For millions of years, the starry sky has attracted a person with its mystery. Our distant ancestors believed that everything that happens on our planet was sent from above. Over time, people learned to read the starry sky like a book. However, many of the mysteries of space remain unsolved to this day. One of these secrets is associated with the disappearance of the planet Phaethon …
A long-standing mystery for scientific astronomers is the field of asteroids, which are located in the space between Mars and Jupiter. Since ancient times, astrologers have been surprised by such an arrangement of cosmic bodies. Many agreed that there must be another planet in this place.
So, in Georgia, a copy of a document from 1561 has been preserved, which says that there is another star near Mars. On clay tablets of ancient shumad (V-IV millennium BC) information is recorded, from which it follows that between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, people observed an "invisible planet." This kind of mystery is found in the ancient Chinese annals.
Chance helped shed light on the search for a mysterious planet. 1766 - German astronomer, physicist and mathematician Johann Titius formulated, and another German astronomer, Johann Bode, substantiated the numerical pattern in the distances of planets from the Sun. According to this pattern, between Mars and Jupiter, there should be a "planet number 5". The fact that the Titius-Bode rule works is proved by the subsequent discoveries of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
At the end of the 18th century, at a congress in the German city of Gotha, they decided to start searching for the missing planet. But none of the astronomers entrusted with the observation were lucky. The planet was discovered in 1801 by Giuseppo Piazzi, director of the observatory in Palermo (Sicily). When the orbit of this cosmic body was calculated, it turned out that it moves exactly at the distance from the Sun, which predicts the Titius-Bode rule. Scientists rejoiced: the missing planet was discovered. She was named Ceres, after the patron goddess of Sicily.
But soon the joy of astronomers was overshadowed by a chain of new discoveries. 1802 - discovered between Jupiter and Mars another small planet - Pallada. 1804 - the third planet - Juno, and in 1807 - Vesta. So, where they expected to find one large planet, they found four small ones. Meanwhile, the stream of discoveries of small planets (they are also called asteroids, that is, "star-like") did not stop, and by 1890 more than 300 of them were known. Astronomers were sure that between Mars and Jupiter in orbits around the Sun a whole swarm of small planets. In our time, about 2,000 asteroids are known. And according to some estimates, their number may exceed 7000.
They all moved at approximately the same distance from the Sun as Ceres - 2.8 AU (one AU is equal to the Earth's distance from the Sun, which is 150 million km). It was this circumstance that made it possible for the German astronomer G. Olbers back in 1804 to put forward a hypothesis that the minor planets resulted from the disintegration of one large planet, which he named Phaethon.
So, according to ancient Greek myths, the name of the son of the sun god Helios was. Once Phaethon begged his father to allow him to drive the golden chariot of the Sun, in which Helios made his daily journey across the sky. The father did not agree for a long time, but in the end he succumbed to the desire of the young man. But Phaethon lost his way among the celestial constellations. The horses, feeling the driver's uncertain hand, carried it. And when the chariot approached a dangerous distance to our planet, the flame engulfed the Earth. God Zeus the Thunderer, to save the Earth, threw lightning into the chariot. Phaethon fell to Earth and died.
Promotional video:
This is how a beautiful legend received a real scientific basis. Although some contemporaries of H. Olbers (W. Herschel, Laverrier, P. Laplace) expressed other assumptions about the origin of asteroids, but Olbers's point of view was more popular, which better explained all the facts known then.
The hypothesis of the German scientist turned out to be so plausible that the existence of Phaethon was considered generally recognized until 1944, before the appearance of the cosmological theory of O. Yu. Schmidt, who interpreted the appearance of asteroids differently. According to this theory, asteroids are not fragments of Phaeton, but the matter of some unformed planet. At the dawn of the birth of the planets, about four billion years ago, the young Sun was surrounded by a cloud of gas and dust. Due to the relatively low velocities, the dust particles began to quickly stick together, forming cosmic bodies comparable in size to modern asteroids.
The fastest process of birth of these bodies took place in the region of the orbit of the present Jupiter, where the largest planet was formed. The growing Jupiter eventually began to push protoasteroids out of its zone of influence, generating chaotic motion among them. They could no longer unite, the fragmentation process began to prevail over the growth process. Part of the protoasteroids left the solar system, the other part from time to time returns in the form of comets, reaching the Earth.
Studying the falling meteorites was one of the ways to find out if the planet Phaethon existed. Academician A. Zavarnitsky, relying on analyzes of the composition of meteorites, made an attempt to reconstruct the structure of the dead planet Phaeton. He considered iron meteorites to be fragments of the planetary core, stone meteorites as remnants of the crust, and iron-stone ones as mantles.
Science, proving the reality of the existence of the once planet Phaeton, relies on the fact that meteorites that have fallen to the Earth have only two classes of mean densities, which could appear only during the destruction of the shell and core of a celestial body, that is, meteorites are part of one planet, which includes they have gone through the processes of densification, remelting, mixing and crystallization.
Fossilized bacteria, similar to terrestrial cyanobacteria, were found by paleontologists in stony matter. These microorganisms live in rocks and hot springs, feeding on chemical reactions and do not need oxygen or sunlight. This indicates that the meteorite substance was formed on a large celestial body and life existed on it.
Despite the above arguments, for the most part modern scientists question the theory of G. Olbers. In the 1970s, the opinion began to prevail that the planet Phaethon did not exist, but that there were remnants of the unreacted primary matter of the protosolar nebula, from which the Asteroid Ring between Mars and Jupiter emerged.
Astronomer A. N. Chibisov (Moscow), using the methods of celestial mechanics, tried to "collect" the asteroids together and determine the approximate orbit of the parent planet. He came to the conclusion that it is impossible to determine either the area where the planet exploded, nor the orbit in which it moved before the explosion.
Scientist I. F. Sultanov (Azerbaijan) approached this issue from the other side. He calculated how the fragments should have been distributed in space after the explosion of the planet. The data obtained was compared with the existing distribution of asteroids. The result was not in favor of the Olbers theory.
But in the early 1970s, astronomers calculated a hypothetical mass for the planet and suggested that the destruction occurred about 16 million years ago. For such a long time, under the influence of the planets, the orbits of asteroids have become entangled to such an extent that it is simply not possible to restore the initial conditions.
Many of the defenders of the planet Phaethon question this date. If Phaethon exploded 16 million years ago, then where did the trail from the asteroid that fell on our planet 65 million years ago come from? Alternatively, they suggest a later date of 4 billion years.
There is no consensus among experts regarding the reasons for the death of Phaethon. Some believe that the planet died as a result of volcanic activity, others - that Phaethon was torn apart by centrifugal force due to too fast daily rotation. Some see the reason for the death of the planet in a collision with its own satellite or a dangerous approach to Jupiter.
A number of astronomers associate the death of the planet Phaethon with the movement of the solar system through the jet streams of the Milky Way. A passing star by the force of its gravity destroyed Phaeton.
Supporters of the stellar theory do not agree with this development of events, who consider Phaethon not an ordinary planet of the solar system, but a dwarf star.
The fatal role in the death of Phaethon was played by the jet stream, which was literally packed with comets. The largest of them dealt a crushing blow to Phaeton, resulting in an explosion. Pieces of the exploding star, mixing with comets, flew in different directions. Departing from orbit between Mars and Jupiter, they collided with the planets of the solar system, leaving giant craters on them. These collisions disfigured beyond recognition the nearest planet - Mars. Our planet, in comparison with Mars, suffered less from collisions. Some of the scientists associate the explosion of the planet Phaethon with the death of dinosaurs and the beginning of a new evolutionary round of life forms on Earth.
Experts from the NASA Space Agency Research Center see the reason for the death of Phaeton in the instability of its orbit between Jupiter, Mars and the asteroid strip. As a result of the interaction of the planet and asteroids, the latter also began to change their orbits. Some of these asteroids began to cross the orbit of our planet and bombard it and the Moon. Having brought chaos into the inner part of the solar system, Phaethon disappeared by itself: most likely, moving in a highly elongated orbit, this planet approached the Sun at a dangerous distance and was swallowed by it.
Now a hypothesis is being actively developed according to which the planet Phaethon did not perish, but continues to exist in the outer orbit of Pluto. During the transition to a new stage of development (from a planet to a star) about 4 billion years ago, it "shed" about 10% of its mass (crust or "shell"), which became the asteroid belt of the solar system.
To this day, all attempts to detect Phaethon ended in nothing, although the presence of an extraneous gravitational field in the solar system was replaced long ago. In the 1980s, the American spacecraft Pioneer and Voyager began to deviate more and more from the calculated trajectories as they approached the boundaries of the solar system. Calculations show that the deviations are caused by the presence of a gravitational field of an unknown planetary mass beyond Pluto's orbit.
And in 1997, American astronomers explained that they had discovered a small planet at the periphery of the solar system. It revolves around the Sun in an elliptical orbit, approaching it at a minimum distance of 35 and moving away at a maximum distance of 130 astronomical units. Maybe this planet should be considered Phaeton? And this very star was seen by the Magi from the East 2,000 years ago, and its description is present in the ancient chronicles? The answers to these questions and many others related to the mysteries of the "invisible planet" have yet to be given by scientists in the future.
V. Syadro, T. Iovleva