Phaeton The Fifth Rocky planet that exploded and created the asteroid belt?
For many years, there has been a debate about whether the Asteroid Belt, which lies between
Mars and Jupiter, was a planet that destroyed itself. Many people have speculated about this,
and some exciting theories may support this idea. In this video, we'll explore
this theory and examine the scientific evidence to determine if the Asteroid Belt is the remains
of an ancient planet. COMPOSITION
The asteroid belt is a ring-shaped region of the solar system between Mars and Jupiter; it is made
up of several million asteroids ranging from a few centimeters to several km; it also contains
five objects of greater mass which are Ceres, the planet dwarf, and the massive asteroids,
Pallas, Vesta, Hygia and Juno. Between these 5, they make up more
than half of the total mass of the entire asteroid belt, and contrary to what is seen in the movies,
where a ship that crosses the asteroid belt has to perform incredible maneuvers to evade them,
the reality is that each asteroid is separated by more than 5 million kilometers, that is to say,
that it is almost impossible to collide with one, in fact,
the probes that explore the limits of the solar system and that have passed through
that region have never had any problem of colliding even with minor asteroids.
DISCOVERY In 1766 the astronomer
Johann Daniel Titus discovered a supposed pattern in the distance of the planets from the Sun.
The pattern consisted of a numerical sequence that started from zero, continued with three, and from
there, the previous figure was doubled so that the sequence remained: 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, etc.
If you add 4 to each figure and divide it by 10, you have the sequence: 0.4, 0.7, 1, 1.6, 2.8, 5.2,
10, etc. And why were these numbers important? Johann Daniel Titus took this sequence of numbers,
converted them to astronomical units, and compared them to the distances the planets
were. When he compared the sequence of numbers to the actual distances
of the planets from the Sun, he discovered that the similarity was very significant.
The sequence seemed to predict the position of the planets around the sun very accurately;
the strange thing is that it marked areas where planets had not yet been found.
For this reason, in 1871, the astronomer William Hershell speculated that perhaps
there would be a seventh planet right in the region predicted by the Titus -Bode law after
the planet Saturn and to everyone's surprise, shortly after, the planet Uranus was discovered,
which was right in the region that predicted the numerical sequence,
which is why from then on it began to be called the "Titus -Bode Law."”
Before we continue, for those who are wondering, why was this law called Titus -Bode?
It is not because the discoverer was called Titus and Bode. It was because two years after
Johann Daniel Titus discovered the numerical sequence, Johann Elert Bode used this exact
measurement in one of his writings without telling anyone that Titus had discovered it.
In this way, for 15 years, various authors attributed the discovery of the sequence to Bode
and placed him in the references of several books instead of Titus; when the misunderstanding was
fixed, Bode's name had already been used so much that the law ended up being called Titus -Bode.
If you like this video, we invite you to subscribe to our channel and hit the notification bell,
so you don't miss all our videos! After the discovery of Uranus,
the Titus -Bode law gained strength, but there was still an error. That error was
that the law predicted that there was a planet between Mars and Jupiter;
however, until then, no planet had been discovered in that place.
In search of the elusive planet In 1801 the astronomer Franz Xaver
von Zach began the search for the happy planet that was between Mars and Jupiter;
he summoned 24 astronomers to form what would be known (among themselves) as The Celestial Police,
which there were significant astronomers like William Herschel, Charles Messier, Johann Elert
Bode, Heinrich Olbers, to mention a few. They soon got to work, observing this
region of the sky night after night until just one year later,
the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi beat them to it and found a small planet he named Ceres.
Although Piazzi had already found the famous planet, it was tiny, so at first,
the astronomical community did not consider it a planet but rather a non-gas comet.
Fifteen months later, astronomer Heinrich Olbers, a member of the Celestial Police,
found a new object right in the same region where Ceres was located, which he named Pallas.
This puzzled astronomers since both Ceres and Pallas were in precisely the same region where
they should have found a planet, but instead, they were finding tiny bodies that were not planets.
Subsequently, the discovery of Juno followed, then the asteroid Vesta, then Astrea,
and suddenly astronomers began to find hundreds of small bodies that all orbited in the same region.
Since they were neither planets nor stars, they were classified with a new name, "Asteroids".
This new type of object was a tiny body that orbited the sun in the region between Mars and
Jupiter, they did not become planets, but they were not comets or satellites, much fewer stars.
Ceres and the asteroid belt Logically, when finding hundreds
of small bodies where they should have found a planet, astronomers thought that perhaps in that
region at first, there was a planet destroyed, and only the fragments that made it up remained;
these fragments were the asteroids that astronomers were discovering.
Another theory suggests that the planet would have formed in a different orbit and was destroyed by a
collision with another celestial body. According to this theory, the remains of the planet would
have been scattered throughout the solar system, and some would have gathered in the Asteroid Belt.
For some years, this idea seemed attractive to many astronomers of the time, especially Giuseppe
Piazzi, who, after discovering Ceres, repeatedly urged the scientific community to classify Ceres
as a planet and not as a non-gas comet. Let us remember that at that time,
the classification of "dwarf planet" did not yet exist, and very little was known about the objects
of the solar system. That is why the idea of Ceres being classified as a planet seemed attractive to
many other scientists who considered that this object met all the requirements to be a planet,
especially the fact that this object matched the predictions of Law Titus-Bode.
Many scientists genuinely believed that Ceres was the fifth rocky planet in the solar system
that the law predicted; in fact, Ceres appeared as a planet in astronomical books and tables
of the time for more than half a century. Until the 1850s, when many other similar
objects were found in the same region of space, Ceres and that group of bodies were called the
asteroid belt, where Ceres would be the largest. The scientific consensus was shielded by
the argument that Ceres was too small to be considered a planet.
But, the discovery of the asteroid belt led another group of scientists to
imagine it was the remnants of an ancient destroyed planet they called Phaethon.
The planet Phaeton . The origin of the asteroid belt?
In 1802 the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers proposed that objects in the asteroid belt,
including Ceres, were fragments of a planet that initially revolved around the Sun. He also
predicted that more of these pieces would be found as part of the asteroid belt. The discoveries of
the asteroid Juno by Karl Ludwig Harding and of Vesta by Olbers supported this hypothesis.
Theories related to the formation of the asteroid belt from the destruction of a hypothetical fifth
planet are now collectively called "disruption theory." This theory indicates that at some point,
there was a central planetary member of the solar system circling in the current
gap between Mars and Jupiter, which was destroyed by some unknown event such as:
She was getting too close to Jupiter and being torn apart by the gas giant's powerful gravity,
hitting another large celestial body, among other hypotheses.
In the 20th century, the Russian meteorite scholar Yevgeny Leonidovich Krinov (involved
in investigating the Tunguska event) suggested that the planet exploited in Olbers's theory
was called Phaethon, after the Greek myth. Taking, then, into consideration the previous
existence of Phaethon from the academic world, other scientific theories arose
that supported the idea of considering the dwarf planet Ceres, or even Mars, as ancient
natural moons of said disappeared planet. One of the assumptions to affirm that Mars
was an ancient natural satellite of Phaethon, which, after the cataclysm,
found its orbit in the solar system, would be based on the characteristic and irregular exposure
to meteorites suffered by the Martian surface. Until recently, the Phaethon hypothesis had been
rendered obsolete by the accretion disk model. However, the recent discoveries
that have taken place since 2010 regarding the specific composition of certain asteroids in
the belt between Mars and Jupiter have made this hypothesis reconsidered as possible.
The true origin of the asteroid belt Once studies of the chemical composition of
objects in the asteroid belt began, astronomers concluded that the diversity of asteroid
composition was challenging to fit into the fifth rocky planet theory. So this idea was scrapped.
But if the asteroid belt had not been a planet that was destroyed, then what was its true origin?
And the current consensus in the scientific community is that initially, when the solar
system was in formation, between Mars and Jupiter, there was an accretion disk equal
to the one that gives rise to the planets. In a planetary system, gaseous planets form
first since gas binds more easily than rocks. When the inner planets were forming, the matter
that would give rise to the fifth rocky planet was disturbed by Jupiter's strong gravitational pull.
The gas giant caused a large part of the matter that made up the disk to shoot out of the solar
system, and the other part acquired very high speeds causing collisions between them; thus,
instead of the debris grouping to form a planet, they disintegrated each other forming the asteroid
belt that we currently have, leaving only 1% of the asteroids that were initially.
In simpler words, the asteroid belt is not the remains of a planet that
exploded but rather the fragments of a planet that never managed to form.
From its origin to date, it is thought that the asteroid belt has not changed much. Collisions
between the largest asteroids occur once every few million years, and in fact, it is thought that the
famous asteroid that killed the dinosaurs came from this region of the solar system.
So when someone asked you what is the function of the asteroid belt? Remember that the asteroid that
wiped out the dinosaurs came from here and began the era of mammals that currently rule the planet.
What other topic would you like us to talk about? Let us know your opinion in the comments!