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.
2. The Explanatory and Predictive Power of the Exploded Planet Hypothesis
a. Asteroids and Meteorites
However, notwithstanding the problem of the enormous energy required for a planet to blow up, plus the additional problem of a plausible physical model by which such an event may be explained by natural causes, the Exploded Planet Hypothesis does possess enormous explanatory and predictive power, an explanatory and predictive power that far exceeds those of the favored theories within contemporary astronomy.
For example, the hypothesis is more than an adequate explanation not only for the occurrence of meteorites, but for some of their more unusual features:
Some of them show evidence of rapid melting a long time ago, as if they were affected by an immense heat blast. A few show evidence of shock, others are badly charred. Some meteorites display evidence that they formed in a high-temperature or high-pressure environment, as in the interior of a large planet; for example, tiny diamonds have occasionally been reported in meteorites. And there is specific evidence of exposure to an event of enormous energy, which conventional theory supposes to have been a nearby supernova.14
Moreover, those bodies without an atmosphere in the “outer solar system are coated with an extremely dark material. This may be the carbonaceous residue from the blast.”15Additionally, some of the moons of Neptune lie within the Roche limit “where tidal stresses would tear apart a forming body.” Remember this point about tidal stresses, for it will become crucially important in a moment. This means simply that these “moonlets” simply could not have been formed near their current orbits, but were the result of capture, and the “exploded planet hypothesis provides a natural origin” for this phenomenon.16
And as for the presence of diamonds in some meteorites, this is not the only unusual feature of meteorites that the hypothesis helps to explain. Their presence in fact led some astronomers to propose novel and heretofore unknown mechanisms for their formation from “space collisions” or “during atmospheric entry or by Earth-impact shock” without the need for the sudden shock and high-pressure high-heat environment of a planetary explosion. But there exists one unshocked meteorite, named Abee, where none of these suggestions “can be operative.” Moreover, there are diamonds found at the K/T geological boundary on earth (ca. 65,000,000 years ago) that “are confirmed to be of extraterrestrial origin” and which therefore cannot be generated by earth impact.17
Yet another unusual feature is explained by the hypothesis. Van Flandern puts it this way:
Asteroids exhibit “explosion signatures” in the distribution of their orbital elements. These relationships between the orbital elements “a” (semi-major axis), “e” (eccentricity), and “I” (inclination) were first found among fragments from artificial satellites of the Earth which exploded in orbit, and then were found to hold for the asteroid belt as well.18
The theory explains why some of these asteroids, which appear to have their own even smaller satellites, even have such satellites at all, for “tidal forces and collisions should have eliminated most minor planet satellites in far less than the age of the solar system, but not in a time as short as a few million years.”19In other words, the event that led to the formation of the asteroid belt, in which one finds asteroids with their own tiny satellites, must have occurred in a relatively “recent” time as far as astronomical times go, in the last few million years. As we shall soon discover, the timing of this event will assume enormous importance both for the development of the Exploded Planet, and for the Cosmic War, Hypothesis.
b. Comets
While the Exploded Planet Hypothesis was first formulated by Olbers to explain the existence of asteroids, Lagrange soon found an even more interesting aspect of its explanatory power: it adequately accounted not only for the existence of the elongated orbits of comets and their large orbital periods, but it accounted adequately for their origin. It also accounted for another odd feature of comets, or rather, for an odd feature that has never been observed about comets. If one assumes, as contemporary astronomical theory does, that most comets originate from a point beyond the planetary solar system, that is, from a point beyond Pluto, then one should expe
ct that there is a class of comet, on hyperbolic orbits, that will take them into the solar system once, then back out of it, once, never to return. But no such orbits have ever been observed for comets.20
This raises the issue of the current standard theory for the origin of comets, the so-called “Oort cloud” and its corollaries. The Oort cloud is contemporary astronomy’s accepted standard model for the origin of comets. This “cloud” is thought to be a region of “space debris” far beyond the orbit of Pluto, at the very fringes of the solar system. At such distances, the debris is thought to be able to react to the gravitation of passing stars, which then more or less “kick” it into the wild orbits we observe as comets. But this theory should mean that some comets are “kicked” into the hyperbolic orbits already described, and these should “arrive at the rate of at least a few per century if comets have been interacting with passing stars for billions of years.”21 But comets, as we know, return. They may be recurrent pests, visiting every few decades or so, or the occasional visitor stopping by once every few hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years. But the point is, they return, and if they return, then there is a regularity and pattern to their orbits that is difficult for the Oort Cloud model to predict. It is here that the scientific priesthood stepped in with a quick patch to fix the leaky structure:
To minimize these difficulties it is now imagined that the Oort cloud comets come form a hypothetical “inner core” between the planetary region22 and the Oort cloud. There is no observational evidence for such a region - it is simply a theoretical construct. Then the inner core is fed by a hypothesized “Kuiper belt” of comets of nearly circular orbits near the plane of the other planets, beginning just outside the orbit of Neptune, which is supposed to have been left over from the primeval solar nebula. Again, there is no observational evidence for this region either, despite many intensive searches...23
Thus, Van Flandern proposed a revival and revision of the Exploded Planet Hypothesis in 1978, since the origin of comets in the explosion of a planet would explain the observed characteristics of their orbits “in an a priori way.” Moreover, the new theory proposed that the exploded planet, which was the origin of comets, existed in a parent body “in or near the present location of the asteroid belt” and that this event had necessarily occurred “in the relatively recent past.”24
Such a theory makes far more sense than an imaginary theoretical construct like the Oort Cloud, with its recent “fix”, the Kuiper Belt, for yet another simple reason. In order for the Oort cloud theory to work, the “debris cloud” which comprises it has “to be immense in order to provide the few comets we observe, because the chances are so small of any one comet being perturbed into observable range.”25
In summary, the hypothesis that comets originated in a breakup event only a few million years ago in the inner solar system makes a number of very specific predictions: that there will exist a category of first return (“new”) comets; that these will have huge aphelion distances with intrinsically very little scatter; that they will come from preferred directions on the celestial sphere with a specific percentage bias; that the number of orbits will diminish as one looks closer to the Sun; that the distances and directions of approach will be correlated; and several other characteristics.26
Thus,
The exploded planet theory is the only dynamically viable alternative to the Oort cloud. The latter requires the existence of an implausible cloud of more than a trillion comets orbiting the Sun at distances 1000 times that of Pluto, so remote that passing stars would frequently pass through it.27
The failure of this standard Oort cloud theory to detect any source for a re-supply of the Oort cloud “from a hypothetical inner ‘Kuiper Belt’ means that Oort cloud comets should have long since been depleted by passing stars, galactic tides, and passage of the Sun....unless comets originated quite recently.”28
c. Other Phenomena Explained by the Exploding Planet Hypothesis
Other strange solar system phenomena are explained by the hypothesis, not the least of which is the strange hemispheric discrepancy observed on the Earth’s satellite, the Moon, and its even stranger regions of anomalous “denser mass,” the well-known “mascons,” for
The Moon’s hemispheric asymmetry could have been caused by the blast. It would then be no coincidence that the hemisphere with all the dark “seas” faces the Earth, since the extra mass accreted by the Moon (which shows up as “mascons” — mass concentrations under the lunar “seas”, which are actually lava flows) would have caused the Moon to change its orientation until its “heavy side” faced “down”.29
Yet another odd feature explained by the hypothesis is that the orbit of Mars’ moon Phobos will decay into Mars’ atmosphere “in about 30-40 million years,” a fact which is explainable if Phobos originated about “3,200,000 years ago.”30 Note now that one has the first indicator of a more or less exact time that the explosion of the missing planet occurred. This will become quite the crucial point as we proceed.
A loose corroboration of this timing is provided by the fact that the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium on Mars indicates that the Red Planet’s “formerly abundant flowing water has been lost in just the last 105 to 107 years,”31 that is, Mars lost its water between 100,000 and 10,000,000 years ago. This would mean that during the 3,200,000 years event, Mars may still have been a water-bearing planet. Yet another loose corroboration of the 3,200,000 years benchmark is provided by Jupiter and its massive gravity itself. While Jupiter’s mass “is insufficient to have interfered with the formation of a normal planet” in the asteroid belt, it is sufficient to have “swept up almost all the mass from the exploded planet that did not escape the solar system.” Even its excess heat “may be an indication of relatively recent mass accretion by the planet.”32
d. The Timing of the Event: 3,200,000 Years Ago
In its original version, Van Flandern was led by the preponderance of the evidence, especially the mathematical, statistical evidence based on cometary orbits, to suggest that the explosion of the missing planet occurred some 3,200,000 years ago. He describes what then occurred in very suggestive terms:
Let us go back in time three million years. On Earth, the dinosaurs became extinct much earlier, land animals gave rise to the primates, and the earliest ancestors of man have just appeared on the scene. Elsewhere in the solar system everything is as we know it in the twentieth century, with one major exception. There is one additional planet between Mars and Jupiter, larger than any of the others except Jupiter itself. From Earth the extra planet is bright enough to be seen in the daytime, and dominates the night sky with its brilliance.
Suddenly, it explodes! Like a nova in our own solar system, it brightens until it outshines the Sun itself. Solid, liquid, and gaseous debris is hurled into space at high velocities in all directions. Nonetheless, it takes months for the leading edge of the blast to reach the Earth. What a sight it would have been for early man to see! The sky ablaze with meteors night and day unceasingly for months.33
Such an event, and its effect on the Earth and any observers on it, would clearly have been very dramatic, as Van Flandern suggests. More importantly, it would have had an inevitable effect on the Earth’s geology and climate. Indeed, it is precisely around the same time frame, approximately 3,000,000 years ago, that the equatorial-like climatic conditions which are believed to have prevailed on the Earth up until that time, suddenly changed to “a succession of ice ages over the past 3,000,000 years or so.”34 While the mechanism for such a sudden change is not known in conventional theories, a “massive influx of water vapor from the planetary explosion may have been responsible.”35 Indeed, to the influx of water vapor one would also have to add an influx of “debris” and “dust” that would have had atmospheric and climate-altering potential.
So what do we know about the missing planet? “Ovenden’s dynamical calculations indicate that a massive planet, perhaps Saturn-sized, is missing from the gap between Mars an
d Jupiter, where the main belt of asteroids is found.”36 Since comets and asteroids also appear to be about 20% water,37 we can now draw some conclusions:
1. The planet was large, approximately the same mass as Saturn.
2. The planet was solid, for diamond bearing carbonaceous asteroids appear as the debris of its explosion.
3. The planet was very likely a water-bearing planet, since Mars, exhibits definite and distinct evidence of sudden, massive flooding across its entire southern hemisphere.
We may now speculate a bit further. If this planet was home to intelligent human-like life, it would seem to be likely that such life would have been of much larger size, with more massive skeletal structure and musculature to accommodate the higher gravity. In short, such creatures would be, by modern human standards, giants. Thus, the existence of any remains of such creatures might be explainable as having an ultimate origin on such a world, and would therefore constitute corroborative evidence — of a very loose sort, to be sure - of the existence of such a planet.
The Cosmic War: Interplanetary Warfare, Modern Physics and Ancient Texts Page 3
