1. The History of the Exploded Planet Hypothesis
The history of the
Exploded Planet Hypothesis actually begins in the eighteenth
century with an unusual astronomical law known as Bode’s law, or
the Titius-Bode law, named for the German astronomers Johann Daniel
Titius and Johann Ehlert Bode who first proposed it. Basically,
both astronomers noticed that the distance of the planets’ orbits
from the Sun fell into a neat harmonic mathematical progression.
The progression may be obtained by starting with the simple
numerical sequence 0 1 2 4 8 16 32 128 256. Multiply this by 3 to
get 0 3 12 24 48 96 192 384 768. Add 4 to this to obtain 4 7 10 16
28 52 100 196 388 772. Setting the earth’s distance at “10” gives
Mercury at 4, Venus at 7.2, Mars at 15.2, and Jupiter at 52.0,
which is approximately in line with the progression and with their
actual orbits. But astronomers noticed that, by the prediction of
the law, there should be a planet at the number 24 in the
progression, but there was none. The search was quickly on for the
missing planet. The modern exponent of the Exploded Planet
Hypothesis, astronomer Dr. Tom Van Flandern, puts this history this
way in his work Dark Matter, Missing Planets,
and New Comets:
The astronomer Daniel Titius notices a curious fact about the spacing of the planets: each of the six known planets is roughly twice the distance of the previous one from the Sun, with only one exception, a gap between Mars and Jupiter. The gap is just the right size to hold one additional planet. Astronomer Johann Bode publicizes the curious fact in 1778 as a “law.” Not too much is thought of it until 1781, when William Herschel discovers the seventh planet, Uranus, and it is found to be in excellent agreement with Bode’s law. This draws attention to the gap and the missing planet predicted by the law.4
The problem was
quickly resolved, for on January 1, 1801 the Italian astronomer
Giuseppe Piazzi “discovers the missing planet while
observing.”5 The new planet orbits
the Sun exactly where the Titius-Bode law predicted it should. It
was given the name Ceres.
But there was a
further problem, and it was a significant one. The new “planet” was
“incredibly tiny compared to the other planets, not even big enough
to make a good-sized moon.”6 The problem was
quickly magnified when later that year yet another miniature
“planet” was discovered in roughly the same orbital distance from
the sun, and given the name Pallas.7 Now there was not
one, but two miniature planetoids, where there should only have
been one large planet according to the Titius-Bode law, and both of
these “planets” were not even as large as moons.
At this point, the
German astronomer Heinrich Olbers proposed a bold new theory to
explain the phenomenon: “a larger planet had exploded!”8 Thus, Olbers was able
to predict that more such miniature “planets” would be discovered
in more or less the same orbit, and “that they would vary in
brightness as they spun, because fragments should be irregular in
shape.”9 The Exploded Planet
Hypothesis was then expanded by the French astronomer Louis
Lagrange in 1814 to explain the origin, and the unusual and
extremely elongated orbits, of comets, since these would be
“natural byproducts of an explosion.”10
However,
unfortunately for Obler’s and Lagrange’s explosion theory, the well
known and highly respected astronomer Laplace weighed in with
“several telling arguments” and discounted the theory.
The attack of this prestigious astronomer cast the planetary explosion theory into disfavor for most of the next 175 years. Various new evidence and arguments, pro and con, appeared in the interim, but the astronomers as a whole were now committed to more conventional explanations. Even the appearance of a definitive treatise on meteorites by Brown and Patterson in 1948, in which they concluded there was irrefutable evidence that meteorites were once an integral part of a larger planet, did not sway the bulk of the astronomers.... who generally believed that the thousands of known minor planets orbiting between Mars and Jupiter were the remains of a planet which had never been formed, rather than one which had broken up.11
Then, in 1972, the
Exploding Planet Hypothesis was given a first nudge toward rebirth
when the Canadian astronomer Michael Ovenden resurrected and
revised Bode’s Law.
Ovenden derived a
much more elaborate mathematical formula than the original
Titius-Bode law, a new formula that not only “predicted the spacing
of the planets” but also “their major satellites.”12 But that was not
all.
(He) also came to the conclusion that a planet was missing from the area where the minor planets orbited. But Ovenden predicted that it must have been a giant planet the size of Saturn, and much larger than all the other planets put together. This was an important possibility not previously considered. It meant that the event which destroyed the planet must have involved enormous energy. It also meant that much of the debris had been blasted out of the solar system completely.13
The enormous energy
required for a planet to explode plus a plausible model for why
they should do so is one of the most significant difficulties in
the Exploded Planet Hypothesis, as we shall see.