© 2009 Philip Calabrese
© 2009 The Urantia Book Fellowship
New information gathered during the last 53 years concerning the origin and evolution of the solar system provides a good way to estimate the scientific accuracy of The Urantia Book. Much that was unknown when the book was published in 1955 has become known in the intervening years, and new questions have arisen as a result of these new discoveries. How well or poorly has The Urantia Book done in keeping up with, or even offering explanations for, these about to be discovered astronomical facts? Let us review the new discoveries and see how they gibe with what The Urantia Book says. We will also evaluate the currently conventional theory of the origin of the solar system in light of these new discoveries.
Retrograde motion in the solar system. Most objects orbiting the sun, most moons orbiting planets, and most axial rotations move in the same direction as the sun rotates on its axis—counter-clockwise when viewed from above the north pole of the sun. However, Halley’s comet has a retrograde (clockwise) orbit around the sun, and Triton [1], the one really large moon of Neptune, orbits Neptune in the retrograde direction. Furthermore, Pluto [2] rotates on its axis in the retrograde direction, and most small moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune orbit in the retrograde direction [3]. In addition, the planet Venus [4] slowly rotates on its axis in the retrograde (clockwise) direction even as it orbits the sun in the counter-clockwise direction. [On Venus the sun rises very slowly in the west, not in the east as it does on earth. This retrograde motion is so slow that the planet’s year (225 earth days) is shorter than its day (243 earth days). The combined effect gives Venus a sunrise in half the time (117 earth days).]
Inclinations of axes of rotation and orbits. Most objects orbiting the sun rotate on an axis more or less parallel to the sun’s axis and perpendicular to the plane of their orbit around the sun, although earth’s axis is 23 degrees off its orbital plane, thus accounting for our change of seasons during the year. Moreover, the planet Uranus rotates on its side, on an axis that is more than half way flipped over, inclined 98 degrees from perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun! Or by switching which pole is considered north, Uranus can be regarded as rotating in the retrograde direction on an axis inclined 82 degrees. Either way, Uranus is unusual. Halley’s comet has an orbital inclination of 162.3 degrees, which is equivalent to 17.7 degrees inclination and a retrograde (clockwise) direction around the sun. [5]
Very eccentric orbits of some objects. Although Halley’s comet, with an elongated orbit around the sun taking 75.3 years to complete, was known long before 1955, the discovery in 2003 of the planetoid (or dwarf planet) Sedna introduced dramatically more elongated orbits: Sedna’s orbit requires over 12,000 years to complete and reaches distances of 975 astronomical units (AU) compared to 35.1 AU for Halley’s comet. [One AU is the average distance from earth to the sun.] Sedna also has almost a 12-degree orbital inclination [6] to the average of the planetary orbital planes.
The Kuiper Belt. Discovered in 1992 [7], this zone of objects ranging from the orbit of Neptune (30 AU) out to about 55 AU is considered home to comets like Halley. Several other similar objects (e.g. Eris, 2004 XR190) have recently been discovered [8] with inclinations of around 45 degrees. Because of their orbits, objects from this region are conjectured to have been scattered by the large planets and so are called members of the “Scattered Disc”. The “Kuiper Cliff” refers to the abrupt fall-off of these objects at about 50 AU prompting speculation [9] about a possible world “shepherding” these objects just as small moons maintain the sharp edges and spaces between Saturn’s rings by “shepherding”.
The Oort Cloud. Since the discovery of Sedna with its extremely elongated orbit reaching out so much further than the Kuiper Belt, well beyond the “scattered disk” objects, another spherical zone [10] roughly out to 50,000 AU, or nearly a light-year, from the Sun has been postulated to account for objects orbiting out to such far distant zones and orbiting the sun at various inclinations.
Comets formed at intense temperatures. The Wild-2 comet [11] was sampled by NASA’s Stardust Spacecraft launched on February 7, 1999. Various crystalline silicates found in the comet dust could only have formed at very high temperatures, not by accretion of cold matter.
Solar polar temperatures. The north pole of the sun is 80,000 degrees (K) hotter [12] than its south pole, and this is independent of magnetic orientation (since the magnetic orientation switches every 11 years).
The contemporary model for the origin of the solar system is a gaseous cloud of material, especially hydrogen, with some initial angular momentum, compressing by gravity attraction with resultant pressure and temperature increase until the temperatures cause nuclear energy release through fusion or other nuclear processes. While this mode of solar system birth is listed in The Urantia Book as one of several popular modes [13] [UB 15:5.5], our own solar system, it says, had an exceptional origin, a mode responsible for less than 1% of solar system births.
The Urantia Book describes in great detail [14] [UB 41:10.1] [UB 57:3] a rare and more complicated birth in which our sun, initially a variable star expanding and contracting as they do, was partially disrupted during an expansion phase by the disruptive gravity attraction of a passing “dark gravity body”. The disgorgement of a huge column of material from the central core of the sun is described, which immediately started orbiting the sun, quickly becoming twelve original planets, which consolidated nearby material by aggregation. With the help of its mother nebula, our sun captured three outlying major satellites and much smaller material of the passing dark gravity body as indicated by their retrograde orbits; but nothing from the sun completely escaped the sun’s gravity. The Urantia Book refers to the dark gravity body and its satellites as the “Angona system”. Here are just two of many descriptive paragraphs:
As Angona more closely approached the sun, at moments of maximum expansion during solar pulsations, streams of gaseous material were shot out into space as gigantic solar tongues. At first these flaming gas tongues would invariably fall back into the sun, but as Angona drew nearer and nearer, the gravity pull of the gigantic visitor became so great that these tongues of gas would break off at certain points, the roots falling back into the sun while the outer sections would become detached to form independent bodies of matter, solar meteorites, which immediately started to revolve about the sun in elliptical orbits of their own.
As the Angona system drew nearer, the solar extrusions grew larger and larger; more and more matter was drawn from the sun to become independent circulating bodies in surrounding space. This situation developed for about five hundred thousand years until Angona made its closest approach to the sun; whereupon the sun, in conjunction with one of its periodic internal convulsions, experienced a partial disruption; from opposite sides and simultaneously, enormous volumes of matter were disgorged. From the Angona side there was drawn out a vast column of solar gases, rather pointed at both ends and markedly bulging at the center, which became permanently detached from the immediate gravity control of the sun. [UB 57:5.5-6]
Here again The Urantia Book goes out on a limb, making itself quite scientifically falsifiable since this scenario could easily be disproved, and that would discredit The Urantia Book’s claim to be of immense (albeit transient) value to present day scientists and cosmologists.
If the solar system simply condensed by gravity why is there retrograde motion?
How could the rotation orientation of earth (23 deg.) and especially Uranus (98 deg.) arise?
How could such eccentric orbits as Halley’s comet and even Sedna’s arise?
What could explain the Kuiper Belt and the Kuiper Cliff?
What could explain the Oort Cloud, 100 times more distant than the Kuiper Belt?
What could explain silicates (only formed at high temperature) found inside a comet?
What is different about the north pole of the sun that makes it 80,000º K hotter than the south? IV . Test of the two theories.
Let us see how The Urantia Book fares in explaining these new observations and questions as compared with contemporary science.
Retrograde motion. According to The Urantia Book there would be no retrograde motion in the solar system had there not been a collision, and new material introduced to the solar system. Can it be proven that there can be no retrograde motion in a counter-clockwise rotating condensation system without outside disturbance? According to this theory, bodies such as Triton and Halley’s comet orbiting in the retrograde direction would likely be of non-solar origin. By contrast, the conventional condensation theory conjectures about possible affects of Jupiter and Saturn.
Orientations. Here again, a pure condensation model must introduce new elements or events into its theory to account for such irregularities, but the Passing Body Partial Disruption (PBPD) theory of The Urantia Book already has a ready explanation in the huge disturbance that would have lurched the planets and turned their rotation axes like spinning wheels subjected to a torque.
Eccentric orbits. While the condensation model needs to postulate actions by Jupiter and Saturn to account for eccentric orbits hardly produced by pure condensation, the PBPD theory again has a ready explanation since a passing heavy body would pull material into very eccentric orbits. This is explicitly described in The Urantia Book.
Kuiper Belt. The great inclinations of the orbits of the Kuiper Belt comets to the average plane of the planets is another problem for the condensation model requiring special events to account for them. However, here again, the PBPD model has the passing heavy body moving at an angle to the plane of the sun’s equator and therefore capable of pulling matter into orbits with great inclination.
Oort Cloud. The Condensation model must imagine why there is a Kuiper belt and material orbiting with such elongated orbits as to require the postulation of the Oort cloud, but the PBPD model already has the heavy passing body pulling material out and almost capturing it, thus leaving the material in elongated orbits.
Silicates in comets. According to the condensation model, cold material is gathered by gravity until the pressure rises in the nucleus and so the temperature rises until a sun ignites. Much material remains in orbit and stays cold including comets. But the PBPD theory claims that material inside our sun was expelled and formed the planets and other bodies including the comets (except for what was caught from the passing dark gravity body system).
North-pole temperature of sun. Like the condensation model, the PBPD theory seems to have nothing to say about why the north pole of the sun is hotter than the south pole of the sun. (However, elsewhere in The Urantia Book greater force-energy is associated with the north pole of the nucleus of ultimate particles.)
Notice that in each of the first six questions and issues, the PBPD theory can plausibly account for the phenomenon without needing to introduce something new into the theory. Each time, the same basic idea explains the observations. The Urantia Book even explicitly described the Kuiper Belt and Oort material before it was discovered. But the condensation model repeatedly needs new assumptions. That is a characteristic of a failing theory. It doesn’t explain or predict without new conjectures and assumptions— new patches to the holes in the theory.
It should also be mentioned that the PBPD theory explains the sizable difference (almost 7 degrees) between the plane of the sun’s equator and the average orbital plane of the planets, including Jupiter and Saturn. Only with effort and additional assumptions can a purely condensation theory explain this fact. Gravity compression and increased rotary motion result in a spinning disk of matter in the plane of the eventual sun’s equator, not on a plane inclined 7 degrees to the sun’s equator. But, as The Urantia Book asserts, that was the angle of the passing dark, heavy, charged body that helped the already pulsing sun disgorge the planetary material as it passed by.
This material coming from the rapidly spinning of the sun in two antipodal directions carried away almost all of the angular momentum of the sun. (According to The Urantia Book the sun was originally a variable star with a contraction-expansion period of only 3.5 days, the 11.5-year sunspot cycle being what remains of this periodicity.) Here again, the condensation model has little to offer in the way of explanation of the fact that 99% of the total angular momentum of the solar system is held by the planets [UB 57:5.5] rather than much of it held by the sun itself as would be the case if the system arose from pure gravity compression with rapid spinning at the center. A partial disruption, however, can account for the loss of angular momentum by the sun.
The PBPD theory is a significant variation of the old Encounter Hypothesis, which imagined that a passing star extracted the hottest gases from the sun by purely tidal forces. As it was formulated, the Encounter Hypothesis did not include the variable aspect of the sun, expanding and contracting, and partially disrupting—disgorging rapidly spinning material from its core. Furthermore, the “passing star” was really a dark body with massive gravity and charge, not an ordinary star. These kinds of bodies were not even known in 1955. Dark matter came later. Granted this scenario is a rare event, but that too is stated and quantified in The Urantia Book.
Since its 1955 publication I have repeatedly noticed [15] contemporary science subsequently discovering new information that very much corroborates the science and cosmology of The Urantia Book. On statistical grounds alone I have rejected the “null hypothesis”, that The Urantia Book is the product of mere human knowledge. I accept the alternate hypothesis.
Phil Calabrese is an award-winning mathematician. He spent forty years in teaching, both college-level statistics and the first college course for credit on The Urantia Book in 1971. In addition he has presented the cosmological implications of the book at various conferences. In 1990, as a result of a paper he had published, he was awarded a senior research associateship by the National Research Council and subsequently won a 3-year prime contract with the U.S. Navy to provide “techniques for uncertain conditional information processing.”
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/08/18/ten-mysteries-of-thesolar-system/ ↩︎
http://science.jrank.org/pages/6266/Solar-System-angularmomentum-problem.html ↩︎
Extended Abstract: http://urantiabook.org/archive/readers/coming_sci_val_abstr2.htm. Complete Paper: http://ubthenews.com/articles/ub_validation-1.pdf ↩︎