Strange Asteroids Baffle Scientists. A Boost To The ‘Exploded Planet’ Hypothesis?

Many of us have long felt that the Asteroid belt is the remnant of a planet that was destroyed due to some inexplicable reason. Now comes evidence that some asteroids in the Asteroid Belt might contain mineral evidence for a new class of asteroids or long eroded mini-worlds.


The Asteroid Belt
Courtesy: Spitzinc

The asteroids, (7472) Kumakiri and (10537) 1991 RY16, were found to contain basalt, a grey-black mineral that forms much of the crust on Earth and the other inner planets. Basalt has also been found in space rocks shed by Vesta, the third largest object in the asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. The presence of basalt is evidence that an object was once large enough to sustain internal heating.

One possibility, Gaffey told SPACE.com, is that the parent bodies of Kumakiri and 1991 RY16 were long ago worn down by repeated collisions into smaller and smaller pieces, which have since been whisked out of our solar system.

The finding, made using photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), was presented at annual European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany.
www.livescience.com...

Are we getting closer to the reality that there was indeed a planet that exploded or was destroyed eons ago? As per the Titius-Bode Law of Planetary spacing, there must have been a planetary body between Mars and Jupiter.

Titius-Bode Law of Planetary Spacing.

Planet---------Distance--------Formula

Mercury-------------0.4---------------0.5
Venus---------------0.7---------------0.7
Earth----------------1.0---------------1.0
Mars-----------------1.5---------------1.6
????----------------##----------------2.8
Jupiter---------------5.2---------------5.2
Saturn---------------9.5---------------10
Uranus---------------19.2--------------19.6
Neptune-------------30.1--------------38.8

Formula: distance in au
=0.4+0.3*2(n-2)
metaresearch.org...

So, what could have happened? The planet may have exploded due to:

> Internal dynamics.

> A collision with another massive body.

> An experiment by aliens on the planet which had gone awry, releasing a massive amount of energy that resulted in an explosion that destroyed it.

> An interstellar space war on or near the planet with weapons of mass destruction.

The last two hypotheses are needless to say, far fetched, bordering on science fiction. But who knows? Do we have all the answers to what may have happened in the Solar System in the past? Do we know for sure how it was destroyed? Untill then, I’m keeping my options open!

Cheers!








[edit on 23-8-2007 by mikesingh]

It's theorised that Earth originally shared orbit with another, smaller, proto-planet and that they collided around 4,500 million years ago, with the Moon forming out of the resulting debris field.

Maybe something similar happened in the asteroid belt, but with both bodies of similar size and with neither retaining sufficient mass, so that the debris didn't reform into a large body. And/or the collision sent some of the debris - maybe the largest bit, out towards Jupiter where it became one or more of the Jovian moons?

Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt, is now classified as a dwarf planet I think, but adding all the asteroids together, and even allowing for say half the mass to have been captured by other planets over time, you'd still only end up with a body much smaller than the larger Jovian Moons and not a full planet.

Whatever happened, I would be inclined towards it occuring in the early days of the solar system.

Originally posted by Essan
...but adding all the asteroids together, and even allowing for say half the mass to have been captured by other planets over time, you'd still only end up with a body much smaller than the larger Jovian Moons and not a full planet.

Well, that is a good point! But her's an explanation...

Where Did All the Mass Go?

Although over 10,000 asteroids have well-determined orbits, the combined mass of all other asteroids is not as great as that of the largest asteroid, Ceres. That makes the total mass of the asteroid belt only about 0.001 of the mass of the Earth. A frequently asked question is, if a major planet exploded, where is the rest of its mass?

Consider what would happen if the Earth exploded today. Surface and crustal rocks would shatter and fragment, but remain rocks. However, rocks from depths greater than about 40 km are under so much pressure at high temperature that, if suddenly released into a vacuum, such rocks would vaporize. As a consequence, over 99% of the Earth’s total mass would vaporize in an explosion, with only its low-pressure crustal and upper mantle layers surviving.
metaresearch.org...

Well, that probably answers the question of where all that matter went - Vaporized!

Cheers!

[edit on 23-8-2007 by mikesingh]

Now why hasn't any serious astrophysicist ever thought of that? In any case, it all happened a long, long time ago - long enough ago for gravity to have smoothed into almost rounded shapes all the jagged shards of rock that must have originally existed

well, vaporizing ... the matter doesn't cease to exist

but ... maybe a lot more moons are from this. Who's to say only jupiter caught some?

and ... in an explosion, would the stuff go in all directions? so a lot of it could have went in a different plane. Not to mention our solar system is traveling through space, and not on the plane of the milky way ... so, over time, a lot of stuff could have gone a lot of places.

some of it could be asteroids and comets. some of it could have been caught up in the kaiper belt.

the possibilities are endless. I think the idea of it is very sound though.

scientists are masters of denial ... a lot of them don't like to think about things like this. Not that they can prove what they claim either ... but they like their jobs and don't want to be labeled as kooks in their field if they think something is generally accepted as not possible by current trends and computer models, despite what common sense, reality, and a small bit of imagination can do.

They forget, they enter all the information into their computer models, they tell it how to perform ... tell me that isn't biased?

Jupiter is a problem for any planets in the region of the asteroid belt. If a planet did form there, and that's a big if, it didn't last long.