So many new planets ! Windsor Star February 3, 2001

An article by Robert Matthews in the Sunday Telegraph, London

"The first serious scientific theory emerged in 1796 in the work of French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace, who proposed that the sun and the planets condensed out of a huge, slowly rotating ball of gas and dust.

This ball collapsed under its own gravity, flattening into a disc and rotating ever faster.

Rings of dust flew off from the disc, themselves condensing under gravity to form the planets. Finally all the remaining gunk gathered to form the sun, which continued to collapse and spin to form the huge, hot mass we see today."

My Comments:

The above theory is not so far fetched. Pierre does not seem to have specified how large or small the particles of dust were. If he had considered that the particles are now known to range in size from a few microns to hundreds of kilometers he would not have found it necessary to include so much unsubstantiated speculation about the effect of the forces of gravity which in fact would be almost non existent in a cloud, regardless of its size, of small particles and gasses. And he would have been able to develop a more logical sequence of events.

If we understood the forces and factors involved we should not be wasting our energies looking for planets around other stars. We do know that space is peppered with bodies of all sizes and we should know that if there is a particularly large one the others will orbit it. That is the nature of movement of bodies affected by gravity. Why we should be surprised to identify one orbiting a star is beyond me. And why we wonder about the apparent unusually large size and close orbits of the ones that have been identified is strange indeed. Is it not obvious that our instruments and measurements would not be sensitive enough to record the effect of a smaller or more distant planet that spent a year or ten years completing a single orbit of the star? To wonder at or marvel at the possibility of planets orbiting another star is to deny what a star is. A star is the manifestation of the electrons ejected from the interior as the star accumulates matter from asteroids, comets and planets that crash into it. The brightness or weakness of a star is the result of the rate of accumulation of matter from space, not from an unexplained swelling, shrinking, collapsing or burning out.

There is now no doubt that with the exception of hydrogen, the dust and gasses of space originated in a star, an exploding star, a super nova. That source would have produced very long arcs of materials rather than a slowly rotating ball of gas and dust. The condensing materials did not start as a rotating system, but the larger chunks of rock - one to several hundred kilometers, which we know to be part of the 'dust' would begin to enlarge by accumulating matter from surroundings. There would be much jockeying for position and control until eventually due to chance of size and proximity, a larger body would succeed in remaining central to one or more rotating bodies. All solar/star systems initially form in this manner. There is a continuous evolution and the bodies can be any size and rotating at virtually any distance from the star. Some are 'near stars' and some will become brilliant stars. It is a normal, continuous, non reversible evolutionary sequence.

Since the 'sun and planets' form, not from a rotating ball of gas but from significant chunks of materials, they would be quite large before there was any significant rotation in the system. In addition there would be no internal or external force to cause rings of dust and gases to spin off or to coalesce into planets. A ring of dust and gasses would continue forever as a ring except to the extent that any larger body passing through the area would capture some of the dust and gasses. That is how our comets replenish themselves in the cold deep recesses of space.

The orbits of all orbiting bodies are continuously changed by the effect of gravity of other bodies they pass. These changes result in a significant number being rerouted to a collision course with the sun or another planet for a continuous evolution of those bodies. The uncertainty of predicting orbits of asteroids or comets that cross the paths of numerous large bodies is disturbing because they will never follow the same path twice. The only consolation is that their orbits generally range to a hundred years or more and they are no longer very numerous near earth orbit. However, sooner or later a large asteroid will, by a pass near a planet, be catapulted to an orbit of a direct collision with another planet. The comet that crashed directly into Jupiter eliminated one risk to us and many more would be expected to impact our sun.