Attos' Magazine

Volume #65, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Origin of the Planetary System

All theories of the origin of the planetary system and the motive forces that sustain the motion of its members go back to the gravitational theory and the celestial mechanics of Newton. The sun attracts the planets, and if it were not for a second urge, they would fall into the sun; but each planet is impelled by its momentum to proceed in a direction away from the sun, and as a result, an orbit is formed. Similarly, a satellite or a moon is subject to an urge that drives it away from its primary, but the attraction of the primary bends the path on which the satellite would have proceeded if there had been no attraction between the bodies, and out of these urges a satellite orbit is traced. The inertia or persistence of motion implanted in planets and satellites was postulated by Newton, but he did not explain how or when the initial pull or push occurred.

The theory of the origin of the planetary system which dominated the entire nineteenth century was proposed by Swedenborg, the theologian, and Kant, the philosopher. It was put into scientific terms by Laplace, although not explored by him quantitatively, and in brief is as follows:

Hundreds of millions of years ago the sun was nebulous and very large and had a form approaching that of a disc. This disc was as wide as the whole orbit of the farthest of the planets. It rotated around its center. Owing to the process of compression caused by gravitation, a globular sun shaped itself in the center of the disc. Because of the rotating motion of the whole nebula, a centrifugal force was in action; parts of matter more on the periphery resisted the retracting action directed toward the center and broke up into rings which balled into globes—these were the planets in the process of shaping. In other words, as a result of the shrinkage of the rotating sun, matter broke away and portions of this solar material developed into planets. The plane in which the planets revolve is the equatorial plane of the sun.

This theory is now regarded as unsatisfactory. Three objections stand out above others. First, the velocity of the axial rotation of the sun at the time the planetary system was built could not have been sufficient to enable bands of matter to break away; but even if they had broken away, they would not have balled into globes. Second, the Laplace theory does not explain why the planets have larger angular velocity of daily rotation and yearly revolution than the sun could have imparted to them. Third, what made some of the satellites revolve retrogradely, or in a direction opposite to that of most of the members of the solar system?

“It appears to be clearly established that, whatever structure we assign to a primitive sun, a planetary system cannot come into being merely as the result of the sun’s rotation. If a sun, rotating alone in space, is not able of itself to produce its family of planets and satellites, it becomes necessary to invoke the presence and assistance of some second body. This brings us at once to the tidal theory.”

The tidal theory, which, in its earlier stage, was called the planetesimal theory, assumes that a star passed close to the sun. An immense tide of matter arose from the sun in the direction of the passing star and was torn from the body of the sun but remained in its domain, being the material out of which the planets were built. In the planetesimal theory the mass that was torn out broke into small parts which solidified in space; some were driven out of the solar system, and some fell back into the sun, but the rest moved around it because of its gravitational pull. Sweeping in elongated orbits around the sun, they conglomerated, rounded out their orbits as a result of mutual collisions, and grew to form planets and satellites around the planets.

The tidal theory does not allow the matter torn from the sun to disperse first and reunite later; the tide broke into a few portions that rather quickly changed from gaseous to fluid, and then to the solid state. In support of this theory it was indicated that such a tide, when broken into a number of “drops,” would probably build the largest “drops” out of its middle portion, and small “drops” from its begin- fling (near the sun) and its end (most remote from the sun). Actually, Mercury, nearest to the sun, is a small planet. Venus is larger; earth is a little larger than Venus; Jupiter is three hundred and twenty times as large as the earth (in mass); Saturn is somewhat smaller than Jupiter; Uranus and Neptune, though large planets, are not as large as Jupiter and Saturn. Pluto is quite as small as Mercury.

The first difficulty of the tidal hypothesis lies in the very point adduced in its support, the mass of the planets. Between the earth and Jupiter there revolves a small planet, Mars, a tenth part of the earth in mass, where, according to the scheme, a planet ten to fifty times as large as the earth should be expected. Again, Neptune is larger and not smaller than Uranus.

Another difficulty is the allegedly rare chance of an encounter between two stars. One of the authors of the tidal theory gave this estimate of its probability:

“At a rough estimate we may suppose that a given star’s chance of forming a planetary system is one in 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.” But since the life span of a star is much shorter than this figure, “only about one star in 100,000 can have formed a planetary system in the whole of its life.” In the galactic system of one hundred million stars, planetary systems “form at the rate of about one per five billion years… our own system, with an age of the order of two billion years, is probably the youngest system in the whole galactic system of stars.” The nebular and tidal theories alike regard the planets as derivatives of the sun, and the satellites as derivatives of the planets.

The problem of the origin of the moon can be regarded as disturbing to the tidal theory. Being smaller than the earth, the moon completed earlier the process of cooling and shrinking, and the lunar volcanoes had already ceased to be active. It is calculated that the moon possesses a lighter specific weight than the earth. It is assumed that the moon was produced from the superficial layers of the earth’s body, which are rich in light silicon, whereas the core of the earth, the main portion of its body, is made of heavy metals, particularly iron. But this assumption postulates the origin of the moon as not simultaneous with the origin of the earth; the earth, being formed out of a mass ejected from the sun, had to undergo a process of leveling, which placed the heavy metals in the core and silicon at the periphery, before the moon parted from the earth by a new tidal distortion. This would mean two consecutive tidal distortions in a system where the chance of even one is held extremely rare. If the passing of one star near another happens among one hundred million stars once in five billion years, two occurrences like this for one and the same star seem quite incredible. Therefore, as no better explanation is available, the satellites are supposed to have been torn from the planets by the sun’s attraction on their first perihelion passage, when, sweeping along on stretched orbits, the planets came close to the sun.

The circling of the satellites around the planets also confronts existing cosmological theories with difficulties. Laplace built his theory of the origin of the solar system on the assumption that all planets and satellites revolve in the same direction. He wrote that the axial rotation of the sun and the orbital revolutions and axial rotations of the six planets, the moon, the satellites, and the rings of Saturn present forty-three movements, all in the same direction. “One finds by the analysis of the probabilities that there are more than four thousand billion chances to one that this arrangement is not the result of chance, this probability is considerably higher than that of the reality of historical events with regard to which no one would venture a doubt.” He deduced that a common and primal cause directed the movements of the planets and satellites.

Since the time of Laplace, new members of the solar system have been discovered. Now we know that though the majority of the satellites revolve in the same direction as the planets revolve and the sun rotates, the moons of Uranus revolve in a plane almost perpendicular to the orbital plane of their planet, and three of the eleven moons of Jupiter, one of the nine moons of Saturn, and the one moon of Neptune revolve retrogradely. These facts contradict the main argument of the Laplace theory: a rotating nebula could not produce satellites revolving in two directions.

In the tidal theory the direction of the planets’ movements depended on the star that passed: it passed in the plane in which the planets now revolve and in a direction which determined their circling from west to east. But why should the satellites of Uranus revolve perpendicularly to that plane and some moons of Jupiter and Saturn in reverse directions? This the tidal theory fails to explain.

According to all existing theories, the angular velocity of the revolution of a satellite must be slower than the velocity of rotation of its parent. But the inner satellite of Mars revolves more rapidly than Mars rotates.

Some of the difficulties that confront the nebular and tidal theories also confront another theory that has been proposed in recent years. According to it, the sun is supposed to have been a member of a double star system. A passing star crushed the companion of the sun, and out of its debris planets were formed. In further development of this hypothesis, it is maintained that the larger planets were built out of the debris, and the smaller ones, the so-called “terrestrial” planets, were formed from the larger ones by a process of cleavage.

The birth of smaller, solid planets out of the larger, gaseous ones is conjectured in order to explain the difference in the relation of weight to volume in the larger and smaller planets; but this theory is unable to explain the difference in the specific weights of the smaller planets and their satellites. By a process of cleavage, the moon was born of the earth; but since the specific weight of the moon is greater than that of the larger planets and smaller than that of the earth, it would seem to be more in accord with the theory that the earth was born of the moon, despite its smallness. This confuses the argument.

The origin of the planets and their satellites remains unsolved. The theories not only contradict one another, but each of them bears within itself its own contradictions. “If the sun had been unattended by planets, its origin and evolution would have presented no difficulty.”

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