A short history of the Solar System

[frankglennjacobs@gmail.com]

First off, this ISN'T a "theory". Theories are high and holy and full of math that I don't understand. This isn't even a "hypothesis".

 

It is what we called in the Army a S.W.E.G. (Scientific Wild-Eyed Guess).

 

Lately a lot of Hot Jupiters have been found. That may be because they are the easiest to detect.

 

Again, this isn't theory. (Theories are for people who know what they're doing. I don't.)

 

PLAN A: They are near the end of spiraling down into their stars.

 

PLAN B: They are near the beginning of spiraling up from their stars.

 

PLAN C: They started there and they aren't going anywhere except around and around.

 

Our own familiar Jupiter either started where it is -- or started close to the sun and gained altitude over the past bazillion years -- or started higher and is gradually working its way down toward the sun, or, even started high, went down and came back up.

 

We cannot tell by reasoning from general principles that there was not another gas giant which has by now impacted the sun.

 

Whether going up or going down, if such a planet were precisely in the same orbital plane with the other planets, they would all impact it, one by one, leaving exactly nothing.

 

Going up or going down, any thing that got within the Roche Limit of a Jupiter-size planet would not merely be perturbed, it would lose something or other.

 

Now, here comes a Hot Jupiter somewhat-sort of matching the orbit of the ProtoEarth. First thing to go is the atmosphere. Next go the oceans. As the two approach each other, there go some mountain ranges and then maybe a few Tectonic Plates.

 

This gets messy. As what is left of ProtoEarth and the Hot Jupiter move past each other, most of that rock (mostly basalt) fall into the gas-giant. Most of what is left is scattered into space -- and one spectacularly large piece of basalt, due to coincidental conservation of energy, doesn't do either, but remains in a random orbit.

 

Untold millions of tons of rock fall back onto the ProtoEarth, onto the ProtoMoon and into the wrecking-ball of a planet.

 

And there you have the ProtoMoon, with its similar basalt rock, slowly regulating its orbit.

 

And there you have the ProtoEarth, battered by big rocks, stripped of atmosphere and ocean.

 

Hundreds of millions of years later (you just can't rush these things) Mars gets the same treatment, only worse, as it has never recovered.

 

And there is a worse case. An (un-named) planet beyond the orbit of Mars is completely disrupted by the same tidal forces. Nine tenths of it falls into Jupiter. Nine tenths of what is left is scattered at random into all of space. And the one percent that is left remains in wild random orbits. We call that area The Asteroid Belt.

 

Nobody can tell if Jupiter is still going up. Nobody can tell if it will catch up to Saturn.

 

[in case that was not Jupiter coming up, but a Hot-Jupiter going down, just reverse the order of those astronomic shipwrecks.]

 

[in case Jupiter is not going anyplace, we can always go back to the "Niburu" notion.]

 

 

[Argent]

As you say it is a SWEG. I tend to reject it for the following reasons.

 

Planetary migration occurs during the formation of planetary systems, while there is still a significant protoplanetary disc of gas and dust, and before orbits have stabilised. Detailed simulations strongly suggest that the solar system orbits are stable over the next several billion years. Jupiter stopped its migration billions of years ago. I think the latest thinking is that it swopped places with Saturn, ejecting another giant planet from the system in the process.

 

Your stripping of the proto-Earth and related events don't really square up with the detailed geochemistry of Earth, moon and meteorites.

 

Keep guessing. It can be be fun, but I don't think this one worked out.

[swansont]

!

Moderator Note

This is a science site. We don't do SWEG. Not even in speculations.

 

OTOH, you are free to reformulate this into a question, or series of questions, if you are interested in learning some science.