Law sometime in elementary school and my knowledge of the planets probably didn't procede much further.
And why exactly did THAT happen?
X-Planets FR 'blog
There is not enough mass in the asteroid belt. Jupiter played a large part in the prevention of the asteroids from forming even a small moon like object.There is not enough mass *now*. Jupiter has more than half the mass of all known Solar System objects in orbit around the Sun (IOW, not counting the Sun), but is enriched in noble gases, so (from the standpoint of the dominant model for planetary formation) either it formed much further out, or accumulated most of its mass from interaction with other bodies.
Just an updated ping message.
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