Throughout history, human beings have peered into the night sky and recorded the glowing
lights that flicker and move above our heads.
The first maps of the stars and planets were drawn on the walls of caves, recorded as calendars
and tracked with astronomical symbols.
Then books and written records became the main source of information that expressed
the way the people of that time thought of the Cosmos.
As technology, along with our understanding of the universe became ever more sophisticated,
more and more worlds in our solar system were discovered.
Moons around Jupiter and Saturn, ice Giant planets and frozen dwarf worlds.
But there were also many worlds that were not discovered.
Like the hypothetical planet named Vulcan for example.
In the early 1800s, Vulcan was thought to be the closest planet to the Sun, closer even
than Mercury.
It was even claimed to have been observed by many respectable astronomers.
However, it turned out that it did not exist, and that what many of them were observing
was probably sunspots.
A dark world, named Nemesis was hypothesised in the mid-1980s attempting to explain why
the Earth goes through periodic mass extinctions.
Could a giant object at the edge of the solar system really be pushing comets into a collision
course with Earth?
Well, an object of that nature has never been discovered.
Even in more recent times, we have seen a world wide hunt for an elusive Planet nine
somewhere out beyond Neptune.
But as of August 2023, nothing has been discovered.
It seems that we are always in some way or another on the hunt for new planets lurking
in the shadows of the solar system.
And one of the most fascinating examples of this is the planet named Phaeton, a hypothetical
world that was believed to exist between Mars and Jupiter.
The true 5th planet from the Sun.
So what led scientists to go looking for this mysterious world?
Why did they think it was there?
And what did they discover in its place?
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When William Herschel spotted Uranus in 1781, it sparked a new interest in our solar system.
After all, Uranus was the first planet to be discovered in thousands of years.
And so, astronomers of the time began peering into the night skies, hoping that they would
become the next person to discover a new planet.
However, finding a new planet is like finding a needle in a haystack, after all the solar
system is spread across an enormously vast region.
But there was a mathematical method discovered at the time, that seemed to predict where
you might start looking, narrowing down the search area, and it was called the Titius-
Bode law.
The formula suggested that extending outward, each planet should be approximately twice
as far from the Sun as the one before it.
And when applied to the planets that were known to exist at the time, it roughly predicted
each of their distances, even the newly discovered Uranus.
However, according to the formula, there was a planet missing, that should be located between
Mars and Jupiter, around 2.8 astronomical units from the Sun.
After discovering this exciting gap in the sequence, many astronomers began the hunt
for this predicted missing world.
Then on Jan 1st 1801, Astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi spotted an unfamiliar dot of light
moving slowly among the stars.
Originally thought to be a comet, he named it, Ceres, after the Roman goddess of agriculture.
At 2.8 AU from the Sun, however, Ceres appeared to fit the Titius–Bode law almost perfectly,
and although Ceres was fainter than the other known planets of the time, indicating that
it was fair smaller, it was nevertheless, considered by many to be the missing planet.
The true fifth planet from the sun had finally been discovered.
The mysterious gap in the Titius–Bode law sequence had been solved.
It was assigned a planetary symbol and the inner solar system seemed to be all in order.
Or was it?
Quite quickly the euphoria over the discovery of Ceres faded.
Because by 1802, just a year later, an object named Pallas was spotted.
Then in 1804, another was found, named Juno.
And in 1807, Vesta was discovered.
Each of these newly found objects roughly share the same orbit with Ceres causing astronomers
to suspect that what they had found was actually the first of a new class of object.
Despite this, for around half a century, our solar system had 11 planets according to astronomy
books.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, then Vesta, Juno, Ceres, and Pallas, followed by Jupiter,
Saturn, and Uranus.
Not too long after in 1846, the planet Neptune was also discovered, but the discovery did
not fit with the Titius–Bode law, as Neptune was eight Astronomical units closer than predicted.
It was then concluded that the Titius–Bode law was likely just a cosmic coincidence as
the formula did not work for the outer planets.
By the 1860s most astronomers widely accepted that a fundamental difference existed between
the major planets and objects like Ceres or Pallas, and eventually, they were renamed
as "asteroids" and the region where they are located would be called the asteroid belt.
So within a year of the "missing planet" being discovered, it became clear that there was
no missing planet to be found.
There is no major planet in the asteroid belt, just millions of scattered rocks.
But where did these chunks of rock come from?
Well in 1823, the astronomer that discovered the asteroid Pallas, Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers
proposed that these objects, were actually fragments of a destroyed planet, bringing
forth the planet Phaeton hypothesis.
The name Pheaton was taken from a mythical Greek character and means "shining one".
According to the myth, Pheaton was the son of Helios, the Sun god, who rode his burning
chariot across the sky every day.
One day, Helios granted Phaeton's wish to take the reins of the chariot, but the ride
was a disaster, Phaeton could not keep a firm grip of the horses.
As a result, the chariot came too close to the Earth, burning it, and too far from it,
freezing it.
In the end, after many complaints, from the stars in the sky to the Earth itself, Zeus
struck Phaeton with one of his lightning bolts, destroying him instantly.
A fitting name for a destroyed planet.
The Pheaton planet hypothesis suggests that the asteroid belt was created after the destruction
of a planet that orbited the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
It became known as the disruption theory and suggested that the planet was destroyed by
one of the following processes.
The first possibility is that it veered too close to Jupiter, and was torn apart by its
powerful gravitational tides.
The second is that it was struck by another large celestial body, such as another planet.
The third is that it was destroyed by a hypothetical brown dwarf, a companion star to the Sun dubbed
Nemesis.
And Finally, the fourth is that it was shattered by some internal catastrophic process.
So was there really a planet that somehow became torn apart, leaving only its scattered
remains orbiting the Sun?
Well as fascinating as this idea is, it is unlikely to have happened.
The reason is that studies of the asteroid belt have shown that its total mass is only
4% of the mass of the Moon.
Meaning that it just doesn't have enough material to have once formed a planet.
It is now thought that the asteroids are simply remnants from the formation of our solar system
around 4.5 billion years ago.
It is the leftovers from the disc of gas and dust that once surrounded the Sun called the
accretion disc, the material that created all the planets, moons, asteroids and comets
we see today.
The asteroid belt may seem like nothing more than a circle of rocks drifting around the
sun, but It is actually a window into the past, allowing us to study a frozen stage
in our Solar system's history.
A glimpse at a time when material came together, to form the embryos of a planet that would
never be.
But what if it had formed?
What would the planet Phaeton have been like?
Orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, the hypothetical planet would have been smaller
than Pluto, rendering it the smallest major planet in the Solar System.
It would likely have been a barren planet, with little atmosphere and no magnetic field
to protect its rocky surface from solar radiation.
But as suspected with many smaller worlds across the solar system.
It may have been able to sustain an ocean of liquid water below its crust warm enough
for life to exist.
We would have likely sent multiple spacecraft to explore its surface and possibly even landed
on it.
Despite many astronomers during the 19th and 20th centuries wishing for this hypothetical
planet's existence, studies of the asteroid belt have disproved Phaeton.
But even though it didn't exist, it still had a fascinating story.
One that inspired science fiction writers and scientists alike.
This is the planet that was discovered, destroyed, and then forgotten.
I hope you enjoyed this fascinating look into the undiscovered world of Phaeton, if you
did, then tap the like button and subscribe.
Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.