In 1986, when I first learned of the
discovery of the asteroid Chiron (actually discovered in 1978), and, soon
after, another such asteroid, in an orbit between Jupiter and Neptune, I
thought to myself, "Aha! Another asteroid belt is being discovered."
Although not then familiar with the conception of LaRouche associate Tennenbaum
of the idea of "register shifts" in the solar system, I did, like any
good student of astronomy, know of the "Bode Law," and of Kepler's
model of approximate planetary distances, using nested platonic solids.
Although these models were crude approximations, they, nonetheless gave a
tantalizing taste of some ordering principle which had not yet been found.
In this report, I report on an exciting
discovery within the astronomical community, which has gradually come to be
realized by more and more people over the past decade. Like most discoveries,
it is both disturbing to many, but, then, elating, when we realize that the new
and true system is more worthy than the false system it replaces, but which we
may be attached to emotionally. I wish to explore some implications of this new
finding, from a Keplerian standpoint. First, I give a quick summary of the
discovery of the Asteroid Belt, as an aid to what will follow.
In 1772, Johan Bode, the director of the
Berlin Observatory, publicized the discovery of Titius of Wittenbert, a
discovery today called the "Titus-Bode Law" of planetary distances.
Starting with the number 0, and jumping to 3, he then produced a series, where
each successive term after 3 was the previous term doubled. Next, he added 4 to
each term. This fit very closely with the known planets of the time. (This was
before the discovery of Uranus and Neptune.) The slashes signify the space
between columns.
Original+4
Added to SeriesReal Distance of Planet (Earth=10)
Most striking in this pattern, is the
glaring gap between Mars and Jupiter, which led to the hypothesis that an
unknown planet must exist in the gap. Kepler hypothesized that something
unusual must be in this orbit, based on his work with musical intervals, and
his hypothesis that a common characteristic geometry --a "curvature"
as we say now--underlay both the geometry of music and the geometry of the
universe at large. (It was Bach's discovery of the well tempered system of
musical tuning which offered the next great step after Kepler, in solving this
problem.)
One thing that Kepler noticed, was that, a
simple extension of the ratio of the axis of the Earth to the axis of Mars, if
extended upwards, beyond Mars, would result in two positions between Mars and Jupiter, whereas, a simple
extension of the ratio of Jupiter's axis to that of Saturn, extended downwards, resulted in only one such position between
Mars and Jupiter. i.e. the ratio of the Earth's axis to that of Mars is about
1.52. If we take Mars' distance from the sun, which is 1.52AU, and multiply it,
successively, by this ratio of 1.52, we get the following positions: 2.32AU,
3.53AU and 5.4AU. The last value is close to the axis of Jupiter, which is
5.2AU. However, if we do the same operation with the Saturn to Jupiter ratio,
we get positions at about 2.84AU and 1.55AU. The lower of these is close to the
axis of Mars. This showed that a simple progression of distance was not the
generating principle producing the different planetary distances. But, Kepler
was certain that there had to be some principle at work, and set out to find
it. Moreover, he concluded that there had to be something in the region between
Mars and Jupiter, although he thought that this body, whatever it was, would
have an unusual quality.
In 1801,
Italian Guiseppi Piazzi discovered what was classified for a while as the
missing planet, and named Ceres. A year later, the German amateur astronomer
Olbers (sp?), who ran a search from the rooftop observatory of his house,
discovered Pallas. He suggested that the two known bodies could be part of an
exploded planet, and that other pieces of this former planet might exist.
Today, we know of thousands of such "Asteroids."
The
"Asteroid Belt" would seem to be a region of instability, where the
matter that normally would coalesce into a planet, was prevented from doing so,
and, instead, formed countless small planetoids. However, this belt fit neatly
into the gap that had been hypothesized as the location of a missing world.
When Uranus was
discovered in 1781 by the great English astronomer (and musician) Herschel, it
was noticed with delight that it also fit very neatly into the "Bode
law" scenario. It was assumed that further planets would also fall into
this pattern. However, notice that the pattern breaks down with Neptune and
Pluto. Pluto occupies a position which one would expect to be occupied by
Neptune, while Neptune is far closer to the sun than the rule would allow. See
the continuation of the earlier pattern below:
In 1988
LaRouche associate Jonathan Tennenbaum hypothesized that the Asteroid Belt
existed at a point in the solar system's ordering which played the same role as
that which manifested in the geometry of the human singing voice, as a
"register shift," where the increase of pitch meets a roadblock and a
change of method of singing must be taken up to break through the barrier.
Although modern music teachers try to smooth over these shifts, they are a
physical fact of the geometry of the voice. They are a region of instability of
the voice, where the singer must "change gears" or risk damaging his
or her voice permanently. One reason why most opera singers don't last very long
anymore, is because they are taught to ignore this fact by our modern Cartesian
theory of music. Thus, they lose their voices at a very young age, very often.
(I suggest studying the work done by the Schiller Institute on this, for an
exhaustive treatment of this angle.)
After our solar
system's "register shift," the nature of the planets changes very
dramatically: Before the asteroid belt, planets are rocky and very dense, as
the Earth. However, past the belt, planets take the form of the "gas
giant" planets, such as Jupiter. The largest "terrestrial planet,
Earth is 12,756 km. In diameter, while the smallest of the "gas
giants," Uranus and Neptune, have diameters about four times that of
Earth. There is a jump in size between the two. Also the gas giants are made up
of gasses, while the terrestrial planets are rocky and very dense. Moreover,
smaller bodies past this shift, such as the moons of Jupiter, also change. In the outer solar system we
do not find rocky, terrestrial bodies, except for in very rare circumstances.
Smaller bodies in the outer solar system are generally icy, with a combination
of rock and frozen gasses. In cases where this is not the case, these bodies
are very likely captured asteroids that originated in the inner solar system.
There are not any fairly large bodies in the outer solar system, with diameters
over a few hundreds of kilometers in diameter, which have a terrestrial
composition. Thus, the asteroids represent a "register shift" between
the two types of planets.
When I heard of
this idea, I immediately remembered Chiron and the second asteroid belt
hypothesis. "Aha! Could this second asteroid belt be a second register
shift between Neptune and Pluto?" I thought. This would explain the shift
from the gas giant planets, back to "ice midget" Pluto. Although
Chiron was not in an orbit between Neptune and Pluto, (It orbits between
Jupiter and Neptune.), I figured that, as more of this new asteroids were
found, they would average out into an orbit that was.) The first actual body found
in what is now called the "Kuiper Belt" was found in 1992.) However,
my earlier hypothesis had only been partly correct.
Now, a decade
later, about 300 of these new "Kuiper Belt" asteroids have been
found. Most of them have orbits similar to Pluto's. They never pass further
from the sun than about 55AU. Many are highly elliptical, such that they pass
near or within the orbit of Neptune at their closest points to the sun, like
Pluto. About 35% of them have a 3:2 resonance with Neptune, as does Pluto, and
also have a major axis of about 39AU, as does Pluto. These have been given the
name "Plutinos," because of this. (One recent estimate is that there
are 25,000 such Plutinos larger than 100 km in diameter.) The 3:2 resonance of
these Plutinos means that for every three Neptune revolutions around the sun,
these bodies orbit twice around the sun. This prevents them from interacting
with Neptune's gravity field, or, in some cases, even crashing into Neptune. If
they did not have such a resonance, or some other resonance, they would have
unstable orbits. Close encounters with Neptune would disrupt both their own and
Neptune's orbits. The bulk of the rest of these bodies are called
"Classical Kuiper Belt Objects," and have far less elliptical orbits,
and, thus, do not need resonances with Neptune, since they never get too near
to it. Objects, such as Chiron have unstable orbits and are believed to be
originally from the Kuiper Belt.
In 2000,
astronomers at the Inter-American Observatory in Chile searched 6 areas of the
sky about equal in area to a full moon, and discovered 24 new such objects, 9
of which were larger than 160 km in diameter. Based upon extrapolating this to
the remaining unchartered area of the ecliptic plane, it was estimated that
there are 35,000 of these objects larger than 100 km in diameter. Several of
the most recent Kuiper objects found are similar in size to the giant asteroid
Ceres. It is probably only a matter of time before even larger ones are found.
For comparison, the asteroid belt has only a relative handful of asteroids
larger than 100 km in diameter Thus, this belt is far more extensive and
massive than the first asteroid belt.
The Incredible
Discovery: Pluto is not a Planet!
The evidence
has slowly piled up, over the last decade, to the point that it can no longer
be ignored. The evidence is massive and overwhelming. Pluto has certainly
seemed unusual for a planet for a long time. Its tiny size of 2274 km, makes it
smaller than our own moon, while its mass is only 1/6 the mass of our moon. For
comparison the smallest planet other than Pluto, which is Mercury, has a mass,
26 times that of Pluto. In fact, Pluto's mass is even less than that of the
largest asteroid, Ceres, since it has such a low density.
Far more
devastating to Pluto's status as a planet than its size and mass, at least from
a Keplerian standpoint, is its orbital characteristics. For example, Pluto is
the only planet with a perihelion (point closest to the sun), which lies inside
the orbit of another planet. For 20 years out of its 247.7 yearlong revolution
about the sun, Pluto lies closer to the sun than Neptune. This last happened
between 1979 to 1999. At this point, Pluto is about 30AU from the sun. At its
distant aphelion (point furthest from the sun), Pluto is about 50AU from the
sun!
But, this is
typical for Kuiper Belt objects. Most devastating of all is the fact that
Pluto's orbit is characteristic of tens of thousands of other similar bodies,
smaller than itself. It seems, thus, that Pluto plays a role within this Kuiper
Belt similar to that which Ceres plays in the inner asteroid belt, as the
largest object within the belt. It may even be the case that other bodies
similar in size to Pluto, or even larger, exist in this same belt. Currently,
the largest known bodies in the belt, are Pluto (2274 km in diameter) and its
satellite Charon (1172 km in diameter.) In December 2000 one which may measure
1,200 was discovered. In April 2000, a pair of such bodies, which orbit each
other in a way similar to the Pluto-Charon system, was discovered, with
diameters similar to that of Ceres.
Implications
for astronomy:
If Kepler
thought that the zone of the inner asteroids was an area of instability, let us
ask: what is the geometry causing this Kuiper Belt area to be unstable? Why was
all the matter in this zone not able to coalesce into a single planet? One
argument is that the matter in this zone was too far apart and disperse to do
so. What would we say from a Keplerian standpoint?
What is the
change in the order of matter, past this second register shift? What form would
any planets beyond this belt take? If we consider that Jupiter is over three
times further from the sun than Mars, past the Asteroid belt, how much further
beyond this belt would a true 10th planet lie? Were we to project
the Mars to Jupiter ratio past this belt, we would expect a planet at about
100AU, as a crude and educated guess. Such
a planet would have an orbital period of about 1000 years, four times longer
than the period of Pluto, meaning that its angular displacement would make it
far more difficult to discern, without a longer time between successive
photographs of areas of the sky. If the axis of such a planet were
further out, this problem would be even far worse. The most exhaustive search
ever done of the ecliptic zone for missing planets was done by Clyde Tombaugh,
et al, who found Pluto, in 1930. Even his search would have failed to find
Pluto had Pluto been near its point of aphelion, and, thus, further away and
far fainter. If such a planet exists, even if very large, it would not
necessarily be easy to spot. What would be the composition of such outer
planets? Pluto is likely about 30% rock and 70% water and other ices. Would
further-out planets be almost entirely ices, as the comets? Or dry ice? Or
something else?
Of course, we
cannot assume that there are
planets further out than Neptune, although such a thing would be very exciting.
What we can assume, is that
there are further "register shifts" further out, since matter does
not order itself in the random way that some people seem to think. Perhaps, we
will find another asteroid belt at about 600AU, with a crude orbital period of
about 14-15,000 years? I find it likely that the current theory of the Oort
Cloud will eventually be replaced with a notion of successive zones, instead of
an undifferentiated "fuzz" that extends randomly in all directions.