Exploded Planet Hypothesis - Part II, Modern Findings

Last time, I talked at the end of my post about the last nail in the EPH coffin: non-intersecting orbits of asteroids discovered by Simon Newcomb in the 1860's. He saw this as evidence that the asteroids did not come from a point source, like an exploding planet, but were better explained as primordial remnants of solar system formation.

Since Newcomb's time, several other factors have come to light that must be incorporated into his experiment and findings. At the time Newcomb was conducting his studies only a few dozen asteroids were known to exist. Because of this fact, Newcomb greatly underestimated (if he considered it at all) the impact (pun intended) of asteroid collisions on their orbits. Such collisions would tend to circularize the orbits of the asteroids around the sun. Newcomb also failed to take into account gravitational perturbations caused by the near approaches of Jupiter, which would have a similar long-term "circularizing" effect to asteroidal collisions.

Another objection to the EPH that is often cited is a problem of mass. If an Earth-sized (or larger) body exploded, where did all the mass go? It is known that the sum of the mass of all bodies in the asteroid belt comes to about .001 Earth masses. So there must be another entry in the balance sheet if the EPH is to remain.

The core of a rocky planet like the Earth is at extreme temperatures and under extreme pressures which increase dramatically with planetary size. In a cataclysmic scenario where a planet is literally shattered, the relatively cool crust would fragment, but remain essentially rock. The hot, highly pressurized liquid core, however, would vaporize almost instantly when exposed to the cold vacuum of space. It is also possible that significant mass from the explosion (in the form of rocky fragments and/or a vapor cloud) was swept up by other planetary bodies, or fell into the sun.

Many meteorites (also fragments of Planet V, in the EPH) are found to contain chondrite, small silicate spherules known to form when superheated rocky material is rapidly cooled (in an hour or two) from temperatures ranging from 1000 to 2000 degrees C, similar temperatures to what is found in the Earth's mantel. Chondrite is often found to contain a compound similar to kerogen, the precursor to fossil-fuels. There is some evidence to suggest that kerogen can form abiotically within the mantel of the Earth. (An index of articles on this subject can be found at the Free Energy News website.) This data suggests that fragments from the crust of Planet V could have collected these condensed droplets of vaporized mantel during or after the explosion.

Another bit of supporting evidence for the EPH can be found by plotting the mean distance from the sun (semi-major axis) for asteroids in the main belt versus their eccentricity. In the solar nebula theory, asteroid orbits should be nearly circular for any semi-major axis. However, if the EPH were true, we should see some minimum eccentricity occurring at the hypothesized exploded planet distance, with increasing eccentricity as we move away from that distance (both towards the sun and away from the sun).

This argument is basically saying that the only asteroids with circular orbits would be those whose semi-major axis is exactly the same as the exploded planet's orbital distance. (Of course there is some random variation due to gravitational interactions with massive planets, and collisions between asteroids, as discussed earlier.)

In fact, we should see almost no asteroids with the same semi-major axis as the exploded planet at all. Only a tiny fraction of the debris from an exploded planet would actually follow the orbital path of the parent body. Some of the debris would be very near the original parent body orbit forming what we know today as the asteroid belt. Most of the debris would be flung away in every other direction, becoming what we call comets.

This is, in fact, what we see when thousands of main-belt asteroids are plotted. Chalk one up for EPH!

I think I should talk about the Oort Cloud here. The Oort Cloud is a hypothetical cloud of comets with a total mass somewhere between 5 and 100 Earth masses, with a mean distance from the sun of about one light-year. It is said to have formed from the "leftovers" of the condensation of the solar nebula in the inner solar system. These leftovers were ejected into highly elliptical orbits by gravitational perturbations of the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn. Subsequently they were re-stabilized into circular orbits far from the sun by the nearby approaches of other stars.

It should be emphasized that no observations of the Oort Cloud have ever been made. It is an entirely hypothetical construct. The only observed object to be labeled as belonging to the Oort cloud is the planetoid Sedna, discovered in 2003. It has a semi-major axis only half of what would be expected for an object in the proposed Oort Cloud. Considering this, any theory of cometary origin based on observational evidence is better than the Oort Cloud hypothesis, and should be favored.

There is another interesting EPH test involving comets supposedly (in the standard model) from the Oort Cloud. The gravitational escape energy of comets can be measured and compared. (For example the Earth has an energy parameter of about -100,000. A value of 0 would be the escape energy.) If a distribution is taken of the number of incoming (towards the inner solar system) comets for each energy parameter, a clustering at about -5 is seen. If the same analysis is done on outgoing comets, there is no clustering anywhere on the plot. This suggests that the comets in the cluster are "first timers"; comets that are approaching the solar system for the first time.

If the EPH is correct, then these comets are returning to the inner solar system for the first time since their parent body exploded. This means that the period of these "new comets" would be the same as the number of years since the planet exploded. When such an analysis is done on the comets in the cluster, a date for the explosion event can be calculated: about 3.2 million years ago...