David Calder Hardy's Cosmology
What Makes a Rocky Planet
I think that the artists impression above portrays the content of the scientific report at left very well, so lets take a close look at what appears to be happening within it.
There are four planetoids belting around in fixed orbit within a disk of dust and gas. (Ok, that's obvious). But is it possible?
Before I say no, lets come back to earth and look at the Concord, a plane built to travel at twice the speed of sound. At that speed, 1,520 miles an hour or 2,400 kms, an hour, the plane heated up even in the very rarefied upper atmosphere of our tiny planet. If the plane had flown in a slightly denser atmosphere closer to the ground at that speed it would have burst into flames through friction.
This same problem is faced with space shuttles and with anything that has to fall into our atmosphere from outside of it. And how dense is our atmosphere? Without going into figures just let's say that it is an infintisimal pressure compared with the pressures within that nebula in the picture.
Our earth belts around the sun at 30 kms a second, or 108,000 kms an hour, and let's say that's 42 times faster than Concord. Any one of those planets in the picture has to be travelling more or less at 100,000 kms. an hour, just to stay in orbit. That point is vital and inescapable.
So some may be thinking that the nebula is also belting around the growing star as well. Firstly, the picture does not show that to be so, and secondly, orbiting material will not fall into the central forming star, so if it is travelling around the star, it's doing so very, very slowly. And the reason for that is that the nebula material has to collapse into the growing star in order to form a star, which is the end result after all. This means that the dust and gas right in close to the star is under incredible pressure; pressure higher than we can produce on earth, even by compression from an explosion.
Instead this material doesn't explode but does the very opposite. It implodes, and by doing so it's mass becomes violently crushed and reduced and it's ambient heat is intensely compressed within it. This atomically converted material, slams into the growing star and the unaffected nebula dust/gas beyond instantly blasts in to occupy the space vacated by its absense. Lets just accept the fact that anything like a planet within the nebula will not survive that holocaust and stay fixed in its orbit. How on earth could it.
The collapsing of a nebula is dependant upon huge pressures exerted onto the centre core of the growing star, which by implosion after implosion will absorb the whole nebula mass. What is left at the end of the performance is a star made of all the elements we know of. Any gas not absorbed will be blown away by solar wind.
So nothing is left in orbit and we have the whole huge gravitational mass of gas and dust, plus anything that looked like a planet, cleared from the trillions of cubic kilometers it once occupied, and now is concentrated in a new radiant star some one hundred and fifty times the size of our sun.
It may be said that the planets could belt around unharmed if the nebula belted around at the correct orbital speed for all of them. The image does not show that, which means that probably more collapses, or at least absorption by the star are imminent within the scene above. One has to ask then, what would happen to all this dust if it all reached orbital velocity? It's too heavy to be blasted away to the Kuiper Belt by the solar wind, and it can't stay where it is. Stars don't have stuff like that hanging around.
I think that a nebula, such is shown, has to keep on collapsing and the only way it could stop would be if it was not in contact with the star and it's disk radius was not tapered. It would have to be somewhat like Saturn, where the inner ring is above and not in contact with Saturn's more stationary atmosphere. Contact with the star would create drag and that would slow the nebula orbital velocity.
When you read the article to the left, none of the aformentioned problems with planet formation within a collapsing nebula are addressed. Why?
Genesis Continuous, as it occured to me back in 1971 was even then a denial of what the scientific people were saying, and obviously what they are still saying today. The picture above is just as I saw it in my mind from the description presented by science back in those days of building planets. The only difference was that rings of dust were left over after the nebula had collapsed, which later somehow or other rolled up into planets, all nicely spaced out in their Bode orbital positions. I said, NO then and I say NO, now.
But why is this glitch in Cosmology such a problem? Frustratingly it shuts a door on what is almost certainly happening throughout the universe. That is a continuum of planet birth and destiny and star formation.
Quite simply, within a time framework of 13.7 billion years, (since Big Bang), there is not enough time for all the right things to happen in a recycleable universe. Planets have no destiny. Science doesn't talk about old planets and what happens to them. Probably nobody cares. Planets are said to be in fixed orbits right from the beginning of their existence, and somehow that's it. Perhaps they assume that they just fade away.
But when we speak of gas nebulae, is it taken for granted that there is or was nothing for the gas to cling to? I cannot believe that. A gas giant like our outer planets, are, to all intent and purposes, baby nebula that can't grow whilst the mother sun's solar wind keeps blowing any free gas away out to the kuiper belt or where ever. But a spiralling planet, being released by a shrinking star losing gravity, will eventually drift away from orbit. It will collect a bigger and bigger atmosphere as it travels away and the name gas giant will then change to nebula.
Science has recently discovered 13 free roaming gas giants in a part of the Milky way and they've got some funny ideas of how they came to exist. And that's because they stick to their antiquated text books that support fixed orbit planetary systems, born during the nebula collapse, Big Bang and a 13.7 billion year existence.
Our sun has nine or ten or perhaps more planets that will all be released, I think, about 2.5 billion years apart. These are non-radiant bodies absolutely ideal to collect gas and become nebula.
They have made a start already and being non-radiant, this is something that as far as I know, only they can do.
So instead of a supernova being needed to trigger the collapse of a nebula, there is an old molten planet right in the middle of it just waiting for the right pressure to explode. The explosion compresses the gas immediately above and around it and that triggers implosion number one. Science now says that there appears to be a limit to the size of stars, and that concurs with what I have said.
So look at a planetary system and how it is layed out,- watch the oldest planets drift away and eventually become stars, - add more generations to that scenario, - perhaps thousands of them, and you have a picture of how galaxies are layed out. And there can only be one result - eternity.
Incidentally, there's something else those 23 scientists have not explained, and that is why their planets haven't got iron cores. According to them the nebula was composed of hydrogen and silica. There has to be iron in a star to create an equitorial plane of planets, and that's acceptable, but the planets must have iron in them to respond to that polarity control.
At this very moment there is an asteroid belt of iron rich rocks 2 solar widths away from the sun. I predicted its existence back in 1972, and it was actually discovered in 1983. To me that placed the birth of planets etc., in a very different arena. One where solar wind cleared the way for their orbital freedom, and where molten or semi-molten iron could first roll up into a planetisimal and over billions of years, grow from collision with all sorts of extraterrestrial material and spiral away.
So iron rich, probably semi molten rocks is just what is needed to form the core of a planet. I believe that this little ring of iron is continually added to by eruption from the sun. About every 2 to 2.5 billion years, it rolls up, by attraction, and becomes a planetisimal somewhat like Mercury would have been a billion years ago. And yes, moons could form up at the same time and being smaller, would go into orbit around the larger body. No glancing blow by some rogue planet that bounced off earth and formed the moon. (There are too many moons around for that explanation). In fact, there need be nothing unique or accidental in the formation of a planetary, luna, cometry system.
I wonder if this work by 23 experts is designed to just confuse and not to inform, like a Discovery channel concoction of purely imaginary graphic sequences shrouded in unrelated weird music and the commentator's threats of disaster that leaves the viewer wondering what or what not to believe, and the milkman, because he watched it and couldn't sleep, was late for his delivery in the morning.
It is these important points that Genesis Continuous is based upon. There's a lot more problems dealt with here than the one above.
The problem then, for Science, is their inability to describe a plausable, rational, no-nonsense up and running universe that surely we should be happy to believe in and expect to be eternal. Let the evolution of Big Bang give way to creation and re-creation and more creation for ever and ever.
There is another odd thing about the nebula pictured above. Is it just the central remains of a nebula that was vastly larger when it first started to collapse, and why is there so much dust in it?
A nebula of mainly hydrogen is surely most unlikely to support the heavier molecules of silica. Even a dust storm on earth clears when the wind stops and all the dust falls back onto the ground, leaving a cleared atmosphere. Why, or how does this dust remain air-born or, even less likely, hydrogen-born when its tendency would be to fall through the gas and become a separate mass virtually on top of the star - or be immediately absorbed by the star.
Dust must surely make its way down through the nebula over the millions or billions of years it exists and settle onto the core at the centre, leaving a cleared hydrogen atmosphere above. Or, as it gets closer to the centre it whips into orbital velocity leaving the gas sitting on top of it. But the growing pressure of the accumulating gas from above surely must force the dust into the growing star. thereby causing planet making to be utterly impossible Once again, how can a planetoid ploughing through a more sluggish nebula not burn up?
Another aspect of the collapse is that orbiting material will be attracted to the equatorial of the star by magnetic attraction and also to the centre of the star by gravity. Therefore a collapsing nebula has a problem proportional to its width. All of it will be drawn to the equatorial and will obviously be in collision.. The stuff farthest away from the equatorial will, if it didn't strike something, cross the equatorial every half orbit. At the same time, stuff on the other side will be crossing the other way. Collision must be a constant occurence and be proportional to density, width, and distance from the growing star. Any planet caught up in that field is certainly going to get beaten up.
Clearly, since everything not on the equitorial will be pushing it's way toward it, from both sides. The fact that the nebula bulges outward further as it gets closer to the star, means that stuff could be trying to orbit at fortyfive degrees or more from the true equitorial.
Summary - (Nov 25, 2004) Protoplanetary discs surrounding new stars seem to have the building blocks for rocky planets right from the start, according to new research from an international team of researchers. The astronomers used the European Southern Observatory's VLT Interferometer to examine the discs around three young stars, which were similar to what our own Sun looked like more than 4.5 billion years ago. They found that the inner part of these discs is very rich in sand, ready to be clumped by gravity into larger and larger rocks until full planets form.Full Story - One of the currently hottest astrophysical topics - the hunt for Earth-like planets around other stars - has just received an important impetus from new spectral observations with the MIDI instrument at the ESO VLT Interferometer (VLTI).
An international team of astronomers [2] has obtained unique infrared spectra of the dust in the innermost regions of the proto-planetary discs around three young stars - now in a state possibly very similar to that of our solar system in the making, some 4,500 million years ago.
Reporting in this week's issue of the science journal Nature, and thanks to the unequalled, sharp and penetrating view of interferometry, they show that in all three, the right ingredients are present in the right place to start formation of rocky planets at these stars.
"Sand" in the inner regions of stellar discs
The Sun was born about 4,500 million years ago from a cold and massive cloud of interstellar gas and dust that collapsed under its own gravitational pull. A dusty disc was present around the young star, in which the Earth and other planets, as well as comets and asteroids were later formed.This epoch is long gone, but we may still witness that same process by observing the infrared emission from very young stars and the dusty protoplanetary discs around them. So far, however, the available instrumentation did not allow a study of the distribution of the different components of the dust in such discs; even the closest known are too far away for the best single telescopes to resolve them. But now, as Francesco Paresce, Project Scientist for the VLT Interferometer and a member of the team from ESO explains, "With the VLTI we can combine the light from two well-separated large telescopes to obtain unprecedented angular resolution. This has allowed us, for the first time, to peer directly into the innermost region of the discs around some nearby young stars, right in the place where we expect planets like our Earth are forming or will soon form".
Specifically, new interferometric observations of three young stars by an international team [2], using the combined power of two 8.2-m VLT telescopes a hundred metres apart, has achieved sufficient image sharpness (about 0.02 arcsec) to measure the infrared emission from the inner region of the discs around three stars (corresponding approximately to the size of the Earth's orbit around the Sun) and the emission from the outer part of those discs. The corresponding infrared spectra have provided crucial information about the chemical composition of the dust in the discs and also about the average grain size.
These trailblazing observations show that the inner part of the discs is very rich in crystalline silicate grains ("sand") with an average diameter of about 0.001 mm. They are formed by coagulation of much smaller, amorphous dust grains that were omnipresent in the interstellar cloud that gave birth to the stars and their discs.
Model calculations show that crystalline grains should be abundantly present in the inner part of the disc at the time of formation of the Earth. In fact, the meteorites in our own solar system are mainly composed of this kind of silicate.
Dutch astronomer Rens Waters, a member of the team from the Astronomical Institute of University of Amsterdam, is enthusiastic: "With all the ingredients in place and the formation of larger grains from dust already started, the formation of bigger and bigger chunks of stone and, finally, Earth-like planets from these discs is almost unavoidable!"
Transforming the grains
It has been known for some time that most of the dust in discs around newborn stars is made up of silicates. In the natal cloud this dust is amorphous, i.e. the atoms and molecules that make up a dust grain are put together in a chaotic way, and the grains are fluffy and very small, typically about 0.0001 mm in size. However, near the young star where the temperature and density are highest, the dust particles in the circumstellar disc tend to stick together so that the grains become larger. Moreover, the dust is heated by stellar radiation and this causes the molecules in the grains to re-arrange themselves in geometric (crystalline) patterns.Accordingly, the dust in the disc regions that are closest to the star is soon transformed from "pristine" (small and amorphous) to "processed" (larger and crystalline) grains.
Spectral observations of silicate grains in the mid-infrared wavelength region (around 10 µm) will tell whether they are "pristine" or "processed". Earlier observations of discs around young stars have shown a mixture of pristine and processed material to be present, but it was so far impossible to tell where the different grains resided in the disc.
Thanks to a hundred-fold increase in angular resolution with the VLTI and the highly sensitive MIDI instrument, detailed infrared spectra of the various regions of the protoplanetary discs around three newborn stars, only a few million years old, now show that the dust close to the star is much more processed than the dust in the outer disc regions. In two stars (HD 144432 and HD 163296) the dust in the inner disc is fairly processed whereas the dust in the outer disc is nearly pristine. In the third star (HD 142527) the dust is processed in the entire disc. In the central region of this disc, it is extremely processed, consistent with completely crystalline dust.
An important conclusion from the VLTI observations is therefore that the building blocks for Earth-like planets are present in circumstellar discs from the very start. This is of great importance as it indicates that planets of the terrestrial (rocky) type like the Earth are most probably quite common in planetary systems, also outside the solar system.
The pristine comets
The present observations also have implications for the study of comets. Some - perhaps all - comets in the solar system do contain both pristine (amorphous) and processed (crystalline) dust. Comets were definitely formed at large distances from the Sun, in the outer regions of the solar system where it has always been very cold. It is therefore not clear how processed dust grains may end up in comets.In one theory, processed dust is transported outwards from the young Sun by turbulence in the rather dense circumsolar disc. Other theories claim that the processed dust in comets was produced locally in the cold regions over a much longer time, perhaps by shock waves or lightning bolts in the disc, or by frequent collisions between bigger fragments.
The present team of astronomers now conclude that the first theory is the most likely explanation for the presence of processed dust in comets. This also implies that the long-period comets that sometimes visit us from the outer reaches of our solar system are truly pristine bodies, dating back to an era when the Earth and the other planets had not yet been formed.
Studies of such comets, especially when performed in-situ, will therefore provide direct access to the original material from which the solar system was formed.
More information
The results reported in this ESO PR are presented in more detail in a research paper "The building blocks of planets within the "terrestrial" region of protoplanetary disks", by Roy van Boekel and co-authors (Nature, November 25, 2004). The observations were made in the course of ESO's early science demonstration programme.Notes
[1]: This ESO press release is issued in collaboration with the Astronomical Institute of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (NOVA PR) and the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (Heidelberg, Germany (MPG PR).
[2]: The team consists of Roy van Boekel, Michiel Min, Rens Waters, Carsten Dominik and Alex de Koter (Astronomical Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Christoph Leinert, Olivier Chesneau, Uwe Graser, Thomas Henning, Rainer Köhler and Frank Przygodda (Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Heidelberg, Germany), Andrea Richichi, Sebastien Morel, Francesco Paresce, Markus Schöller and Markus Wittkowski (ESO), Walter Jaffe and Jeroen de Jong (Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands), Anne Dutrey and Fabien Malbet (Observatoire de Bordeaux, France), Bruno Lopez (Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur, Nice, France), Guy Perrin (LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, France) and Thomas Preibisch (Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Bonn, Germany).
[3]: The MIDI instrument is the result of a collaboration between German, Dutch and French institutes. See ESO PR 17/03 and ESO PR 25/02 for more information.
Original Source: ESO News Release
Genesis Continuous - Complete