They Might Have Been Giants
Posted by Jameske at 08:15, 03 Nov 2009Most planets around suns in the life giving range tend to be gas giants, or so it is believed from all the discoveries so far. And yet, our solar system only has rocky planets in this region.
So, lets suppose our solar system is an exception rather than the rule, which leads us to the conclusion that planet Earth was a gas giant. Does it get us anywhere to think that way?
Firstly a mechanism is required to turn a gas giant into a rocky planet.
So, the sun had a nova event, an extreme shedding of material - coronal mass ejections gone mad, if you like. This might have happened suddenly or over a longer period. But not too long. Perhaps it was just a violent episode in the Sun's history, or perhaps Oliver Manuel's theory has a lot to say about the development of the solar system.
Such an event might have been strong enough to overcome the Earth's magnetic field, or perhaps the magnetic field was in a lull, and the nova material could have stripped much of the gas giant atmosphere from the Earth.
So, then we have a smaller Earth and a correspondingly larger satellite, the Moon. Now a double planet system rather than a gas giant and satellite. So, there we have an explanation for the anomalous size of the Moon in comparison to the Earth. And we have an explanation for the disparity between exoplanet data and our solar system.
Going further, the loss of pressure due to less atmosphere led to the expansion of the rocky core, leading to a resultant crustal expansion and the development of oceans - a new chemistry deep in the earth due to change in pressure and a resulting product of water to fill crustal spread. Also, coronal mass ejections have much hydrogen and oxygen in them and water may have come from the sky also in the form of small icy comets. water may have already been in the atmosphere also. So, we have an explanation for the state of the Earth's crust and for the development of mountains and continental shelves and oceans.
We could even hazard a guess as to when this happened - just prior to the Cambrian explosion. Life gets a chance to develop from primitive pre-existing forms that were born in the gas giant Earth, and this life gets the chance to modulate the atmosphere and recycle oxygen for respiration. An explanation for the mysterious Cambrian explosion. Perhaps also an explanation for the transition from a reducing to an oxidising atmosphere.
Over time the moon slows down the Earth. A factor in the change in species?
Other events may have happened around this time along with this. The destruction of a planet between Earth and Jupiter. Venus moving away from Earth (possibly once a satellite of a gas giant Earth - or a gas giant in its own right with a satellite Mercury - but subject to more devastation and different chemistry. Of course other theories exist and thats fine.
Other aspects: Gas giants often have mega-lightning. Possible carving of landmasses by megalightning on gas giant Earth - the scars of which exist to this day. Megalightning in a reducing atmosphere may also have encouraged the formation of the building blocks of life, such as witnessed in the Urey experiment on a small scale.
The scenario tries to marry different theories into a synthesis. A just so story, but one i happen to like.
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Comments
22 November 2004
3 days 16 hours
There are so many interesting possibilities. And even more questions. Is our place average, or very special? How many different kinds of solar system are there?
Personally I doubt that there is just one common pattern, the stars show too much variation for that. But of course that is
just a guess, perhaps the patterns that lead to solar system tend to coalesce in just a few ways.
The last few days I have been playing with some rules in a computer simulation, something cute and instructive. This has been around for a bit more than 20 years. Flocks of birds, schools of fish, charged particles, and many similar things. The intriguing part is that if you vary the parameters just a little, you can get vastly different patterns. You don't just get smaller or bigger versions of the same pattern, faster or slower. No, the patterns are qualitatively different.
But for the part where gas giants are more common in general, that has an easy explanation. They are much easier to find with the methods being used now, compared to planets with less mass. What matters for their detection is that they move their star around so that astronomers notice.
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We are the cat.
1 May 2004
1 year 19 hours
Of course they are easier to find because they are bigger. But the bigger ones are still being found in the habitable region. That is what is interesting. Adding to that, just because bigger ones are being found doesnt change the history of how the rocky planets came to be which i reckon is a bit of a thorny problem otherwise.
So the explanation i offer provides a solution to many different anomalies and as a synthesis it is a stronger case than current theory that the earth has always been a rocky body.
yes, there are many possibilities. another one i like is that the solar system may have gone through many cycles. What if all the current satellites were actually once gas giants in an earlier cycle of the solar system and have already gone through the process. They then get captured by gas giants birthed from the sun or captured by the sun.
You could also reverse the process and have the rocky bodies collecting material slowly and the age of a body is related to how much gas it has. Though it probably has more problems with it than the other way around.
One must care about the truth to seek it, and not care about the truth to find it.
Jameske
12 April 2007
7 hours 10 min
We need to find another Earth-like planet well inside the habitable zone, in order to finally compare just how special or average our own world is.
It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
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@red_pill_junkie
1 May 2004
1 year 19 hours
I suspect there will be plenty of planets around earth-size in the habitable zones of many solar systems in which the stars have undergone substantial shedding of their surface material in a short space of time. Of course, because earth-size planets are small they will be difficult to find. But inner rocky planets i believe will tell a story of shedding a gas giant atmosphere. Expanding earth theory may turn out to be a non-catastrophic case of the exploding planet hypothesis of the sadly deceased Tom Van Flandern.
The alternative is: reducing atmospheres considered important for the building blocks of life just become oxidising atmospheres, plate tectonics just happens, life explodes in a flourish for no good reason, abnormally large satellites are birthed in rare collisions or are captured under extraordinary gravitational circumstances. That could all be true, but if a synthetic theory offers an explanation for several anomalous problems in tandem it ought to be seriously considered.
One must care about the truth to seek it, and not care about the truth to find it.
Jameske
12 April 2007
7 hours 10 min
Just keep in mind that the O2 in our atmosphere is a biological waste. Life had to evolve later to adapt to the Oxygen.
It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
_______________
@red_pill_junkie
1 May 2004
1 year 19 hours
O2 is only partially a waste product. Plants also use oxygen. Nevertheless, the traditional view is that a reducing atmosphere is conducive to the building blocks of life but an oxidsing atmosphere is conducive to the flourishing of life. That's my point.
One must care about the truth to seek it, and not care about the truth to find it.
Jameske
22 November 2004
3 days 16 hours
The current atmosphere is oxidizing because life makes it so.
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We are the cat.
1 May 2004
1 year 19 hours
Exactly. So there is what is called the Cambrian explosion - a mysterious flourishing of life. Since life flourishes in an atmosphere with free oxygen (compare with Mars or Venus - which may have some forms of life, who knows, but nothing on the order of Earth) I am suggesting a trigger for the Cambrian explosion - a transition from a reducing atmosphere to a oxidising one. Obviously the change precedes the Cambrian explosion but the trigger is there if one considers the transition from a gas giant to a rocky planet.
I do further suggest that life then originates in gas giants in the style of the Urey experiment. Megalightning and plenty of hydrocarbons and other elements create the building blocks of life and may even lead to the creation of simple organisms which then survive in small measure, slowly altering the atmosphere. But a dramatic change in atmosphere from other physical means would allow life to exploit the opportunity.
One must care about the truth to seek it, and not care about the truth to find it.
Jameske
22 November 2004
3 days 16 hours
I have another candidate: who says all the planets are from a single source?
Since all the material is old (the sun is not a first generation star), we already know everything is from previously dead stars. So perhaps our system is the result of two gas clouds colliding, I think I have seen that mentioned. Or some variation of that, a solar system colliding with another one, perhaps in somewhat early stages of formation. This sort of thing is bound to happen, why not here?
That gives me an idea for a nice little software project - a solar system creation simulator. Maybe it exists already?
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We are the cat.
12 April 2007
7 hours 10 min
I think there's a theory that our galaxy crashed or engulfed another galactic body a long time ago, and our own Solar System is an interloper from elsewhere.
I for one would have no problem in accepting that some of the planets in our system are "aggregations" of the original "litter" of planets spawned by our sun.
The question is: how do you go about to prove this? You would need more than computer simulations; you would need mineral samples from all the planets in the solar system to study their compositions —or if the samples are too hard to acquire, I reckon you would need to compare the spectrographic signatures of the planets' chemical composition.
It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
_______________
@red_pill_junkie
22 November 2004
3 days 16 hours
Well yes, for evidence we might want some material that is not from the interior of the system. We have 382 kg form the moon, a few kg from Mars (got here on it's own), and some stuff from the asteroid belt (probably, got here on it's own too). And we have a little dust from Genesis and Stardust. Nothing from the big planets. The problem is that sample return missions take decades that far out.
So yes, we need faster and cheaper rockets :)
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We are the cat.
1 May 2004
1 year 19 hours
Theory indicates that planets have the majority of the angular momentum which might be an indicator that the sun shed material to form planets and in so-doing reduced its angular momentum.
I would suggest that similarity of chemistry as an indicator of similarity of origins. Very loosely, Jupiter and Saturn look more alike to each other than either of them do to Neptune and Uranus, that also look more alike to each other. It may be an indicator of age or of origin or indeed of solar system cycle. One might be able to extend such a scheme to satellites.
One must care about the truth to seek it, and not care about the truth to find it.
Jameske
22 November 2004
3 days 16 hours
There is a small problem, namely that we don't know the isotope ratios for the outer planets. I don't think those show up in the spectrum, which is where we get our data from currently.
And the isotope mixture from radioactive decay is how we estimate the age of rocky stuff we have here.
So I have no idea whether anything indicates one or more sources. That's why I would want a simulator :)
I can't find much about planetary accretion simulators, although that is how the current theories are evaluated. Just nothing easily available.
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We are the cat.
1 May 2004
1 year 19 hours
The theory regarding the moon's origins involved isotope ratios etc. I may not be remembering correctly, but i thought it had something to do with the notion that the moon came from the earth rather than a capture. However, at the time i had a look at the data and it didnt look very convincing to me.
One must care about the truth to seek it, and not care about the truth to find it.
Jameske
12 April 2007
7 hours 10 min
The current theory is, if I'm not mistaken, that the Earth collided with an objetct that was the size of Mars. Instead of cracking our planet in half, it 'expelled' a big chunck of material after the impact, that later coalesced into our Moon.
The evidence for this is that the rocks the astronauts brought back from the apollo missions are chemically the same as what we can find in the Earth's most ancient layers.
I'm sure that our geologist friend Daydreamer could expand this much better than I can *queue for entry* ;-)
It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
_______________
@red_pill_junkie
21 February 2006
22 weeks 3 days
Hi Guys
All very interesting ideas.
Marvin Herndon advocates a former gas giant state for Earth & Venus, with Mercury, Mars and Luna being originally moons. He doesn't explain how either planet lost its envelope of gases.
Michael Woolfson has worked on the Capture Theory of planet origins since the early 1960s with some interesting implications. Basically the proto-Sun tidally interacted with an uncondensed protostar - probably a brown-dwarf that was still collapsing under its own gravity to planet density. The tidal deformation of the protostar formed a long gaseous filament that was captured by the Sun and compressed enough to gravitationally collapse into a string of gas planets - Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and two inner gas giants.
The proto-Sun was surrounded by a gas/dust disk which slowed and circularised the orbits of the captured planets. That process made them precess and criss-cross their orbits. Two of the proto-planets collided and one of them was enriched in deuterium enough to cause a massive fusion explosion that blew the heavy-element cores of the proto-planets apart into separate orbits - Earth and Venus. Their moons became the smaller planets, the small debris became the asteroids and comets.
Since Woolfson first developed the theory the resolution of computer modelling has meant a whole new insight on planet formation has arisen in the general astrophysics community. We now know that stars form in huge nebula in large numbers very close together, thus meaning tidal interactions were common enough to make the observed fraction of stars-with-planets. A lot of small "planet-like" objects have been observed in young star-forming regions, yet they aren't orbitting any stars. Are they formed like the stars? Or around larger stars in huge tidal interactions, as new simulations suggest, then flung into space? Star and planet formation, as we now realise, wasn't a peaceful, isolated affair, but a dynamic, almost cataclysmic process.
The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we CAN imagine.
1 May 2004
1 year 19 hours
C. Warren Hunt wrote books - Environment of violence and Expanding geospheres - somewhere in those i read something about the possibiliity of earth being a gas giant. he proposed mass creation in the earth being responsible for its expansion.
My interest in exo-planet data led me to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the traditional view of the inner solar system. Exoplanet data indicates much larger planetary bodies in the habitable range. OK, so bigger planets are easier to find. But you can only deal with what you discover. And whilst it is a fair criticism, it does not invalidate the scenario. I propose there will be many rocky earth size planets as a result of the mechanism.
Over the years I have posted the occasional article on Oliver Manuel's theory of the sun. So for me it was a matter of marrying a few concepts. From there, it was a relatively easy job to see the outcomes. I beleive I have also posted stuff on TDG regarding Marvin Herndon too. A long long time ago.
The issue of the origin of the moon is not an easy one. Some scientists say it was a rocky collision because they dont know how the moon could have been captured due to the moon earth ratio being so small. Well, we know that gas giants have several satellites and so the capture theory or the core expulsion theory are much easier to imagine. earth as a former gas giant solves the issue of the moon, either way. The rocky collision theory may have some support from rocks but I remember checking it out and really the supposed similarities were not as similar as you would be led to believe. But chemical similarity may also indicate core expulsion. In this regard, I am less interested. I dont really mind which is the case, but I would suggest given a few other issues I bring up, like earth expansion theory, the cambrian explosion and the notion that expanded earth theory is a non-catastrophic case of the exploded planet hypothesis, i think there is a valid synthesis of anomalies brought together into a coherent mechanism.
One must care about the truth to seek it, and not care about the truth to find it.
Jameske
21 September 2009
3 years 31 weeks
Its all a huge big piss take! And when the end comes, please don't blame me for ur not having a sense of humour!
Aurum Metallicum all things in moderation...
The matrix of ones blood is far more to conquer then the matrix of ones mind.
Satanists are like majic mushroom's. Once you see one... then you can see them all!
1 May 2004
1 year 19 hours
like candida?
One must care about the truth to seek it, and not care about the truth to find it.
Jameske