When the four terrestrial planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars - are placed side by side, it's clear their size distribution is close to symmetrical, with the two largest lying between the two smallest (Illustration: NASA)
When the four terrestrial planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars - are placed side by side, it's clear their size distribution is close to symmetrical, with the two largest lying between the two smallest (Illustration: NASA)
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Interesting theory but it seems to me that once set in motion it would be hard to get them to settle into regular orbits. Add gravitational effects of the other planets and it seems that it would cause even more erratic orbits.
Cool stuff fer ponderin anyway.
All of this collapses into a number of gas giants with rocky cores.
The gas giants gradually spiral in toward the Sun. Some, of course, crash into the Sun and disappear. Others are eventually scoured of their gas as the Sun goes through more active phases on the way to its mainstream steady state.
It's at that point they stop spiraling in to the Sun.
What you end up with is a bunch of rocky planets near the Sun and a bunch of gas giants at vast distances from the Sun.
Recent discoveries of solar systems with large gas giants close to the central star suggest the "spiraling in" scenario may be more nearly correct.
Venus is the daughter of Jupiter, and some of her lovers include Mars and Vulcan, modeled on the affairs of Aphrodite. Venus' importance rose, and that of her cult, through the influence of several Roman political leaders."
Even given the suggested scenario, what’s curious is the strange fluctuation in rotational speeds.
Earth and Mars are almost identical in daily rotation, while Venus is retrograde, having a longer day than its year.
Mercury has a very slow rotation also. It is about two thirds tidally locked.
Now what suggests itself is that those planets inbound from the center of gravity of all four planets were affected by the accumulation of differential masses having orbital speed faster than the main mass, giving them “reverse english” in billiards parlance.
Possibly that could also explain Earth and Mars, but it would take some computational time on a super-computer. Or perhaps Earth lost quite a bit of rotational speed to its parking brake partner, the moon.
Now the next question: How do we form them into a Klemperer Rosette?
Here’s a visual for ya.
Take an 11”x17” sheet of paper and draw the following:
At the left side of the page with a #2 pencil, draw the smallest circle you can. This is the Sun, the circle you draw will be way too big at this scale but what the heck it’ll work for the visual.
Next, about 1/3rd the distance from the left side of the page make a dot, that’s Mercury and as you might have guessed the dot is thousands of times way to big on this scale but now we’re just making a mark for reference. But try to make the dot as small as you can. :)
Next, about 2/3rds from the left of the page make another dot, That’s Venus and yes its also a couple thousand times to big but you have to be able to see it don’t ya?
Finally all the way to the right make your last dot and that’s Earth. As with the last two dots (planets) the smallest dot you can make (with a #2 pencil) is still thousands of times way too big at this scale but again this is just for reference.
Now hold the page out in front of you and even though the planets look like dust particles they are planets. Amazingly this looks nothing like the drawings of the solar system we’ve all grown up looking at but this one is to scale sorta, distance wise yes, planet sizes no. Also note that as big as the Sun really is, its nothing compared to the vast distances between the planets is it?
Anyway, now try and imagine dust particles floating around in all this empty space, touching and clinging to each other and wow, creating planets.
Nope, it ain’t gonna happen.
JB
Sure sure, but what caused this mysterious “big bang?”
Obviously Mercury was the runt of the litter.
