Phaeton (hypothetical planet) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Phaeton is the name of a hypothetical planet

Hypothetical planet

A hypothetical Solar System object is a planet, natural satellite or similar body in our Solar System whose existence is not known, but has been inferred from observational scientific evidence. Over the years a number of hypothetical planets have been proposed, and many have been disproved...

posited to once have existed between the orbit

Orbit

In physics, an orbit is the gravitationally curved path of an object around a point in space, for example the orbit of a planet around the center of a star system, such as the Solar System...

s of Mars

Mars

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...

and Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...

whose destruction supposedly led to the formation of the asteroid belt

Asteroid belt

The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets...

. The hypothetical planet was named for Phaëton

Phaëton

In Greek mythology, Phaëton or Phaethon was the son of Helios and the Oceanid Clymene. Alternate, less common genealogies make him a son of Clymenus by Merope, of Helios and Rhode or of Helios and Prote....

, the son of the sun god Helios

Helios

Helios was the personification of the Sun in Greek mythology. Homer often calls him simply Titan or Hyperion, while Hesiod and the Homeric Hymn separate him as a son of the Titans Hyperion and Theia or Euryphaessa and brother of the goddesses Selene, the moon, and Eos, the dawn...

in Greek mythology

Greek mythology

Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...

, who attempted to drive his father's solar chariot for a day with disastrous results and was ultimately destroyed by Zeus

Zeus

In the ancient Greek religion, Zeus was the "Father of Gods and men" who ruled the Olympians of Mount Olympus as a father ruled the family. He was the god of sky and thunder in Greek mythology. His Roman counterpart is Jupiter and his Etruscan counterpart is Tinia.Zeus was the child of Cronus...

.

The asteroid 3200 Phaethon

3200 Phaethon

3200 Phaethon is an asteroid with an unusual orbit that brings it closer to the Sun than any other named asteroid . For this reason, it was named after the Greek myth of Phaëton, son of the sun god Helios...

, sometimes incorrectly spelled Phaeton, shares Phaeton's name. 3200 Phaethon is a Mercury-, Venus-

Venus-crosser asteroid

A Venus-crosser is an asteroid whose orbit crosses that of Venus. The known numbered Venus-crossers and outer-grazers are listed below .Venus also has a quasi-satellite, 2002 VE68...

, Earth-

Earth-crosser asteroid

An Earth-crosser is a near-Earth asteroid whose orbit crosses that of Earth as observed from the ecliptic pole of Earth's orbit. The known numbered Earth-crossers are listed here. Those Earth-crossers whose semi-major axes are smaller than Earth's are Aten asteroids; the remaining ones are Apollo...

, and Mars-

Mars-crosser asteroid

A Mars-crosser is an asteroid whose orbit crosses that of Mars. The known numbered Mars-crossers are listed here. They include the two numbered Mars trojans 5261 Eureka and ....

orbit crossing Apollo asteroid

Apollo asteroid

The Apollo asteroids are a group of near-Earth asteroids named after 1862 Apollo, the first asteroid of this group to be discovered by Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth...

with unusual properties.

The Phaeton hypothesis

According to the now-discredited Titius–Bode law, a planet was believed to exist between Mars and Jupiter. Johann Elert Bode

Johann Elert Bode

Johann Elert Bode was a German astronomer known for his reformulation and popularization of the Titius-Bode law. Bode determined the orbit of Uranus and suggested the planet's name.-Biography:...

himself urged a search for the fifth planet. When Ceres

1 Ceres

Ceres, formally 1 Ceres, is the smallest identified dwarf planet in the Solar System and the only one in the asteroid belt. With a diameter of about 950 km, Ceres is by far the largest and most-massive asteroid, comprising about a third of the mass of the asteroid belt. Discovered on 1 January 1801...

, the largest of the asteroids in the asteroid belt (now considered a dwarf planet

Dwarf planet

A dwarf planet, as defined by the International Astronomical Union , is a celestial body orbiting the Sun that is massive enough to be spherical as a result of its own gravity but has not cleared its neighboring region of planetesimals and is not a satellite...

), was found in 1801 at the predicted position of the fifth planet, many believed it was the missing planet. However, in 1802 astronomer

Astronomer

An astronomer is a scientist who studies celestial bodies such as planets, stars and galaxies.Historically, astronomy was more concerned with the classification and description of phenomena in the sky, while astrophysics attempted to explain these phenomena and the differences between them using...

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers was a German physician and astronomer.-Life and career:Olbers was born in Arbergen, near Bremen, and studied to be a physician at Göttingen. After his graduation in 1780, he began practicing medicine in Bremen, Germany...

discovered and named another object in the same general orbit as Ceres, the asteroid Pallas

2 Pallas

Pallas, formally designated 2 Pallas, is the second asteroid to have been discovered , and one of the largest. It is estimated to constitute 7% of the mass of the asteroid belt, and its diameter of 530–565 km is comparable to, or slightly larger than, that of 4 Vesta. It is however 20%...

.

Olbers proposed that these new discoveries were the fragments of a disrupted planet that had formerly revolved around the sun. He also predicted that more of these pieces would be found. The discovery of the asteroid Juno

3 Juno

Juno , formal designation 3 Juno in the Minor Planet Center catalogue system, was the third asteroid to be discovered and is one of the larger main-belt asteroids, being one of the two largest stony asteroids, along with 15 Eunomia. Juno is estimated to contain 1% of the total mass of the asteroid...

by Karl Ludwig Harding

Karl Ludwig Harding

Karl Ludwig Harding was a German astronomer notable for having discovered the asteroid 3 Juno.-Biography:...

and Vesta

4 Vesta

Vesta, formally designated 4 Vesta, is one of the largest asteroids, with a mean diameter of about . It was discovered by Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers on March 29, 1807, and is named after the Roman virgin goddess of home and hearth, Vesta....

by Olbers buttressed the Olbers hypothesis.

Theories regarding the formation of the asteroid belt from the destruction of a hypothetical fifth planet

Fifth planet (hypothetical)

In the history of astronomy, a handful of solar system bodies have been counted as the fifth planet from the Sun. Under the present definition of a planet, this celestial body is Jupiter.-Previous fifth planets:...

are today collectively referred to as the "disruption theory". This theory states that there was once a major planetary member of the solar system circulating in the present gap between Mars and Jupiter, which was variously destroyed when:

it veered too close to Jupiter and was torn apart by the gas giant
Gas giant
A gas giant is a large planet that is not primarily composed of rock or other solid matter. There are four gas giants in the Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune...

's powerful gravity.
it was struck by another large celestial body.
it was destroyed by a hypothetical brown dwarf
Brown dwarf
Brown dwarfs are sub-stellar objects which are too low in mass to sustain hydrogen-1 fusion reactions in their cores, which is characteristic of stars on the main sequence. Brown dwarfs have fully convective surfaces and interiors, with no chemical differentiation by depth...

, the companion star to the Sun
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...

known as Nemesis
Nemesis (star)
Nemesis is a hypothetical hard-to-detect red dwarf star, white dwarf star or brown dwarf, originally postulated in 1984 to be orbiting the Sun at a distance of about 95,000 AU , somewhat beyond the Oort cloud, to explain a perceived cycle of mass extinctions in the geological record, which seem to...

.
it was shattered by some internal catastrophe.

In the twentieth century, Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n meteoriticist Yevgeny Leonidovich Krinov (involved in the investigation of the Tunguska event

Tunguska event

The Tunguska event, or Tunguska blast or Tunguska explosion, was an enormously powerful explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, at about 7:14 a.m...

), suggested that the exploded planet in the Olbers theory be named Phaeton after the story in Greek myth.

Today, the Phaeton hypothesis has been superseded by the accretion model

Accretion disc

An accretion disc is a structure formed by diffuse material in orbital motion around a central body. The central body is typically a star. Gravity causes material in the disc to spiral inward towards the central body. Gravitational forces compress the material causing the emission of...

. Most astronomers today believe that the asteroids in the main belt are remnants of the protoplanetary disk

Protoplanetary disk

A protoplanetary disk is a rotating circumstellar disk of dense gas surrounding a young newly formed star, a T Tauri star, or Herbig Ae/Be star...

, and in this region the incorporation of protoplanetary remnants into the planets was prevented by large gravitational perturbations induced by Jupiter during the formative period of the solar system

Solar System

The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...

Fringe theories

The hypothesis continues to be advocated by some non-scientists. One notable proponent is Zecharia Sitchin

Zecharia Sitchin

Zecharia Sitchin was an Azerbaijani-born American author of books promoting an explanation for human origins involving ancient astronauts. Sitchin attributes the creation of the ancient Sumerian culture to the Anunnaki, which he states was a race of extra-terrestrials from a planet beyond Neptune...

, who has proposed, based on his reading of ancient Sumer

Sumer

Sumer was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age....

ian mythology, that the planet known to the Sumerians as Tiamat was destroyed by a rogue planet

Rogue Planet

- Literature :* "Rogue Planet" , a Dan Dare story that ran in the original Eagle comic from Volume 6, Issue 48 to Volume 8, Issue 7* Rogue Planet , a 2000 novel set in the Star Wars galaxy- Other :...

known as Nibiru. However, his work is widely regarded as pseudoscience

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...

.

In 1988, Donald W. Patten wrote a book entitled Catastrophism and the Old Testament outlining the theory that a planet he called Astra overtook Mars and, upon reaching the Roche limit

Roche limit

The Roche limit , sometimes referred to as the Roche radius, is the distance within which a celestial body, held together only by its own gravity, will disintegrate due to a second celestial body's tidal forces exceeding the first body's gravitational self-attraction...

, broke apart much like the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 did when it reached Jupiter's Roche limit in 1994.

In UFO

Unidentified flying object

A term originally coined by the military, an unidentified flying object is an unusual apparent anomaly in the sky that is not readily identifiable to the observer as any known object...

and channelling

Channelling (mediumistic)

In spirituality, channelling or channeling is the belief that communication of information occurs by or through a person , from a deity, spirit or other paranormal entity outside the mind of the channel...

related sources, and in the Ascended Master Teachings

Ascended Master Teachings

The students of "Ascended Master Teachings" organizations believe that the Presence of Life/God - Individualizes as the "I AM", and incarnates throughout the created universes until it achieves The Ascension . The "Teachings" as all Religious Teachings.....

, a group of religions based on Theosophy

Theosophy

Theosophy, in its modern presentation, is a spiritual philosophy developed since the late 19th century. Its major themes were originally described mainly by Helena Blavatsky , co-founder of the Theosophical Society...

, Phaeton is referred to as Maldek.

The Phaeton hypothesis

Fringe theories

See also

Books

External links