© 1995 Dick Bain
© 1995 The Urantia Book Fellowship
© 2020 Jan Herca, some additions
¶ Introduction
Jupiter has always been fascinating to astronomers and non-astronomers alike. For Hector Berlioz, Jupiter was the bringer of joviality in his composition The Planets. But some solar system theorists may not feel so jovial when considering a recent theory about the likelihood of Jupiter’s existence. A group of astronomers have found evidence that giant gas planets like Jupiter may be rare in other solar systems, and this may say something important about the origin of our solar system.
The author of Paper 57 in The Urantia Book informs us that our solar system formed from material pulled out of our sun by a passing dark giant of space, Angona.
. . . Your sun was in just such a state of mighty pulsation when the massive Angona system swung into near approach, and the outer surface of the sun began to erupt veritable streams —continuous sheets— of matter. . . . [1]
4,500,000,000 years ago the enormous Angona system began its approach to the neighbourhood of this solitary sun. The centre of this great system was a dark giant of space, solid, highly charged, and possessing tremendous gravity pull. [2]
This theory of origin, known to astronomers as the catastrophic or dualistic theory (“Chamberlin-Moulton planetesimal theory”)[3], was proposed independently by Thomas Crowder Chamberlin[4] and Forest Ray Moulton[5] in the early part of this century.[6] Another source[7] says that the theory was first suggested early in this century by astronomer Sir James Jeans (1877–1946) and geophysicist Sir Harold Jefferies (1891–1989). The astronomic community eventually rejected this theory for several reasons, one being that such an encounter would be quite rare[8]. In fact, we are told in The Urantia Book that most planets did not have such an origin:
The majority of solar systems, however, had an origin entirely different from yours, and this is true even of those which were produced by gravity-tidal technique. . . . [9]
The Encyclopedia Britannica gives an additional reason for rejection of the catastrophic theory: “…acquired a more mature understanding of the behavior of gases under astrophysical conditions. This perspective led to the realization that hot gases stripped from a stellar atmosphere would simply dissipate in space; they would not condense to form planets.”[10] It seems to me that the idea in The Urantia Book sounds more reasonable; some of the material pulled out would fall back into the sun, some would be captured by the body passing by the sun, but some material would stay in orbit. Perhaps this orbiting material formed a disc around our sun, and from this disc the planets of our solar system formed.
¶ The problem of the angular momentum
There was another problem found with the catastrophic theory (Chamberlin–Moulton), namely the distribution of angular momentum in the solar system. Angular momentum is a measure of the speed of rotation of a body around a center and it’s distance from that center of rotation. Though the sun has 99.9% of the solar system’s mass, it has less than 0.5% of its angular momentum. Jupiter, with only a fraction of a percent of the mass in the solar system has about 99% of the angular momentum of the solar system. This situation would not be expected if the solar system had a catastrophic origin. Significantly however, this unexpected distribution of angular momentum is also a problem for the other major theory of planetary formation, the nebular or monistic theory. [11]
In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanual Kant (1724—1804) proposed that our planetary system coalesced from a cloud or nebula of dispersed particles. About twenty years later, the mathematician LaPlace (1749—1827) proposed that a cloud of dust and gases around a sun would form into rings from which planets would coalesce.[12]
In fact, this idea of ring formation is mentioned in The Urantia Book:
. . . Not all nebulae are spiral. Many an immense nebula, instead of splitting into a double star system or evolving as a spiral, undergoes condensation by multiple-ring formation. For long periods such a nebula appears as an enormous central sun surrounded by numerous gigantic clouds of encircling, ring-appearing formations of matter. [13]
The author does not specifically say that the rings form into planets, but the entry is under the heading “The Origin of Space Bodies,” so that planetary formation from the rings is intimated. Astronomers are now finding many young stars with discs of dust and gas around them, and this tends to support the idea that planets form from such rings. But in the case of our solar system, the nebular hypothesis has problems other than that of the distribution of angular momentum.
¶ The problem of retrograde motion
One of the unusual features found in our system is retrograde motion (or more correctly, retrograde rotation) of two planets, and some moons of several planets. If a planetary system formed from a uniform disc of material, we would expect the planets and their satellites to all lie in the same plane and rotate in the same direction. If a planet rotates in the opposite direction from the others, that phenomenon is an example of a type of retrograde motion. There are two planets, Venus and Uranus, that exhibit retrograde rotation in our solar system.
Astronomers have not found an explanation to account for this retrograde motion that is satisfactory to everyone.The problem of retrograde motion in our solar system is mentioned on THe Urantia Book where the Life Carrier author tells us:
Retrograde motion in any astronomic system is always accidental and always appears as a result of the collisional impact of foreign space bodies. Such collisions may not always produce retrograde motion, but no retrograde ever appears except in a system containing masses which have diverse origins. [14]
According to the author, the masses which caused the retrograde motion were captured by our sun from the passing Angona system. And in addition to the problems already mentioned, the nebular hypothesis now has a Jupiter problem.
¶ The problem of Jupiter
Jupiter shouldn’t be where it is. Jupiter’s anomalous size and location in our solar system has puzzled scientists for years, as it doesn’t fit our models of planet formation. According to current models, giant planets form in the outer reaches of a system, then migrate inward, ending up very close to their star. But this could not be for Jupiter. It is a huge planet, more than twice the mass of all the other planets in the solar system combined, yet it orbits deep inside.
Where Jupiter formed has always been a problem that has vexed planetary scientists, since it seems that gas giants cannot form near a star. Intense gravity, stellar radiation, and powerful stellar winds in close quarters would prevent the gas from holding together long enough to coalesce into a planet.
To try to deal with this problem, the Great Turning Hypothesis has been proposed. According to this theory the planet Jupiter, after forming at a distance of 3.5 astronomical units (AU[15]), migrated inward at 1.5 AU, before reversing its course due to the capture of Saturn in a configuration orbital resonance, finally stopping near its current orbit at 5.2 AU[16].
The exoplanets discovered to date seem to indicate that our solar system has a rather unusual configuration compared to them. In the exoplanets the regions equivalent to the area of the Earth in the solar system are occupied by large gaseous planets more similar to Neptune or Uranus than to Earth.
Although there is a broad consensus that the nebular theory is correct, and that the strange movements or the existence of Jupiter can be explained with refinements of the theory, all is not lost for the rest of the hypotheses that have been considered for a long time. including the Chamberlin-Moulton theory that so closely fits the content of The Urantia Book.
Detailed studies of isotope anomolies in meteorites have provided evidence that the solar nebular was contaminated very early in its history by one or more injections of material from sources external to the solar system. [17]
A recent article in Science News reported that a team from MIT examined 20 nearby, sunlike stars one to ten million years old and reported that even these very young stars did not have enough molecular hydrogen in their vicinity to form a planet the size of Jupiter. The researchers conclude that either a planet like Jupiter would have to form very quickly before the hydrogen was lost, or more likely there is only a small chance of such planets forming in the first place. If, on the other hand, material were pulled out from our sun as claimed in The Urantia Book, there would be plenty of material to form the two gas giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn.
The approach of a star to the solar system is not something that is currently considered unreasonable. In 2013, astronomer Ralf-Dieter Scholz discovered a very dim binary system near the Sun, 22 light-years away, in the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn), close to the galactic plane. In 2015, a team led by Eric Mamajek reported that they had discovered that Scholz’s star had passed very close to the solar system, through the Oort cloud, 70,000 years ago. The Scholz binary system consists of a red dwarf with about 86 times the mass of our Jupiter, and a brown dwarf with about 65 times the mass of Jupiter[18]. It is not the only star that will approach our Sun within the next few millennia, nor is it the closest. During these years, astronomers have collected a good number of data about the stars that will be closest to us in the distant future[19]. These recent discoveries make the claims of The Urantia Book much more plausible.
A recent discovery of a giant planet orbiting a small star calls into question everything that is known about planet formation. The star, a red dwarf 39 light-years from us, is more massive than its planet, called GJ 3512b, but the difference in size is much smaller than that between the Sun and Jupiter. This star is only 270 times bigger than the planet, while our Sun is 1,050 times more massive than Jupiter. According to current models, such a planet should not exist. Predictions for a red dwarf star are that it should be orbited by small planets[20].
The catastrophic origin hypothesis/Angona theory may still have more strikes against it than the nebular hypothesis, but it looks like the score is beginning to even up. Perhaps early in the third millennial innings astronomers will resurrect the catastrophic hypothesis and come to the same conclusion as the author of Paper 57. And 2001 isn’t so far off, is it?
¶ External links
- Article in Innerface International: https://urantia-book.org/archive/newsletters/innerface/vol2_4/page17.html
¶ References
The Importance of Being Jupiter, Science News.
The “Chamberlin-Moulton planetesimal theory” is a catastrophic theory. These theories were based on the main idea that the solar system was formed either by the collision of two stars, or by the approach of the Sun to another star, as opposed to evolutionary theories, in which the solar system is formed independently without the intervention of any other star. Although the theory is considered catastrophic for postulating an origin in part due to another star, it is called “planetesimal” because it postulated that once the influence of the other star had been lost, planets formed by accretion of small objects called “planetesimals”. This part of the theory, unlike the rest, has continued to be considered valid by the current scientific community. The theory was viewed favorably for nearly a third of a century, but fell out of favor in the late 1930s, finally being discarded in the 1940s as incompatible with Jupiter’s angular momentum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlin-Moulton_planetesimal_hypothesis ↩︎
Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin (1843—1928) was an influential American geologist and educator. Apart from the planetesimal theory, he also elaborated other hypotheses in which he concluded that the Earth was much older than what Lord Kelvin supposed (which he estimated to be 100 million years old). His speculations to explain the source of energy that would justify the long life of the Sun as a radiant body were premonitory, intuiting some form of energy extracted from the interior structures of the atom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Chrowder_Chamberlin ↩︎
Forest Ray Moulton (1872—1952) was a well-known American astronomer and mathematician. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Ray_Moulton ↩︎
Encyclopedia Britannica Macropedia, 1993 ↩︎
Preston Cloud (1978). Cosmos, Earth and Man (Yale University Press) ↩︎
For a complete list of all the theories that have dealt with the origin of the solar system see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Solar_System_formation_and_evolution_hypotheses ↩︎
Encyclopedia Britannica Macropedia, 1993 ↩︎
The nebular theory is the most widely accepted model in the field of cosmology to explain the formation and evolution of the solar system. It suggests that the solar system formed from nebulous material in space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis ↩︎
Laplace’s theory of the formation of the solar system is known as nebular theory, and it is an evolutionary theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis ↩︎
An astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, 149,597,870.7 km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit ↩︎
Robert T. Dodd, Thunderstones and Shooting Stars. Harvard University Press, 1986. ↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs#Distant_future_and_past_encounters ↩︎
Morales, J.C.; Mustill, A.J.; Ribas, I. et al. A giant exoplanet orbiting a very-low-mass star challenges planet formation models, Science, Vol. 365, Issue 6440, p. 1441-1445 (2019) ↩︎